Rosebud
One word, one sled, eighty-five years of arguing about what a life amounts to.
Spoilers for a film released in 1941 follow immediately and without further warning.
The word
Charles Foster Kane dies in the first scene of the film, alone in Xanadu, dropping a snow globe and one word: "Rosebud." A newsreel outfit spends the entire picture interviewing everyone who knew him, trying to learn what it meant. They never do.
The reveal
The audience does. In the final shot, workmen clearing the dead man’s warehoused possessions toss a cheap child’s sled into a furnace — the sled Kane was playing with the day he was taken from his mother. The camera finds the painted name as it burns. The fortune, the papers, the palace: the man had spent all of it trying to buy his way back to the last morning anyone loved him for free.
Whose word it was
Welles called the device "dollar-book Freud" and always credited the word itself to co-writer Herman Mankiewicz. A far seamier theory of where Mankiewicz picked it up — circulated for decades by Gore Vidal, concerning Hearst’s private vocabulary for Marion Davies — is unverifiable, was denied by everyone positioned to know, and is exactly the kind of story a yellow newspaper would have loved. It stays in this footnote.
The sled afterlife
The production made several balsa sleds to burn and at least three hardwood ones that survived. In 1982 one went to auction and was bought for $60,500 by Steven Spielberg, who called it a talisman of why anyone makes movies. It has since been exhibited, loaned, and argued over like a saint’s relic — which, for the American film industry, it is.