Free Thoughts on Violence

I listened to two interviews with the directors of Hostel II and Captivity recently, which made me think a bit more about "torture porn" and the public debate over the effects of violent media. I'd always dismissed extreme horror from afar, but these guys seem pretty intelligent and sensible. Unfortunately, I can't say the same thing about the audience. So, though its a dead-horse subject, I thought I'd wildly speculate about the effects of violent media, just for kicks.

One thing that bugs me about the debate is the exclusive concentration on ratings. This implies that negative effects can only happen to people who are 17 or younger. I'll accept the fact that the younger you are, the more susceptible to media messages you are, but that doesn't mean that everyone over 17 is not influenced by what they see in movies, on TV, and on the internet. My feeling is that kids are deprived of violent and sexual media (or at least it is discouraged by parents) and then when they go away to college, they binge on it. It has the appeal of the forbidden fruit, and they feel as though they have to find out what they've been missing (and there's a natural draw to it, at least for males).

Is it that hard to believe that watching a ton of extremely violent media might make an adult more apt to be violent? Chuck Klosterman had a good point in the terrific doc Metal: A Headbanger's Journey about media effects. He knows that the lyrics to Ozzy Osborne's Suicide Solution is about boozing, but accepts the fact that maybe someone might misinterpret the lyrics and think its primarily about killing yourself. That's all I'm saying here: its not a huge leap to think that someone might not get the subtle subtext of a movie like Hostel II (which, according to Eli Roth, is about young Americans' lamentable lack of worldliness in the post-9/11 world).

Let's say one 22 year old watches Hostel II (fine, Hostel PART II) once, watches about 2 or 3 extremely violent movies and plays 40-50 hours of extremely violent videogames every year, while another 22 year-old watches Hostel II 5 times, watches 20 or 30 extremely violent movies and plays roughly 400 hours of violent videogames per year. If these individuals were 17 or under, we could blame the parents of the second one. But they're not. They're adults, and they can do whatever they want. Does that mean that the second individual cannot be swayed by what he watches and plays? That seems to be the common wisdom, which is complete bullshit (I think).

My understanding of the existing research on media violence is that only those who are prone to violent behavior and/or have behavioral problems are likely to be negatively effected by violent media. So clearly, its less about an individual text and more about the context in which it is seen, the context in the viewer's life. I'd speculate that if a person who is prone to violence could be made to act violently, it wouldn't be by an individual movie or game but through an unvaried "media diet": nothing but torture porn, 1st-person shooters, and Faces of Death. If you had two anti-social 30 year-olds, and one of them watched nothing but torture porn for a year, and the other watched one or two per year and instead just listened to a lot of metal and lifted weights to get out his aggression, it seems possible that the second person might not only be less apt to be violent, but be less apt to be an anti-social person.

That's another thing: I doubt that watching or playing a ton of violent media will make you more apt to torture or kill someone, but it might make you a shittier person in general. It might have the same effects as heavy porn use. Neither is going to make you go rape or kill someone, but you'll be less apt to go out and try to make deep, lasting bonds with people. Like drugs or booze, excessively sexy and/or violent media (or rather excessive use of such media) makes a person happy; its tricks your mind into thinking that you're doing something good by releasing endorphins, when in actuality, you're just fucking with the chemicals in your brain without really changing your life circumstances.

Maybe anti-sociability is the real threat, not Columbine or Virginia Tech-like disasters which, sad as they are, are still extremely uncommon. Consider the following detriments to being anti-social:

• Politically, you're easy to control. By listening to the new Rage Against the Machine album, anti-social adults think they're sticking it to the man, when in fact they're just listening to music. Not that RATM is excessively violent or sexual (certainly not excessively sexual), but only that the adult whose desires are sated by media is less apt to interact with the world at large, less apt to learn about something from someone else or debate a point and more apt to regurgitate whatever the rock star said. Sure, sometimes media can be a catalyst for action, but from what I've seen, its just as often used as a substitute for action.
  

• Economically, you're destined to spend most of your life on a lower rung of the ladder. To achieve success in any line of work, it helps to be able to connect with other people, and if all you can talk about is the Burning Crusade, you're not gonna make it very far, whether you want to start an organic farm or work for Goldman Sachs.
  

• Healthwise, you're more likely to be a burden to the system. In the long run, anti-social people are more apt to be angry and depressed, and angry and depressed people are more apt to require treatment (which funnels R&D $ and time away from cancer research, etc).

If you're going to treat the concept of media effects seriously, I think you've got to get past two ideas: only children are susceptible to media's influence; seeing or playing an individual text once is likely to have a substantial effect. It seems like there's going to be more and more violent and sexual (and sexually violent) media out there, whether we like it or not. Perhaps this will mean that we have to stop thinking about individual texts (because if you ban or regulate one, someone else will just make a similar one to replace it) and start thinking about regulating media diets the way we are starting to regulate tobacco or booze use, for instance. Maybe you could tax the shit out of all sexually violent videos to deter people from using it. You can't just rely on parents to dictate their offspring's media diet for the rest of their lives. At some point, adults will need to realize that media they freely choose could make them as anti-social (and as much of a burden to the system) as an alcoholic.

The industry, academia, and the world at large seems to tacitly accept the fact that a 16 year-old who watches extremely violent and or sexually violent material will be negatively effected by it, but I can't imagine that they would ever be willing to accept the possibility that a 22 or 32 year-old can be negatively effected by violent media as well. 'Sup wit dat?

When thinking about how to regulate violent media, I like to compare the negative social impact of violent media to that of drugs and booze. We've decided that people are too easily fooled into thinking that the pleasure of doing heroin outweighs the negative effects on them and, since they cannot help but be a part of society, on society as a whole. We've also decided that that's not the case with booze, or cigarettes for that matter. Sure, people can drink themselves to death, but its harder to really fuck up your life with booze than w/ heroin, so one is legal (but heavily regulated) and the other isn't. Where does violent media fit in to all this?

I'd say its more like booze, for now. Maybe, you get a few cases of it possibly influencing someone who wouldn't have been as violent as they turned out to be to become more violent, but society is hardly falling apart. But this could change if people inundate unregulated online video sites with homemade torture porn (and if people think that Eli Roth is the problem, they should wait until the internet does to the horror genre what it did to porn - make it more extreme, cheaper, and more accessible). And maybe the measure of how bad things are getting has less to do with how many massacres we have and more to do with how socially, politically, and economically active a violent/sexual media-sated generation turns out to be.

Network Narratives

Understanding and enjoying network narratives (such as Babel, 21 Grams, and several Altman films) depends not on how complex or how out-of-order the plotting is, but rather on when the information that will lead the viewer to piece together a coherent linear story is doled out.

While watching 21 Grams, I assumed that the reveal (the part that lets us know how everything fits together) would be at the end. Instead, it comes gradually around 30-40 minutes in, and without much fanfare.

Generally, we're told how the pieces all fit when the narration reveals a crucial cause-effect relationship between certain scenes. Until we get that crucial linking scene, we treat the film as a puzzle. We can't become fully immersed in the film because we're too busy trying to figure it all out. That's generally how I felt about Babel. It kept me at a distance, and the payoff wasn't worth the trouble.

By revealing this crucial piece of the puzzle earlier than some network narratives, 21 Grams is less of a puzzle or a stunt and more of a clever way of getting us not to choose sides, a way of making more than one character sympathetic, which under normal, linear plotting circumstances, may be impossible.

After the moment we learn how the puzzle fits together, we're concerned with when certain characters will find out information that we know but they don't know (Naomi Watts finds out that Sean Penn's character has her dead husband's heart at 1:28 or so) and what chain of events will lead to the the events we see throughout the film - like a mystery - (Sean Penn getting shot in the chest after hunting down Benicio Del Toro), and also what will happen to the characters in the end, which is what we're generally concerned with when we watch any movie.

That said, this movie revels a bit too much in its poignancy for me, and 21 Grams has to be the most misleading title for a movie I've heard in awhile. It sounds drug-related.

Ronald Jenkees, a Real Character

The Sports Guy has drawn my attention to the latest freak vlogger: Ronald Jenkees. Beebee890, DaxFlame, and Ronald Jenkees are not quite taking over YouTube, but they represent a decent-sized niche within the YouTube ecosphere. DaxFlame is #32 on all-time most subscribed list, and Jenkees is #50 on all-time most subscribed musicians.

Mainstream press and/or Digg picks up on these guys, and that gets them their initial boom in subscribers. The Sports Guy and Digg brought attention to Ronald, and G4 did something on DaxFlame (to which he angrily responded). All it takes is one member of the mainstream media to reference one of them, and then they become discussion topics. Their freak appeal takes it from there.

So, is he socially awkward, mentally challenged, or neither? What do we mean by mentally challenged (or retarded, disabled, etc)? Perhaps we've been able to get away with two vastly different views of these different people. There's the PC "noble savage" view, which says that anyone who appears to be "different" is worthy of praise (regardless of whether the behavior can be attributed to social awkwardness or a physiological condition), and the grade-school playground view, which says that anyone different must be ridiculed. These knee-jerk reactions have been able to coexist because the two groups don't have to come into contact with one another because those freaks that spark the debate between the two camps aren't in the public eye that much. Until now.

But Ronald Jenkees is more than just another William Hung. His keyboard and beat-making skilz rival that of any shitty post-krunk hiphop producer. There's talk of him being some sort of savant. He claims that he is not, but how would he know if he were a savant? Who is the authority on this - the individual in question? A doctor? Movies about savants (e.g. Rainman)? Us? I'm also reminded of the unhappy story of another "different" musical genius: Daniel Johnston. Once fans recognize an artist as a savant or a genius, the bar gets set unrealistically high. An unstable person gets introduced to the wrong people, and disaster ensues.

Before we assume that Ronald is acting, its worth considering the possibility that "different" people like Ronald have been waiting in the wings, not good-looking or "normal" enough to be in the public eye before YouTube. They could've had a blog and/or a MySpace page, but that just wouldn't have conveyed how different they were - only video could do that.

To the debates over whether or not he is acting like a dork/mentally challenged person, we should add the question as to whether or not he wrote the damn good songs he performs. Maybe they're pre-recorded loops he got from someone else, though the visuals seem to provide the needed proof that he can play the keyboard.

Somehow, their freakishness works to their advantage, drawing attention to them and making them impervious to criticism (provided you don't get busted for acting). How can anyone rag on you if you can always hide behind being different? You could try to be cool, you could try to be your normal semi-cool self, or you could exaggerate your inner dork to the point where you're clearly different (not retarded, just different). If you do this, any social misstep you might make can be attributed to your different-ness, which is considered a positive attribute (kind of like the self-effacing jujitsu Eminem uses on his first couple of albums).

There may be people as talented as Ronald Jenkees out there, but who would notice them if they're just another Steve Vai wannabe from Berklee School of Music, some quiet man-of-mystery (which reads as holier-than-thou) with a ponytail, no fashion sense, and zero charisma? If that were you, then wouldn't you have an easier time getting attention and sympathy if you exaggerated your dorky characteristics (in effect "passing" as a dork)? Just like people who pass as black, gay, etc, there is enough of an element of truth to the claim that the passer could not be outed as a total fraud.

So, what happens next? What does stardom (or the new semi-stardom that online fame creates) do to a person? What makes it seem as though DaxFlame is an act is that he seems utterly oblivious towards his newfound semi-fame. There's something about the kind of fame that's achieved by vloggers on YouTube that feels hermetically sealed, cut off for the most part from real life like all social acts online. For this reason, vlogging and YouTube in general still feels like a proving ground for would-be stars (albeit a different breed of would-be stars). Ever since Brookers got signed by Carson Daly, that's the way that most people think about it. Ronald Jenkees is interesting only if he's going to put out an album or work with established rap stars.

On The Lot: No Accounting for Taste

Though it comes across as more awkward than compelling, On The Lot continues to offer an intriguing view of audience fragmentation and demographic appeal. It occurs to me that the show is as much a study of whether or not the viewers of the show prefer a certain genre or a certain aesthetic rather than a competition to see who is the most talented.

This stands in stark contrast to American Idol, in which genre isn't as much of a variable, and the variations in style between singers are limited. One could say that Chris Daughtry and Taylor Hicks had very distinct styles and that they chose songs from very different genres (Nickleback-esque "rock" vs. Doobie Bros Blue Eyed soul). Still, I never got the feeling that contestants won or lost based on the appeal of their chosen genre or stylistic influences. I do, however, get that feeling with On The Lot.

You have one contestant, Jason Epperson, who makes films with a certain down market appeal - a rather obvious physical comedy that may or may not have been making fun of 'tards and a drug story cum heavy-handed Christian allegory. Then you have Jess Brillhart - an NYU film school grad whose first two films have an arty bend to them. Are we to believe that the audience will be adept at comparing apples to oranges, determining which filmmaker is better at their given nitch?

Even when all contestants are assigned a particular genre for a given week (e.g. horror or comedy), their writing choices betray their cultural perspective (urban, Southern, feminist, sci-fi dork, sappy romantic, arty weirdo) in a way that AI contestants' song or style choices do not. I get the sense that the range of AI contestants' cultural appeal is limited to white/non-white and gender demographic distinctions (and maybe pop rock vs. R&B vs. country, though the audience seems to lean heavily towards adult contempo R&B). In the end, I feel as though On the Lot viewers are more apt to vote according to their cultural perspective than AI viewers. So far, AI has had a fairly diverse group of winners (white man, white woman, black woman, black man if you count Ruben, country, R&B, pop rock). People keep watching because the record shows that their group (or the representative of their race/gender/taste) has a legitimate shot at winning. If you're group isn't represented in the winner's circle (or at least later rounds), there's not much point in participating - an example of voter disenfranchisement if there ever was one.

Still, I like to think that many of the AI voters vote based on one undefinable characteristic: chops. If you're black/white/country/R&B/man/woman, it doesn't really matter as long as you can carry a tune. I just can't imagine that the audience for On the Lot cares more about these filmmakers' abilities to tell comprehensible stories from a unique perspective more than they care about which filmmakers' cultural backgrounds and sensibilities jibe with their own. It would be interesting if a few of the filmmakers began to understand this and started to adapt their work to the tastes of the voting public.

As it happened, I think the filmmaker with the narrowest cultural appeal (arty Jess) made the worst film this week, while down-market Jason's effort was passable. I'd like to say that Jason's success will prove my theory of demographics over style and substance, but I'm not sure its that clear cut. Just have to keep watching.

Who Thinks Ambiguity Sucks?

The finale of The Sopranos has sparked familiar discussion over the merits of open-ended narratives, but perhaps on an unprecedented scale. Its the IMDB debate over Mulholland Drive writ large, with familiar defenses (its consistent with the rest of the author's work; though it has no definable narrative meaning, it has allegorical/thematic meaning - that Tony's life will always be full of threats and dread) and derisions (ambiguity and vagueness is a sign of laziness or contempt on the part of the author). Both camps seem intensely aware of one another, thanks to the internet, and assume that divining the intention of the author is akin to knowing the true meaning of the episode. I'm beginning to think that if Last Year at Marienbad were released today, there would be a time-travel theory about it and Robbe-Grillet would be called a self-indulgent asshole.

Oddly, sports guys and morning DJs were analyzing the conclusion as much as media critics were. Debates of this fervor and scale only really happen with texts that attract split audiences: jocks and nerds, melodrama addicts and sci-fi freaks (see Lost). European art film ambiguity doesn't ruffle feathers, but TV, with its relatively broad appeal, cannot help but do so. Michael Wilbon of ESPN's PTI claimed that the ambiguity was Chase's way of not following his vision, of trying to be all things to all people. Scott Tobias of The Onion AV Club thought that the ambiguous ending was evidence that Chase had maintained his unique vision, refusing to bow to audience or studio executive pressure. Even the meaning/worth of discrete attributes of the conclusion are debatable.

Lost in some of the debate over the merit of the final scene are the extensions of thematic concerns of the series in the last episode. Among the small details: TVs in the background of the episode providing an incongruous or enervating distraction (Little Miss Sunshine on TV in Sil's hospital room; AJ watching a politician dance mashup with his model girlfriend; the clip from The Twilight Zone episode entitled "The Hack" in the back of the Bing; the TVs in the loony bin with Junior). This is in keeping with Jeffrey Goldberg's assessment of Chase's motives as "anti-television." Its an argument I'm sympathetic to, especially when it comes to TVs in public places which essentially control public emotion (an effect that the security forces designing and running American airports are surely familiar with). The fact that many viewers think that a guy walking into a bathroom is a sign of impending doom is a sign of how deeply influenced we all are by mob stories, on the big or small screen. AJ's decision (caving to his parents' wills) to go into movies instead of the Army is another way of saying that we use media as an opiate more than catalyst for action.

I also liked how AJ got shamed out of being smart again. Before, it was "Nitch." This time, its "Yeets." Can you really blame him for taking the easy way out - helping to churn out forgettable shitty Hollywood movies - instead of getting smart when people laugh at his attempts to learn? Another knock at a society Chase seems to have stopped hiding his contempt for. The episode, after all, is titled "Made in America."

I made some remark at the conclusion of a class I taught on TV & Post TV about the arbitrariness of endings of serial narratives. The only true end to any story (to paraphrase Jonathan Franzen and countless others, I'm sure) is death. If characters ride off into the sunset, if they get married, there will always be something after that. The last 30 seconds of The Graduate offer a rare authorial acknowledgment of this fact (its rather telling that Hollywood simply couldn't accept this rare instance of brilliant open-endedness, and somehow churned out a semi-sequel 35 years later). There's the "Waiting for Godot" ending, sitting in an unchanging room, waiting forever. I suppose David Chase could've locked up Tony in a prison cell and remained consistent with the plot of the show, but it might've seemed too moral, and certainly too reminiscent of Seinfeld's much-hated conclusion. So, you can either snuff out the lead consciousness of the show, or you can acknowledge the fact that things just keep going, after our view on them ceases to exist. At the conclusion of the British Office, Tim mentions this - after the audience leaves, the characters' lives go on, one failure after another victory until death. The Sopranos gave us both options - death or simply the end of our view on their lives. As I see it, there really aren't any other options.

Lastly, its kinda funny that a sudden cut to black (often mislabled as a fade to black) will, for the time being, be read as a humorous reference to The Sopranos. In fact, any loss of picture due to technical difficulties may cause me to think back to this episode.

The Sopranos Final Moments

Its been said that David Chase didn't want to send a typical mob-story message with the conclusion of The Sopranos. If Tony was triumphant, that would essentially say that crime pays. If Tony died or was thrown in jail, that would say what most Hays code era mob stories said: crime doesn't pay. How, then, can you end The Sopranos (or any story, for that matter) without sending a message?

The Sopranos always distanced us from the main characters to some extent. We sympathized with them, but we also analyzed them and laughed at them. It was never about getting sucked into a narrative where you were more emotionally involved than you were intellectually involved. The immersion in the diegetic world you felt was a secondary pleasure. At most, its a hybrid between family drama and aloof satire. Though its been said that messages aren't David Chase's style, I'd argue that he still likes to use the show to comment (albeit in subtle and often ambiguous ways) on life, rather than as a way to get viewers emotionally involved in the lives of fictional characters. The show was, of course, marketed and talked about like any other show. We were supposed to care whether or not Tony died, and I suppose a lot of viewers did (the ones who are probably extremely pissed off after the conclusion of the series). But personally, I never got that involved in the story. The show was never really about the war between the two families. There weren't that many cliffhangers. So the ending of the show doesn't really piss me off. I'm still not sure that I like it, though.

At the very least, I admired it because it left me with a unique feeling, which is pretty hard to do after several millennia of storytelling. I imagine that a lot of people would write off the ending as lazy ambiguity, ending a show in medias res because he couldn't think of any satisfying way to end it - the ultimate cop out or, worse, a prank. Maybe, but I think that's oversimplifying. In the last scene, there's a very conscious build-up of tension through cross cutting between Tony & Carmela, Meadow (safely?) outside the restaurant, and the shady dude who walked in with AJ. Clearly, we are meant to think that this shady dude will abruptly spoil the familial idyll at the diner table. The family is finally getting along for once, and now it will be shattered. I knew this trope, and yet my heart was still beating a mile a minute at the end.

There's some dramatic irony at the conclusion: the characters think they're fine, but because of what the narration shows us, and because we're well versed in tension building exercises that have littered Hollywood since the days of D.W. Griffith, we're convinced that they're not fine at all. That's the tension at the end: between the lives the characters know and what we know of their world. True ambiguity would've given us and the characters competing cues as to what was about to happen. If it had been a "choose-you-own-adventure" or a "viewer-supplies-the-ending," like many are mistaking it for, it would've presented us with competing cues of at least 2 possible (and equally likely) outcomes. While one could argue that it was equally possible that what Tony was looking at in the final frame was either is killer or Meadow, its telling that one of those possibilities is extremely mundane. If you're 50% sure that a person coming through a door, any door, at any time, is coming to kill you, then that's not the same as when a character is in a temporary state of mortal danger (always the case with choose-your-own-adventures) and he/she may or may not make it out alive.

Instead of wondering whether he'll be fine or whether he'll die, we're nearly certain that he's going to die. The final emotion is one of dread and unrealized fear, not curiousity. The final violent act is unseen, and perhaps is all the more powerful because of that. Then again, maybe he's fucking with us and I'm overanalyzing. I've found that most people err on the side of "the writer is fucking w/ us" simply because they're afraid of being made to look like fools. At the same time, there are those blind acolytes who will find meaning in anything, regardless of whether the author intended it, or whether other people find that meaning. Another possibility that isn't considered by many: maybe he's doing both. Maybe he's telling the closure-junkies raised on serial TV to go fuck themselves, and he's leaving those willing to look deeper with a unique ending that was as unpredictable as the show always was. As with David Lynch films and TV shows, the ambiguity reveals cultural differences, what we find acceptable in our art, or if we believe that TV is a place for art.

Speaking of Lynch, I kept thinking back to the most provocative conclusion of a story I'd ever seen, one that sparked my interest in the possibilities of TV, film, pop culture, and art: Twin Peaks. Its worth noting that David Chase claims to be a big fan of that series, and that Lynch catches plenty of shit for not concluding his stories in a classical, unambiguous manner. The Twin Peaks ending more obviously evoked feelings of dread, but the more I think about the conclusion of The Sopranos, the more I see parallels between the two endings. They're both deeply unsettling, partly because we're aware of some horrible thing that the characters are not aware of.

I think this will come out on subsequent viewings. There was so much build-up, so much general hype and momentum that it was hard, even for the distanced viewer, not to get caught up in expecting what they were about to see. As time passes, perhaps the feeling of being cheated will, too.

Footnote: I actually mis-remembered the last shot. I thought I saw Meadow coming through the door, when in fact I only saw Tony's reaction. There is not shot of Meadow entering. Such is the power of great editing. Also, Bill on Time magazine's article's comments caught a significant bit of editing I noticed but quickly forgot about: we see a shot of Tony glancing into the diner followed by an impossible POV shot of Tony sitting at a table. A witness to his own death?

Anti-Heroes and the Therapists who Love Them

After reading the analysis of last night's episode of The Sopranos on Slate, I buy what Jeff Goldberg said: that like Dr. Melfi, the viewers tricked themselves into believing that they were doing something good by analyzing this person that they knew was evil. But now, at the end, finally we wake up and realize that we need to stop, that if we’re going to be good, reasonable people, we can’t enable this person any longer.

There’s also something interesting going on in terms of the ambiguity of viewer identification with characters on The Sopranos. For me, Dr. Melfi has always been more sympathetic, if for no other reason than that she’s from a socio-economic class closer to my own than most of the other characters are. That’s probably true for a lot (but maybe not most) of the audience. We think of ourselves as superior to Tony, who isn’t terribly bright, but we think that he wants to be good. We feel his anger and his sorrow. We’re occasionally empathetic. But we also have known all along that he’s a murderer, that he’s a bad person.

In Scorsese on Scorsese, Marty talks about wanting to portray people normally thought of as bad or evil, particularly Jake Lamotta and Travis Bickle, as something more sympathetic, or perhaps more complex. This wouldn’t excuse their actions (or would it?), but would somehow be more realistic, and therefore preferable to the black-and-white unrealistic morality of traditional Hollywood. While describing the sympathy that viewers might feel for the main characters in Goodfellas, Scorsese talks about it in terms of growing up: “It raises a moral question, like a kid getting older and realizing what these people have done, but still having those first feelings for them as people.” At the conclusion of most of their narratives, Scorsese’s anti-heroes are either praised by a backwards society (Taxi Driver, King of Comedy), thus indicting society, or they’re leading undesirable, unglamorous lives (Goodfellas, Raging Bull), which, in a culture where glamour and fame are indistinguishable from respect, can only be considered a fate worse than death. None of the films really let the immoral protagonist (or the viewer who identifies with him) off the hook, but it doesn’t punish them the way the old Hays code would’ve demanded that they do. This moral gray area is defended on the grounds that it is more realistic than Hollywood’s depiction of evil.

Dr. Melfi hasn’t really played too prominently in the last few seasons of The Sopranos, so this second-to-last episode, in which Melfi recognizes that she’s been mollycoddling a murderer, seems like a bit of an unsatisfying cheat, an escape hatch for those of us who always felt uncomfortable with the prospect of a murderous protagonist. I’ve spent so much more time with Tony that I’m more inclined to identify with him, but when I take a step back, I clearly identify with Melfi more, feeling that, as Scorsese put it, its time to grow up and judge this person for his actions. What might’ve been praised by some as the realistic, gray-area depiction of evil is really just an attempt to excuse the voyeuristic pleasure of the therapist/viewer.

Because it has two points of viewer identification, the show can have it both ways. We can wash our hands of Tony and the show, giving up our vicarious addiction to the pleasures of acting selfishly, or we can believe, like Tony believes, that we're the last of a dying breed, and that there's a nobility in that.

Then there's the nascent terrorist AJ, but maybe it'll be better to write about that after the series concludes.

Is The Sopranos a Unified, Coherent Text?

As The Sopranos concludes next Sunday, I keep wondering whether it could be watched (or taught) in the same way that an epic novel could be read. The amount of time one would need to watch it roughly corresponds to the time it would take to read an epic novel - about a semesters' worth of watching, at a leisurely pace of 6 hours per week.

The most obvious thing working against any TV show aspiring to be be great, lasting art is the fact that they are written as they go along. Everyone loves to point out that Dickens wrote classics in serial format, and that some great works of literature and film were parts of a serial that was written as they went along, but generally, the most read, most cited, most resonant works tend to be conceived of at once, with an overarching plot, OR they have such a structure imposed on them afterwards.

Even if David Chase was more secure than most show runners, virtually guaranteed the right to end the show on his terms, there's still the issue of multiple writers and directors with separate visions. Naturally, these visions must pass muster with the show runner, but still there are more likely to be tangents that don't tie into the whole arc of the story. Of course, these tangents may develop the characters, or be thematically resonant with the rest of the show, but there seems to be the expectation on the part of critics and viewers that each episode and season provide a certain amount of plot points related to a story that carries through from the start of the show to the end.

The critical discourse on Slate often describes ways in which themes and actions that occur in the final season tie into themes and actions that happened in earlier seasons. The mere fact that the show achieved some unity despite being on television (which is assumed to work against authors' efforts to created a unified text) is worthy of praise; so much the better if those themes resonate with the culture and all cultures in general.

But is this kind of unity unlike what Terry Winter laments about network TV: "where everything is wrapped up in neat little bows"? On one end of the spectrum, we have "reality," where there are no conclusions until each of our consciousnesses are snuffed out, where there are infinite vantage points instead of the lone POV of the narration. On the other end, we have the half-hour sitcom, where no actions have lasting consequences, and we're offered a single point of view and many "neat and tidy" conclusions. Somewhere in the middle are the great works of narrative art. But I think that their inner unity or cohesion isn't praiseworthy because its more realistic than sitcoms and such (though that may be true), but more because of a long standing rule of aesthetic judgment: unity = quality.

The last episode didn't quite cohere with the rest of the show to the degree that other episodes in the final season did. It featured a lot of Tony "checking in" with various characters (e.g. Uncle Junior, Janice, Paulie) who were no longer causally connected with the major plotlines that were still in play - will Tony be indicted or murdered by Phil, etc. AJ's multiple reversals were consistent with his confused adolescent character, but still felt a little haphazard. The show did, however, maintain a thematic unity, commenting on American entertainment (particularly TV), depression, and corruption from the very beginning to the very end (though the observations about AJ's depression seemed to run out of steam in the last episode). As for the last scene, I think that it was more consistent with the rest of the show than many are likely to realize.

Of course, unity isn't everything. There are a million reasons why The Sopranos is a great show, or why any story that isn't particularly well unified can be just as affecting as any other.