The Sopranos: That Last scene

      This marks the 25th anniversary of that brilliant groundbreaking TV drama, The Sopranos. Wow! 25 years. It really did revolutionize TV drama.

    At the time I published three editions of episode-by-episode analyses of the drama, by Continuum Books. The Sopranos on the Couch. Check Abe/Amazon for them. Go for "The Ultimate Edition," which was ultimate at the time, preceding the 7th season, which I covered in an essay anthology on lulu.com. Here is a paper I unloaded at a Sopranos conference in NYC.

Unpredictable But Inevitable: That Last Scene 

I know, I know, David Chase has avowed that Tony Soprano does not get whacked at the end of The Sopranos. And even if we set aside the allure of a Sopranos movie sequel or twelve, Chase might be expected to know because he conceived the whole drama and supervised every instant, every component, across the seven seasons, and in fact both wrote and directed that controversial last episode. But as the reverend D. H. Lawrence has exhorted us -- Trust the art not the artist. As we return to the Art and look very closely at the last scene and the last episode and the last season and indeed at the whole motherjumpin’ series -- Does Tony Soprano get whacked? My conclusion is unequivocal: Yes and No.  

The No is obvious because, as Mr Chase acknowledges, we don’t see Tony get killed. We get that notorious blank screen. Nor do we see either the conception or delivery of Meadow and AJ -- yet we infer those occurred because the context of the drama suggests as much. And as the later action suggests the earlier happened, the earlier action may strongly suggest what happens behind that blank screen. Context counts.

  A plethora of evidence in the drama and around it sets up our expectation he will be killed. This architecture compels the inference that Tony dies in the diner -- and probably not from indigestion. 

For one thing, high art and popular culture have always been obligated to assure us that crime does not pay. The hours and the per diem may make up for the lack of tenure – but crime does not pay. In life and in politics perhaps but in art, nope. So our killers have always been brought to boot heel, even when they are Good Guys like Shane, leave alone the gangsters in David Chase’s primary models – The Public Enemy, The Godfather trilogy and most pertinently the schnook’s mortal boredom at the end of GoodFellas.  

As well Chase has established a tightening noose around Tony. Over the course of the two-season epilogue we see Uncle Junior disintegrate, lovable Bobby killed, Silvio near-fatally wounded, Phil Leotardo squashed, AJ flub his suicide, and even Tony’s beloved Christopher – snuffed by Tony himself. In the lingo of the presidential race and the other Super Bowl, Big Old Moe Mentum has switched from Survival to Death. 

Chase leaves Tony’s fate ambiguous not because Tony escapes death but because Chase – as he has all through the seven seasons -- rejects closure, would rather unsettle than pacify his viewer, and again declares his independence from narrative convention. To the end more like life than like TV, this one last reticence settles nothing – and everything.

Consistent with the drama’s penchant for lifelike paradox, Chase’s ending is both happy and tragic. Tony’s survival would be happy for him -- but is tragic insofar as it extends and validates his moral failure and his damage to others. His death, which would be perhaps not that positive to him, would be the broadly happy ending because it would betoken justice, not just civil but poetic. The ambiguity of that blank screen admits both endings. 

That suggests that whether Tony lives or dies is ultimately insignificant. His human failure leaves him in the state of Death-in-Life. This balances off Tony’s Life-in-Death experience at the beginning of the drama’s epilogue, Season Six, when his near-death leads to a spiritual awakening and a harmony with the universe – that through Season Seven disintegrates. In the last episode at Bobby’s wake Paulie encapsulates this introspective ambiguity: “In the midst of death, we are in life. Huh? Or is it the other way around?... Either way, you’re halfway up the ass.” 

Perhaps Tony has to be left in limbo because he has come to personify the contemporary American pragmatic capitalist – and that just carries on. Indeed The Sopranos could have carried Orson Welles’s working title for Citizen Kane: “The American.” As the last episode title, Made in America, confirms, the general mix of idealistic pretense and corrupt practice, delusions, denial and defeat, covers a considerable stretch of contemporary American culture. More innocent national satires, the current Little Miss Sunshine and the classic Twilight Zone, play respectively on the comatose Silvio’s TV and in Tony’s safe house. 

Tony’s failure appears in his children’s moral decline, like the fast flare and funk of AJ’s idealism. At Bobby’s wake AJ contends that enlisting to “go kill some fuckin terrorists” would be “more noble than watching jerk-off fantasies on TV if I were kicking their asses.” He echoes Tony’s immigrant idealism: “It’s like – America, this is where people came. To make it. It’s a beautiful idea. And what do they get? Blame? And come-ons for what they don’t need and can’t afford.” AJ tells his new therapist that his SUV’s explosion felt like a cleansing. “We have to break our dependence on foreign oil,” he recites. But even as AJ buys Arabic lesson CDs his idealism remains materialistic. When the army’s helicopter training could get him a job with Donald Trump his ambition stays in the TV fantasies (Trump’s “reality” show) that he spurned. 

AJ readily abandons his military sacrifice for a film job – that brings a sporty new BMW. This career puts AJ on the film course that doomed Tony’s adoptive “son,” Christopher. AJ’s film project is about a private eye who’s sucked into the internet to solve the murders of some virtual prostitutes. Chase has consistently teased the relationship between life and fiction, between actor and role. A real character’s need to solve the murder of fictional prostitutes reflects upon the conventions of fiction suspended by Chase’s open ending. 

Like AJ, Meadow’s legal career reverts to her past. She switched from medicine when her father’s arrests proved “The state can crush the individual.” Echoing Carmela’s denial – which she used to reject -- Meadow blames Tony’s arrests on anti-Italian prejudice -- as if his guilt were irrelevant. As well, she moves from her volunteer work defending oppressed minorities, like blacks and Moslems, into her fiance’s big law firm –where she will start at $170k – that defends a politician against corruption charges involving bid rigging, bagmen and whores. In contrast, her bulemic classmate Hunter (played by David Chase’s daughter) has straightened out and is in second-year Medicine. That is, Hunter escapes her dysfunction while the healthier Meadow relapses into her father’s. 

The other supporting characters, trapped in their selves, confirm the Death-in-Life pattern. Janice tries to inveigle Uncle Junior of his missing money and claims improvement: “I had therapy. I’m a good mother. I put Ma and all her warped shit behind me…. Not that I get any thanks for it.” Within a breath her Livia element rebounds. So, too, Uncle Junior doesn’t recognize Janice or Tony but he proudly remembers “This thing of ours”: “I was involved in that?” As patterns persist, AJ’s new therapist is a Wasp Melfi who crosses her long, lovely legs and evokes both Tony’s old claim  -- an unloving mother who “was a borderline personality”--  and Carmela’s denial: “Maybe the army’d be great for [AJ], if there wasn’t a war going on.”

In fact the only major character to change is the once virtuous FBI Agent Harris – as he sinks into Tony. By the old proverb, whoever touches pitch is defiled. After the FBI surveillance protects the Sopranos at Bobby’s funeral, Harris fingers Tony’s nemesis Phil Leotardo. Harris reacts to Phil’s death as if he were on Tony’s team: “Damn, we’re gonna win this thing.” As Big Pussy Bonpensiero came to see himself as an FBI agent, Harris has turned Soprano. As he betrays his wife with his colleague mistress, he betrays his colleagues with his support of Tony. 

The scene where Tony leaves Paulie sunning himself outside Satriale’s replays the II, 11 ending where Agent Harris drops by to introduce his new partner to Tony. Paulie’s antagonism towards the cat that stares at Christopher’s photo coheres with his superstition-based religion. To his claim he saw the Virgin Mary at the Bada Bing (presumably after hours), Tony shows limited support: “Why didn’t you say something? Fuck strippers, we coulda had a shrine. Sold holy water in gallon jugs, we coulda made millions.” Paulie’s reluctant acceptance of his promotion – “I live but to serve you, my liege” – raises the suspicion he could (again) betray Tony. 

Tony’s soft spot for the stray cat – an antithetic reminder of his ducks in I,1 – and his pause to enjoy the air as he rakes round his pool, recall his post-surgery spirituality in Season Six. Season Seven traces his relapse into his selfish brutishness and his consequent isolation. Perhaps Tony’s last emblem is his last supper’s onion ring– unhealthy, flavourful but indigestible, and hollow at the core. Indeed, as the Sopranos swallow the whole ring sans bite or chew, it suggests a profane deep fry communion.

 The closing restaurant scene feels ominous. As we get Tony’s perspective on the bystanders we taste the crime boss’s restless fear. They are the “schnooks” to which Harry Hill, the turncoat hero of GoodFellas, was reduced, so even as innocents they embody Tony’s dread. While Bobby’s wake was at Vesuvio’s, the Holsten’s diner suggests cheap comfort not class. It images Tony’s decline from Artie Bucco’s restaurant and self-realization. As Little Italy is “now reduced to one row of shops and cafes,” the diner is another comedown, like Carmela’s refuge here, an old house reeking with the previous owners’ urine. 

Tony takes a booth from which he can watch the door –and not just for his family’s separate arrivals. In a medley of metaphors, from the tabletop jukebox he plays Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin’. Journey sing off the end of Tony’s, and Chase’s. The lyrics point to the ambiguous end: “Some will win, some will lose, Some were born to sing the blues. Oh, the movie never ends. It goes on and on and on and on.” 

As Tony scans the juke, the song’s flip side explicitly assigns the ending to the viewer: Any Way You Want It. Tony also lingers over Heart’s Where Will You Run To? and Magic Man, and over Tony Bennett’s I’ve Gotta Be Me and – for Tony -- the synonymous A Lonely Place.  As the titles summarize Tony’s condition and like his perspective on the other diners, the very last shot, the no-life blackout, signifies his last view. That makes it the reverse of the episode’s opening shot, where Tony wakes up, resumes consciousness, in the safe house. 

Though AJ cites Tony’s valediction from the end of I, 13 -- “Focus on the good times.” -- we project Tony’s educated suspicion onto the truck driver in a USA cap, the strong young man with a date, the black duo who enter last. Even the man with three boy scouts disturbingly recalls the customers at the hobby shop where Bobby is killed (VII, 8). 

Most importantly, the man who walks past the Sopranos to the WC behind Tony recalls Michael Corleone’s Family initiation, when he retrieved a gun from the toilet box. His “Members Only” jacket repeats the title of the opening episode in Chase’s two-season epilogue, VI,1, after the jacket Eugene Pontecorvo wore when he killed a man in a diner like this one. Tall dark and lanky, the man resembles Eugene, who killed himself when Tony wouldn’t release him from the mob. Earlier Eugene’s wife said someone should “put a bullet in [Tony’s] head” – perhaps setting up a contract fulfilled now.

Meadow’s difficulty in parking her car establishes a suspense we assume is life or death. As Hitchcock contended, dramatic power lies not in the explosion but in its expectation. Will she get there in time to die or late enough to be saved? The last words, as Tony sees someone approach -- maybe Meadow, maybe not -- are Steve Perry interrupted at “Don’t stop.” But as art –whether a song or an epic TV drama – can’t control life the show and I suggest Tony’s life both do stop. We’re deprived of Perry’s last “believin’.”

Reading the blank screen as Tony’s death also fulfills Bobby’s remark about assassinations in “Soprano Home Movies” (VII, 1): “You probably don’t hear it when it happens, right?” In “Stage Five” (VII, 2) when Gerry Torciano is killed “He did not hear a thing” and didn’t realize anything “until it was over.” That’s how Bobby himself got it (VII, 8), how Phil gets it here, and by extension Tony now. 

Further, this is one of only three Sopranos episodes without music over the end-credits. Where II, 8 ended on the beep of the wounded Christopher’s life-support system, Tony at the end has no life-support. VI, 1 ends with Tony shot by Junior, unconscious, and no sound over the end credits. The endings of the first and last episodes of Chase’s two-season epilogue take their cue from Hamlet: “The rest is silence.”  

Nevertheless all this remains surmise. We don’t know Tony has been killed because we haven’t seen it. The conclusion spares/deprives us of the sensation, thrill or more cerebral satisfaction of his death, as Chase denied us Melfi’s vengeance against her rapist (III, 4). Because we have suspended our moral rigour to cheer Tony on all these years Chase won’t give us any easy way out. This reticence is a moral imperative. Knowing Tony is dead could give us false confidence that such unfathomable evil has been controlled. However directed his conclusion, Chase leaves Tony in limbo for the same reason Shakespeare leaves Iago alive and silent -- because such massive evil remains a living danger. We may assume he’s dead but assurance lies elsewhere. As John Allemang put it, “For closure, look to M*A*S*H or Friends/ But Tony’s torment never ends.”  And yet… Tony has to be killed.  It can’t be over till the fat Soprano croaks.