The shaky notes started sounding with the beginning of the end. Lousy sentence. But matched in spades by the lousy finale to an often brilliant television show, The Sopranos. Sunday night was the last we supposedly will see of big Tony Soprano. Based on its creator's attitude toward the last episode/s and the audience... and its producing partner's attitude, HBO, good f''n riddance.
Like that funkily pungent theatrical expression, it went off like a wet fart. Starting with a cheap joke of a collage that featured various HBO stars syncopating tears of admiration, we spent the next hour being jerked one way or another until the ending scene, making the entire thing one long harmonic dirge featuring Tony and his brooding chorus, The Sopranos. They were ushered out of our lives sitting in a diner of a type many of us seek regularly on both a comfort and ironic level. Eating onion rings, there they were, a family, our family, about to be shot or just stuck inside a hermetic brutal bubble of their own making where together they half-heartedly conspire to avoid facing truth about the corrosive, deeply self-subverting lives they have created. It reduced the entire show from great entertainment to something like a bad teenage acid trip where one's pimples morph into anything from flowers to atom bombs, but in the end all you're left is an overwhelming sense of emptiness. And terror at the absence of love.
Okay, enough dramatic license on the criticism. More interesting is the way we fans have made it a fetish object of inquiry, this show with its throw away plots and characters. Two shows before the end and Tony's dryly operatic psychoanalysis is cut short. Insult to injury, we're forced to buy the cheap trick of his therapist deciding after all this time that she was just facilitating a vicious mobster's narcissistic pathology. Why does she decide this? Does it come in any dramatically cohesive way? No, it is driven by a dinner table of academics where their squeaks of enlightened grandstanding seem to get underneath her suddenly way-too-sensitive-skin. How can the passionate but steely doctor get dashed to bits by a tsunami of Upper West Side self-rightousness, all within one half-baked dinner discussion? Based on everything we knew previously, she couldn't, making it totally unfugin believable!
Such a heavy hand was evident repeatedly this season, and yet those of us who watched, did it with the urgent devotion of a hapless faithful. To be fair to the producers and writers, what made it difficult was the periodic brilliance, primarily in certain scenes. Tableaus which were sometimes breathtaking. Tony Soprano, on an outside Miami balcony, watching with a mix of spite and sorrow as Paulie Walnuts, his primary henchman, sits on an edge of a hotel bed, passing the night alone watching television, his spastic laugh loud and empty. Or Tony framed up in a single bed in a dank narrow little house, probably a lot like the claustrophobic quarters where he grew up under a wrathful mother, reduced to waiting it out as his rival hunts him down.
If you read conversations about the series online like those on Slate, the details with which grown men now trade memories like boys with baseball cards, you might be able to locate the reverie which drives economics. And if that sounds like my own cheap way to connect a television show back to this podcast-transformed-into-a-blog, well, I plead guilty of lack of time. So much time that it's been months since me or Titus have contributed interview or post.
The ending of the Sopranos may seem like a portentous or maybe pretentious time to reinvigorate our own focus on the economies behind culture and vice-versa. So be it. The Sopranos was about many things. Masculinity. Expectations of and from women. America. Family. Violence. And money. The way all of these fit together. Sex was a backdrop to it all, but sexuality in the most puritanical rather than purient way. A packaged lozenge to sooth a hacking cough. But underneath it all lived a sense of restlessness and desperation around allocation of resources. The terror that, at any moment, one's entirety of resources would/could disappear. The show gave us the sense that humanity was not about joy, or even getting along. It was about pure survival, whether material or psychic.
The two genders had their periodic moments to forget about such survival. Carmela in her shopping or cooking. Tony over his bar-b-que or, and here is where he demanded respect, in his moments of consciousness. That he wrestled with himself, trying to stretch open his eyes, tiny in proportion to his girth... he could be moving. Draw compassion and even a bit of awe. A man who lived in the shadows and knew it. Forced to acknowledge the immorality of his hunt, he also could claim that, given his background and tribal responsibilities, there were no satisfying alternatives.
Recently in an interview with Peter Lunenfeld, who is as savvy about the mechanics of branding as he is about their manipulations, but someone way too smart to simply dismiss consumer culture as unnecessary, I asked him what he thought was an alternative. If we all stopped buying things that we didn't need for ultimate utility, what would make this engine called "our economy" keep ticking? He admitted that he didn't know. His problem was that too often brands promise to fulfill but only beacon us to purchase more and more. And yet he's come to believe it's easier to critique than to create, or in his words, "manifest."
"That’s why I try to avoid critique and to manifest. It’s profoundly satisfying to be a hater but I want to be a lover, to manifest something worthwhile."
Perhaps the existential fascination with Tony Soprano is that many of us feel a bit like his kindred spirit. Albeit to less bitter or at least violent degrees, like him we wonder about alternatives to our own hunting. And like him, we lack the time or, to put it bluntly, resources, to do much more than wonder. Unlike Tony Soprano, our ends thankfully are our own. We don't have to allow others to cut our questioning off in the name that underneath it all we're all just killers. But like television dramas, but even more so, our lives run in fits and starts. And yet they're also improvisations. Emergent rather than fixed. Surprise as possible as tedium, clarity coming in waves rather than a steady tide, but nevertheless, there for the wrestling. As are our markets, in formation every moment, every day, every action. Our families, ourselves, it's not over till it's over. If it ever goes permanently black, so be it. Not to haggle over for the living.
Jonathan Field
June 12, 2007
With a happy birthday today to my father, who wrestled with me alot when I was growing up, but and had the guts to really wrestle with himself as he grew older, becoming sweeter, wiser, a man whose only conspiracy was to enjoy, and convince his family to do the same... thank you.
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