By As you might expect of a film about the writing of Citizen Kane, David Fincher's Mank packs in a lot of nods, winks and nudges at Citizen Kane. Some are obvious. It’s in black and white (and it was shot exclusively in black and white, rather than being treated afterwards). The soundtrack pops and crackles like it’s just been retrieved after 80 years in a vault on some Californian studio backlot. Mank’s look softens the harsh shadows and dramatic shafts of light of Kane, but you know what it's up to.
Some of them are a lot more subtle, used more like a seasoning which gives a Kane-like flavour to a scene. It might just be where a character stands, or how a shot’s framed, or an odd prop here or there. We've pulled together as many of them as possible here.
The bottle dropping from Mank's hand
If you catch no other references to Citizen Kane, you'll catch this one. The opening sequence in which Kane whispers, "Rosebud," and drops his snowglobe, which smashes on the floor, is perhaps the most parodied in all of cinema. Fincher nods at it when a bottle of sedative drops from Mank’s hand onto the floor.
Shuffled timelines
Another big one. Perhaps the greatest debt Mank owes to Citizen Kane is in its structure, which jumps between Mank in the 1940s trying to write Kane and flashbacks to his early days in Hollywood and the clashes with Hearst and the studio higher-ups. Similarly, Citizen Kane loops back from the present through different characters' reminiscences of Kane himself.
Deep focus
One of the more subtle nods. Orson Welles and cinematographer Gregg Toland set up shots so that everything in the frame was in focus, mimicking how you perceive the world around you more naturally. Fincher makes use of the same technique quite a few times in Mank, and generally when Mank himself is most mentally enmeshed with the story of Kane.
The montage
As the election night wears on, Mank has a bit of a wavy one with numbers, lights and visions floating up in front of him. It feels a lot like an homage to the montages in Kane, particularly the blur of newspaper headlines following Susan's nationwide singing tour.
Flashing bulbs
A very brief motif, but an important one. In Kane, it's when Kane's second wife Susan is about to go onstage for her humiliating stage debut in the opera, and in the aforementioned montage. It stands for the frazzling effect of the stage and Kane's demands which effectively destroys the last of Susan’s will to love him. Soon, her resentment of Kane is completely undisguised. In Mank, the bulbs flash briefly at the election night party, and there’s a definite sense that Mank is burned out with politics afterwards.
The fireplace
Towards the end of Citizen Kane, Kane and Susan’s doomed marriage plays out its last in front of an absolutely ludicrously proportioned fireplace. It’s absolutely gigantic. A very slightly more modestly proportioned fireplace pops up in Mank at Randolph’s Hearst’s house, particularly during Mank’s drunken soliloquy toward the end.
The ice sculpture
There's no symbol of unlimited wealth quite like a bespoke whittled ice sculpture, and at Kane's birthday party, there are a few ice sculptures around: a large K with a newspaper front page inside it, and the heads of Bernstein and Leland. In Mank we see an elephant at the Republican party election do, slowly melting.
Welles launching bottles around
"That's what we need when Susan leaves Kane – an act of purging violence," Mank notes as his wooden box of sedatives splinters against the wall. It's a lot like Kane's final breakdown, where he rages around the room, smashing furniture, destroying and tearing apart every last piece of the marriage which he'd hoped would give him the love he craved. Until he gets to the snowglobe, that is.
All those mirrors
Just after that furious episode, Kane walks out of the room, past one mirror and into a mirrored passageway which reflects Kane back at himself, on and on, into infinity. It's his final appearance in the film, and comes just before the newspaperman's final thoughts about a single word not summing up a person's life.
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