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?
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