..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..R.J. Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

Sopranos, Etc
by Larry Gross

"The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appears."
              -- Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks

"Disillusion is the last illusion."
            -- Wallace Stevens, An Ordinary
      ....     Evening in New Haven

There are different ways to be original and so, necessarily, different ways to be inspired to be original.   These are things to remember and consider when contemplating the aesthetic success or failure of The Soprano's last episode's windup.

A lot of the huffing and puffing about David Chase's choices with regard to the episodes closing moments has to do with the complicated and always conflicted way in which the show addressed its audience.  The whole importance of the show has always originated in Chase's determination not to hide his conflictedness about liking and not liking Tony Soprano, to evade to the furthest degree the either-he's-good-or-he's-bad approach and go for the he's both approach. Tony's a lot of different things at different times. 

Chase himself was always trying to express a lot of different aspirations in this enterprise, even when they slammed up against each other in not entirely satisfactory ways. Let's start by recalling some of the balls Chase has sought to keep in the air.

In addition to being the tale of a Jersey crime boss on his last legs seeking help in therapy  as the myth of the Mafia-macho-omnipotence wanes, a soap about a family perpetually in crisis, and the delineation of multiple turf wars of a more generic crime story kind,  The Sopranos managed to be about other things as well

*It was a love-hate letter to our therapeutic culture of self absorbed self realization and all the ways that psychoanalytic thought has become debased yet inescapable cultural marker. (This was ground, incidentally, that Alan Ball was traversing from the California perspective for many of the same years on Six Feet Under.)

*It was a meditation on the fact that everyone in our world is connected to and obsessed with showbiz/old movie/nostalgia/media/the technology of visual culture, even those mafia goons who would seem least likely to be involved with and most remote from concerns for such things . 

It's important to note in this regard, that in addition to Kristopher's indirectly fatal brush with Hollywood, AJ is tossed into the maw of movies near the end. This is rather explicit proof - if any were needed - that psychological authenticity will always evade him as it has his father and grandfather before him.  (Not unrelated to this is one of the show's most famous episodes, obsessed reliance upon a defective cell phone, a device which today has become itself part of visual culture.)

What clearly must have begun to obsess Chase (and who knows how many of his creative collaborators) as the show evolved, was how the phenomenon of the show's very success itself, mirrored back the contradictions in these thematic arcs.  Vast widespread love and popularity for Tony Soprano must have often felt, for an already-conflicted sensibility like Chase's, an almost insupportably agonizing irony.  And this of course includes its being a good self-esteem boosting thing too, to which he owed a certain basic responsibility. A debt to his audience needed settling and a debt to his own vision.

But the contradictions in the situation for Chase and us still don't end there:  One paradox:  Though Chase was marvelously fierce about not playing by the more inane banally fear-driven rules of tv dramaturgy, he was far more a stylistic traditionalist than he was any kind of stylistic or aesthetically oriented innovator. Rich characterizations and satisfyingly deep emotional expression were the week-by-week stuff that the show did best. If you want hard-to-follow ingenious path-breaking visual metaphor and truly rule-shattering tv dramaturgy you go to Potter's Singing Detective or McGoohan's The Prisoner.  There is more of that type of taste-for-formal-experiment-as-a-virtue and central inspiration in its own right in the work of Gary Shandling and Alan Ball's Six Feet Under or the first year of Twin Peaks, than in The Sopranos.
 
This isn't a knock it's simply a classification. If he were a novelist, Chase wouldn't be Joyce or Kafka, he'd be Balzac or Tolstoy. This is to say that when the show went for more explicit visual “strangeness,” i.e. episodes where Tony's asleep and dreaming or in a bullet induced coma for most of its duration, were not Chase at his strongest.  One absolutely admired his will to flex those muscles, but you were a far from the supple rigorous craziness of the Charlie Kaufmans or the David Lynchs at their intermittent best, when you saw those episodes.

This is to say that the grand contradiction inside Chase's creation was its own ambivalent participation in cultural history.  It dealt with an outmoded 20th century world-view (specifically the nostalgically remembered decades of the sixties and seventies)  colliding with 21st century ambiguity and the artist, whether he fully knew it or not, caught right in the middle of the same thing in his own aesthetic process.  (It's hard to imagine someone as smart as Chase doing anything unwittingly, but then the older you get, the more you know, the more you discover you missed…)

Which gets us to Sunday night's episode with its controversial final sequence in the diner with its eight seconds of blackness at last.

I don't want to say why it was great.  Or even that it was great, because I think there are a lot of strong arguments on both sides of that issue.  Value judgments are like opinions and assholes, everybody's got them…

I am interested in giving an account of where it came from.

Let's dispose of two extreme points of view, one harshly negative, one harshly cynical.  The negative one says he ended it that way because he was chickenshit, stalled or both.  He didn't “know” how to end his show. 

I won't list all the reasons why that's bullshit.  But it is.  And the proof that it is, simply, that the last three episodes were so abundant in conventionally “big” dramatic moments that Chase made it very explicit he could give us one if he wanted to.

A more hardcore cynical interpretation is that Tony lives on in thematic and narrative indeterminacy for reasons entirely irrelevant to the shows structure and themes itself, that Chase simply wants the option to do movies and sequels about Tony.

Let me say this about that. 

I think Chase is probably himself cynical enough or respectful enough of the cynical take on Life, to allow himself to be interpreted that way.  But on another level he's getting the last laugh on those who think about it like that, or let's say, those who think about it in so simple a way  On a more empirically specific level, against that argument, is Gandolfini's widely reiterated determination to leave the show behind, which  would seem to rule out further versions. 

My suspicion is that if Chase returns at all to these characters for whatever reasons after some hiatus, it will be in a structure and tone so different from what The Sopranos has been up till now, that it won't be what it has hitherto been.  A series or a movie about Meadow's middle class marriage woes as a lawyer with a lawyer husband or the saga of the Tony-Carmela marriage's final freeze may come, but I don't think it will be a continuation, in any meaningful way, of The Sopranos.

So if those are not the reasons, what's he about?

Everything about the episode up till the end moments is the meat-and-potatoes, darkly comic psychological moral realism that the show offered us at regular intervals for the previous six years.  But the theme of disappointment and frustration is also obsessively being tracked-and dramatized.  Bobby's funeral is held not with insupportable anguish, but a shrug.  Info is gotten on Phil Leotardo from a Fed who's himself more morally compromised than ever.  Parting glances at Silvio.  Tony's sis.  Paulie's sweetly insufficient visionary moment with the Virgin.  And above all, Tony's devastating failure to talk  with Uncle Junior are all little emblems of failed, disrupted communication.  Even the much admired killing of Phil is abrupt and purposely the result of numerous narrative ellipses.  The way that Meadow and AJ are pulled back into the family's normative straightjacket is quiet and grim, a Chekhovian demonstrations that almost all gestures in life toward psychological autonomy and transcendence habitually end in failure. 

What the cut to black in the last seconds says it says not in a similarly well dramatized manner - not in the manner of a cathartic statement - but at the level of structure. It's Chase saying, “Up till now I've been satisfied to be good at the dramatic.  I am good at the realistic.  But I am at the end of the day aware that that is not enough; that to be true to my vision I have to show that there is an ambiguous unknowable set of moral and social forces working here that cannot be fully resolved in the terms I have set forth.”

It's no wonder this disgusts a sizable part of Chase's audience. 

He has gotten their deepest loyalty in many, many cases by his casual seeming mastery of the most conventional dramatic instruments.  Now at the very ultimate moment he alludes to their insufficiency and symbolically denies his own skill at statement.

But not only is Tony's fate thematically unknowable or undecidable, there's another governing issue.  That long disruptive fragmenting cut to black at the close is a conclusive gesture toward, and even for, the audience, and anything but a display of contempt for them.  Anger and ambivalence maybe, but not contempt.  The filmmaker confesses that the power of making the Sopranos' story meaningful lies not with him, but with us.

The choice to make abrupt empty blackness the “ending”  was entirely about the show's relation to its audience. 

What people wanted was David Chase's conclusive statement about Tony Soprano, but the final ending scene does not come from the nature of Tony Soprano's character, it comes from the problem of David Chase's relationship with his audience.

To clarify by way of analogy, there is a famous choice in movie narrative that nominally offers resolution but in fact destroys the possibility of conclusiveness even more monstrously than this Soprano's finale.  That is the murder of Janet Leigh in Psycho.  And particularly there is a strong similarity in Hitchcock's decision to cast a major star who “could not” be killed a half hour into the film, but whose death and disappearance structured that impossibility as the governing aspect of the film's structure. 

Whatever else is true about that admirably complex choice on Hitchcock's part, you can say that it did not emanate as an inspiration, from the psychological necessities of the character of Marion Crane in that movie, nor was it in any meaningful way a “resolution” of her story.  It was in fact the most aggressive insult to meaning perhaps in the history of cinema. Marion Crane's death is precisely as black and arbitrary as the black screen that ended The Soprano's as a series.

What Chase was doing involved not the characters or the story as such, but a meditation on the show's relation to its audience, not just the audience's literal narrative expectations so much as the whole issue of that audience's feelings about the show. 

If it was (as with the Hitchcock example) an instance of violence to the governing assumptions of the audience, it was of a surpassingly honest kind. It said, “this is what I have been about all along…I have implicated you in the destiny of Tony and his family-but I have always told you are there is a problem and therefore a cost for simplistic, transparent, identification, and now, finally, at last,  the bill has come due.”

It's not the explicit thematic punishment of killing them, which as many Chase supporters have already pointed out would be too tidy and morally coherent by half.   It's the confession that straightforward representational narrative information can't get to the bottom of this diversely jumbled contradictory life Chase has been putting on display.

(What's partly so moving and odd about the whole sequence in the diner is how paradoxically rich with ongoing lived life it is… from the exhilarating  rhythms of the Journey tune to images  a couple smooching in another booth, another family gathering down the end of the aisle, two black guys stopping at a street stand outside, the quintessential Sopranos comedy of Meadow's inept parking job, all the hints of dread in a guy eying Tony, down to the tiny affirmation of AJ talking about “remembering the good times.”)

So as Paulie got it so evocatively wrong at Bobbie's funeral, “in the midst of death we are in life.”  But Chase is not tantalizing us with specific narrative issues.  There's no one in the story left to kill Tony and the danger of a cop bust has already been covered in the scene with his lawyer. Tony's anxious fearful looks to the door are not narratively specific.  They are signatures of his soul's perpetual divided state, as Michael Corleone's blank impassive stare was the signature of his damnation.

The disappointment-causing “attack” on or denial of grayification to the audience is also perhaps the most explicit statement of the sovereignty of the audience, because it was by taking us into consideration that Chase generated this idea in the first place (in the same way that audience certainty that Hitchcock wouldn't/couldn't - not moral or narrative necessity - inspired him to kill Marion Crane).   The audience is always ultimately compelled by the best art to take responsibility, to discover responsibility for its own interpretive moves or failure to make them.

To go back to my first assertion, originality partly means letting yourself be influenced by new and different kinds of reality as the way to make art.  In 19th century fiction, that meant making “ordinary” non-aristocratic human beings the heroes of fiction.  In the great era of modernist narrative, that meant exploring the structure of consciousness as the motive for metaphor.  In the case of Hitchcock, and now in the case of David Chase, two masters of popular visual film narrative, the very sociology of tv and film's popularity itself, our attachment to issues like the star system, and our expectation of easy narrative closure, become problematic zones that inspire a confrontation and questioning of form.

In the end though with Chase, it does come back to character. 

The Sopranos was emphatically not tragedy on the model of The Godfather nor was it exclusively a realist  denunciation of the mob's moral bankruptcy like Goodfellas, though the overwhelming influence of both conceptions on Chase was visible everywhere and generously acknowledge by him many times.  (The rushed anti-dramatic “sit”  discussing Phil's fate in this show was one of many effective smaller-than-life Godfather parody/commentaries in this final episode. Scorsese and Coppola are, of course, Chase's own oedipal issue.)

Tony Soprano has always lived a unique, perpetually undecidable tragic-comic death-in-life that spills outside the very norms of dramatic genre writing Chase deploys so skillfully. Tony has lived between a rock and a hard place, but then so has David Chase.  I believe it was inevitable and profound of Chase to find ways at the end, to share his most intimate dilemmas and questions with us.  

This is NOT the artist abdicating responsibility.  This is the artist, a most solicitous and engaging type usually, insisting that we assume ours.

- Larry Gross
June 12, 2007

Larry Gross is a 25 year screenwriting veteran and Winner of Sundance's Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award for his most recent release, We Don't Live Here Anymore.

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