America is in a tizzy over the Sopranos finale, and people are saying some really stupid things. Take Marvin Kitman, for example. His post here yesterday declared: "An example of promising them everything and giving them nothing, the final episode made me feel snookered and artistically betrayed," and "going to black" was David Chase's way "of pleading intellectual bankruptcy."
What's got Kitman and so many fans so peeved? "Promising them everything and giving them nothing." Could he mean that "everything" would be a tidy, conventional ending, in which Tony explicitly got whacked or indicted? And when did Chase "promise" anything, beyond this episode being the last?
"Giving them nothing" -- nothing? Really? Here's what we got in the final episode: Tony's most dangerous enemy got killed; one of Tony's men flipped, so an indictment is possible; Carmela continued to steel herself for such an event with her real-estate business; Paulie bitterly demonstrated his loyalty to Tony; Uncle Junior proved lost to dementia; Janice prepared to move on to her next sucker of a husband; Meadow solidified her career and marriage plans; A.J. showed flickers of a conscience before having them snuffed out by his parents' gift of a movie job and a BMW. In other words, life will go on for these surviving characters, with the same anxiety and unlearned lessons. That's "nothing"?
"The black screen could be Chase's bid to become the Jean Paul Sartre of TV soap opera," Kitman says. Chase's fondness for arty film directors like Bunuel, Kubrick, Lynch, and Truffaut is well known. With the interrupted final scene and the weird cut to black, he's tipping his hat to their unpredictable, highly imaginative forms of storytelling, and their implication that art is more meaningful when it sidesteps convention. "This ending was his idea of a joke," Kitman says. "He was making fun of the audience who had gotten so hooked on a story that we treated the characters as real people." Chase was clearly implicating the audience as voyeurs in this and the penultimate episode (bystanders ooh and ahh at two murders, and one witness actually barfs), so, yeah, he's kind of making fun of us. But does Chase have to be a "hoaxter," as Kitman calls him, to mock our eagerness for resolution? Isn't it actually more interesting for these characters' ultimate fates to be uncertain, as ours are?
And wait. Kitman says, "Chase was afraid to tell us what he thought all of this meant. Usually, it's called a moral." Kitman hasn't been watching the show too carefully if he thinks Chase has any interest in moralizing. But if you insist, it's there: at their conclusive dinner, A.J. reminds Tony that he told his son to always "Hold on to the good times." But Tony can't do that anymore, because he's haunted. Potential assassins are everywhere, as that final scene so viscerally demonstrated. Whether he lives, dies, gets indicted, or goes senile, he's doomed to unhappiness. That's as close to a moral as any real artist needs to get.