Letters to the Editor
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haha...great ending
Nicely done....a practical joke, "art" or both. Props to Chase for not giving in and going with a morality play or cathartic revenge ending (base emotions). It's the gray areas where real life happens (not that The Sopranos were real) so it's nice to see ambiguity tossed into mass popular culture.
Also props to HBO for allowing for creative freedom and not something else (audience or exec driven). Nice to see some creative cajones in popular culture once in a while...although one could argue there was a little fence sitting in the ending but hey that's life.
BTW, I knew TS wouldn't die because there's a feature film still to be made. Ending the series is one thing...killing off the option of more was never going to happen.
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The Sopranos Movie
Will be about Junior and Johhny. JG has already said he won't do it, so Tony is still only as alive as you want him to be.
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The Great American Telenovel ends like an Arthouse Film
I don't think an ending in a television series has ever been so deliberately abrupt yet so pregnant with significance. (As Heather astutely points out--it "goes on and on and on and on" for powerful people like the Sopranos.) We talk alot about how this era of television shows are "novelistic"; but no novel would end like this without providing any sort of conventional closure. On the other hand, we go to hundreds of foreign and independent films that wrap up on an off beat, and we applaud the daring. Chase has masterfully incorporated two seemingly oppositional art forms into one. Simply put, it's the most unique and thought-provoking conclusion in television history.
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orange
Wasn't Tony eating an orange in the first half-hour? Leads me to believe he is dead.
Concerning the song lyrics: "it goes on and on and on and on" whether Tony lives or dies. -
Taken for a ride
I watched the first season on DVD after being hounded by my "intellectual" friends to do so. "This is different," they said. "It's so much more than just another mob show," they said. Guess what? It wasn't, and I quit watching after that, but I had to hear the weekly synopses and analyses from Sopranos scholars. It sounds as if Chase gave viewers exactly what they deserved in the end--a reminder that they've been taken for a ride by a bloated, sociopathic neanderthal and his dysfunctional, sociopathic family and friends. Unfortunately, that won't stop the wankers from studying this crap for years to come instead of reading a book. Good riddance to the most overrated mediocrity in the history of television.
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One thing I wasn't Clear On
Tony with his coat on walks into the restaurant, surveys the crowd and then sees himself sitting at a table sans the coat. What the fuck was that? Did we then switch to a different point-of-view, or did something happen, allowing Tony to see himself with his family from a distance? I am confused by the ending, but I am not mad. I think only David Chase can clear up what point he was trying to make by cutting to black.
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We share the tension Tony feels
Hitchcock described how he created tension in a scene. He would show the bomb under the table and clock attached to it. The people in the scene did not know the clock-bomb was there -- but we did. Would they get out before the bomb went off? That was the tension.
In the final show, things seem to be going back to normal for Tony. He and the family move back into their house. Carm comments on how much mail piled up. AJ seems stabilized and not in the Army. Meadow is happy. The whole family seems to be living the upper middle-class dream.
But Tony knows (or at least thinks) there is an assassin in the room. So do we. He scans each person in the restaurant for the telltale signs. So do we. How can we (Tony and us) live this way.
Focus on the good times.
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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.