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• Thursday, June 14, 2007 02:13 AM

  I am thinking of a MASH episode entitled "Sometimes you hear the bullet..." (hmmm)

  Sometimes a cut to black is just a clumsy cut to black. Rather than a sublime meditation on nihilism, the blank screen that stunned viewers last Sunday indicated a failure of nerve on the part of David Chase. David Chase is not Goddard, not Truffaut, nor even David Lynch. One should be cautious about trundling out the long-outdated aesthetic theories of dead white European males -- Brecht, Derrida, Baudrillard, et. al. -- from the 1940s-1960s to somehow authorize the impoverished narrative chess move Chase executed. He left us in check -- not checkmated. We were not left with an ending, a meditation on endings, or an illuminating gesture in some metanarratological direction, just an obnoxious, splattered rorschach. In order to demonstrate the ultimate alienation of the bourgeois viewer from the filmic text, Chase should have presented us with two hours of black screen. That would have accomplished far more methodologically than a two-bit soap opera designed to titillate a masochistic audience awaiting it's final punishment.

  In truth, the Brechtian "fourth wall" was firmly in place throughout the series. The Sopranos was a soapy mobster genre piece that "aspired." Unfortunately, in the process of pretending to be something it wasn't it recklessly muddled complicated meta-issues dealing with the nature of psychotherapy, existential crises, and the social location of violence in our society. These potentially meaty issues, barely explored, were merely flickering red herrings distracting from the fundamental thrust of the narrative throughout, which in truth was just a retelling of older stories -- Wiseguy, the Godfather, Goodfellas, etc. The heavy ironizing of the scriptwriting and painful self-consciousness of the actors, revelling in their imagined cleverness, distracted from the intellectual appeal of the series from the very first episode. The final episode ran true to form, like a soap opera, with no profundity inherent in the text itself but rather leaving the overimaginative viewer to interpret the wads of symbolic feces which had been thrown against the semiotic wall for Chase's gorilla-like enjoyment. In the end, the show just sputtered -- not as an acknowledgement of some epistemological event horizon beyond which the viewer cannot peer, but rather as if HBO productions had forgotten to pay the lighting bill on the final day of shooting.

  "The finest plans have always been spoiled by the littleness of them that should carry them out." (Brecht)

  "Lights out, ah hah, blas blast blast." (Peter Wolf)

  —Jim Rockford Read Jim Rockford's other letters
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