Within the gothic, labyrinthine aesthetic of Citizen Kane, a psychological mystery unfolds. The mystery of Rosebud may be the cinema's most beloved red herring, but the mystery of Charles Foster Kane also is solved very early on, and that is Welles' most devilish coup. The answer is plain, though not simple: Kane is a chronically lonely man, amassing all the right things (including the world's biggest art collection) for all the wrong reasons. His is the story of American-dream materialism gone mad. (Fittingly, it was once an amusing pastime for film or art buffs to try to identify the art objects in the film, until it was revealed that they were plaster pieces that RKO had lying around. Even in Hollywood, "$25,000 is a lot of dough to pay for a dame without a head.") Stylistically, Welles' audacious first film is as distanced and inaccessible as Kane himself, protected in his perverse loneliness by a "No Trespassing" sign. The narrative is like the jigsaw puzzle with which Susan Alexander Kane vaguely amuses and tortures herself in the dark "theater" of the Kane castle. Welles didn't invent chiaroscuro lighting, deep focus cinematography, oblique camera angles and lightning flashbacks, but he used them in a Brechtian way to alienate us from the monster he created. The hollowness of his American success story played out in full is captured in a magnificent overhead shot of Kane's art collection, crated for auction, looking everything like the naked city of film noir: cold, bleak, and very concrete.