Notes on The Sopranos and abstract expressionism
St. Eligius Hospital turns out to be an autistic child's fanciful daydream; a suicidal J.R. Ewing fires a revolver, possibly at himself, possibly at the beady-eyed demon in the bedroom mirror; the Seinfeld gang gets put on trial for their supposed lack of humanity. Television history is rife with final episodes of landmark, long-running series that have left loyal fans feeling dazed, confused and royally pissed-off. Judging by the published reports, it would seem that Sunday night's series finale of The Sopranos has now joined those infamous ranks. But it doesn't deserve to, and I would argue that all those out there in TV land who have spent the last 48 hours cursing the name of series creator David Chase never really understood or appreciated what made The Sopranos so great in the first place.
In Las Vegas, where I spent the weekend leading up to and including the Sopranos finale, even those individuals who didn't have money riding on the outcome could scarcely keep themselves from speculating about it. Would Tony graduate to that great pork store in the sky, the way his loyal lieutenant (and brother-in-law) Bobby Baccalieri had just the week prior? Would he live, only to lose another loved one — this time maybe a blood relative — to the family business? One friend of mine, the legendary movie producer and sales agent Jeff Dowd (in town for the annual Cinevegas film festival), said he was sure that Carmela Soprano, finally having had her fill of Tony's shenanigans, would herself take up arms. But then again, Dowd added, he had it on good authority that Chase had filmed multiple endings to the episode just to throw potential spoilers off the scent. So, really, anything could happen.
Anything, I suppose, except for nothing at all. Indeed, even the best Vegas odds makers hadn't given a moment's thought to the possibility that, after eight years and 86 hours of ground-breaking television, The Sopranos might sign off forever with one of the greatest fragmentary non-endings since Franz Kafka's The Castle trailed off in mid-sentence. In that moment, in the Palms hotel suite where I was watching the episode with Dowd and a dozen or so other industry types, the disappointment was pea-soup thick, and by the next morning the newspapers were filled with acid-tongued anecdotes about Sopranos viewing parties from coast to coast at which those in attendance, puzzled by Chase's abrupt cut to black in the middle of the episode's final scene, held their collective breath at what they felt certain was a momentary interruption in their cable service.
The Los Angeles Times reported that at one high-ticket gathering in Hollywood, Florida, where fans had paid hundreds of dollars to watch the finale in the company of select cast and crew members, a woman stood up and shouted "What the hell was that anyway?" — a scene doubtless repeated in living rooms across America. Meanwhile, even some professional critics were busy holding Chase's feet to the fire, accusing him at best of having copped out or, at worst, of having played some sadistic joke on his legions of worshipful viewers. In another Los Angeles Times article, this one headlined "Sopranos: What was that all about?", the critic Mary McNamara opined that "Ending a series with the social weight of The Sopranos is not an enviable task, but end it must, and not with the sophomoric gesture of a blank screen."
For the moment, I'll reserve comment on the sophomoric gestures of some published arts criticism and just say that what I personally find most surprising isn't how The Sopranos ended, but that anyone — least of all the show's supposed die-hard fans — would have expected anything different. Here is a series that, since its inception, has always taken the road less traveled, that managed to invoke a lifetime of mob-movie clichés while simultaneously transcending them. It was a meta-mob-movie in which the characters learned how to be gangsters from watching White Heat and GoodFellas and the Godfather trilogy, and in which family matters were forever intruding upon Family matters. Within the seemingly restrictive boundaries of an exhausted dramatic genre (Was it even possible to care about the petty tribulations of old-fashioned gangsters in the midst of the Enron era?), Chase managed to weave a great American epic about the burden of power, the indignity of old age, the terror of children that they will grow up to become their parents, and, of course, the inability of modern medicine to cure all that ails us (especially existential crises). And yet, people expected Chase to end things...how exactly? With the funeral of Tony Soprano? With Carmela and the kids joining the Federal Witness Protection program? With Artie Bucco deciding to sell the Vesuvio and the whole cast gathering together to sing "Auld Lang Syne"?
No matter what Chase did, of course, it was never going to be to everyone's liking. What he did do, however, strikes me as one of the boldest strokes in a series that was never short on radical gestures. Contrary to the abrupt plug-pulling that some have accused it of being, the final scene of the final Sopranos was in fact a carefully plotted and ingeniously executed distillation of Chase's three greatest themes: work, death and blood ties. Nothing hasty or unplanned about it. We are, as at the end of so many episodes, gathered for a Sopranos family dinner — not at home or at the Vusivio, but this time at Holsten's, a real ice-cream parlor and diner located in the Brookdale section of North Jersey. Tony, the first to arrive, sits down in a booth and, after contemplating several selections (including "I Gotta Be Me" and "In a Lonely Place") punches up some classic Journey on the jukebox. One by one, Carmela, AJ and Meadow arrive, while Chase reminds us, with each nervous ring of the door chime and each menacing cutaway to the mysterious stranger eyeing Tony from the counter that, for this family, the specters of execution or imprisonment forever loom like the sword of Damocles. Then, just as Steve Perry prepares to once more tell us to not stop believing, Chase does exactly that — he stops, effectively leaving it up to each individual viewer to decide whether the lives of some of the most memorable characters in the history of American fiction end over a plate of onion rings or go on and on and on and on.
You can call that a cop-out if you so desire, but to my mind the failing of the final Sopranos isn't Chase's — it's the audience's. Reading those Monday-morning reports of disgruntled viewers assailing cable operators with reports of service outages, I was reminded of something the director David Lynch said to me last fall when we were discussing his most recent (and most widely misunderstood) film, Inland Empire. "Some people really like to know what everything is," he said of viewers ruffled by his own penchant for loose ends and elliptical narratives. "I don't know how they go through life, because life has so many things that are abstract, but they do, and they just like to know — they've got that kind of mind, or being." The comparison is apt, I think, because outside of Lynch, Chase is one of the few contemporary American filmmakers to have actively embraced surrealism and abstract expressionism as part of his aesthetic, and the 21-episode farewell season of The Sopranos could well be considered his Inland Empire, from Tony's comatose Kevin Finity dream to those final seconds of silence and black.
What the reaction to The Sopranos finale rather dishearteningly proves is that many in the show's audience really were watching every week to see who might get whacked next instead of, you know, how David Chase would further push the aesthetic envelope of dramatic television storytelling. It also says something larger (and even more disheartening) about a culture that has been conditioned — perhaps in schools that fail to meet the minimum standards we should demand for our children's education, perhaps by the small-mindedness and lack of ambition in most movies, novels, plays, etc. — to believe that proper stories have distinct beginnings, middles and ends and that anything which departs from this formula is, for lack of a better word, wrong. It says something about an audience that prefers a passive form of spectatorship to an active one, that wishes to sit back and be told exactly how to think and feel at every given moment — an attitude, I would argue, too often carried forth from the cinema or the TV room into the voting booth. And it says something about people who long for closure in things — like human relationships — that are by their very nature forever in flux. As David Chase applied the final strokes to his masterful canvas, it became clear that he had created a Jackson Pollack in a world that prefers Norman Rockwells.
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