The Sopranos Ending
With Emmy nominations out, there’s apparently some buzz that the inconclusive ending to the series might hurt its chances.
Personally…I thought the ending was brilliant.
First of all, anyone who thought that David Chase was going to provide *any* sort of conclusive or definitive ending to “Sopranos” just wasn’t paying attention. Chase not only delights in flying in the face of fan expectations, but apparently still treasures the fact that fans are STILL annoyed about the Russian mobster who escaped into the snow-covered forest, never to be seen again. I didn’t think for a moment that Chase would tie everything off because LIFE doesn’t tie everything off.
In the movie “Man on the Moon,” Andy Kaufman (Jim Carrey) asks a wise man what the secret of comedy is. The wise man replies, “Silence.”
Later Kaufman is shown delightedly coming up with the notion of booby-trapping his special so that, at about the mid-point, the picture would start rolling. His concept was that all across America, people watching the special would go to their TVs and start trying to fix the horizontal hold, and even banging on their sets in frustration. He thought that it would be funny.
Chase applied that sort of thinking to his finale.
I’m sitting there watching the conclusion in a hotel room (I was in LA at the time.) The tension is building, shot by shot. Everything seems innocuous, and so you just KNOW that SOMETHING is going to happen. Tony’s daughter is struggling to park the car; will her inability to parallel park mean that she winds up surviving a massacre? A spooky looking guy keeps glancing Tony’s way. He heads into the bathroom. Is he going in there for a gun? Tony seems oblivious, or is he? Tension build, tension build, almost to the breaking point…
Screen goes black.
I jump to my feet, and I’m shouting, “Son of a bitch!” I’m convinced the cable’s gone out. I’m positive that everyone else is watching this and seeing the ending and my stupid cable has chosen that moment to go on the fritz. For ten of the longest seconds of my life I’m going out of my mind…and then the credits start to roll. It takes me a moment to register what I’ve just seen: I didn’t miss anything. That WAS the end.
Nothing that David Chase could have put in there–NOTHING–could have equaled, in terms of pure emotion, the mind-rending agitation I felt in those long seconds of silence. SIlence, which is apparently the secret to drama as well as comedy. Yelling at the TV, cursing my fate to miss the final moments due to technological ineptitude. Feeling that same frustration that viewers of the Kaufman special would have felt, but heightened. Just as “The Sopranos” was a deeply personal story for Chase, so was the ending a personal experience for every viewer, because everyone experienced their own level of frustration and angst by not knowing for long seconds what the hell was happening.
And, of course, it’s destined to be unique. Short of riffing it in parody, no one can ever do something like that again. It’s “the Sopraonos ending.”
As I said…brilliant.
PAD