Letters to the Editor
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a gimmick, not art
Ending The Sopranos with the family in an ice cream parlor as their life goes on is a fine choice. Too bad David Chase couldn't commit to that choice. Instead, he spent the last minutes of his majestic creation manipulating the audience with cinema techniques of foreboding. So overdone it screamed gimmick, gimmick.
I think Chase trivialized what he'd accomplished as an artist by ending his show with a rather banal comment about the audience's expectations, rather than risk making a clear artistic choice.
If the ending to The Sopranos was - Meadow gets a parking ticket, it would have been more satisfying and more emotional.
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bigger picture
eligit -
Great leap of imagination, and very plausible interpretation. If you're right, and the diner is a microcosm representing America, then we know where all the terrorist trails are leading. Too ghastly to portray as anything but metaphor, that final obliterating blackness might be the blast that tens of thousands of people never hear. Truly horrifying conclusion, when a hundred wrong decisions catch up to us and culminate another national tragedy.
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subject
After watching the rebroadcast a couple times, then ashamedly a third and once more for good measure, I'm sticking to my position: Tony Soprano's fate is obvious.
Knowing the familial history he shares with mental illness and diagnosed Early Onset Alzheimers as Kevin Finnerty, he comes face-to-face with a "fate worse than death" during his visit with Uncle Jun. It doesn't matter if he lives, flips or goes to jail; in spite of power, there will come a day when he doesn't remember his family.
Quick note, chalk this up to AJ's ignorance. It would be pointless for him to learn Arabic if he wants to be an Afghani Liaison. Instead, he should learn Farsi and/or Pashto. And, yes, there's red-white-and-blue in every gas station shot.
In a way the viewer has rarely if ever been slapped by the television, the diner scene - awkward from the start; Americana, not Italian - is an admonishment only if the show is perceived as a series of more narcissistic plot points. "Everybody wants a thrill" covered by a shot of Members Only Jacket Man; Chase is laying it on thick. The appropriate level of suspense is applied according to the viewer. The anxiety ridden final episodes have routinely featured characters asking variations of "is this it?"
Tony's aware that he's slipping when he uncharacteristically grabs AJ's arm in affirmation, having already 'embarrassed' himself in front of his wife when speaking frankly for the first time about his mother to AJ's therapist. Its vaguely reminiscent denizens crosscut with the absurdity of his offspring's parking adventure, Holstens serves simply as a location in Tony Soprano's continuing descent toward the Twilight Zone of dementia. End of story.
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I am thinking about this way too much
I mean, I liked the show a lot, and I agree that it was incredibly important within the television pantheon, but to me it wasn't the best show ever on TV or even the best show on HBO. But -
If Chase really did know how it was going to end from the very beginning, it just jumped to a whole new level in my book. The entire series foreshadowed this ending. I did predict a week ago that there would be an M. Night Shamalan type ending, so maybe I am trying to fit everything inside that box. But as I think back, acknowledging that while I have watched every episode I am not one of those people who can recite everything that ever happened in chronological order, I can't think of a single thing that happened that Tony didn't or couldn't know about either before or after the event, or that couldn't be the result of Tony's imaginings based on limited information.
Maybe he wouldn't have known about all the details, but the details didn't always make perfect sense, did they? Could that, combined with the plot holes and dead end story arcs that people complain about (and that Chase is definitely capable of avoiding) represent Tony's imperfect knowledge of the world around him? Even Meadow parallel parking in the last scene could be Tony imagining why she was late, since it has long been established that she is not a good driver. Could the entire series have been his life flashing before his eyes in the moment of his death?
Anyway. I don't think Tony seeing himself in the diner represented Meadow's point of view. For one thing, he was wearing a different shirt. To me that indicates him thinking that if things had gone a little differently, if he had (as one poster suggested) stayed in college instead of choosing a life of crime, he would be a different person. And for another, it disagrees with my theory that the entire series was from Tony's perspective :)
Why would a mafioso go to dinner without bodyguards? Chase presented The Sopranos to us as a show about an American family from the beginning. One of the most striking things about the show has always been that they considered themselves normal. They had the same problems, the same hopes. They didn't let the breadwinner's choice of career define them any more than a garbage man's or computer programmer's would. Except for Meadow and Tony, they were in complete denial. Meadow and Tony were in partial denial, because they thought they could still be normal most of the time. And one sign of this is that Tony went to strange restaurants without bodyguards all the time. Remember the sushi story arc. Seemed minor at the time, but it set this up perfectly. Tony wants a normal life with his normal family, he just doesn't want a normal job. The final song represents that aspiration, the way it ends shows what it costs him.
For me, the biggest clue that Tony is dead is the music. Another poster brought this up yesterday and that's when things really clicked. The music stopped when the screen went black. In every other episode the music plays over the credits. The man's name is Soprano. And when Sil gets shot, the music coming out of Bada Bing is "When the Music's Over". That, when added to the fact that we have been beaten over the head with "everything just goes black", makes it obvious to me.
The FBI agent doesn't represent our growing disillusionment with the war on terror, he shares it. A man who was regarded as unimportant by his employer even though he thought he was important and did important things. A man who grew increasingly disillusioned as he realized that nothing he did was making a difference, that his bosses were right about his importance in the scheme of things. He sacrificed his health when he went to Afghanistan (or Iraq, can't remember which). He sacrificed his marriage to the constant calls to respond to reports of terrorist activity which he knew were phony or actually tools that would be used to hurt the country. Given the chance to help someone he seems to have some genuine affection for, someone who actually respects him and appreciates his opinions and his help, he takes the opportunity to take action that results in a positive outcome for the first time in a long time. The irony is that he has to ally himself with someone the government views as an enemy to do so.
This has been said over and over, but it keeps coming up so I will repeat it. The guy in the Members Only jacket is not Nicky Leotardo.
I can't remember a TV show that got people talking and thinking like this episode. If the purpose of art is to elicit an emotional response then this is certainly art. For those who are angry about it, its cheap because anger is the easiest emotion to trigger. For those who keep thinking about it, like me, its good. But taking 3 completely innocuous elements and letting foreshadowing turn them into something so menacing and stressful was genius. And eliciting an emotional response that no TV show ever has (right at the moment the screen went black) makes it great art, even if you do think it was cheap.