Letters to the Editor
-
Mattwa 33186 nails it
I think Mattwa sums it up beautifully:
"It was a brilliant final scene no matter what. For the first time I really understood how stressful and fraught with peril the world seemed to Tony."
I took two things from the final scene, which I thought was a great way to go. First, Chase deliberately, and maybe a little too obtrusively, played off all those traditional mob movies including the Godfather. The rising tension, heightened by Meadow's parking problems (would she get whacked with the family, miss the carnage and escape?), set up a dialectic which Chase was Chesire Cat like not going to fall into.
But I saw the fade out in the same way as above. Maintaining his existential approach, Chase ends the Soprano's at the core of the Universe it has portrayed at the beginning. Family comes first, no matter what. And what has always been the quintessential duality of the show, the ordinary schmuck who just happens to be a violent sociopath (mirroring our national leadership by the way, so Tony Soprano is not so far off from the American center), is at the end again on display.
Because surrounding this very ordinary family outing with its seeingly normal and bland talk, is the violent and dangerous Universe this man inhabits and has made his own. The fact of the matter is, for Tony Soprano , who has always lived in a volitile, uncertain world, death and upheaval lurk at every corner.
So Chase leaves us with a tableau, almost as if we are looking at a primal moment frozen in time, or a moment from a dream. This is Tony's world, in his "nest", yet beset by the law, again, with the possibility of violence and violation of his sanctuary always in the periphery of his field of vision.
Whether he is killed here is not the issue. It is the freeze frame, the essence of the show, character, and life that is represented. This is how it was, is, and will be. (With A.J. speaking for Chase to the audience, "Remember the good times".) Tony is a survivor. But for how long is a mystery because his life was always a tightrope dance.
I agree. It was a truly self conscious and referential, yet brilliant way to go.