The Hit

Over the past few weeks I've been moved to write about various episodes of The Sopranos as it hit its creative stride in the run-up to series finale. Usually I wait a day or two to reflect, read some other analysis, and make up my mind about what's stuck, but tonight is going to be different. I'm already getting keyword inquiries about the ending, which as Steve Van Zandt warned us a few weeks ago, has gotten everyone talking. So here goes.


SPOILER SPACE
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Okay, I thought the TiVo had cut off the ending (not the first time, or the first time this week) but then I realized I didn't get the traditional "delete" screen. Then I thought the feed had gone out -- happened a few years ago during the Six Feet Under final season, nearly drove me to homicide.

Then I realized David Chase was seriously screwing with us.

Then, after I got over my denial and anger, I entered the bargaining or, as I prefer to call it, analysis stage. Depression and acceptance are waiting in the wings and, while I'm glimpsing them through the curtains, here are the possible explanations for the ending that come to mind:

• David Chase made a big mistake?
  
  Answer: Don't be a moron.

• It's metatextual?
  
  Answer: Sure.
  
  Chase usually ended seasons with comforting family dinners, even if there might be lightning outside the door, and the major project of most family melodramas -- TV or otherwise -- is the reconstitution of the family. So Chase could be making a point about the falseness of such closures, even as he leaves us tantalizingly close to one, with Meadow in suspense-laden parallel parking holding up the final piece of the familial reconstitution forever.
  
  Or it's a metatextual comment on the nature of filmmaking, the ability to construct intense dread with a series of artificial moving images edited in such a way as to produce a feeling out of thin air. The build of suspense and signifiers. Who just came through the door? What is Tony thinking? Why isn't he concerned about the possible Michael Corleone move in the bathroom? When will we see that sudden splatter of red -- as planted earlier in the season when Silvio witnessed a hit at his restaurant table?
  
  For, as Tony's mother Livia once spat, "It's all a big nothing!"
  

• It's forcing viewers to pay attention not to some sort of tabloid plot closure, but instead to the real themes, the real cry of warning of the series as a whole?
  
  Answer: Why, yes.
  
  Face it: no one's changed. No one's escaped. No one has gotten out alive.
  
  The "family" closure of the final episode is that both kids are headed back into the Family business. Sure, it's movies and law, but both are mob connected, both kids are under their parents' watchful cultural eyes, Carmela has not awakened to her husband's crimes and Tony has gotten just enough therapeutic awareness to do his job better. After all, wasn't that the clear message of the Melfi hit on Tony as patient in last week's penultimate episode?
  
  As I wrote last week, the surreal denial of our citizenry's complicit responsibility for the Iraq War is yet another metaphor for these very toxic characters' blindness to their own responsibility for turning everything they touch to shit and heartbreak. And, to take it step further, just as I entitled that post, "Tony America," Chase entitled this final episode, "Made in America."
  
  The bigger game has always been the turnaround on the audience. Playing with our empathy by linking it to a confirmed devil (see the episode in Vegas where Tony acknowledged as much when, coming on a peyote trip, he nodded to an image of one). Playing with how the "normalcy" of the characters' daily lives is really about how we lie to ourselves all the time, every day, as some possibly apocalyptic survival method.
  
  This reflexive theme of the show is the one most thought-provoking to discuss at parties, but also rubs wrong as a "f.u." from series creator to audience. It's where the show takes the biggest risk (lots of movies, if not TV shows, have had us empathizing with a bad guy, going back to Othello), that of alienating the audience, of biting the hand that feeds it.
  
  Tonight's ending was potentially the biggest bite-back of all. Lots of notes in forums about canceling HBO. One has to assume the execs over there knew it, one wonders if they are really prepared.
  
  But maybe it was the only way to jar us out of our complacency, the only way to escape final judgment as melodrama and instead getting the stamp of legitimately disturbing art.
  
  I'll let the readers argue if it does, but one can say it is a series ending that has never been done before in television, maybe the only way to go out unique, and maybe the only way to force the viewer to wake up (as this episode and maybe all this season started) and actually get something more out of the series as a whole.
  
  
• Vision of hell?
  
  Answer: Well, of course. Per Alan Sepinwall:
  

  -A theory proposed by a reader of the NJ.com Sopranos blog using the handle Lorbnash: the nine episodes of this season have represented the nine circles of Hell from Dante's "The Divine Comedy." The fourth circle, for instance, is for the greedy and the miserly; the fourth episode was Tony and Hesh's gambling showdown. The seventh circle is where the suicides go; A.J. took his dip in the family pool in episode seven. The ninth circle is for the traitors, and Butchie implicitly betrayed Phil. (For added fun, reader Joe Adler pointed out the similarities between the Eugene Delacroix painting "The Barque of Dante" and the Annie Leibovitz promotional image on the season five DVD set. Google them both if you want your mind blown.)

  Tony is a devil in his own hellish materialistic world, making the world hell for the rest of us to live in.
  

• Tony was shot?
  
  Answer: Closure fetishists one and all, we gotta love this one.
  
  It's a classic build up without the money shot. It's true to the point of view of the series -- through Tony's eyes.
  
  He gets hit, his daughter coming through the door just in time to see it, his wife and son about to be splattered, a half-moment later. But why show that? What would be the point? So we can look down on them?
  
  There are clues.
  
  1. The pointed flashback just before the end of the previous episode to Bobby and Tony talking about it on the boat (symbol of Pussy's hit), how you don't see it coming, how everything might just go black.
  
  2. The ominous door. It was the second-to-last shot of the previous week's episode, dollying in on the door to Tony's bedroom in his safehouse, as if anyone could burst through at any moment and blast Tony away. The echo tonight in the bathroom door of the restaurant, or the front door itself.
  
  3. The suspense. Occam's razor, the simplest explanation for the build up. Metatext Chase just takes us right up to the moment, stops a millisecond short.
  
  4. The black. The scene is mainly shot-reverse-shot of Tony and what he sees, his POV. Final POV at the moment of death is, of course, blackness. Maybe the bells of the restaurant door opening (Meadow, Tony's little angel arriving) are heavenly peals signifying Tony's demise. But Chase has a much more pessimistic, one would argue material view of the world. When it's all over and a life is snuffed, all you get is a big nothing.
  

But in the end it's not what's shown that matters, it's what's in your head both due to Chase and to your own imagination.

Imagination like back in the day when we read books at night, before TV spread like a virus. (Title of the script Tony gives to A.J.: Anti-Virus.) Imagination that breaks out of traditional TV confinement.

We cut to black and the hit is on us; our precious series dead, along with our preconceptions of fairness. Tony's world never was fair, and Chase never allowed it to be so. After all, it's the Tonys of the world that win, isn't it, the ones with enough brains and few scruples who take and get away with it?

Wake up.