The Sopranos Redux

The Sopranos has been out of our lives now for weeks, but somehow I just can't let it go. Today I came upon a piece in the current online edition of the New York Review of Books by Geoffrey O'Brien that is as smart and elegant a summary of the show and its attractions as you are likely to find. Here is a sample:

Chase's neatest trick was to make a show about the mob—a show that laid out in gratifying detail the workings of scams and hits, political connections and techniques of intimidation, internecine maneuverings and FBI infiltrations—that constantly suggested that the mob was not what the show was really about. By assimilating the mob into everyday life he dissolved it. Tony Soprano was the gangster who lived on the other side of the fence and sat at the next table in the restaurant, mingling in a world quite sufficiently corrupt without him. He was not, in old movie style, the outsider casting a sinister shadow over the American family; he was himself the prime representative of that family. He had grown up on sitcoms and Seventies rock, and there were moments when Tony and Paulie in the backroom of Satriale's metamorphosed into Ralph Kramden and Ed Norton at the Raccoon Lodge on The Honeymooners, or when Tony, launching one of his racist zingers, seemed a stand-in for Archie Bunker of All in the Family.

Tony was a domesticated end point for the romance of gangsterism that looks to be America's most durable contribution to world folklore. It was a romance fed by movies, not just the early classics with Cagney, Robinson, and Muni, but the harsher and less poetic later movies—The Enforcer (1951), The Brothers Rico (1957), Johnny Cool (1963)—in which gangsterism was no longer a violent aberration but the deadly norm, administered by unpitying accountants flanked by expressionless hitmen in dark glasses. (Cagney's Public Enemy—a Tony Soprano favorite—looked like a Miltonic rebel angel by comparison.) The cycle culminated in Coppola's Godfather films and Scorsese's Goodfellas, crucial reference points for The Sopranos.

And here is O'Brien's analysis of how Chase brought us, in the end, face to face with the reality that is mob life.

It was disturbing to realize how much we did care about these people. Each of the final episodes was anticipated not so much with pleasure as dread, since each posed the risk of an unacceptable loss, as characters in whom we had invested years of attention were swept away. None of the characters in The Sopranos precisely resembled Little Nell, of course. That it was possible to feel so much on behalf of characters often devoid of the least capacity for empathy was a typical Sopranos paradox. As if to emphasize that point, the last episodes went out of their way to cast Tony and the rest in an ever more remote and unsympathetic light. The endgame obliged us to be stripped of any remaining illusions. Perhaps, to ease the pain of our disengagement, Chase felt we should be reminded that we had permitted ourselves to love monsters.

Good stuff. As for his view of the much discussed final episode,

No imaginable end—Tony killed, dead by mischance, in prison, or in the witness protection program—seemed a satisfying prospect. In the last episode, tantalizingly, event followed event with the promise of freshly evolving situations, just as if the conclusion were not in sight. Perhaps the show would not end at all. In a sense it didn't. To the dismay of many viewers, a black screen—at the moment when Tony may or may not have been fatally shot by a hit man who may or may not have been there, as a jukebox song stopped on the phrase "don't stop"—froze all further narrative development. Or perhaps this was a way of conveying that the show had already ended, perhaps a long time before. After all, was there any kind of ending that we had not already seen? In a sense it had all been nothing but a succession of endings. We could hardly complain that there hadn't been enough of them.

Nine Minute Sopranos

Somehow I missed this excellent and well edited summary of all nine seasons of The Sopranos. Enjoy.

The Sopranos - The Tony Got Wacked Theory In Detail

The Last Supper of Tony Soprano?

As I wrote right after seeing the final episode of The Sopranos, I believed that David Chase had decided to let us all decide on the ending for our selves. However, the most common theory on the web has been that the one that believes that the final blackout was the moment of Tony Soprano's death.

If you subscribe to that theory or would just like to think about it some, check out Bob Harris' website. Harris is a writer who was also once a Jeopardy champion.

As Harris says, he could be wrong, but he has strung together every possible element of an intricately woven web of references and directorial choices that point to Tony's death. The premise of this theory is the quote by David Chase that the meaning of the final scene is "all there on the screen."

For me, the truth of theories such as this depends entirely on a knowledge of the kind of person and writer that Chase is. None of us have any idea of that. Absent that knowledge, defining the meaning of the ending is very much like most conspiracy theories. The conspiracy theorist first settles on the nature of the conspiracy and then collects facts that fit that theory. Facts that don't fit are either ignored or debunked until only the theorists view is left standing.

As you will see in Harris essay, he views Chase as having made virtually each and every choice in that scene, indeed in the whole episode, provide foreshadowing and references to death, and specifically to the death scene in The Godfather in which Michael emerges from the bathroom and shoots Solazzo and the police Captain.

I have no doubt that the movement of the suspicious "Members Only" guy toward the bathroom is meant to remind us of that reference. But it could be just another means of suggesting a shooting was imminent. After all, the whole scene is full of such foreboding. Chase could have been pointing us in that direction only to pull us up short and make us painfully aware of our own assumptions and expectations. I don't know about you, but I generally don't take a paranoid perspective when public places are portrayed in movies.

So in the end, we would need to know the kind of writer David Chase is. Does he meticulously plan and rework every word he writes or does he go largely on his artistic instinct, taking advantage of events and chance as they occur on the page and on the set? Did he have the actors consume the famous onion rings as if they were communion wafers to mimic a funeral mass, as Harris suggests, or did it just feel right to Chase that the meal become another reference point to the Catholic faith of the Soprano family.

I don't know, but damn, it is still fun to contemplate. That, in the end, is the final test of great art.

Hillary Clinton Sopranos Spoof.

Well, it is now clear that the Sopranos series, and especially its finale, have entered the lexicon of cultural cliches. Here we have Hillary and Bill strolling into the Mt. Kisco Diner for supper, complete with references to the onion rings, the Journey music, parallel parking, threatening characters and a final blackout. In case the references were not clear enough, we have the actor who portrayed Johnnie Sack giving his best cold-eyed stare at the Clintons.

Ann Althouse has pointed out the problems for Hillary with all the associations imbeded in this video. But perhaps she is putting too fine a point on the event. After all, it does show that the Clintons can appear to have a sense of humor. Yes, I know that the likelihood is that the writer and director had to explain the context to them. It is also impossible to envision Hill and Bill strolling into a diner on Main St., even with the Secret Service entourage in tow.

At the end of the day the video is a Rorschach test of our preconceptions about America's most focused and driven couple.

The Sopranos - You Keep Me Hangin' On

The tension was building to a fever pitch. One by one the Soprano nuclear family gathered in the diner. One by one possible hit men came in while we all waited for Meadow to park her damn car. One last communion-like ingestion of onion rings by all and....black!

Like many, I feared that Comcast had screwed up and dropped the signal at the crucial moment, then, after five seconds, the credits began to roll. Silently, with none of the usual musical overlay.

I began to laugh my ass off. Chase had consumed the seemingly endless speculation from far and wide. He broke the fourth wall and said, screw it, you guys make up your own ending. It was perfect.

Along the way he showed us the total devastation of Uncle Junior, Janice's bottomless focus on getting other people's money, and we were left to imagine the squashing of Phil Leotardo's scull, seen only in the nearly comic take reaction of the bystanders. We also saw the FBI trying to influence the office pool on who would whack who, AJ's salvation from his depression and scattered dreams of saving the world and Meadow's future practicing law in her soon-to-be-husband's firm.

All in all a very satisfying finale featuring a great song by the Vanilla Fudge, one of the preeminent New York bar bands of Chase's and my youth. "You Keep Me Hangin' On" indeed.