Matthew Yglesias (June 11, 2007) - More <em>Sopranos</em> Blogging (Culture)

There is more than one way to end. Short stories and especially poems often end with an intuitive sense of something happening rather than solid plot. I really have to disagree with you on this one. This was a wonderful ending.

Posted by Mtukufu | June 11, 2007 9:00 AM

"I feel like Scott Lemieux is suffering here from some kind of television version of the Stockholm Syndrome: Since David Chase is a genius, and The Sopranos is a brilliant show, it therefore follows that all of his narrative and dramatic choices were brilliant coups."

Or, it could just be that you're the kind of guy who enjoys Michael Bay movies, and thus finds the joys of the Sopranos to be a bit over your head.

-----

Of course, the show did have an ending. It just happened to occur a few episodes ago. The final three episodes were all epilogue.

Don't blame Chase if you can't follow along. It's not all that obscure.

Posted by Petey | June 11, 2007 9:15 AM

I don't think he' saying that resolutions are inherently middlebrow - just that the Sopranos has distinguished itself by not going for obvious or straightforward themes or plots. I liked the ending, but I don't think it leaves everything up in the air. It seems to me that, in the end, Tony is condemned to live perpetually in the kind of suspense that the restaurant scene developed so well. The suspense and anxiety "don't stop" in the end for Tony.

Posted by berger | June 11, 2007 9:16 AM

Narratives have structure. It's why we read them rather than dictionaries.

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | June 11, 2007 9:18 AM

Read Ulysses for one example of an alternative approach to literature. There are many. Naked Lunch is another. This ending was a stylistic choice, one which I admire. I don't think it was lazy or meant to be a silly puzzle.

Posted by Mtukufu | June 11, 2007 9:25 AM

Ambiguous endings are perfectly fine if they make thematic sense. The best example of this is in Thomas Pynchon's "Crying of Lot 49", which essentially replicates Maxwell's Demon in narrative form. There are, essentially, two endings to that book, which makes it a masterpiece. Ambiguous endings because you can't figure out how to finish things off, however, are just a cop out. Saying that, and without ever having seen a single episode of the Sopranos, Berger's analysis seems to justify the ending in this instance.

Posted by Nasara | June 11, 2007 9:29 AM

Any existential philosopher would have been proud of that ending. I loved it.

http://www.americanlegends.blogspot.com

Posted by J. Mark ENglish | June 11, 2007 9:35 AM

My take on the last episode is very similar to Berger's. I posted this on another comment thread:

"The ending was all about tension vs plot content. Tony's and his family's life did not change throughout the series and I believe that that's the point. They continue to exist in the center of a maelstrom, blind to it except in a visceral, reactive way and therefore unable to truly change. They just keep on doing what they do. I loved the ending. Endings are quite difficult. I think time will show that this was a brilliant (especially for TV) close."

Posted by Mtukufu | June 11, 2007 9:36 AM

Or, it could just be that you're the kind of guy who enjoys Michael Bay movies, and thus finds the joys of the Sopranos to be a bit over your head.

I really don't think The Sopranos is over anyone's head, Petey. It's the most popular show on HBO for a reason: it's by far the most readily accessible (leaving aside the borderline sitcom structure of Entourage).

I don't have the gut-level opposition to ambiguous endings that Matt apparently has, and think this ending might have worked perfectly well if the last several seasons of The Sopranos hadn't demonstrated a slow but steady slide into creative stagnation. The reason this ending was jarring to so many people, I think, is because the lack of resolution underscored a lack of character progression in the series itself for the last several years. We've seen season after season of the same characters repeating the same patterns of slightly increased moral depravity with nothing really changing - and nothing really at stake - for years. So when the last scene ends, and nothing happens, it adds insult to injury to those who suspect that nothing has been happening all along.

Posted by Christmas | June 11, 2007 9:37 AM

Like I said in the previous comment thread, I thought last night's finale was pretty good.

That said, Showtime has a better series called Brotherhood. Season 2 starts sometime this summer, I think. See if you can find season 1 in the meantime.

Those of you who like the writing, acting, local authenticity, and occasional violence of The Sopranos will like Brotherhood -- where you get all that and old school features like coherent plots, narrative arcs, etc. As an added bonus, no tedious scenes with Dr. Melfi.

Posted by Fred | June 11, 2007 9:38 AM

Is Matt seriously proposing that Anna Karenina is highbrow? My god, I guess what they say about the decline in value of a Harvard education is true.

Posted by vanya | June 11, 2007 9:43 AM

I think vanya is onto something. In his day, Tolstoy was a rock star.

Posted by Martin | June 11, 2007 9:47 AM

Matt, surely at some point in either high school or college at least once you had an instructor offer up the cliche that "This [film, novel, poem] teaches you how to [watch, read] it." There isn't a medium whose rhythms are *better* suited to that kind of thinking (and that kind of creativity) than television, although only in the last decade or so have the great potential strengths of TV as an artistic medium been really explored, IMO.

I'm not going to say "The Sopranos should've taught you to expect an abrupt cut to black," but if you're surprised by an apparently anticlimactic ending, you weren't watching the show carefully enough over the course of its run. A definitive conclusion would have been a big surprise of artistic misdirection*; the ambiguous sense that maybe things just keep on keepin' on is exactly what you should've learned from the season finales of, well, pretty much every prior season.

*A perfectly valid one, but not in the end the choice Chase wanted to make. Consider that the first season of the show, which Chase thought was going to be the only season (i.e., this doesn't appear to be a decision made with the logic "Nancy Marchand's too good and popular for us to kill her off"), didn't end with Tony resolving the issue at hand by getting to kill his mother - think about that! we would've been with him all the way, which is exactly the kind of moral bind into which Chase delighted in putting the audience as the series went on, that we'd root for a guy to kill his mother - but with her instead suffering a stroke, prolonging the issue and denying Tony, and the audience, a complete resolution.

Posted by Quarterican | June 11, 2007 9:49 AM

"I really don't think The Sopranos is over anyone's head, Petey. It's the most popular show on HBO ... I don't have the gut-level opposition to ambiguous endings that Matt apparently has,"

Of course the show was over the heads of the bulk of its audience. Given that you think the ending was ambiguous, it seems to be over your head as well.

-----

"The idea that desire to see the story of the show brought to some kind of conclusion rather than this childish "is he dead?" / "did the FBI pinch him?" / "guess we'll never know" BS is inherently "middlebrow" has got to be the prime symptom of the illness"

Gawd. So much to unpack here.

Matthew's interpretation of the ending is the lowbrow one. It's plot-obsessed, "who's gonna get whacked?" reading that Chase demonstrates such contempt for.

The middlebrow interpretation of the ending is that Tony will always need to be on guard. It seeks more sophistication than Matthew's clueless reading, but still misses the point.

The correct interpretation of the ending starts with realizing the agitation of the final scene lies only in the viewer, not in Tony. One you get to that point, you can start seeing how the Melfi breakup is integral to the final scene.

Posted by Petey | June 11, 2007 9:51 AM

I think the test may be whether Lemieux thinks Seinfeld's last episode was brilliantly subversive, or just sucked.

Posted by Anderson | June 11, 2007 9:52 AM

"Is Matt seriously proposing that Anna Karenina is highbrow? My god, I guess what they say about the decline in value of a Harvard education is true."

Dude thinks Michael Bay makes good movies. What do you expect? If it's old, it must be highbrow, right?

Posted by Petey | June 11, 2007 9:53 AM

Is Matt seriously proposing that Anna Karenina is highbrow?

The next thing you know he'll be saying Shakespeare is highbrow.

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | June 11, 2007 9:55 AM

I think the test may be whether Lemieux thinks Seinfeld's last episode was brilliantly subversive, or just sucked.

These are not mutually exclusive statements. (Well, "brilliantly" implies a level of success, but it's possible to hold, as I do, the idea that the final episode of Seinfeld was a conceptually brilliant idea that wasn't well executed.)

Posted by Quarterican | June 11, 2007 9:57 AM

Or, it could just be that you're the kind of guy who enjoys Michael Bay movies, and thus finds the joys of the Sopranos to be a bit over your head.

I really don't think The Sopranos is over anyone's head, Petey.

You're going to ruin his only enjoyment of the show! C'mon now.

Posted by neil | June 11, 2007 10:00 AM

"The correct interpretation of the ending starts with realizing the agitation of the final scene lies only in the viewer, not in Tony. One you get to that point, you can start seeing how the Melfi breakup is integral to the final scene."

Ye gods, more post-modern crap where what matters isn't the actual show but what BS excuses and explanations the not-nearly-as-smart-as-he-thinks-he-is viewer comes up with.

You people are no different than the Star Wars geeks who walked out of Phantom Menace desperately trying to convince themselves it didn't suck.

Mike

Posted by MBunge | June 11, 2007 10:08 AM

(Well, "brilliantly" implies a level of success, but it's possible to hold, as I do, the idea that the final episode of Seinfeld was a conceptually brilliant idea that wasn't well executed.)

Amen to that. The biggest problems with the Seinfeld finale had nothing to do with ending up in jail and everything to do with 1) the strained plot contortions to get them into that situation, and 2) the fact that spending most of the finale showing old characters at the trial wasn't half as charming as it might have been if we hadn't just watched a 45 minute clip show that had all of these same people.

Similarly, I have less a problem with the ambiguous ending than I do with the fact that the Phil/Tony dispute wasn't all that interesting as a post-Chrissy epilogue, and tying up the Phil/Tony dispute that ultimately didn't amount to much and watching AJ be AJ didn't seem to be very strong notes to go out on, epilogue or not.

Posted by Royko | June 11, 2007 10:12 AM

"Ye gods, more post-modern crap where what matters isn't the actual show..."

Of course, what matters is precisely the actual show. As you can see by reading the reactions the show is getting, the problem is that most viewers aren't that interested in the actual show.

Since season 3 at least, Chase has reacted to the broad based popularity of the show by spitting in the faces of the less perceptive viewers. Matthew doesn't like when someone spits in his face, which I can understand, I suppose.

But we're certainly not in George Lucas land here...

Posted by Petey | June 11, 2007 10:14 AM

Look, I think Petey's withering hail of contempt for everyone whose aesthetic taste doesn't sync up perfectly with his is obnoxious, but (said contempt aside) he's pretty much spot on here. Quoting Sars from over at The House Next Door, putting it better than I did:

"[Chase] did exactly what he's always done, in exactly the way he's always done it. If his audience didn't enjoy his enduring refusal to provide narrative symmetry, I don't think I understand why they continued watching the show, as this more than anything else is probably his hallmark. The scorpion's been stinging you for close to a decade so why'd you keep crossing the river with him?"

Posted by Quarterican | June 11, 2007 10:17 AM

I don't know about 'highbrow' or 'middlebrow' or any of that, but I don't think it's all that big of deal that the climax about a show that's about a 'anti hero' to be 'anti climactic'.

Posted by j mct | June 11, 2007 10:19 AM

"Petey's withering hail of contempt for everyone whose aesthetic taste doesn't sync up perfectly with his"

Meh.

I think the show is brilliant. But I'm perfectly willing to accept the taste of someone who understands the show is doing and doesn't like it.

My withering hail of contempt is reserved for folks who don't get what's going on with the show but think that they do.

Posted by Petey | June 11, 2007 10:26 AM

"Petey's withering hail of contempt for everyone whose aesthetic taste doesn't sync up perfectly with his"

Meh.

I think the show is brilliant. But I'm perfectly willing to accept the taste of someone who understands what the show is doing and doesn't like it.

My withering hail of contempt is reserved for folks who don't get what's going on with the show but think that they do.

Posted by Petey | June 11, 2007 10:26 AM

"We've seen season after season of the same characters repeating the same patterns of slightly increased moral depravity with nothing really changing - and nothing really at stake - for years. So when the last scene ends, and nothing happens, it adds insult to injury to those who suspect that nothing has been happening all along."

That's the whole point -- nobody has made any progress. Tony wasn't any closer to any sort of breakthrough after 7 years with Melfi, Carmella never really reconsidered selling her soul to the devil, Meadow's now going to become a mob lawyer, for chrissake -- only AJ showed a glimmer of hope, with the Army thing (he seemed actually serious about it, in a way he's never serious about anything), until his parents bribed him with more blood money.

Posted by too many steves | June 11, 2007 10:27 AM

I'm with you, too many steves.

I want to be sure not to suggest that I believe all episodes of The Sopranos were brilliant. They weren't. I agree that Tony's gambling addiction was last-minute, grafted on and clumsy. There were a number of points when the show seemed creatively stalled. I just don't think this ending was one of them.

Also, I disagree with the "correct" interpretation of the ending offered by Petey. The tension did not just lie with the viewer. Tony felt plenty of it. Remember him almost running back up the driveway while getting his morning paper when a car pulled up? And in the last episode he keeps checking his environment. I believe that that's a result of his anxiety.

Posted by Mtukufu | June 11, 2007 10:44 AM

"The tension did not just lie with the viewer. Tony felt plenty of it. Remember him almost running back up the driveway while getting his morning paper when a car pulled up?"

I'm just referring to the final scene in the restaurant. There, the tension was ours, not Tony's.

The final scene was all about us finding ourselves with Melfi's dilemma, not about Tony.

Posted by Petey | June 11, 2007 10:48 AM

Also, I think we're missing the fact that the story did have an ending, sort of. We're supposed to assume that Tony takes over Phil's family, right? So the Sopranos is the story of a New Jersey underboss becoming the boss of a New York family. Of course, that's not the whole story, but that's the traditional mob-movie story. We find the resolution sort of unsatisfying because Tony finds it sort of unsatisfying, too.

Posted by too many steves | June 11, 2007 10:48 AM

"We're supposed to assume that Tony takes over Phil's family, right?"

Plotwise, no. The #2 guy in Phil's family will take over, not Tony. That's why Phil's underlings were amenable to a deal in the first place.

But as always, the show is not about plot.

Posted by Petey | June 11, 2007 10:52 AM

The only episode of the Sopranos I've ever seen was last night's episode. So, I don't know anything about character development, story line, etc.
But I thought last night's episide was great.

One thing that I think was going on that nobody has mentioned here is the set of movie-cliche jokes. Where the creator sets up a scene that seems bound for some sort of standard finish, and then turns a different, surprising direction. In this episode the surprising direction was almost always a scene that seems destined for a dramatic finish ends in nothing. I'm thinking of the moment Tony entered the FBI agent's car (I didn't know he was FBI). I was thinking "no, don't do that! I've seen this; he's going to whack you!!" Or when Philly strays behind after no one was at the meeting place; I was sure that guns would be blazing. There were many, many cliche set ups, none of which followed the cliche format. Maybe the most dramatic was the end, with the mysterious guy going into the bathroom (a la godfather) and nothing happens.

The movie that I enjoyed this pattern most with is Truffaut's "Stolen Kisses". I remember several scenes that seemed destined for the misfit main character to get embarrassed or caught or whatever, and invariable something surprising and non-cliched finishes emerged. Frequently, the non-cliched ending was for the action to have no consequence. In "Stolen Kisses" is really liked the scene where the camera follows the amourous couple up the stairs, but then falls too far behind and gets lost.

There were many, many dashed expectancies in this epside. The dramatic difficulties that the daughter had in parking her car. Clearly, this will lead to her arriving late at the table and missing the massacre!! But nothing. The evil cat who never predicted anything and never got bashed. The babies locked in the moving car who didn't go over a cliff. I'm sure, like the bathroom scene at the end, there are many movie references to look for.

I thought it was very clever and a hoot. It also seems like a good way to end it.

Posted by John | June 11, 2007 11:02 AM

"I thought it was very clever and a hoot."

Along similar lines, I thought this was the funniest episode in quite a while.

Posted by Petey | June 11, 2007 11:06 AM

I don't really watch the Sopranos (I tried, but here in Latin America, HBO shows the Sopranos in the most tupsy turvy way, and it's impossible to know what season you're watching whenever an episode's one).

However, the one thing that I am reminded of when people mention how this episode didn't really have an ending is the final episode of Seinfeld (10 years ago).

That was also not a finish with any closure to it, either.....

Posted by JRVJ | June 11, 2007 11:09 AM

"I'm just referring to the final scene in the restaurant. There, the tension was ours, not Tony's.

The final scene was all about us finding ourselves with Melfi's dilemma, not about Tony."

I stand by my point that Tony was quite vigilant regarding his environment in the diner. To my mind the series began with his anxiety and now ends with it. The anxiety we feel in that last scene is his. He never found a way out of it, which suggests Dr. Melfi might have been correct in her decision to terminate treatment, that is if he didn't find a way out because he never really wanted to do what was necessary to find relief. Having said that, she was certainly unethical in the way she ended the therapy with Tony (also, that plot point was too quickly handled for my taste).

Anyway, that last little bit is just my hoo ha. Petey's interpretation is certainly arguable. I just have to resist the idea of a "correct" intepretation. Too limiting. For example, I'm intriqued by the idea that the blackout is Tony getting whacked, though I tend not to go there. It's a fun idea and arguable given Tony's conversation with Bobby in the boat.

Posted by Mtukufu | June 11, 2007 11:09 AM

"I stand by my point that Tony was quite vigilant regarding his environment in the diner."

Watch the scene again. He definitely looks up from time to time. He perks up when people come in the door. But he's more focussed on his menu and his depression than anything else.

Chase is bombarding us with a thousand and one clues to be vigilant about the environment in the diner, and the very fact that Tony doesn't share our level of agitation is something that makes us even more agitated.

Posted by Petey | June 11, 2007 11:17 AM

"Of course, what matters is precisely the actual show. As you can see by reading the reactions the show is getting, the problem is that most viewers aren't that interested in the actual show.

Since season 3 at least, Chase has reacted to the broad based popularity of the show by spitting in the faces of the less perceptive viewers. Matthew doesn't like when someone spits in his face, which I can understand, I suppose.

But we're certainly not in George Lucas land here..."

When you start talking about "the less perceptive viewers", that's when you enter George Lucas Land. Unless what you're copping to is that the show has pretty much sucked as a piece of entertainment for the last several years. It's valid to question why folks who enjoyed the show as entertainment the first few years have stuck with it as The Sopranos became a show about "The brilliance of Chase". If your defense of the show is a commentary on how Chase tells the story, INSTEAD OF THE STORY ITSELF, you can't really claim to be interested in the actual show.

Mike

Posted by MBunge | June 11, 2007 11:28 AM

Petey, is this all some kind of a sly goof for you, or are you really the pretentious, supercilious asshole you're coming across as here?

Posted by Feathers McGraw | June 11, 2007 11:33 AM

"It's valid to question why folks who enjoyed the show as entertainment the first few years have stuck with it"

The bulk of the viewers watch because of buzz. The show became a requirement for cultural literacy. These folks weren't even viewers in the first couple of years.

HBO on Demand ran a wonderful ad for VOD by having a woman watch old episodes of the Sopranos to have talking points for a first date with a guy she liked. This is the audience for whom, "who's gonna get whacked?" is the reason for watching.

"If your defense of the show is a commentary on how Chase tells the story, INSTEAD OF THE STORY ITSELF, you can't really claim to be interested in the actual show."

You're kinda dim, if you actually believe this.

Posted by Petey | June 11, 2007 11:37 AM

"Petey, is this all some kind of a sly goof for you"

No. I really dig the show. And more generally, I think lousy audiences get waaaaay too obsessed with plot in movies and TV.

Posted by Petey | June 11, 2007 11:39 AM

"and the very fact that Tony doesn't share our level of agitation is something that makes us even more agitated."

Yup. That is what I got. We keep expecting more from Tony and his environment.

I stopped watching regularly after the second season. It is almost a cliche, used by Woody twice in Crimes and Misdeanors and Match Point. The tension is between the banality of evil and the audience's demands for justice and structure. Which is the central human tragedy...umm...we watch a million die in Iraq for nuthin and cry to Heaven:"Why doesn't the world end?" It doesn't. We go shopping.

I liked the old Showtime series Dead Like Me. Young college student gets billboard dropped on his head. Every show started with an unexpected death. Same with Six Feet Under.
Very few of the departed in DLM complained about the injustice. Oh well.

Like I said, the banality of evil & death & injustice has become a cliche for some secular intellectuals. The banality of evil no longer horrifies us. Banal.

Posted by bob mcmanus | June 11, 2007 11:51 AM

"The tension is between the banality of evil and the audience's demands for justice and structure."

I'll buy that for a dollar.

Posted by Petey | June 11, 2007 11:52 AM

I happen to sort-of agree with Petey on the specifics of this episode. But a guy who thinks Edwards is a lock in the general election and Isiah is a good GM shouldn't go around calling our Harvard-boy host a moron.

Posted by too many steves | June 11, 2007 11:57 AM

I want to resist the contrast with Tolstoy for a minute: Anna Karenina doesn't end with Anna's suicide; it ends with Levin (the other protagonist) at a very Tony-like moment, trying to figure out what it all means. And we don't know what happens to him or his family in the end at all.

Posted by Tim | June 11, 2007 11:58 AM

"But a guy who thinks Edwards is a lock in the general election and Isiah is a good GM..."

Edwards is a lock in the general election. Everyone already knows that. It's the primaries that are an uphill struggle.

And my position on Zeke has always been that he's had hits and misses as the Knicks GM - his broad gameplan is sound, but the execution has been spotty - but that's he's an above average coach.

"...shouldn't go around calling our Harvard-boy host a moron."

I went to a better school than Harvard.

Posted by Petey | June 11, 2007 12:00 PM

Petey, is this all some kind of a sly goof for you, or are you really the pretentious, supercilious asshole you're coming across as here?

Petey is the kind of guy who would tell Kurt Vonnegut he didn't know a thing about Kurt Vonnegut.

Posted by Steve | June 11, 2007 12:05 PM

I think the show is brilliant. But I'm perfectly willing to accept the taste of someone who understands what the show is doing and doesn't like it.

My withering hail of contempt is reserved for folks who don't get what's going on with the show but think that they do.

OK, fair enough so far as it goes, though "withering" is a rather self-important way to describe oneself. But by repeatedly insinuating that anybody who "doesn't like" the ending are people "who don't get what's going on", you're trying to have your cake and eat it too, no?

Posted by Evan McElravy | June 11, 2007 12:06 PM

I think Petey's pretty much right on. The Sopranos is probably the most elitist show that has ever run on television. It is certainly more "highbrow" than a fairly conventional narrative like, oh, Anna Karenina. If you did not watch every single episode carefully you definitely do not know what was going on, and you have no basis from which to criticize the finale. Anyone claiming that Lemieux, Petey or others are "reading into the show", the way desperate academics claim that Gilligan's Island is an allegory for Marxism, or search for subtext in Star Wars, is clearly not paying attention. Which is not to say Sopranos is the greatest work of art of all time by any means. Like any ambitious creative work, it fails occasionally, it overreaches, it has many flaws. Personally I find Sopranos too negative and bleak to really be a work of art I can really love. I prefer something life-affirming like Anna Karenina too, but I also don't think "middlebrow" is necessarily an epithet. But if you can't offer criticms more trenchant than "it was a copout!" or, even sillier, "there was no conclusion!", really you should just be quiet.

Posted by vanya | June 11, 2007 12:06 PM

"Petey is the kind of guy who would tell Kurt Vonnegut he didn't know a thing about Kurt Vonnegut."

Of course Kurt Vonnegut doesn't know a thing about Kurt Vonnegut. Dude's dead. The dead don't know nothing about nothing.

Even zombies are pretty dim, hence the constant need for brains.

Posted by Petey | June 11, 2007 12:08 PM

"And we don't know what happens to him or his family in the end at all."

Sure we do. Levin has gained the world, in the very best bourgeois sense, but lost his soul. Tolstoy was a fucking mystical Christian, and Levin is the toughest most challenging example of the banality of evil in literature. AK is so highbrow that highbrows think it's middlebrow. Over the head of everyone but saints and mystics.

I usually think Levin is the important half of the book, but then I figure I am missing a point sommewhere.

Posted by bob mcmanus | June 11, 2007 12:08 PM

I'm with Petey (minus the contempt; lots of brilliant people decline to think hard about TV).

But one addition: the show begins with a panic attack, so it may end with one as well.

This is not inconsistent with Chase's comments. The show is about therapy, not the mob.

Posted by awc | June 11, 2007 12:08 PM

I was the one who described Petey's withering hail of contempt; he was just quoting me back to myself.

Posted by Quarterican | June 11, 2007 12:11 PM

Petey's contempt for plot is shared by many a "high-brow" artist and academic. That said, I believe that his interpretation of the final scene is the only reasonable one.

Tony checks the door, but it's obvious he's just looking for Carmela or AJ to walk in. The camera focuses on various people in the restaurant, but when we see Tony, he's watching the menu. And what about Meadow and her parallel parking problem? Tony can't possibly be watching that. Only the camera is. Or when she dashes across the street and we see a car come rushing toward her, only to realize that it's a trick of the perspective and the car is well behind her?

This is the sort of thing I call psuedo drama--momentary of tension with no impact on plot or story. Of course, Chase is doing this on purpose and it's all just a joke on the audience. I'm not a big fan of that sort of thing.

When Petey says the Soprano's has never been about plot, well, perhaps Chase would like to agree with that statement, but I find it absurd. If it's never been about plot then why so much plot? Why so much sex and violence and mellodrama? Just to get the rubes to watch so Chase can continue to focus on his non-plot artistic expression? The idea is absurd. The Sopranos may take a non-traditional approach to plot resolution, but plot is certainly what it's all about.

Posted by Rob Mac | June 11, 2007 12:18 PM

"Personally I find Sopranos too negative and bleak to really be a work of art I can really love."

No doubt that all the episodes that come after 9/11 are bleak. (The show was more optimistic before that.) And the last couple of seasons fall directly in Godfather Part II uber-bleak territory - a movie which wasn't all that easy to sit through itself.

But the black humor sprinkled throughout the show helps the bleakness go down smoothly. It may be a show about depression, but I always felt happy watching it.

Posted by Petey | June 11, 2007 12:23 PM

"If it's never been about plot then why so much plot?"

I'm an enormous fan of the Coen brothers, and their movies have more plot in them than most movies ever made. But despite the abundance of plot, their movies are never actually about the plot.

Posted by Petey | June 11, 2007 12:31 PM

It was a brilliant ending. Like this guy says:
http://heywriterboy.blogspot.com/2007/06/dont-stop.html

Posted by bubba | June 11, 2007 12:32 PM

"If it's never been about plot then why so much plot? Why so much sex and violence and mellodrama?"

You think there was "plot" in the Sopranos?

Nah, narratives and Perl's (Husserl + Zen?) structure-hunger, this is getting to be too much like work for which I am not qualified.

40th anniversary of the Beatles's Sgt Pepper a while ago. I always liked Harrison's "life flows on within you and without you."

Posted by bob mcmanus | June 11, 2007 12:34 PM

The correct interpretation of the ending is apparently that both David Chase and Petey are smarter than you. On the other hand, disdaining character and plot is a distinctly juvenile affectation that limits ones ability to enjoy narrative art as much as overinvestment in character and plot in art where those are secondary. (Michael Bay is, however, evil.) You have to be able to tell the difference in the creator's intent. And Chase certainly started out, at least, interested in some of his characters.

If it matters, I happen to agree that the show reached its climax when Tony killed Christopher. But these last couple episodes' worth of epilogue were lame and didn't add much, mainly because Seasons 6a and 6b were mostly lame and didn't add much. For me the show was never entirely about Tony; it was about Tony, Carmela, and Christopher. Carmela in particular was almost completely neglected for the last two seasons, and especially in 6b. Chase just couldn't find any more interest in her.

Further, if David Chase really did hate his audience for the way they liked his show from Season 3 on, real respect for his art would have dictated that he end the thing with Season 4. Unless you're so naive as to believe he continued to make it for "me and perhaps a few dozen others as brilliant and perceptive as me."

Finally, Petey, if the final scene had the meaning you ascribe to it (and I think you're probably right about Chase's intent there, actually), then the sudden black screen was a gimmick that added absolutely nothing.

Posted by Antid Oto | June 11, 2007 12:44 PM

Let me try to make this clear. Right now I am listening to John Fahey play a Christmas Carol on guitar while my dogs are trying to get to take them for a walk. The dogs don't hear the melody, for them it is just one damn thing after another, regardless of what Fahey intended.

The dogs are not "wrong."

Posted by bob mcmanus | June 11, 2007 12:44 PM

Carmela in particular was almost completely neglected for the last two seasons, and especially in 6b.

That's because Carmela blew her last chance at redemption when she took Tony back at the end of Season 5.

Posted by Chris Conway | June 11, 2007 12:51 PM

"Levin has gained the world, in the very best bourgeois sense, but lost his soul. Tolstoy was a fucking mystical Christian, and Levin is the toughest most challenging example of the banality of evil in literature. AK is so highbrow that highbrows think it's middlebrow. Over the head of everyone but saints and mystics.

I usually think Levin is the important half of the book, but then I figure I am missing a point sommewhere."

Now who's adding subtext that isn't there. You're right that Levin is the important half of the book - he clearly represents the author (it's not even subtlet "Lev Tolstoy = "Levin", and "Levin" in Russian also means "of Lev", i.e. Leo's). And Levin's spiritual quest is probably the part that Oprah book club readers and Matt Yglesias probably skip over, but it's a stretch to say he "sells his soul" - the mystical Tolstoy of later years would probably agree with you, but the younger Tolstoy who actually wrote the book seems to be saying that life goes ever on, and only in the eternal verites of rural family life, far from the intellectual and material temptations of the false city, can one find faith in God, as Levin does. Pretty damn middlebrow. Your reading is more interesting, but I don't see where the text justifies it.

Posted by vanya | June 11, 2007 12:51 PM

That's because Carmela blew her last chance at redemption

And she couldn't have any more why?

Posted by Antid Oto | June 11, 2007 12:55 PM

The dogs are not "wrong."

This is genius, Bob.

Posted by Steve | June 11, 2007 12:56 PM

I reallly don't understand this logic that goes, "The Sopranos is like a really great novel. All novels have a beginning, middle, and end. QED, the Sopranos must have a resolution at the end."

The Sopranos is (was!) a TV show. It's episodic. Not every episode advanced the narrative arc. There were lots of asides and digressions about Artie Bucco cooking rabbits, etc. You can't compare it to a novel or an 86-hour movie. It just wasn't structured like that.

To naively compare it to a movie or novel and then fault it for not conforming to your flawed comparison is just silly.

"Cheers" ended with Sam closing the bar for the night. But he didn't close it down, he was going to come back and re-open it in the morning. "Seinfeld" ended up with the gang in jail, but quibbling with each other over stupid things like always. The end of good TV shows is often ambiguous.

I loved it for what it was: a great TV show. 86 awesome one-hour movies that often involed the same characters and collectively formed an interesting, textured tableau of life in the NJ mafia and suburbs.

Posted by Frank Bruno | June 11, 2007 1:05 PM

Why are you so concerned with "middlebrow" vs "highbrow" et al?

It seems so collegiate of you...

Posted by tfo | June 11, 2007 1:12 PM

In terms of the ending, de Gustibus non disputatum est; I agree that the neat endings aren't necessarily "middlebrow" (although I think the idea that such an ending is necessary is.) For me, the ending was consistent worth the logic of the show and also effective on its own terms. On the Stockholm Syndrome charge, I'm on the record as saying that the 6A dream sequence episodes are as bad or worse as you've argued...

Posted by Scott Lemieux | June 11, 2007 1:18 PM

"That's because Carmela blew her last chance at redemption

And she couldn't have any more why?"

Well, I suppose she could have, but it would have gotten repetitive. In Season 3 she was told, in no uncertain terms, that leaving Tony and his "blood money" was her only chance for redemption. A season later, she finally got up the gumption to leave him. After she took him back, the game was over: the writers decided not to give her another "leave Tony/take Tony back cycle" and instead she spent the rest of the series locked into her oblivious materialism (which was underscored in the last episode with a shot of her paging through a home decorating catalog).

It sas probably a mistake to "climax" her storyline so early. I agree that she was underused in the last season. (Though I really enjoyed her trip to Europe.)

Posted by Chris Conway | June 11, 2007 1:19 PM

"In terms of the ending, de Gustibus non disputatum est"

As always, just because there's no disputing taste doesn't mean some taste isn't better than others.

Posted by Petey | June 11, 2007 1:24 PM

P.S.: This obsession with AK is bizarre -- the only reason it is regarded as highbrow is because it is so fucking long that no one ever gets through the whole tedious thing. It is a very traditional, very well-done narrative.

If you want highbrow, start talking about something everyone can argue about without ever actually reading, Finnegans Wake.

Posted by tfo | June 11, 2007 1:29 PM

"If you want highbrow, start talking about something everyone can argue about without ever actually reading, Finnegans Wake."

Or even better, take Dostoyevsky, who is genuinely highbrow despite having written as a lowbrow.

Posted by Petey | June 11, 2007 1:35 PM

Frank Bruno:

"The Sopranos is (was!) a TV show. It's episodic. Not every episode advanced the narrative arc... To naively compare it to a movie or novel..."

To be fair, since Hill Street Blues, most TV dramas (with the deliberate exception of Law & Order, where Dick Wolf aimed all along at syndication) have combined episodic stories with (usually) season-length narrative arcs, and longer, series-length character arcs. There's nothing low-brow about keeping those three balls in the air over the course of a well-written TV series.

The Sopranos maintained that convention, for the most part, except for the character arcs. Instead of arcs, you got more layers of detail, because none of the characters grew. You also got, IMO, characters becoming reconciled to their fates. By the end of last night's episode, Tony didn't seem upset that Meadow went from med school ambitions to mob lawyering ambitions; Tony also seemed grateful that he had saved his son.

Posted by Fred | June 11, 2007 1:37 PM

Chris Conway: That does help crystallize a lot of my feelings about why the last two half-seasons have been so dissatisfying. Carmela was the only character with a real moral choice to make. She made it. Show should have ended there.

Posted by Antid Oto | June 11, 2007 1:50 PM

someone upthread mentioned the final black-out as the gimmick. i somewhat agree---i was of the opinion that the show "ended" several episodes ago. i'm not so sure what they added thematically following Tony's post-Christopher, peyote-induced catharsis in Vegas. to me, the whole show revolved around that relationship---it was crucial for both forwarding the plot as well as the meta-theme re: depression. say what you will about chase as a storyteller, but the man knows depression and therapy, which is what the show was really about anyway. (which he really drove home with AJ's character development). That last scene in the desert w/ Tony was the right note to end the series. what occured afterward was post-climactic from a thematic standpoint. (I think Petey noted this upthread but we may have different reasons for believing so.)

Posted by benjamin | June 11, 2007 1:53 PM

Dostoevsky has absolutely ripping and fascinating and engaging yarns for plots - murders, betrayals, hookers w/hearts of gold, family secrets, political rebels, etc. Really juicy stuff.

But the "plot" is not the point of any Dostoevsky that I've read (Notes, C&P, Demons, Bros. K; maybe The Idiot is all about the plot).

BTW, I endorse Fred's take on the structure of The Sopranos; over the last decade more and more shows have embraced the potential inherent in not only telling weekly one hour stories, but sustaining and building on them with both season-long and show-long arcs. And, as the characters on this show don't change, Fred's right: they deepen. Over the, what, 90-something episodes, Tony has become probably the most richly drawn character in the history of the filmed medium.

Posted by Quarterican | June 11, 2007 1:55 PM

""If your defense of the show is a commentary on how Chase tells the story, INSTEAD OF THE STORY ITSELF, you can't really claim to be interested in the actual show."

You're kinda dim, if you actually believe this."

Let me see if I can explain this in simple enough terms for you to understand. Someone interested in the actual show is interested in what happens to Tony and company. Someone who views The Sopranos as a chance to bow before the genius of Chase and pat themselves on the back for "getting it", doesn't care about the show. You'd be just as happy watching David Chase being interviewed about The Sopranos as you would be watching the actual show.

I see someone else already touched on the juvenile denigration of plot by folks too much in love with their own supposed intelligence.

Mike

Posted by MBunge | June 11, 2007 2:11 PM

I agree with Petey, as others have, but I'm curious about peoples immediate reactions after the credits rolled.

I laughed out loud and had a smile on my face for 15 minutes. I really viscerally enjoyed it. I have read that others have laughed, but many more cursed.

I'm guessing your reactions says a lot about how you saw the purpose of the last 6 seasons.

Posted by Rich | June 11, 2007 2:15 PM

benjamin said:

i was of the opinion that the show "ended" several episodes ago. i'm not so sure what they added thematically following Tony's post-Christopher, peyote-induced catharsis in Vegas.

I think this is correct, as far as it can be said that the show ever had an ending. Mostly, it seems to me that the decision was made to end the show for various creative and business reasons, -- ultimately, you can't continue a high-quality franchise of that nature indefinitely.

Unless, you know, you have all your actors, directors, etc BOUND TO YOU BY OATH AND BLOOD.

Posted by tfo | June 11, 2007 2:17 PM

MBunge:

My entire sense of self-worth is deeply tied to whether my appreciation of television/music/pr0n is seens as proper.

Posted by tfo | June 11, 2007 2:23 PM

re: the above typo.

OOPS.

Posted by tfo | June 11, 2007 2:24 PM

"I'm curious about peoples immediate reactions after the credits rolled. I laughed out loud and had a smile on my face for 15 minutes. I really viscerally enjoyed it."

Yup. As far as my reaction went, you've hit the nail on the head.

Posted by Petey | June 11, 2007 2:52 PM

The final, restaurant scene has been so thoroughly discussed that I see little point in discussing it. (Suffice it to say that there is a certain "Emperor's New Clothes" quality to the esoteric celebration of Chase's "genius." Furthermore, not only is Anna Karenina highbrow; but, if you think otherwise, then you're not.)

Rather, I'd like to state that the ending was but the final straw in a show that, overall, was disappointing:

The crime war lacked all drama. It just arbitrarily fizzled out. The prior show had suggested Tony was on the ropes, but New York just caves in.
The thing about the cat was weird.
A.J. was the least interesting member of the Soprano family but the focus of this show.
Pauli was the least interesting member of the crime family, but - once again - got a big role.
The business about Janice was boring.
The entire show dragged. E.g., the scene with Phil and at least one of the scenes with Junior could have been cut entirely.

So, no, I don't get Chase's esoterica - and if that makes me "lowbrow," then I shall make the most of it.

Posted by Duncan Kinder | June 11, 2007 3:09 PM

"My entire sense of self-worth is deeply tied to whether my appreciation of television/music/pr0n is seens as proper."

You can appreciate what you want any way you want it.

Mike

Posted by MBunge | June 11, 2007 3:35 PM

Duncan,

Thinking AK is "highbrow" only reveals your shocking ignorance of Russian 19th century literary culture. Tolstoy would have been amused. However, I suppose learning Russian to read Anna Karenin in the original is arguably a "highbrow" approach to the novel (if the student is not Russian), and I assume you've done so.

Posted by vanya | June 11, 2007 3:38 PM

Isn't this high-brow/low-brow dichotomy a fairly recent and modern invention? Was Aeschylus considered high-brow in ancient Athens, or a night out at the theater? What about Shakespeare in Elizabethan England?

My guess is that folks in earlier times left the question of high-brow/low-brow to posterity and used other means to signify their status, e.g., how many slaves they had, or how much land they owned, etc.

Posted by Fred | June 11, 2007 3:53 PM

Fred -- I think you're agreeing with me, so thanks.

There's a natural tension between having an arc and being able to deviate from it from time to time. LOST for example, is very intentionally trying to be a 100-hour movie. But even they stray for some one-off "filler" episodes.

Chase has explicitly stated that he wanted to combine larger story arcs with one-off, self-contained episodes.

That said, we got a LOT of character resolution here: Meadow, AJ, the Tony-Junior drama that's been building since Season 1, etc. I found the last few episodes incredibly satisfying for what they were.

Posted by Frank Bruno | June 11, 2007 3:58 PM

"Isn't this high-brow/low-brow dichotomy a fairly recent and modern invention? "

No.

"What about Shakespeare in Elizabethan England?"

Low-brow.

Posted by Petey | June 11, 2007 5:16 PM

""Isn't this high-brow/low-brow dichotomy a fairly recent and modern invention? "

No."

If Shakespeare was low-brow, what was high-brow? What would fit the low-brow/high-brow distinction from ancient Greece or the late 19th century? Was Da Vinci or Michelangelo low-brow or high-brow or both? How about Homer? Was Emily Dickinson low-brow poetry? Robert Frost?

Mike

Posted by MBunge | June 11, 2007 5:22 PM

"Isn't this high-brow/low-brow dichotomy a fairly recent and modern invention? "

No."

The words date from the late 1800s. Post-phrenology, that is. I'm relatively confident that the distinction more generally between high and popular culture comes from the Romantics (who valued the latter) in the early- to mid-1800s.

Posted by Antid Oto | June 11, 2007 5:35 PM

if you're surprised by an apparently anticlimactic ending, you weren't watching the show carefully enough over the course of its run. A definitive conclusion would have been a big surprise of artistic misdirection

This and the other comments that suggest that this just is the way the show has operated surprise me, and strike me as rather revisionist.

The first several seasons had fairly definitive "Will they get killed/pinched/etc" story arcs. In the season finale of Season 1, Junior gets pinched. Season 2, Big Pussy is shot; season 3, Jackie Jr; season 5, Adriana (2nd to last episode). These were all actual conclusions to long-running story arcs. Even in season 4, the decision not to hit Carmine (as expected) was a conclusion. There were other end-of-season conclusions, like Furio leaving and Carmella ending her possible dalliance with Father Whatshisname.

It is only in the last two seasons that the writing has become meandering, and, at times, rather lazy.

In this season, for example, both Chris killing JT and Tony killing Chris were deeply out of character, cheap tricks to distance the viewer from the characters, making them less morally ambiguous (and therefore less interesting) than in previous seasons.

Personally, I read the entire episode as Tony (and, by extension, the mob's) continuing slide into irrelevence. Everything we see is outdated, from Uncle Junior and his senility, to the superstitions about cats, to Agent Harris' flagging interest in Tony's business, to that epic final scene, where they are sitting in a relic of a diner listening to Journey, every motion was toward feeling that the show, and the characters, had become dated. Frankly, the black-screen ending just seemed like a way to express that the writers didn't care about the characters they had invented anymore.

So why should we?

Posted by Brad L | June 11, 2007 6:01 PM

What was with the lame Journey karaoke song at the end? Was Livin On A Prayer not available? Summer Nights?

Posted by Random Dude | June 11, 2007 6:20 PM

". Frankly, the black-screen ending just seemed like a way to express that the writers didn't care about the characters they had invented anymore. So why should we?"

You shouldn't care. It just wasn't show for your particular audience.

May I recommend, Deal! No Deal! for your, um, peculiarities.

Posted by Petey | June 11, 2007 6:26 PM

Petey has elevated his assholishness to performance art here. My hat is off to you, man.

I hope this doesn't make your brain explode, but I enjoy both The Sopranos and Deal or No Deal. I don't exactly go out of my way to catch Deal or No Deal, but if I'm flipping around and it's on, I'll probably stop. I remember when it first came on there was a page 1 WSJ story about what a great economic experiment it was, what with the risk tolerance and so on.

Posted by too many steves | June 11, 2007 6:37 PM

Of course Tony's always on guard. He won't go get the newspaper anymore; he pulls a sawed off shotgun out of his SUV at the sight of an unfamiliar car coming up the driveway. And he's on guard in that restaurant.

Posted by rd | June 11, 2007 6:48 PM

Here's one thing I didn't get: what did it mean when, after hearing Phil was killed, Agent Harris said "We're going to win this thing?" I thought it meant that he's kinda identifying with Tony and hoping that he (Tony) beats New York. Or is it that the FBI is going to win the war on organized crime? Or is it that there's an office pool about who's going to die (I saw that on some other website, can't remember where)?

Posted by Random Dude | June 11, 2007 7:00 PM

WRT the high-brow/low-brow dichotomy, such as it is: In Ayn Rand's collected letters (a door-stopper I don't have handy right now), Rand was bragging to someone (DeMille, maybe?) that she was able to write stuff that, on a surface level could appeal to regular folks as entertainment, but on a higher level could be appreciated by smarter folks. Mightn't Shakespeare and others who wrote with one eye on the box office have been able to do something similar?

Posted by Fred | June 11, 2007 7:05 PM

Random Dude: bite your tongue. Everyone knows Journey rocks.

Posted by Fred | June 11, 2007 7:10 PM

Unsupported aesthetic pronunciamentos? Low brow.

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | June 11, 2007 7:17 PM

May I recommend, Deal! No Deal! for your, um, peculiarities.

An odd suggestion to someone that seems dissapointed in a show with a lack of a well-told ending to a story.

I can only suspect that my "um, peculiarity" is that I don't agree with your assessment of brilliance at eschewing a formal conclusion to the story?

Apart from the oddly masturbatory discussion of whether the work is low/middle/highbrow, the most interesting comment you've made is this:

And more generally, I think lousy audiences get waaaaay too obsessed with plot in movies and TV.

This may be true -- there are plenty of good examples of storytelling that is more experiential than plot driven (last year's film Cache comes to mind), but the Sopranos was never one of them. For five seasons, the season long arcs were built around the mundane business of feuds, murder, romantic betrayal, etc.

Pretending that these were not, in fact, the show's dramatic turning points for the sake of claiming great (and continued) subversiveness is silly. It was a mob show with the typical themes: loyalty, brutality, the struggle for normalcy and escape, etc., and it's success was in the portrayal of the latter (Tony and Carmella's frequently failing relationship, Meadow's alternating rebellion and acceptance of her family, etc.) while satisfying the former two.

Posted by Brad L | June 11, 2007 7:19 PM

"Unsupported aesthetic pronunciamentos? Low brow."

Let's leave Chavez's assault on Venezuelan TV out of this, OK?

Posted by Fred | June 11, 2007 8:40 PM

There's probably no point in posting to a thread as old as this one. Dang it! That's what I get for working for a living.

But I do think Brad L is right on. This is what I meant waaay up above when I said the show has always been "about" plot (which is actually a goofy way of putting it).

This sort of nose-in-the air sterile appreciation of narrative fiction that ignores (or diminishes) such concerns as story and character is rather disgusting. How could you fail to be moved by the harrowing scene when Tony discovers AJ in the midst of his pathetic suicide attempt. Is it really more "high-brow" to be above all that and look instead for some sort of supposed deeper meaning by examining the imagery for symbolism and references to other cultural works or whatever it is that is considered "high-brow"?

Petey would have us believe that any concern with plot is somehow not high-brow and thus, well, stupid, I supposed--the concerns of the unwashed Cheeto-eating masses. But what possible higher artistic achievement could there be than to really delve into the human condition (a cliche, I know) and truly move your audience? Is it really less of an artistic achievement to leave your audience panting to find out what happens next than it is to leave a few intellectual types tipping back their heads with fingers on chins thinking, yes, I get that?

In my experience, symbol laden, knowing fiction that eschews plot is actually pretty easy to pull off. Any odd choice you make becomes artistic and deep. Satisfying plot driven fiction of any quality is immensely difficult to produce, and this is why I've always considered shows like the Wire and the Soprano's at its plot-driven best to be art of the highest order.

Posted by Rob Mac | June 11, 2007 8:54 PM

Vanya:

Of course I haven't read Tolstoy in the original Russian and am sorry to say I was unaware that speaking Russian was necessary to form an opinion about the highbrowness of those works. Thanks for filling me in on this, as apparently Russian is a very unusual language.

Accordingly corrected, I now stand branded as a lowbrow and, so encumbered, must struggle on.

Posted by Duncan Kinder | June 11, 2007 8:56 PM

1. - Petey is right about everything.
2. - The Sopranos ending was entirely clear, and anyone who didn't think so is better off watching Deal or No Deal. See No. 1.
3. Petey says, "The correct interpretation of the ending starts with realizing the agitation of the final scene lies only in the viewer, not in Tony." All hail Petey. See No. 1. I'd still like to know, though, how Petey regards the Melfi breakup as being important to the final scene. I would say, rather, that Melfi's *conclusions* were important to the final scene. I wonder if that's what Petey is saying.
4. - Yglesias says, "I think the beginning/middle/end narrative structure characterizes a lot of perfectly highbrow works." This is so foolish in this context that it doesn't merit a response. Petey doesn't respond. See No. 1
5. - I disagree with Petey about the series end being the Kennedy and Heidi episode, but that just means that I'm wrong. See No. 1.

Posted by politicalfootball | June 11, 2007 8:58 PM

"Petey would have us believe that any concern with plot is somehow not high-brow and thus, well, stupid."

I hesitate to speak on behalf of He-Who-Does-Not-Err, but I think Petey's point is that people who failed to *understand* the plot in the Sopranos finale are a bit dim.

For my part, I was moved - and amused - by the finale. De gustibus etc. etc, so I understand if others weren't as entertained - but it's hard to escape the idea that Rob Mac misunderstands the finale when he suggests that "In my experience, symbol laden, knowing fiction that eschews plot is actually pretty easy to pull off. Any odd choice you make becomes artistic and deep."

But the only thing that Rob Mac seems to be advocating here is that Chase make "any odd choice" - Tony gets killed; Tony turns states evidence; Tony gets busted; Tony doesn't get killed, etc. It doesn't matter, just so long as we wrap it up into a nice neat package.

Don't get me wrong, I like nice neat packages too, but that's not the only choice given to legitimate dramatists. Chase was telling us something clear, interesting and (I thought) really witty about his dramatic vision for The Sopranos.

Posted by politicalfootball | June 11, 2007 9:14 PM

Socky Mcpuppet strikes.

Posted by dudeson | June 11, 2007 9:30 PM

Petey's really making it difficult for me to agree with him, and this thread is really quite old now, but the apparent definition of "plot" that Rob Mac is working with isn't an actual definition of "plot," at least as used by writing/critic types.

"Plot" = the stuff that happens: somebody gets killed, the police investigate, catch the killer, force a confession out of him.

"Story" = something I've always had a harder time defining, but essentially "what the art is about". In the above example of plot, an episode of Law & Order will most likely be about the plot and nothing else - every once in a while, some ethical quandary, or Jack McCoy's scotch habit, or something. In NYPD Blue, to use Milch's formulation, the story is probably going to be about what the plot shows us in the characters and the overarching theme of "law without order" (and the first season of Deadwood was "order without law").

Sopranos *absolutely* had a story that was very important - the Story of Tony Soprano, or if you want to be more inclusive and, for the first five season, accurate, the Story of Tony and Carmela; everything else story-wise ties back to Tony and his relationship with Carm. When I said that the show wasn't about plot, I'm not saying it didn't have one; I'm saying that the issue of how a specific beef gets resolved were always less important than the exploration of Tony, his relationships, and his milieu. "Will Carmine get whacked" was of less interest to the show's creators than "What's the status of Tony's relationship with John Sacrimoni, the only man in the world whom he can regard as both friend and peer?" "Where's Furio?" was of less interest than "Will all of this stuff prodding Carmela to leave Tony have an effect? (Not in the long run.)" All the show's plot machinations were in service of the story that Tony's professional/social world was being slowly stripped away from him, that he accurately diagnosed his state in the first episode ("I came in at the end of something") and every worthy peer or potentially worthy successor has to, for some reason or other, wind up dead for Tony to maintain an existence that, by virtue of this same constant winnowing, becomes ever more precarious and ever more hollow.

You can debate what the show's "story" was, but it just wasn't about the machinations of the plot in the way that a Grisham novel is, pretty much, about the details of how things unfold. And my point about going back to the beginning wasn't to demonstrate that the show didn't wrap up plot elements, it was to argue that wrapping up the plot elements was never the foregrounded, most important thing going on (and also, though I didn't say so, point out that plot elements have also been dropped all along; witness the creators' peevish insistence that everybody forget about the goddamned Russian, because they just didn't care and he wasn't important). Every bloody (or unbloody) denoument - the destruction of Junior's crew and the near-murder of Livia, the killing of Richie Aprile and Big Pussy, whatever might've happened towards the end of Season 3, if anything, since I can't recall, the killings of Tony B. and then Phil Leotardo - is followed by a scene telling us: and so life goes on, a little less secure, a little more ragged. At the end of season 1, we get Tony and his wife and children coming together, forgetting the awful events of the past hour, for a meal at Vesuvio. At the end of season 2, we end with (I think) the camera pulling back on the guys lounging outside Satriale's, just being the Neighborhood Guys like nothing ever happened. At the end of season 3 we end again with community and proximity to food, w/Junior singing at that big gathering (although Meadow is pissed and runs away for some reason - Jackie Jr? - we have a crack in the pattern). I don't remember the literal last scene of season 4, but in general it concludes with the collapse of Tony and Carmela's marriage, only to find that its (bloody, moneyed) resurrection is the end of season 5. Compare to other, more plot-driven shows, which end their seasons on big revelations or cliffhangers or ecstatic climaxes (and please note I have in mind here some shows I very much *liked*, such as X-Files); the Sopranos always went out by showing us that life continued in its sorry, David Chase Hates Us All kind of way. So I ask again - why would you expect anything different?

(And of course the show cared about character; what it had to *say* about it in the end may not have been your cup of tea or even mine [I'm more hopeful about the Human Condition than Chase is] but I've said here and elsewhere that the greatest gift of the show is Tony Soprano and his marriage to Carmela, an unbelievably richly written and acted portrayal of two people as real and riveting as any we've ever had the privilege to see.)

Posted by Quarterican | June 11, 2007 11:09 PM

Quarterican: You're getting the ideas and their implications right, but at least as I've learned them getting the words "plot" and "story" exactly mixed up. The classic definitions come from E.M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel, and the succinctest telling is this:

We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. "The king died and then the queen died" is a story. "The king died and then the queen died of grief" is a plot. The time-sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it. Or again: "The queen died, no one knew why, until it was discovered that it was through grief at the death of the king. This is a plot with a mystery in it, a form capable of high development. It suspends the time-sequence, it moves as far away from the story as its limitations will allow. Consider the death of the queen. If it is in a story we say "and then?" If it is in a plot we ask "why?"

Posted by Antid Oto | June 12, 2007 12:13 AM

I would have to agree that Petey's interpretation of the final scene is the most apt - or at least the most sensible. (Even though the use of the phrase "correct interpretation" in reference to art strikes me as a bit - oh, shall I say - lowbrow)

I still did not like the ending, though. I have watched Sopranos since its inception many years back, and what attracted me was the dark humor and the gangster drama, not the highbrow psycho analytical stuff. Beyond that point, I could care less about David Chase; just as I believe David Chase could care less whether or not he has a crusading army of groupies to ridicule any naysayers or unenlightened fans.

But I do think he would put enormous thought into the ending of his life's most important work. There is only one conceivable reason to end with a cut to black: to screw with the audience, induce some kind of emotion or self-reflection. Or to say: How does it feel, to be invested in the life of a confirmed sociopath?

Posted by Neal M | June 12, 2007 12:29 AM

Antid Oto -

No, you're right, and those definitions were the sense in which I was trying to use the words. What tripped me up, and usually does, is my conflation of "story" with "what the art is about," which doesn't really work very neatly. What I mean when I talk about "what it's about" is essentially what I take the artistic concern to be, the primary focus. Of course, this is rarely a single-minded thing, and the more complex or developed the art the more things you can stuff into the bag of "what it's about," as is the case with the Sopranos. I just think that in the set of things the show was about, "How Tony outmaneuvered the NYC mob and stayed one step ahead of the Feds" - a catalog of clever strategems and alliances - was a lot lower on the creators' list than things like "Tony's world will continue to get inexorably smaller and more dangerous," "Tony and Carmela's marriage," "Portrait and Parody of millenial American culture," "Nobody ever changes all that much, no matter how many chances they get," but the plot machinations were more important than other things the show was about, like "Mobsters: Prone to Malapropisms" and "Tony's Russian Gooma: Superfine, yet Supertiresome".

Posted by Quarterican | June 12, 2007 12:41 AM

"Or to say: How does it feel, to be invested in the life of a confirmed sociopath?"

That would be true if it happened at the end of season 5, or season 6a. By the end of 6b, he'd killed Christopher-- was anyone really left that sympathetic to him?

Honestly, I would have liked almost any actual ending better-- even a "happy" Tony-comes-out-on-top ending that suggests that evil sometimes triumphs. This wasn't even that, because he's still bedeviled by numerous small concerns (Janice's kids, the indictment, whatnot).

The ending we were left with was a non-ending. By eschewing moral justice or any kind of narrative teleology, the work defined itself with a sort of purposeless nihilism.

Cut to black.
You might as well.

Posted by Anthony Damiani | June 12, 2007 3:46 AM

Matthew Yglesias:
I feel like Scott Lemieux is suffering here from some kind of television version of the Stockholm Syndrome
"Petey":
Or, it could just be that you're the kind of guy who enjoys Michael Bay movies, and thus finds the joys of the Sopranos to be a bit over your head

This is a good example of something that's always puzzled me: why do people feel the need to turn other people's interpretations of a TV show, movie, book or work of art to the point of argument or even ad hominens (even if meant as goodhearted teasing)? You are never going to convince someone to like something by arguing with them about their feelings. It seems like such a foolish exercise: they like what they like and dislike what they dislike and arguing is not going to change that.

I'm prejudiced, I guess, because I ended up in work that analyzes people's reactions to high-to-low art, in the form of what hard cash they are willing to put down to own such things, but am I the only one who finds it endlessly fascinating to see the huge variety of human reaction to works of culture and art? Why the need to criticize a reaction? To criticize professional critics for their opinion is one thing, as they can affect the audience the piece reaches. But to criticize the interpretations of end users of a work seems to be folly. It is what it is, and one can learn something about the human condition, and how best to communicate, from watching, not judging, reactions. Certainly few creators would deign to state to a user that their interpretation of a piece is wrong, rather, they are interested in knowing.

Posted by artappraiser | June 12, 2007 4:21 AM

Neal M:
induce some kind of emotion or self-reflection. Or to say:How does it feel, to be invested in the life of a confirmed sociopath?

A.J.'s reactions weren't blatant enough for you? Suicide attempt, psychological institution inpatient, "existential pain"?

Anthony Damiani:

By eschewing moral justice or any kind of narrative teleology, the work defined itself with a sort of purposeless nihilism

No kidding! Correct me if there is sarcasm intended in your comment, but you expected something else from a drama about a 21st-century middle-aged American guy with a college education stuck in an ancient tribal familial criminal old-country-codes gang, who early in the series has chosen to go into therapy because of panic attacks?

(Ever hear the one where psychological therapy is looked down upon by those with strong moral codes?)

Posted by artappraiser | June 12, 2007 5:13 AM

Correct me if there is sarcasm intended in your comment, but you expected something else

Yep, pretty much.

Actually, I kinda expected something like this because David Chase strikes me as having total contempt for his audience and basic dramatic structure-- but I would have preferred a tragedy, or even a clearcut victory for (caveated that Tony's moral depravity had been high-lighted post Christopher) that mocked the very concept of moral justice. What we got was a tale full of sound and fury, signifying not "nothing" but an existential nothingness.

Posted by Anthony Damiani | June 12, 2007 7:31 AM

No "highbrow" stuff intended, sorry kids. Entertainment was always the main goal:

"I have no interest in explaining, defending, reinterpreting, or adding to what is there," he says of the final scene.

"No one was trying to be audacious, honest to God," he adds. "We did what we thought we had to do. No one was trying to blow people's minds, or thinking, 'Wow, this'll (tick) them off.' People get the impression that you're trying to (mess) with them and it's not true. You're trying to entertain them."

from
David Chase speaks!
Posted by Alan Sepinwall June 11, 2007 10:50PM
"exclusive interview, agreed to well before the season began"

Posted by artappraiser | June 12, 2007 7:33 AM

Look, I think the whole browheight sidebar to this discussion is a load of BS, and illustrative of how I think people have screwed up conceptions about "entertainment" and/or/vs "art", but Chase saying he wasn't trying to just fuck with us != Chase had no intent of communicating a message, or trying to be what perhaps he himself conceives of as "highbrow". If Chase's goal was simply to entertain the median fan of the show - which is to say, if he were interested in pandering to his audience, rather than just making his art and putting out there for them to be entertained or not - then seasons 2-6 would've been markedly different. Presumably Chase finds the last few seasons of the show entertaining, just as I do. All he's saying here is "No, I wasn't trying to say 'screw you' or give the audience a heart attack here, I was just trying to provide a good ending," - there's no brow involved.

Posted by Quarterican | June 12, 2007 8:14 AM

the sudden black screen was a gimmick that added absolutely nothing.

Bingo

Posted by Just Karl | June 12, 2007 8:14 AM

I would have preferred a tragedy

What more do you want? Everyone in Tony's family had a chance to get out of the life - by the end it's clear all 4 have been sucked in for good, Tony's lost all his dependable advisors, his last "friend" - Paulie - clearly no longer has his heart in the life, the boy he considered "almost a son" is dead by Tony's own hand, his therapist has turned her back on him - he has no way out now. You really needed to see him gunned down to turn this into a tragedy? I find the show's actual ending was much more tragic than any of the "Tony gets whacked" or "Tony goes to prison" scenarios being bandied about the intertubes last week. What is shocking to me is that intelligent people can watch this, and then claim that Chase is some kind of cold post-modernist simply playing with structure and character. He's actually a very good storyteller, and he told the story the way it needed to be told.

Posted by vanya | June 12, 2007 9:27 AM

"I'd still like to know, though, how Petey regards the Melfi breakup as being important to the final scene."

When Melfi closed the door on Tony, she was acting as our stand-in. She was rejecting our fascination with the sociopath. At the dinner party, the scene ended with someone commenting that treating him must be fascinating, and she replied that it was. But she closes the door on him anyway.

And in the final scene, we're fascinated by watching the clues of whether or not Tony is going to get whacked. We, as Melfi had been, are intensely concerned about Tony's fate. But at the same time, we're watching Tony eating lousy food, in a lousy looking place, listening to lousy music, as a lousy husband and a lousy father. We reject the fascination with the sociopath, and close the door, following the path Melfi has laid out for us.

Posted by Petey | June 12, 2007 10:13 AM

"Look, I think the whole browheight sidebar to this discussion is a load of BS"

I'd actually tend to agree with this.

Posted by Petey | June 12, 2007 10:16 AM

"This is a good example of something that's always puzzled me: why do people feel the need to turn other people's interpretations of a TV show, movie, book or work of art to the point of argument or even ad hominens (even if meant as goodhearted teasing)?"

Argumentative nature of the blogosphere. In this arena, wisdom is arrived at through vituperative argument.

Posted by Petey | June 12, 2007 10:20 AM

"we're watching Tony eating lousy food, in a lousy looking place, listening to lousy music, as a lousy husband and a lousy father"

I thought the onion rings were the best in the state! And I know you didn't just call "Don't Stop Believing" lousy... The main reason the last scene made me smile is that I was rocking out in a totally non-ironic way.

Posted by too many steves | June 12, 2007 10:41 AM

the sudden black screen was a gimmick that added absolutely nothing.

When the screen blacked out, I actually thought that the satellite had just gone on the blink the way it occasionally does.

It was not until the credits started rolling that I realized that the blackout was deliberate.

If you think that satellite blackouts can give rise to artistic effects, that is your privilege - but it is also possible for the proverbial monkey at a typewriter to generate "highbrow" literature.

Posted by Duncan Kinder | June 12, 2007 10:47 AM

we're watching Tony eating lousy food, in a lousy looking place most of the population of North Jersey would disagree you on that point, including David Chase I assume. SI's Peter King praises Holsten's cheeseburgers and vanilla shakes to high heaven in his latest column.

Posted by vanya | June 12, 2007 10:49 AM

On bobmcmanus' point that "The tension is between the banality of evil and the audience's demands for justice and structure". It seems like Chase maybe had that same dilemma in the editing booth...

http://www.nypost.com/seven/06122007/news/nationalnews/sopranos_snit_hits_the_fans_nationalnews_michael_starr_and_murray_weiss.htm?page=2

Matt Servitto, who played FBI Special Agent Harris, said Chase briefly kept the camera rolling after what amounted to Tony's final moment on screen - and that the extra footage appeared to clearly spell the end for the supreme Soprano.

"[Tony's daughter] Meadow got into the diner, sat down . . . The menacing 'Members Only' jacket-wearing man at the counter was a little bit more in play, and I think she's sitting there with the family kind of all together . . . and all of a sudden, the menacing man gets up, starts walking toward their booth. End of show," Servitto said.

Posted by jzouk | June 12, 2007 10:53 AM

"most of the population of North Jersey would disagree you on that point, including David Chase I assume. SI's Peter King praises Holsten's cheeseburgers and vanilla shakes to high heaven in his latest column."

Charming place, I'm sure. Fun looking jukeboxes too.

But everything would've felt different if they'd ended at Vesuvio's.

The difference for Carmela between Meadow being a doctor and a mob lawyer is the difference for the viewer between Vesuvio's and Holstein's.

Water found its level.

Posted by Petey | June 12, 2007 11:32 AM

we're watching Tony eating lousy food, in a lousy looking place, listening to lousy music, as a lousy husband and a lousy father. We reject the fascination with the sociopath, and close the door, following the path Melfi has laid out for us.

Remarkably, this isn't a far cry from the reading I suggested and was blasted for by Petey. The characters had slid/are sliding into oblivion and irrelevance, both in their world and in the viewers' eyes. The black screen is the culmination of that.

I was just disappointed that a) they used fairly cheap writing/action to get there and b) that, after spending 7 years on these characters, there would be more to say about them than "huh, I guess they don't really matter that much after all."

It was lame to just turn Tony into a sociopath at the end (sealed by his killing Chris). In previous seasons, he had a fairly well defined (if evolving) moral code, cobbled out of a combination of tradition, pragmatism, and emotional connection to his family. It was brutal, certainly, but it made him interesting. He regularly wrestled with guilt over his misdeeds while struggling to maintain surface normalcy.

By the end, all but the pragmatism was gone, but it didn't happen in any meaningful progression. Instead, wham, he just kills one of his closest relations, with nary an afterthought about it (unless a joyous "I get it!" counts). Talk about oversimplifying a complex character for expedience.

Similarly, Melfi dumping Tony was abrupt, not the culmination of any particular misgivings, just the result of a little cocktail chat and one bedtime's reading. Oops, time to end the series, lets dump this in there, even though Melfi and their sessions had been an afterthought for the past couple of seasons anyway.

Posted by Brad L | June 12, 2007 12:34 PM

Every bloody (or unbloody) denoument - the destruction of Junior's crew and the near-murder of Livia, the killing of Richie Aprile and Big Pussy, whatever might've happened towards the end of Season 3, if anything, since I can't recall, the killings of Tony B. and then Phil Leotardo - is followed by a scene telling us: and so life goes on, a little less secure, a little more ragged.

This, and most of this post, is spot on. But the plot machinations were necessary to the effect, the balance to the struggle for normalcy. And, they always happened, one way or the other. The ever-continuing struggle for normalcy was a counterpoint to the brutality of the world that these characters have created for themselves.

But, as the family grew ever more ragged, the natural question was -- what is Tony's fate? How does he exist as, each time, the foundations of his world are removed. In the finale, he is without elders (June, Melfi), without heirs (Chris, Bobby) and without peers (Sil, Johnny, even Phil). All that is left is Paulie, the smallest-minded and most petty of his crew.

Watching his hold grow ever more tenuous, we all sensed that there was an inevitable end of some sort: at some point, life doesn't just go on for him. Denying this is sending the audience to the top of the rollercoaster without the plunge. Playing with audience expectations may be interesting, but it is ultimately unsatisfying. The story had a direction, and it was denied in the end.

Posted by Brad L | June 12, 2007 1:03 PM

Though Tolstoy's narrative structure is fairly linear, we know well before the denouement of his novel what will happen with Anna. I'll go out on a limb here and assume that almost no one is reading the novel to see what will happen at the end. Similarly, David Chase took a somewhat worn theme, humanized and universalized the experiences of atypical characters, injected it with doses of the low-, middle- and high-brow and created a compelling narrative which garnered both critical appreciation and mass appeal. Although I think that choosing to bypass the constraints of cultural mores, believability and stylistic choice with ambiguity is largely a cop-out, I've thoroughly enjoyed the the vast majority of the space between intro and conclusion--though this sometimes came in the form of kicking, screaming, bitching and complaining--and my biggest complaint now is simply about the fact that it's finally over.

Posted by VasyaDC | June 12, 2007 2:28 PM

"Similarly, Melfi dumping Tony was abrupt, not the culmination of any particular misgivings, just the result of a little cocktail chat and one bedtime's reading."

I would not call it abrupt. The plot structures in the Soprano's are seldom fully fleshed out - but I would not always attribute that to laziness. For one, I would have hated to see some long side-story arch whereby Melfi is wrestling with her ethical senses for 10 episodes.

The reason the break-up between Melfi and Tony was so apparently quick was because she had real if unacknowledged 'misgivings' about him through the entire show. I would not put Melfi into the role of naive, simple-minded counselor who believes she can help everyone. She was always a skeptic - and the study just put her over the edge.

I agree with pretty much all your points though -especially the one about Christophers death. I do think Melfi, however, was well-done.

Posted by Neal Murray | June 12, 2007 3:53 PM

I felt the break-up was quick and justified. Because the break was not provoked by Melfi's misgivings or moral qualms - rather as soon as she was exposed to a wide group of peers as a "mafia therapist", she dumped Tony. She could justify her dubious interest in Tony to herself, but she couldn't bear appearing foolish to others so she ended it. I saw nothing noble or decent in her act, just a desire not to be embarassed.

Posted by vanya | June 12, 2007 4:09 PM

Could someone please direct me to a transcript of the interviews where David Chase expresses such disdain for the "we're interested in such bourgeouise things as plot" viewership? Not a quote from the article, and actual citation. I want to read it for myself from a reputable news source.

I've read the interview after the final episode, and I've listened to (most of) two interviews he did on the NPR show "Fresh Air", and neither of them gave me any hint that he held plot-oriented viewers in contempt. In fact, from the two NPR interviews (one from 2000, the other from 2004) seemed just the opposite-- Chase actually seemed interested in what has happening to the characters himself, which would suggest that he wouldn't be likely to hold viewers who did the same in such contempt. (Unless he's a self-hating writer, which I suppose is possible.)

I haven't seen any episodes of the Sopranos, and if I'm going to rent them I want to know if the creator will be laughing at me because I'm the sort of person who thinks TV shows are about the people in them and what happens to them, which people like Petey think is a very foolish thing to think.

Unless I see some proof that Chase hates the "who's gonna get whacked" crowd, I'll have to assume that the people who hold that crowd in contempt are trying to justify the fact that they became emotionally invested in a TV show by pretending it's High Art.

Posted by greg | June 16, 2007 8:38 AM

The Sopranos was supposed to bring America together but all it has done is divided us. There is a very simple explanation of what happened at the end that I think we can all agree on:
http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/06/last-sopranos-finale-review-ever.html

Posted by Jon Swift | June 18, 2007 10:55 PM

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