Epics

So the Senate testimony of former Deputy Attorney General James Comey against the perjurer Gonzales, the stuff about the hospital visit to semi-comatose Attorney General John Ashcroft to get his signature on the Bush/Cheney/Rove Triad's Constitution-breaking has surveillance crimes has already been translated into the fairly deft little video, Godfather IV.

What the heck, at just over a minute, it's already better than the third movie. And any excuse to see Sterling Haydn hit a man...

Speaking of organized crime, I won't go deep into this week's Sopranos episode, 3rd to last of the series, but I will point out that it felt like the most depressing episode in ages (coming down off the peyote high in Vegas?) as well as having a very lucid and pivotal film quote that I've seen neither of my episode-analysis gurus, Alan Sepinwall or Matt Zoller Seitz, recognize yet.

SPOILERville.









In scene near the end of the episode where Tony and Little Carmine are turned away by Butch at Phil Leotardo's doorstep, the framing of the doorway confrontation, with the action of a third party blocking a consummation between the visiting party, and someone hidden and unheard upstairs somewhere in the house, is direct echo of the turning point scene in Orson Welles' ill-fated second feature film, The Magnificent Ambersons.

You can see a few moments of the original at the end of this trailer clip. (From a really great unofficial Ambersons site.)

In Welles' adaptation of Booth Tarkington's novel, self-made man Joseph Cotten is blocked from continuing his blossoming middle-aged relationship with his childhood love, once the richest girl in town, by her spoiled, angry son, played by Tim Holt. From that point forward the would-be lovers never meet again, not even on her deathbed.

The standoff with Butch is shot basically the same way, albeit if these mob characters in The Sopranos always end up turning everything they touch into shit, the same thing kind of happens when Phil starts yelling down from the attic as Tony and Little Carmine head back to their cars. It would be comic save for the violence we're sure will follow, but Phil's hollerings are essentially a shit on the Ambersons theme, the f.u. punk rock version, irreverent but dumb. Perfect for the series.

If Tarkington's/Welles' tale is essentially about the passing of an age, from the landed aristocracy with their assumptions of permanence and dwindling relevance, even insult to American social health, then cannot one make the same case for Chase's epic?

The episode starts with the asbestos Tony is ultimately responsible for disposing of safely, instead dumped in New Jersey wetlands to wisp over the natural landscape like a pestilence. Cut to Tony in plush bedcovers, his affluence paid for by our collective loss, a thieving inflicted upon all of us. Cut to his son in bed, same affluence. Same source.

There's the pain of it. Either Tony survives and we pay for it, or maybe it really is like the Ambersons, the sweep of this series being the contemporary decline of the historical 20th century power of the American gangster, at least the European side of it.

The spoiled son looking for his comeuppance is A.J. this time. The lover denied is Phil. (Think of his brutal homophobic murder last season as overcompensation.)

Then, like the Amberson family, shall the House of Soprano reveal its rickety foundations, aging without replenishment, long gentle arcs then the sudden storm that leaves them without what they thought they had. A new and more relevant class replacing them, one not shackled in the values of some previous century.

A change that leaves them as bereft and forgotten as Johnny Sacramoni's family.