The final scene of the final episode of the long-running HBO hit The Sopranos inspired thousands of fans to go to the Internet's sounding boards to complain about the choice of the series's creator, David Chase, to end it with an inconclusive blackout. For several minutes previously, he had led audience expectations up the garden path to a hecatomb of slaughter in a suburban diner before pulling the plug at what ought to have been the climactic moment. What made it worse was that Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) and his family were left having dinner together, all of them happy--and happy with each other--for perhaps the first time in the eight years and seven seasons of the show's run. This was obviously the perfect dramatic moment for the mass execution that Chase's camera had seemed to be setting us up for.
Yet I think he had several good reasons for depriving us of it. Had, for a start, the complainers forgotten how many times he has similarly teased them before? The Sopranos is nothing if not mock heroic, and the mock heroic's characteristic mode is bathos. We expect high drama, if not heroism, and we get farce. In the final episode, alone, there were several examples. We were invited to revel in the macabre comedy of the death of Tony's gangland rival Phil Leotardo (Frank Vincent), his head run over by his own SUV and producing a sickening crunch as it disturbed the even ride of his grandchildren, strapped into their
car seats above. In another SUV--an inherently comic vehicle--Anthony Jr. (Robert Iler) was seen engaging in sexual activities with a girlfriend while parked on a lonely country road. We could feel the subtextual undertow of the teen slasher movies, in which the couple would be doomed just by being there, as well as the anticipation as smoke begins seeping into the cab of the vehicle through its air vents. Aha! Here must be the answer to the question posed implicitly in the penultimate episode when Tony told his wife Carmela (Edie Falco), "They never touch the family."
Does such gangland chivalry still apply, or are we now living in a more brutal world?
We never find out here any more than we do in the disputed ending. It's all a false alarm. The smoke comes from A.J.'s having parked the SUV on a pile of dead leaves, which its overheated catalytic converter has then set fire to. As the kids scramble out of the car and down the hill, they watch as it catches fire and explodes, the very image of Mafia murders by car bombs in The Godfather and other films. Except that it's not a Mafia murder but a bathetic suburban accident caused by heedless affluence.
"I'm depressed," moans A.J. when his parents scold him for his carelessness. "I'm supposed to worry about catalytic converters?" That's The Sopranos in a nutshell: The heroic turning into a mockery of itself--usually with the help of therapeutic psychobabble--at (almost) every turn, while still attempting to cling to its heroic dignity.
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