Something Old, Something New
He’ll never get to use an iPhoneA lot of people in the business ask me how it is that I find time to run this blog and our forums, when I’ve got deadlines and family commitments and the rest of life bearing down on me.
Frankly, I don’t know. For instance, right now it’s just about 11:30 PM Pacific time, and I’ve got at least another two hours of writing ahead of me.
I’m bleary.
And so, I turn to this as respite.
By the way, if you don’t understand why a writer tired of writing would write in order to take a break from writing, then you may not be a writer.
Admittedly, part of my bleariness is because instead of writing what I needed to yesterday, I spent time getting and setting up my new iPhone.
Before I add to the infinite instareviews available to you on the internet, I’ve finally got my working theory about the ending of The Sopranos.
Yeah, I know. Old news. But I’ve been thinking about it for a while, and I’m not sure anyone else has forwarded this theory yet. I’m sure someone will dig up a link to something similar.
Like everyone, my first reaction to the final moment of the final episode was “Oh God, my TiVo…” Then I sort of reeled into a bit of shock. A bit of shock. It’s still a TV show, after all. Nonetheless, Chase managed to completely surprise everyone.
The quick theories were: it’s a meaningless surprise for surprise’s sake, Tony dies, it’s a cliffhanger for a movie…
I don’t think so.
I don’t think Chase invested so much time and energy and transparent deliberation into the final scene just to lead up to a “Ha ha, here’s something you never expected, it doesn’t mean anything but at least I didn’t do any of the dumb crap you predicted” moment. It just doesn’t seem within his creative character.
I don’t think Tony was killed. Yes, Chase wanted to ratchet up the tension to lead to what might be a whacking (and more on why when I get to my theory), but if the cut to black signifies Tony’s death, then why cut out on his face? Shouldn’t it cut to black off his POV?
Cliffhanger for a movie? That’s just dumb. An uncompromising master like Chase isn’t going to pimp his entire series out just to set up a first scene in some theoretical film that might or might not happen.
So why?
Why did Chase do that?
My theory.
Remember when Carmela saw her own therapist for a single session, back in the 3rd season? A blunt man, he basically told Carmela that her problems weren’t psychological as much as they were crassly circumstantial: she’s married to a ruthless killer, and all of the money Carmela spends is blood money. The only advice a reasonable person can give is to take the kids and get away from Tony.
That was the truth.
Still, season after season, we the audience found ourselves rooting for Tony, particularly when inter-mob stories were introduced.
In the final season, Chase begins to really hammer home just how pathetic and evil Tony is. Tony kills Christopher. Tony celebrates Christopher’s death. Tony turns a session about A.J. into a whine-fest about himself. Tony cheats on his wife for the millionth time. Tony thinks about killing Pauly because he’s getting old and mouthy.
And yet, the audience (and by audience, I mean me and apparently many others) were mostly interested in how he’d make his way out of the mess with New York.
Would Tony win?
Chase seemed to recognize this. The federal agent once assigned to Tony but now on a terrorism beat apparently shared our problem. He slips Tony info to use in Tony’s war with Phil. “We might win this one!”
We?
As awful as Chase made Tony, we kept loving him. When Chase would scold us for loving him, we would nod, then love him some more.
We’re Carmella.
And our marriage to the show was a bad one. It had to end, because Tony isn’t a good guy, he doesn’t deserve our respect, and frankly, we shouldn’t give a damn what happens to a sociopath like him.
I think Chase’s finale ending was a message to the audience, and a bit of a punishment as well.
“You want to know what’s going to happen? Will he die? Is this just another day in his miserable life? Will he run the whole mob? You know what? Screw you. I’m not telling you. In fact, I’m pulling the plug on this relationship in the most vicious, unsatisfying manner just to rub your nose in your own sick need to care about this jerk.”
That’s my theory about Chase’s intention.
Tony’s intention? That’s easy. He picked it on the jukebox. “Don’t stop believing.”
Those are his last words to us. “Don’t stop.”
But Chase hit “stop” anyway, because Tony is a bad man, and we should take our TiVos and get as far away from him as possible.
So…that’s the old.
Here’s the new.
The iPhone is AWESOME. It’s everything Apple promised, and then some. If you can afford it, buy it. If you appreciate elegance in technology, buy it. If people say, “I don’t get it, it’s just a phone, Apple’s a cult, blah blah blah” then make a note that those people are idiots, and then get the iPhone.
It’s wonderful.
I’d write more about it, but it’s a quarter to midnight now.
And there are pages to go before I sleep.
And so, I turn to this as respite.
By the way, if you don’t understand why a writer tired of writing would write in order to take a break from writing, then you may not be a writer.
I know exactly what you mean. I work nine hour days writing and there’s no way I can sit and write with the same mindset for nine hours, even with breaks and lunch. I have to have a distraction to keep sane. Though, that’s been questioned.
But, I’m actually more productive if I stop to do something completely different, like come here. When I return to my work I’m refreshed have dumped all my frustrations on the boards. Thanks.
Craig:
In all fairness, you should’ve named this post Half Baked Theory #3! :)
Regarding the IPhone, I was sooo damn close to getting a free one on Friday it still hurts to think about it! We were filming the “sequel” to the I Got A Crush On Obama video that I co-directed and the head Apple promotions guy was gonna give us some free phones. Unfortunately, we got broken up by the police because we drew a crowd of about 100 people. By the time I snuck back on to the Apple premises…no more Apple guy.
Damn.
Now truthfully, did you think about the phone before you went to sleep?
Nice breakdown … the best shot by shot analysis I’ve read so far is by Bob Harris … he really goes to town with it … I’ve linked it in the Dojo here http://writerjoshuajames.com/dailydojo/?p=316
Check it out, fascinating stuff.
Great line!
Kevin, that Obama Girl video is hysterical.
BTW, was Apple Guy going to spot you the $40 activation fee and $1200 subscription, or just the phone? ;)
Aaron,
Thanks!
Sadly…just the phone.
Great post. I never thought Tony got killed either. My reasoning was more rooted in the history of the show and perhaps every mob movie.
You can’t just kill a boss. Tony is/was a boss.
I think all of the imagery was just to confuse people in a Fellini kind of way and distract them from the fact that ambiguity in that instance was much better than definite resolution.
As far as the movie, I hear that Gandolfini hates the character and wouldn’t want a movie.
The Carmella theory is interesting, though. I guess that’s the beauty of his ending, We can think about it forever and never know.
As far as the iPhone, I may get one at some point but it is just a phone.
Clever and well thought out.
I always figured it was a “you’ve seen the man for the last six seasons. He’s your hero in villainy…you conclude the series on a personal level.”
Like when a hero dies at the end of a movie, people get bummed. But when he doesn’t die, they say, “It would have been more believable had he died.” I know that I, personally would have loved to have seen Neve Campbell bite the dust in the last scream, but shit happens. I think what Chase did was essentially dull the double-edged, damned if you do/don’t blade and let the viewer decide.
I tuned out of Sopranos after the first season, but the finale is obvious - the viewer will never know what happened, just like Tony never knows what’s about to happen.
For an instance, Chase put his viewership into the same spot as his lead character - a very dark place, ruled by constant paranoia that destroys even the more pleasant moments in his life, like burgers with the wife and kids.
Brilliant.
Too bad a majority of the fans don’t seem to appreciate what Chase did for them. Too bad, because it shows people obviously didn’t tune in for the smart subtext of the show, but because it had a lot of fucking and killing. At least in the first season…
Re: Sopranos
Yes! Exactly! Boy, thank God somebody said it.
I think you’ve called it for the exact reasons you cite, to which I would add just one more. When David Chase wants you to know something happened, he shows you. He doesn’t do implication.
Bleary…late at night…turning to it as a respite. All so familiar. My wife calls it toaster polishing—what writers do when they are desperate to stop living in the travails and conflicts of their characters. In days gone by, she’d find me polishing the toaster, I guess. Now I fool with my website or, in fact, practically any website. For a while, I would turn off my internet connection in order to write. Then I had a computer without one. Now I have a computer that CANNOT have one set up on it, bought through Craig’s list. ‘Broken computer, cannot access internet, name your price.’ I did it for $12.00 and it has seen me through three novels…
Whitley:
I’ve thought about going to that extreme, because the Internet is definitely the Devil’s work.
I often wonder if I would have even become a writer if I hadn’t started before the net became widely available (and interesting).
Here’s how small the internet is… I was just reading Whitley’s site before I came here and saw his entry! Eerie… Must be the drones.
“Polishing the toaster.” Is that what they are calling it nowadays?
Your theory is the best one I’ve come across so far.
However, if Chase’s intention was to say “you shouldn’t care about what happens to Tony the Sociopath,” my question is this: Didn’t he WANT us to care about Tony? Didn’t Chase NEED us to care about Tony? Sure he did. Chase wagging his finger at us and saying “Shame on you for giving a damn” doesn’t fly because giving a damn is exactly what he intended for us to do.
We know Tony is bad guy. We know he isn’t worthy of our respect. We know he’s done horrible things, leads a miserable existence and is a pathetic excuse for human being. But Chase created that monster, and in doing so, he gave us a character we would care about. And it wasn�t because we liked the guy and wanted great things for him. Let�s face it, Phil Leotardo didn�t like Tony, but he sure did care about what happened to him.
But maybe we should have seen it coming. After all, how many people had Tony said “screw you” to over the course of the series? How many people ended up being punished, just because they cared about him?
We may be Carmella, but David Chase is Tony Soprano.
mediocrity abounds
Cathy:
Interesting question. I always felt that part of Chase’s intention was to challenge us into a non-rooting experience. We were supposed to be fascinated by the prospect of Tony’s redemption.
In that regard, we’re not just Carmela, but Melfi as well. And just as Melfi comes to the conclusion in the final episode that her interest in Tony is not bringing about his redemption, and that it may be as much about her lurid fascination with him as anything else, she decides to…
…cut him off.
That’s what we ought to be able to do as well. We ought to be able to just cut this guy off, because he’s not getting better. He’s getting worse, despite our attention, despite his wife’s faith, despite his near-death experience.
But we can’t.
So Chase does it for us.
My theory is Chase was making the point that there is no moral to the story. Not for “The Soprano’s” and not for human beings in general. Tony doesn’t live (moral: might makes right) or die (moral: live by the sword, die by the sword). When the screen goes black, it’s meant to be a kind of death, but it’s not Tony’s.
I LOVE my iphone.
“By the way, if you don�t understand why a writer tired of writing would write in order to take a break from writing, then you may not be a writer.”
My strategy is I confine myself to one or two websites per phase of writing. For example, while writing my short story, I was confined to the myspace page of the youth group of the church I was attending & volunteering to help out with at the time. I exercised restraint & merely discovered the myspace phenomenon by looking & seeing how it worked & did not write a thing. Unfortunately, the youth pastor & his aides began giving me weird looks & making strange comments to me about myspace. I think they thought I was stalking them or irretrievably in love with them. When a sermon touched me to tears, the youth group leader took me aside afterward & announced that, contrary to rumor, he was not actually engaged though he was in a relationship. I had no idea what he was talking about. He asked if I still intended to help with youth group & when I gave him a befuddled look & said yes, he brightened considerably.
Of course, there are the other sites on which I write with, unfortunately, the pent-up frustration of someone conditioned to resigning myself to much delayed gratification regarding my ‘real’ writing. I think that’s what it is. Writing on the internet or on anything besides that from which I am taking a break is writing with the fun of instant gratification instead of delayed. And that is the genesis of the logic of limiting myself to one or two websites. Because one can only get so much gratification from one or two websites before one must go back to the writing without gratification. Unfortunately, though, the hazard is being viewed as an overly enthusiastic aficionado of the youth group’s & youth group leader’s myspace sites (somehow when sites are linked it is not cheating beyond my 2-site limit so much).
the iPhone is great but I think I hate ATT too much to keep it.
the ending…I still think if Chase went godfather style a la Michael’s killing scene it would have been absolutely MIND BLOWING.
to see the whole family brutally and realistically gunned down. AJ shot in the leg, crawling for the front door. The gunman coming from behind, putting a bullet in the back of his head while Carmilla watches.
I can’t think of a better end.
Maybe we’re Carmela.
Maybe we’re Melfi.
Or maybe we’re Phil - suddenly everything goes black. And then our heads are crushed.
Of course, the demise of the despicable character(s)/show caught my attention when Larry David came back to write the 2 part finale of SEINFELD. Leaving that narcissistic crew in a jail cell bickering to the end was the perfect slap back to reality for all the fans who forgot what the f ck a value was. Every once in a while we get someone who plays us like a violin and then reminds us where the strings came from… Bravo!