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The Sopranos Ends With a ...
If you still have your copy sitting unwatched on your Tivo, I'd suggest that you stop reading before you are spoiled. The show is done at last and apparently fans are freaking out over the bizarre ending. At my house, we thought at first that the DVR crashed until the credits appeared in silence. Personally I thought that a show known for such excess tried to take an artful bow: It didn't work for me, but I get it at least. Anyway, I had a number of Sopranos submissions this morning and figured I'd just post this comment to give people who were interested in discussing the end of the show a nice place to discuss before they cancel their HBO.
It completely sucked. It left you with thinking "he either got shot.. or didn't get shot."
I guess their main objective was to leave question, but leave everyone realizing that he's got to spend the rest of his life in anxiety, wondering if he's going to get shot at any time.
"Please, shut up. Just when I think you can't say anything more stupid, you speak again." -Archie Bunker.
That sense of tension and anxiety at the end is how Tony has to lead his life, every minute of every day. He doesn't know what's going to happen next, and now you know what that's like.
At first I was like: WTF?
But then I realized we were looking at every action around him as a source of danger... Expecting anything to happen. And for that short few minutes we knew what it was like to be Tony. Could be the FBI waiting to grab you, could be some hired killers edging their way toward your table and entire family, the whole damn place could explode, etc...
No nice tidy bow wrapped ending for us or Tony, just another rev of the same wheel.
That's exactly what the series ended with. You can read into it all the "meaning" you like. The fact is, the writers, directors, producers, et. al., left it wide open. "How do we end it?" they all said to themselves. Then, HBO executives, said: "Just don't. Don't end it at all. Don't have Tony dead. Don't have him in jail. Don't have him run to his new FBI friend and make a deal. Don't resolve anything. Don't do anything that will lock us into or out of possible future revenue. Just cut to black." And the rest of them, in unison, standing their in muffled awe, breathed "Genius."
Whatever the original artistic intent of this ending was, it occurred to me that if I was going to depict a guy getting whacked who never saw it coming - from that guy's own perspective - this might be just how I'd portray that.
This probably reads like a troll, but I'm genuinely interested, because I so don't get it. Think of it as a personal failing on my part, and point out the cultural riches I'm missing out on. People have a fascination with badasses and few people have a better image of badassery than mobsters. All of us live life constrained by the rules and subservient to those with power. Mobsters take power and make their own rules. We see the danger they live in and see ourselves as too timid to embrace the prospect of self-destruction at any moment but our popular image of the mobster is that he lives and dies hard. Of course, since most of us also have no direct experience with these people, we fill in the blanks with our own romantic ideas of what goes down. I remember reading about one mobster who went with his mugs to go see a crime picture. He was very impressed with the fictional mob rites of loyalty and oath-taking. "Dis stuff is good," he said to one of his goombahs. "We need to be doin' dis."
Mobsters were simply the latest flavor of the generation. Before the mobster fascination we had cowboys and gunfighters. Before that we had romantic notions of pirate kings and exotic foreign lands. If you think the mobsters are bad, you don't even want to read about what hardcore pirates were like. The level of violence and brutality is sickening to see described in words on paper, I cannot even imagine what it looked like in person. And somehow, despite all that, we see pirates celebrated as shady but with hearts of gold.
But here's the funny part. What do you call a truly successful pirate or mobster? Your majesty. Seriously. Where do you think the ruling houses and nobles came from? Sure, ten generations down the line the House of Someguy is represented by some effete twit but I guarantee you the original Someguy was a badass you did not want to cross. And the best mobsters were the ones who figured out how to operate with the law on their side. Robber-baron was not a title of pressroom hyperbole. Where did Daddy Kennedy make his money? Rum-running. How did George W. Bush's grandpappy get rich? Doing business with the Nazis.
We don't see movies made about average joes living contented lives. We never read about the farmboy who stayed home, obeyed his fathers wishes and took over the farm. We read about his brother, the one who ran away to join the Navy, who decided to fight in some noble war in some far-flung land. We read about the man with the ambition to do something great, no matter how much blood was needed to grease the wheels. It is spectacle, it is horror, and it is a dreadful fascination, and newspapermen will continue to make money feeding that curiosity.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
I think the reason so many fans are going to feel this is that the show started off as a badass mob series that attracted viewers of a certain nature who enjoy living a vicarious life of crime.
This show started off as a show about a mobster who's mother had driven him to panic attacks.
It was not really until the actress playing Livia Soprano died that the show really took its turn into
badass mob series. It was the quirk of a mobster in therapy that drew me to the show. It made for
interesting drama.
Unfortunately, the ending just wasn't juicy enough to satiate that kind of appetite and I think that's why you'll hear so much about this. Personally, I liked it although I recognize that too many questions were left unanswered, too many futures were left uncertain & too many problems were left unresolved.
You have to give credit where its due. They sure as hell created massive tension in the last 5 minutes with all the cuts between the family at the table, the guy at the counter, meadow trying to parallel park, the other customers in the diner. The cut to black left me sitting in my dark living room, with my heart racing. It was a great ending. Life is tense. Life goes on. Life sucks, then you die. Shit happens. Shit fails to happen. Resolution is for the lucky.
That was significantly better than a climactic gun fight, a last second hit, a wake-up from a dream, or, heaven help us, an animal-house-style what-happens-to-the-characters montage.
Go black. Never go back.
Ciao Tony Soprano. Thanks. It was fun while it lasted.
My Heart Is A Flower
He's alive. And not just to leave it open for a movie or new series, but because the entire show was about this same cycle. The show was never about closure, or redemption, or the hero's journey. It was about making you sit in his seat for awhile, and see the world through his eyes, not a glorified "Top of the world ma!" go out in a blaze of glory type thing. It was an "end up in a wheel chair unaware of who you are" sort of thing.
The break away to black was a crescendo to the tension they created with the folks walking in, looking shifty. "OMG, that guys gonna whack him!", "OMG, that dude is gonna shoot AJ", "OMG, Meadow's car will blow up."
Why kill him? Why not show him being killed if he is? What lesson would we learn from that that we don't learn by him being alive, but trapped. By the life, the fear, the machine. He's not afraid to die, he's afraid of that senile old man in the chair.
"This thing of ours, once you're in, there ain't no gettin' out." Which is a fitting prison for Tony, locked in a life of his own making, nostalgically trying to reach out for the "old days" when his Dad and Uncle June ran N. Jersey. But those days are gone, if they ever existed. There are no good old days, just days, and life goes on. Let's get some onion rings tonight, b/c there's a good chance we'll all be dead tomorrow.