When the Fat Italian Sings

When I talked about favourite TV shows a month ago, I mentioned how the Sopranos had kind of fallen out of my radar due to the long period of time that had elapsed since it had really been current. The first half of season 6 was really strange (half of it in a weird-coma fantasy about Tony living an alternative life that ends up mirroring hell), and since I had watched the first four seasons in one running sprint back in 2003, I really hadn't felt any connection to the show in a long time.

Then I watched the last 5 episodes in the days leading up to the finale, and the finale itself. The internet exploded when the show ended in a tense scene with the family in a diner, with Journey's "Don't Stop Believing" playing, making it appear as if Tony was likely to be shot by any number of suspicious characters...when there was an abrupt fade to black. Huge controversy raged over whether this represents the viewers experiencing Tony's death (even though the elements wanting to kill him had already been eliminated), whether it was some kind of huge cop-out by creator David Chase. A wide swath of people interpret the peculiar ending as the ultimate expression of his disdain for the audience and their desire to see a more traditional/dramatic wrap-up of an ending. But it really raised my appreciation for what DC was trying to do with the show.

I think there are obviously myriad ways in which the show is meant to be a catalyst through which one gains appreciation for the essence of humanity in this day and age; what it means to anticipate death, the crumbling of tradition and need for arbitrary draconian order to be imposed in its place, the relationship to fiction and what and why we expect certain things.

But most of all I think it cemented the way in which this show better than anything else captures the contemporary American mood. The Wire is in some ways more astounding - because it almost transcends the label of "fiction" - but sometimes one has to go beyond the looking glass a little in order to hit home. All of the weird prophetic dreams and visions that Tony has throughout the course of the show - aren't stuck in there so as to advance the plot, but instead establish the way in which we know our own path but keep our eyes firmly fixed either behind or directly ahead of us.

The parallels meant between the family and what the majority considers the "ideal" of American family life became much starker at the conclusion. Every commentator has picked up on the remarkable way in which the characters don't change their essential nature; the entire enterprise of "personal growth" as it is considered today was symbolized by the therapy which ultimately revealed itself to be a means of perpetuating one's ability to live with things, not a means for any kind of real change. Spinning in circles and revolutions might be the same thing if you're speaking mathematically, but not humanly. And the need for that self-justification, the veneer of fake self-investigation, is something we absolutely crave in order to keep the part of our minds open to genius and realization at arms length. To prevent our better judgments from seizing control of us, we will resort to extreme measures to avoid the coup. The concept of resistance is so tainted now by the ultimate disdain we have for any kind of social movements; pale shadows of the 60s and 70s when new meaning was still possible. Changes of government, changes of mob rule; these shiftings of strategic positioning that distract us from the glaring need for self-reinvention. That is the area in which we have stalled, that is what keeps the ketchup jammed in the Heinz bottle, and we all know it! That is why everything else happens so much faster and tastes so much like ashes on our lips. We try to run from our one need, and the constant inability to do so reveals that need as to a greater degree....which prompts us to run harder. Everyone faces a choice between apocalypse and leaping across a chasm; the leap is inevitable, we just can't decide if we should be the ones to make it, our let ourselves be pushed.

In 1989 with the end of the USSR at hand, a guy named Francis Fukuyama wrote an article called "The End of History and the Last Man." This argument was that the mass changes in government and economic states that had formed the horizons of history were at an end, and liberal democracies mostly dominated by capitalist markets were the inevitable and universal model for all countries that would follow.

I won't go into much of what I think about this position (it is a strangely Marxian response to the death of Marxism, in that it is also a very bad reading of Hegel's Master/Slave dynamic), but it is a huge part of the American psyche. The real emotional impact of 9/11 was not the body count involved, but the fact that these brown backwards people had the audacity to challenge the narrative that American values had clearly won. The Russians were a peculiar blend of other and sameness to the point where our concerns were competing over the same things; number of satelites, number of nuclear weapons, etc. They had the same end goal, just a different means of going about it; so it felt more like a race to see who could get to that goal the soonest. The new "terrorist" threats don't even have the same end-game, which is absurd. EVERYONE should want to be like us and buy our products.

Fans wanted and expected the show to end crystallized around a massive opposition of Tony vs. an other - the New York crew, or the FBI, or even that Russian mobster who escaped a hit seasons ago and people kept wondering when he would be brought back (David Chase loved to play with the audience, even going so far as to have in the teaser for the final season a shot of the forest he escaped in with the words "revenge is a dish best served cold", which was a genius). They wanted a storyline around which they could define Tony as a clear protagonist. Instead the final episodes had him kill his nephew/heir apparent figure mainly because he was pathetic, coerce his depressive son into the mafia world, see his daughter revolve back into it of her own accord...he used his power and influence to avoid change as long as he could; and people around him were either forced into the same stagnation or ended up dead. It is also no accident that while Martin Scorsese looks to New York to capture a slice of the American dream, David Chase points the cameras at the suburbs just next to New York to showcase the ugly reality. Both Tony Soprano and America are joined at the hip on one issue: when confronted with challenges to the nostalgic script we want life to adapt to, rather than rethink their dreams, both choose death.

Not to get all cheesy or anything, but I'm strongly reminded of the home/otherness/voyage dynamic that shows up in Holderlin's poem "Andenken" that Heidegger makes such a big fuss of:
Many are afraid to go to the source,
since treasure is first found in the sea.
Like painters, they gather up earth's beauty,
and they don't scorn winged war,
or to live alone for years
beneath the bare mast —
where the city's festivities
don't flash through the night, or
the sound of strings and native dancing.

But now the men
have left for India...
from the windy peaks
and vine-covered hills
where the Dardogne
comes down with the great
Garonne; wide as an ocean
the river flows outward.
But the sea takes
and gives memory,
and love fixes the eye diligently,
and poets establish
that which endures.