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?

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.