Essa foi a melhor, mais minuciosa e mais arguta análise de uma produção audio-visual que eu já vi. Inspiradora de transformadora da maneira como passei a assitir qualquer obra A-V.
Enjoy!
Tony Soprano didn’t just get whacked; he practically got a funeral
Friday, 15 June 2007
I finally got around to watching the much-debated Sopranos finale last night. I haven’t seen the show much in years; it’s brilliant and all, but I gave up around season four. Just had things to do, and the show got a little, I dunno, slow for a while. You know. But after all the hullaballoo, I decided to take a look again for myself.
After looking closely at the final episode, I’m reminded of people who left the film American Beauty wondering who had actually shot Kevin Spacey, just because face of the killer was offscreen when the trigger was pulled, despite the fact that his identity couldn’t have been clearer. This is a lot like that.
I should add, incidentally, that I was a TV writer myself for a while. Not a particularly accomplished one. Mostly small stuff nobody ever saw. I worked for CSI: Crime Scene Investigation for most of the third season; that was the one credit you might recognize. Anyway, my point: not any claim to expertise -- which is minimal at most, I promise, and for you to judge, in any case -- but during the year of my life that I helped in modest ways to hang dwarfs, make parasailers go Icarus, and poison poker players with lead-filled candies, I saw first-hand just how meticulously little details could be fussed over – and that was on a show with a breakneck production schedule and no particular auteur nursing his vision through every single shot.
So.
Keeping in mind that Sopranos creator David Chase wrote and directed this episode himself after months of planning –
[Update: actually, it might have been well over a year of planning:
Meanwhile, remember that 21-month hiatus between Seasons Five and Six? That was Chase thinking up the ending. HBO chairman Chris Albrecht came to him after Season Five and suggested thinking up a conclusion to the series; Chase agreed, on the condition that he get "a long break" to decide on an ending.
so we might be in for a ride.]-- and that he has already told interviewers that “it’s all there,” let’s take him at his word.
So, starting with the two most blatant clues and working outward until we stumble into what may be Tony’s own weirdly implied funeral rites:
The sensation of imminent death – “you probably don’t even hear it when it happens, right?” – was now-famously discussed in an episode called “Soprano Home Movies.”
This same episode was reportedly repeated, out of sequence, re-airing “you probably don’t even hear it when it happens, right?” the week before the finale.
And the same exact scene – this same discussion of how death would be experienced – “you probably don’t even hear it when it happens, right?” – was also apparently excerpted in flashback in the second-to-last episode.
This is called hitting the audience in the face with a two-by-four, hoping they'll notice. We have been instructed as to what to expect from first-person death, as clearly as any self-respecting dramatist would likely allow.
[Update: The song titles given close-ups on the jukebox also point directly to "Soprano Home Movies." See the end of the post.]
[Update: And now I am informed that for the next episode, they're repeating "Soprano Home Movies," out of sequence, yet again. You are now being hit in the head with a truckload of lumber.]
(Incidentally, you probably would hear the shot from a pistol even at short range, but that hardly matters; this is fiction, and the only thing that matters is its own reality.)
Also, Tony got shot once before – in an episode called “Members Only.” And sure enough, a guy in a Members Only jacket – an unlikely fashion choice, unless David Chase is showing us the ending in enormous letters – walks in, looks repeatedly in Tony’s direction, and moves to a spot that would give him an unimpeded line of fire. [Added for clarity: moments before the end, he is entering a bathroom near Tony.]
A few seconds later -- and much as described in advance -- things suddenly, silently end.
Members Only Guy, incidentally, is listed in the credits not as “Furtive Man Drinking Coffee” or “Guy Who Gets Up To Pee” or “Weak-Bladdered Fellow With Strange Fashion Sense.”
He's "Man in Members Only Jacket." The chosen wording of the credit itself is a big freakin’ arrow.
Another strikingly obvious bit of information: shortly before his death, David Chase very briefly frames Tony in a shot that visually quotes the Last Supper (one-point perspective; special holy light from above (more obvious in the footage than the grab); a long horizontal base supporting triangular composition, human forms on both sides of the subject; etc.).
[Fwiw, the Last Supper was a common subject for numerous masters, and in Italy it took on a recognizable, almost iconic general composition, before and after da Vinci. This Washington Post writer suggests that Chase was actually quoting the del Castagno. I don't; I think the general layout is plenty.]
We’ll get back to this imagery [and discover that the entire back wall was created just for this scene] shortly.
Hardly surprising, though, that Tony’s last conversation with Carm mentions his own personal Judas. And we all know what happened after the Last Supper.
Clear enough yet? We’re just getting started. [Added for clarity: we'll now go very closely through the scene, with particular attention to the direction.]
Remember, the show is largely (albeit not completely) told from Tony’s POV. Long stretches of Tony's dreams, fantasies, and passing perceptions have been presented as the show’s reality. Now look again at the sequence. Members Only Guy enters, holding his left arm with an odd stiffness; there’s even a small, visible bulge in the bottom of his left jacket pocket. (Out of frame in the grab below, unfortunately. On the tape, this looks more to me like a roll of quarters than the barrel of, say, a Glock 36, but hey, it’s there. Make of it what you wish.) But all this is only visible for about a second before Tony’s son A.J. emerges from behind him, and Tony’s (and our) focus shifts to Tony’s son.
The restaurant, incidentally, is manifestly not filled with people gunning for Tony, despite the online rumor. There's literally nothing in the sequence that indicates such a thing. Instead, the restaurant is simply filled with a strangely color-desaturated vision (more on that shortly) of ordinary middle-class Americana: Cub Scouts, kids on dates, etc.
David Chase shows us Members Only Guy almost continuously from the time he enters, although this may not be immediately obvious – he’s often not in focus, but he’s in the background behind A.J., at center frame in the over-the-shoulder shot used conventionally to show Tony’s POV in a conversation.
Members Only Guy is thus directly in Tony’s eyeline throughout.
We have this put directly in our face, front and center. More than half a dozen times, in fact. But Tony's focus is on his son.
David Chase, who has complete control of the seating and camera angles, seems to be directly showing us that Tony’s not paying attention to Members Only Guy. Whether that’s wise of Tony is another issue.
We could ignore Members Only Guy ourselves, but Chase also shows him in repeated clear-focus medium shots, with his left side remaining away from the camera – which is to say, from Tony’s POV. And Chase shows us that Members Only Guy is doing nothing in the entire scene but turning and looking directly at Tony – and no one else in the restaurant – over and over, in a highly suspicious way.
It’s true that there are plenty of other people in the restaurant. None of them are staring at Tony this way. And it’s true that Members Only Guy is a character no one has ever seen before. But certainly some of the show’s victims never recognized their attackers, either.
Eventually, Members Only Guy, named for the episode in which Tony gets shot, gets up, sidles near, is discounted by Tony as a threat…
And the series ends within seconds, in precisely the sudden full-stop manner repeatedly (and in repeats) described in advance.
[Update: I didn't know this when I wrote the original entry, but the Sollozzo murder, where Michael Corleone shoots Sollozzo just after emerging from the bathroom, has been established as Tony's very favorite scene in The Godfather. So this would be a damned appropriate way for Tony to go.]
[Update: the New York Times now reports that David Chase wanted the blackness to last a full 30 seconds, which certainly is an even stronger implication of death.]
[Incidentally, there are five separate shots involved in showing us the Members Only Guy going to the bathroom. It goes by so fast it barely registers, although nobody had to be reminded of having seen him, either: (1) Members Only stands up; (2) Tony reacts; (3) Members Only approaches, from Tony's POV; (4) Tony discounts the threat; (5) the camera dollies to stay on Members Only, revealing the bathroom, while Tony glances back and discounts him yet a second time. All of this just to get some poor random guy to the can? Man, either he's absolutely essential to the scene, or he must have really, really had to pee.
That must have been a strange day for the actor. I mean, it's your first gig, you're excited, you're in makeup, you've got this spiffy new jacket that looked cool in 1981... and then your entire evening is nothing but getting up to head to the toilet a couple of times... then waiting around for the cameras to be set up again. Then you're getting up to walk toward the toilet a few times again from Tony's POV... then waiting around for the cameras to be set up again. Then you're heading suspiciously toward the toilet from yet a third camera angle...
You gotta go, you gotta go.]
[Update: And several NJ emailers say that the real room is actually the Ladies' room; it was only switched to a Men's room and given a visible sign specifically for this scene. I saw this note so many times that I finally called Holsten's and asked; they confirmed it. So even the set dressing points us to an implied Sollozzo ending.]
Need more? There are dozens of other hints throughout the episode, starting from the very first frame.
The episode actually opens with a harbinger of Tony’s funeral, plain as day. Remember, David Chase personally directed for the first time since the series premiere. And David Chase’s very first shot in eight years is of Tony Soprano lying flat on his back, viewed from above, much as if we are looking down on him in his coffin.
There is a literal moment of silence.
Then, when the clock radio kicks on, the first bars of the song are funereal organ music.
Tony stirs, the music starts to rock, and Tony begins his day. But about five minutes in, Tony’s eating an orange. This is a specific reference both to the Godfather series and to earlier Sopranos episodes: in simplest, familiar form, Orange = Death. [If you need an explanation, read this list of allusions to the Godfather for starters; also see the updates at end of the post. At minimum, remember that both Michael and Don Vito Corleone died with oranges; the former in his hand, the latter in his mouth.] As a reference it's so well-established and on the nose that I was surprised to see it. It’s almost cliché.
Speaking of which, there’s a lot of fuss about the big orange cat (note the color; to a writer as careful as Chase, this probably would not have been arbitrary). There’s really no need to debate its meaning. This is carefully-crafted fiction, so as a rule, things generally mean what the characters anticipate they mean; that’s how harbingers and foreboding often work. Otherwise, we'd have only our own prior cultural references to know what to fear. And Paulie could not be clearer that the creature is a Bad Omen. Of what? Through the episode, the cat is literally focused on a reminder of death – specifically, Tony’s murder of Christopher, who was almost a surrogate son.
Yeah, sure, but the orange cat doesn’t actually show up when Tony supposedly dies, does he? Sure he does – in an almost laughably large way. David Chase chose to shoot the final scene in a dessert shop in Bloomfield, New Jersey, where the actual mascot of the town’s real high school football team is the same as that of nearby Princeton University -- an orange tiger. In the Last Supper shot, guess what David Chase shows us, beyond Tony’s right shoulder?
A bigass orange cat three feet high, that’s what. The framing is actually pushed slightly to that side, favoring the cat.
David Chase could have shot that scene in any restaurant in Jersey. He chose that one for some good reason. And he didn’t have to frame the giant orange cat over Tony’s shoulder. He chose to. (See below.) Does it work as art? Eh. He’s a genius, but it’s not the most brilliant bit of symbolism I’ve ever seen. But it’s there on the tape, coincidence or whatever it is.
[OK, one more update: If you like, compare the TV show's wall to the real back wall of Holsten's (see links below). What the photos show, among many other details: the three-foot cat apparently only exists in Sopranoland. So whatever it does or doesn't mean, it's there intentionally.
I'm not showing the actual photos here because they frankly crash right through the reality that David Chase spent so much time creating, and I respect that too much to just dump them onto the page. Before you click, consider the choice. It might be a bit like whipping open the box and seeing that the girl isn't really being sawn in half (spoiler alert!), and then the wonder is gone, although you can better appreciate the craft of the magician. I hope you'll only click if the latter is what you're after.
In any case, the photos reveal a lot of stuff: it's not just the giant cat; the entire back wall was redressed. Also, the real room has lots of bright yellows, blues, and greens, all of which are pretty much obliterated in the final color scheme (see below). There's also no sign of the all-gray waitress smocks in Sopranoland; the employees apparently wear either white or bright red shirts. Even the color of the table where the Sopranos sit is a bright and more saturated yellow in real life.
There are no jukeboxes on the tables; the show apparently brought in props. This supports the assumption that the music (about which more later) was integral to the scene's conception.
I'd figured that Holsten's was chosen partly for the back wall. Guess not. But directors do have full-time location scouts specifically to find places to fit their exact needs. (Fwiw, the last name of a The Sopranos' location scout matches one of the two athletes' surnames on the redressed back wall during the scene. The other athlete shares a name with the show's parking director, who has the underappreciated job of literally ensuring room for everybody to, yes, park. I have no idea if these really are shout-outs, but it seems likely. People working shows do little shout-outs like this all the time. I've done it myself and been shouted-out-to. Good times.)
So if we assume the location scout gets paid for a reason, forgetting the wall, why this restaurant? Why this particular booth? If we peek at the real one, it really doesn't look that special. Surprisingly cheery. Cozy. The onion rings are divine. But there's no sign in the window screaming "culminate your career in a courageous if puzzling choice that will confuse millions here -- we validate." Looking more closely, however, the place has a lot to offer. There's enough room here for the equipment to light and film Tony from all sides, including over the shoulder, with no pillars or other obstructions. Tony's facing the door as people enter, but the counter is also in his natural over-the-shoulder POV, and the stools are naturally tall enough to keep Members Only Guy hovering quietly over A.J.'s shoulder. Plus, there's convenient whacking access from the nearby Sollozzo Lounge. Are we doing anything else in the scene, really? No? Great! Let's get some jukeboxes in here, and maybe, I dunno, a big damn cat that doesn't quite work... hey, what's the parking situation like?
So, Neo, you take the blue pill, and just keep reading, or you take the red pill, and peek... Apoc, are we online?]
Whatever the deal is with the cat, death is palpable everywhere in this world by the time they sit down. By this point, almost everyone in Tony’s world outside his immediate family is either emotionally dead to him (Dr. Melfi, Carlo), physically dead (Christopher, Bobby, etc.), or incapacitated (Junior, Silvio, etc.). Even Paulie speaks fearfully of the afterlife and the Virgin Mary… before agreeing to a job he believes will lead to a premature death.
Hardly surprising that the entire family is wearing black at the end.
[Updated: Tony's shirt isn't just black -- it's the exact same design he was wearing when he was shot the first time. This looks to be another reference back to "Members Only." Several emailers pointed me to this clip on YouTube:]
What else stands out about the restaurant scene in the episode? Not tons – but it’s orange as hell, right down to the orange neon and the orange vinyl and the orange trim on the jukebox cards. Besides setting up a subtle Last Supper, and the nice geography for that Godfather-inspired post-piss cap job. (Remember, Chase could have stuck Tony in a corner booth with his back to the wall, something we’ve all seen before. He chose not to.)
Also worth noting: the restaurant’s servers and customers and even the Members Only Guy are in muted tones and lots and lots of gray. The USA hat on the coffee-drinking trucker doesn’t have the bright red-white-&-blue you’d expect. Even the Cub Scouts’ kerchiefs are quite notably gray, not bright golden yellow. [Updated -- see the end of the post and the entry below.]
You don't get lighting and costuming this uniform by random accident; the colors could also have been manipulated in the editing room. In any case, the only obvious colors in the entire sequence are various shades of orange and black. Death, death, death.
[Update: This color scheme stuff has been the most misunderstood part of the post, which is my fault, the same way I also wrongly assumed most people knew the significance of oranges (the fruit and the color) in the Godfather series. My bad. So here: I'm not saying that everything in the scene is precisely orange, nor am I saying that orange always equals death, universally. Obviously not. But directors and their lighting guys do sometimes like to set up shots with specific color palettes. It sets a mood. It helps create the scene. How many times have you seen morgue shots with an unnaturally greenish hue, even when there's no rational source for the greenish light? Or romantic scenes dominated by reds and yellows? Emotionally antiseptic worlds in pale blues? Scenes of intense emotion reflected with vivid colors across the spectrum? Watch the Matrix movies sometime with the sound down, and you'll see how places and even worlds can be defined just by changing hues. Or, better, watch Soderbergh famously use three different color schemes for the three separate but interplaying worlds in Traffic. It's wonderfully effective.
If you don't notice this stuff while watching, that's because you're not really supposed to; if the craft were obvious, you wouldn't suspend disbelief, defeating the whole purpose. But rest assured, good directors have lots of little tools to heighten and enhance a scene -- different angles and movements and lenses and film stocks -- and light itself is the medium they work in. In a quality production, virtually nothing goes in front of a camera without thought.
Color schemes don't necessarily have intrinsic meaning; they might just shift to create a sense of changing place. Still, directors often try to set a tone or reinforce whatever else is going on when they can. For comparison's sake, look again at the general hue of the kitchen where Tony eats the orange fruit.
Different from the restaurant, isn't it? Cold. Creepy, even. (The screengrab exaggerates things a bit, but the greenish hue is there in the actual lighting and decor. You can see it for yourself on the tape sometime.)
Just sticking to color, and just in the rest of this single episode -- look at the tape: family gatherings, dinners, etc. run toward warm, homey yellows and golds. Silvio's antiseptic hospital room is mostly blue -- blue sheets, blue tubing, Gabriella in a blue sweater, etc. The emotionally cold scene between Tony and Junior has a cold morguish green cast to it -- to my eye, a little greener than when Janice visits in the same episode. (Nice touch, I thought.)
Especially for interiors and night scenes, if a director so chooses, you'll often see color used to give a scene anything from a subtle tinge to a clear and dominant hue.
So looking again at the Soprano family sitting in the booth, if Paulie Walnuts held a gun to your head and asked you what "color" that scene was, as a whole, in one word, what would you say?
And look again at that whole restaurant, closely, either on tape or even just glancing at the Last Supper image: any bright blue hats, purple sweatshirts, or pink hair ribbons?
Nope. A large part of the basic color wheel -- the whole bright-blue section directly opposite to orange -- has been whacked. Just pale gray waitresses. Scouts with gray kerchiefs, led by a man with gray hair in a gray sweater. A woman with gray hair and a colorless shirt on the far side of the jukebox. A gray Members Only jacket. A girl drinking brown chocolate milk in next to a kid in a brown-trimmed T-shirt and a khaki jacket with a red-orange splotch on the arm. Whatever else is going on, almost the entire sequence (save stuff like tiny glimpses of the real-world neon at the far left of shots of the front door) is tightly limited in color and saturation: grays. Neutrals. Oranges, reddish-oranges, orange-browns. And blacks.
The blackest clothes in the room? The Sopranos' own table.
Now in that context, as to why Chase chose that restaurant and that color scheme for Tony's last moments before the sudden silence, the best idea I had with was that it fit with the orange-death connection precedent of the Godfather series. This makes some sense, especially since the Sollozzo shooting is referenced both physically and verbally in the very same scene. That's what I meant about the "orange" in the scene.
Now, this may or may not be correct. As I've said, the color scheme may not mean anything at all; it's mostly a means of amplifying whatever else you're doing. But you can rest assured that this was location-scouted and art-directed until it screamed, and the coloration here was intentional, for whatever reason. And certainly the final color scheme is plain enough, unless I missed a flying purple elephant during the onion rings and brown cola. I'll further suggest, as you can consider while peeking at the real Holsten's, that since bright reds, oranges, and yellows usually bring warmth and cheer to a place -- just ask the designers of fast-food joints -- Chase muted his already narrowed palette to make the room a little colder and less cozy, too. That's my guess, anyway. I don't pretend to know. Chase may take his own reason to the grave.]
We are also directly told that both Tony and his milieu are at an end. As a tour bus passes, we hear a disembodied guide explaining – in an announcement unrelated in any way to the plot – that Little Italy is rapidly vanishing. And Tony himself actually tells Meadow that “my chances are flying by me,” a phrase close enough to “my life is flashing before my eyes” to be virtually the same thing. (Compare this with Phil Leotardo’s “bye bye” to the children in the very same episode, shortly before death from a point-blank gunshot he, too, never saw coming; Chase seems to delight in these cues, where a line of dialogue turns out to mean more than the character realizes.)
[And yes, as many emailers noticed: the final shot of Tony leaving Junior's side -- the very last shot before the restaurant sequence begins -- includes an easy-to-spot bulletin board stating that the "Next Meal" will be "Supper." This could just be yet another in a series of remarkably consistent coincidences, or it could be Chase's intentional little in-joke. Your call.]
So, finally, Tony enters the restaurant. There is a bell on the door, and the rest of the scene involves Tony (and us) taking note of the occasions that the bell rings. The ringing of bells is not essential to the story in any way, and these characters have met in public places hundreds of times with no bell present, but Chase makes a meal of it here. This might veer into The Walrus Was Paul territory, but the repeated ringing of a bell, in a different context, is called a knell; it’s a well-known sign of mourning.
Weirdly, the door is also glimpsed opening and closing silently; still, the bell rings only and exactly six times. It sure seems like a conscious part of the sound design. “Six bells” is also a traditional call to Mass, and in the Catholic church, a Mass is said at a funeral.
[Update: I should be clearer here that I'm skeptical of this idea about the bells myself, but just sharing what I do see in the episode and what it might mean.]
Before you discard this as seeing ten guys on the Grassy Knoll -- and I'm sure as hell tempted myself -- we’ve already been shown a coffin shot, an orange, an orange restaurant, two orange cats, and a three-second Last Supper shot, referencing the very center of the rite of the Eucharist. So it's at least reasonable to ask: besides the Last Supper and a half-assed bell thingy, are there other unusual things going on here indicating that Chase may have been trying (successfully or not) to subtly invoke a Catholic Mass?
Yes. A bunch.
[Update: This Washington Post TV editor finds all sorts of Biblical symbols I would never have noticed, including events throughout the episode. Interesting. Guy knows way more about the Bible than I do, I can see that. Judge for yourself.]
This isn’t a particularly Catholic idea, but one big point of Mass in many churches is communion with the Holy Ghost. And after Carmela sits down, Tony says something truly odd, using a nickname for A.J. which makes little obvious sense: “Where’s the ghost?” [ERRATUM -- this entire paragraph is just incorrect; see the end of the post. I've left it here because people should be happy to admit when they're wrong.]
Carmela doesn’t miss a beat: “He just called. He’s on his way.”
Okaaaaaaay. Maybe the Walrus is Paul. [Or not.]
[Updated: At this point, when A.J. first sits down, Tony's description of the onion rings -- "the best in the state" -- pretty directly references Tony's favorite Godfather scene: Sollozzo describes the veal as "the best in the city" before being shot by a man coming out of a bathroom. See the end of the post.]
A.J. arrives, and Tony awkwardly takes A.J.’s hand with the same sort of overhand non-shake grip you see in church when people join hands in the Sign of Peace. [UPDATE: Eh... on second thought, this, too, is a serious reach. I got carried away with the Mass thing and started seeing it everywhere. Withdrawn. My bad.]
Soon, onion rings appear. (Yes, still more orange food. And I feel like I’m being hit by a hammer at this point.) And then something else truly odd happens – all three consume the onion rings not the way that ordinary human beings eat onion rings – bite off a chunk, chew, swallow, etc. – but by sliding the whole rings onto their tongues. Like communion wafers.
Honest, it’s right there on the film. It's really odd. Look at it again. And just so we don’t miss it, David Chase even highlights this strange series of actions with three separate close-ups.
It’s so blunt and unwieldy a symbol that I’d be tempted to dismiss it. I mean, come on -- onion rings? But it's either intentional, or three different actors all made the same bizarre choice, framed by individual shots that took time to set up and light, without it all somehow being the director’s intent.
[I have no idea which. Just pointing out what's actually in the episode, and trying to give David Chase, a brilliant guy who both wrote and filmed this as Tony's last moments, credit for having something in mind.]
Weird.
[Updated: Many readers insist that the onion rings aren't exactly orange. They're a pale orange on my TV, which is a pretty darn nice one, but OK, whatever -- I'm still waiting for a better explanation of what's up with three separate Catholic characters using their own mouths like giant CD insertion trays, all three highlighted in separate close-ups, in the weighted final moments before the long-planned climax of an eight-year show. Sure, maybe onion rings are just onion rings. In which case, well, pretty strange onion rings.]
What else happens at a funeral? You eulogize the dead – “eulogy” from “good words” in Greek – remembering them in the best light possible. The last thing Tony's son ever gets to tell his father? “Focus on the good times,” A.J. says. "Try to remember the times that were good."
He’s quoting Tony, back to him. Tony responds by speaking of himself in past tense, suddenly showing little more self-awareness than Junior has just shown in the previous scene. “I said that?” Tony asks, genuinely and pleasantly surprised.
The last moments show a developing bond between Tony and A.J. Which is interesting. Given the death of Christopher, A.J. is the only potential male heir left in Tony’s life.
Hmm. Right about here I paused the DVR and thought for a minute. David Chase chose a literal reference to A.J. himself to invoke the Ghost image. [ERRATUM -- nope; see the end of the post.] I wonder about another possibility in addition to Tony’s death: A.J.’s.
Farfetched? Maybe. But this episode has also contained repeated suggestions of A.J.’s mortality. The giant fireball at the SUV might have been the first clue. His reaction in therapy. His desire to run off to a war zone. And, um, the urgent attention his parents have been giving to the issue of keeping him not very dead of late.
And, say, from Tony's POV, Members Only Guy physically blots out A.J. while entering (much more notably in the footage than in the grab, below) – something which was probably intentional, since you don’t send actors willy-nilly into frame during even a minor scene.
Still, I’m less than 50-50 on this idea. But if Members Only Guy shot when he emerged from the bathroom, the only person in position to react – as Chase himself has designed it, remember – would have been A.J. Alternate endings, anyone?
[Updated: The actor who played Members Only Guy has said that something "shocking" happens in an unaired version. Maybe we'll find out someday.]
[And here's another interview with the same guy that makes it even clearer that there was an ending filmed beyond the sudden silence. The guy says there were at least 10 takes of everything. So that's 30 trips to the toilet in one day. I hope he's not Method. Because, y'know, his kidneys... Anyhow, if this were the Sopranos' universe, Chase would have this guy whacked before he spills.]
If we have been set up for both Tony and A.J. to die [a big if -- this bit is just wild speculation here] this would end the Soprano male bloodline. The finale would be absolute. Carm would be destroyed (whether physically wounded or not) and Meadow, the only one with a real chance to go straight, would be literally on the outside, watching from afar.
In any case, Tony’s swallowing of his greasy orange wafer ring is his last act on this earth (or at least on our TV screens). But do we have any more evidence that this is, indeed, Dead Man Communing? Yup. In the soundtrack.
In Catholicism, administration of the Eucharist in the moments before death is known as Viaticum, derived in part from the Latin for… “Journey.”
*Loud throat clearing noise.*
[The link leads to the Catholic Encyclopedia for a full explanation of the derivation.]
[Yes, this could be just coincidence. I'm with you. I get it. But there it is. Of course, if Chase just liked the lyric and had only a passing fancy that the band's name would also imply a metaphorical Journey, that would make it both intentional and a coincidence, with everything just arising from the same metaphor.]
Which brings us to the final songs:
One thing seemingly missing from the Catholic Mass references described above is the lack of a visual shout-out to holy water at the outset, the ritual reminder of damp divine purification. However, when Tony enters the restaurant, the background music is 1975’s “All That You Dream” by Little Feat. And David Chase has it cued up not to the beginning, but to this specific lyric:
All, all that you dream... it comes through shining, silver lining and
Clouds, clouds change the scene... rain starts washing all love’s caution...
Clouds, clouds change the scene... rain starts washing all love’s caution...
“Rain starts washing” – an explicit description of water providing cleansing from the heavens – plays during the Last Supper shot. Those three words, only those three words, and only that one time.
Either Chase really had this in mind – and by all accounts he makes extremely careful decisions about music – or this is one mind-blowingly cool coincidence.
[This didn't involve slowing down records and playing them backwards, btw. It just involved listening closely. Exactly once. It's right there.]
As to the final song, the Viaticum -- sorry, Journey -- power ballad so widely debated: it begins at the precise instant that Carmela is shown entering the restaurant. Not a frame before, not a frame later, from the looks of it. Literally bang on the cut. See for yourself if you have the tape. [At 24 frames per second,] this is not the sort of thing that happens by accident. It's a choice you make in the editing room.
So I guess the music seems symbolically intended for Carmela, the most likely survivor of any post-onion-ring gunplay at the table. (This notion is reinforced by the way the lyrics "just a small-town girl" and "livin' in a lonely world" are both matched to insert close-ups of Carmela's face, interrupted by a shot of Tony.)
Why would Carmela need her own song when at least one person she loves is apparently about to practically die in her lap?
The purpose of most Christian funeral music is to reassure the mourners of the presence of God, express the hope that Christ will take the deceased to Himself, and provide comfort in the faith that the loved ones will all one day be reunited in the afterlife.
For the survivors, in other words -- and really quite precisely:
Ohh, doooon’t stop… belieeeeevin’…
I've probably screwed up some of this. Religiously, I'm a lapsed agnostic, so I don't even remember what I don't care about. And maybe it’s all wild happenstance. This could be so utterly, buffoonishly wrong. Which would be cool, too. I like a good laugh as much as anybody.
I repeat: this is only my opinion. I do not know anything. I do not pretend to. This is party conversation I'm not even particularly attached to, something a friend muses about while you're both getting more beer, floated specifically because it's amusing to chat about and the speaker is having a bit of fun. Don't take this too seriously. David Chase made a work of art. This is what I saw when I looked at it with a degree of playful curiosity, nothing more. I guarantee there are errors here in fact and judgment. There always are, for all of us.
I hope you've enjoyed this.
But I encourage you to look again for yourself at what's actually on the screen and in the soundtrack.
David Chase did, after all, insist: “Anybody who wants to watch it, it’s all there.”
UPDATE: The line attributed to Tony above, "Where is the Ghost" is incorrect. According to the Closed Captioning, which I didn't initially think to check, the exact words are "Where is Googootz," pronounced like "guh-goats." While "Googootz" looks like an infectious crusty buildup caused by the overuse of search engines, it's actually a real Italian nickname that I simply didn't recognize and therefore misheard. This resets the meaning of both that piece of dialogue and any implication it might have had about A.J.'s possible doom. The rest still makes sense. So far. Recalibrate your credulity to taste.
I also mistyped Phil Leotardo's name as "Paul," which I've corrected directly in the text because it could lead to confusion with Paulie.
One weird apparent implication of imminent death explained away beautifully; at least a dozen or more to go.
UPDATE again: The Scouts are apparently Bear Scouts, who wear pale kerchiefs. My bad. Still, the point about the choice of a washed-out color spectrum, save for mostly orange hues, seems self-evident from the sequence. Editors in post-production can jack colors around quite a bit. And there's a whole lot of neutral tone in that restaurant, right down to the choice of the gray Members Only jacket, which kinda blends right in.
Come to think of it, that, in fact, may have been the practical point of the color scheme in there, and not so much the orange tone of the room per se. Hmm.
But the thingy about oranges being a hint of death -- this is extremely well-known to fans of the Godfather series. Don Corleone buys oranges and immediately gets shot; much later, he finally dies with a piece of orange in his mouth. Michael Corleone also dies with an orange in his hand; if memory serves, it falls to the ground when he dies. There are also many minor examples, where the color orange itself becomes a hint that something bad is coming for that character. In the Sopranos, Tony had orange juice in the episode where he was shot, a fairly obvious wink to the Godfather. And now he eats an orange in the beginning of the final episode...
UPDATES never end: I only noticed this while first typing the words "Try the veal. It's the best in the city" in the joking Godfather reference at the top, welcoming the flood of new traffic. However, in their last conversation, Tony oddly tells A.J. that the onion rings are "the best in the state." It's a fairly strange comment. However, it makes absolute sense if Chase is deliberately referencing the famous Sollozzo shooting scene ("Try the veal. It's the best in the city.") in the Godfather. Sollozzo famously dies just after commenting on the veal, so much so that it's a common in-joke among fans to drop the phrase "try the veal" into conversation.
Moments later, the speaker is shot by Michael Corleone -- emerging from a nearby bathroom.
YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Lots of folks have been puzzling over the significance of the handful of song titles given close-ups when Tony first sits down and fools around with the jukebox.
Notably, "This Magic Moment" appears near the center of the frame just after Tony first flips the titles; "This Magic Moment" also appears again, moments later, as the card directly behind Tony's final selection, "Don't Stop Believin'" by Journey.
According to the HBO website, "This Magic Moment" is is the song playing as Bobby returns to the lake house in "Soprano Home Movies." That's the episode in which the much-repeated conversation about death being a sudden silence – “you probably don’t even hear it when it happens, right?” -- took place.
As far as I can determine, none of the other songs briefly shown on the jukebox have previously appeared on the show. So while there seems to be some face value meaning in some of the other titles, and perhaps they reference other things in other ways, the mysterious jukebox titles seem at minimum to be another in-your-grill pointer to Bobby's description of death in that episode.
Again, I'd like to thank several emailers for providing various screengrabs illustrating the points. This post was originally all text; I've been adding grabs as people have kindly filled in the blanks. Much appreciated.
OK, I'm gonna go resume my life. (I actually have one, honest. I like it.) Please, everybody, one thing I beg of you to remember: it's a TV show. It's fun. It's nothing else. And again, I'm not presenting the above as, er, Gospel. It's a list of things which actually happen on the screen, and a series of opinions as to what they mean, if anything, based on a very limited amount of experience.
As I've said throughout: every single word here could be wrong. I am completely certain that at least some of them are. Some of them may not be. I don't know which ones.
Do your own thinking. Have fun.
Leave the gun, people. Take the cannoli.
And then fuhgeddaboudit.
• • •
A FEW DAYS LATER -- READ THIS FIRST; IT MAY SAVE YOU SOME TIME, HONEST:
In less than 48 hours, this post has already been viewed by over 80,000 people. [Another 48: 160,000.] So this has been a bit like expecting a few friends to pop over and suddenly Yankee Stadium shows up. (Then Shea. And Wrigley.) Neat, but also overwhelming.
Um... hi.
Hold on. Let me put on some better pants... OK.
I am flooded with emails, nearly all extremely kind. One of you even forwarded helpful screengrabs originally posted by A Lesson A Day; my thanks to all. I'll never catch up with it all now, unfortunately. I appreciate every letter -- sincerely -- but I've barely time to even read them all, and there's a point of diminishing returns. I mean, of course we won't all agree with every little thing here. As I keep saying, I'm not even sure I do. That's just how art is sometimes. I was thinking out loud here, nothing more.
Media folks? Thanks, but heavens no, thank you. I was just sharing with the class. I'm glad lots of people liked it. But I wouldn't presume to push my ideas on the meaning of someone else's creation beyond this one article, which will remain quietly here for anyone to consider when they want to. It's a respect thing. It's not remotely my place. I hope you'll understand.
I only wrote this because I thought the way The Sopranos ended was cool and layered and wonderfully bold. I thought I'd have my little say, like everyone else, and then get back to politics, travel, and the other stuff that draws my usual massive 1000 visitors a day. Then, well, the deluge, but them's the Intertubes. In the initial torrent, I allowed my thoughts to evolve in public for a couple of days, just out of respect for all involved. The thing got longer, but you can see where I tried to admit my own mistakes and add new information as best as possible. I think you guys are smart enough to decide which bits are worthwhile, one by one.
Within what follows, the original post remains intact, with errors simply pointed out. I know we're almost trained in this culture to expect people to burn embarrassing documents or bull-headedly insist on being right about everything. Strangely, we may value this in our leaders and opinion-makers most of all. But everybody makes mistakes. Best to admit them with grace, enjoy a moment of feeling silly, and move on.
Jake Tapper, ABC News's Senior National Correspondent, did a nice, clear job of summarizing a few salient bits of all this. And thank goodness. :) If you only have five minutes, go read that, with my full blessing. You may still want to come back here later; there's a lot more, and the visuals below will help with some of the ideas. One quibble: I never meant to imply anyone should be "embarrassed" for feeling confused. Goodness, no. I still am about some of this. And where the hell are my keys...?
Like anyone's, my original take had merits and weaknesses. About a quarter of what I originally thought was pretty much crap, as I've eagerly pointed out myself. But the rest seems worth considering, and readers have brought up much additional stuff -- Tony's shirt, the song pointing to Bobby on the jukebox, online pics of the real Holsten's back wall, etc. -- which flesh out many of my original thoughts in interesting ways. Ultimately, I hope you'll have fun here. But that's all this is. Fun. Nothing more.
Finally, a few folks have titled their links here as "this guy solved it!" and similar. I want to be clear: I disavow any such claim in the strongest terms. I'm glad people enjoyed this, but when I wrote the words "this could be a coincidence" and such, I meant them. Every time. This is what I saw when I approached it with playful curiosity, that's all. Final answers are fun, but this is just an opinion even I'm not particularly attached to, a bit of fluff, cocktail conversation among friends, meant to entertain as much as anything. About twelve million people have opinions on this. This is one. That's it. The creative process itself is often so intuitive that I doubt there even is a "right" answer for some of this stuff. And if David Chase himself someday declared all of these ideas complete rubbish, I would be perfectly happy.
Meanwhile, there are other topics I'm much more interested in, honest to God. You know the litany of important stuff in the world -- Iraq and Afghanistan are both off the rails, there's talk about bombing Iran, etc. (If I start quoting Yeets -- er, Yeats -- just roll your eyes.) I hope you'll be at least as interested in those complex puzzles as you are in what happened to one fictional guy.
If you find the post below engaging, you might like the rest of the site, too. Or the book on your upper left, or the one I have coming out in the fall. Which I have to get back to. Meanwhile, have fun with this for what it is, nothing more, OK? I hope maybe you'll even bookmark the main page and then remember to come back again some time, when there aren't 80,000 160,000 visitors fighting over my only bag of chips.
Moving on now. Existing post, interruptions and all, begins here.
• • •
REALLY FINAL UPDATE: AS I KEEP INSISTING, THIS ENTIRE POST MAY BE RUBBISHThis Canadian wire story, which has now also been picked up by the AP, implies that the upcoming deluxe edition of The Sopranos: The Complete Book includes an interview with David Chase in which he may disavow some, much, or all of the below. The writer implies more disavowal than seems to be contained in Chase's actual quotes, so it's hard to tell. We'll have to see when the book is released.
In any case, I wouldn't be surprised -- in fact, I'd be delighted.
I wrote most of the post below one night during a family health crisis, trying to keep my mind off my worries by taking a look at the puzzling Sopranos finale and writing about it for a few hours. I thought I saw something brilliant, so I said so. That's all this was and all it was intended to be.
I also emphasized repeatedly that I wasn't presenting any of this as "the" answer, but just a playful take trying to see what might be there, just for general amusement and nothing else. (Scroll down and count the disclaimers yourself.) I assumed that like almost everything else I post here, it would roll off the bottom of the page unnoticed in a week, and that would be that.
But nature abhors a vacuum, and David Chase seems to have left a big one regarding what happened to Tony. So within just a few hours, the Internet overmind took this tossed-off post and ran with it. Before long, it was linked to by over 300 other blogs and received over 400,000 hits. Most things I write get maybe a few thousand page-views, tops.
Jeebus, I don't even particularly care about the Sopranos, honest to god, and I said so. But I could also tell from the emails that people were already taking this waaaaay more seriously than I intended.
So I then spent a few hours that weekend patching and correcting obvious mistakes and adding even more disclaimers begging people not to take this as representative of anything but a lark. (btw, if you doubt that thousands of words can really be tossed off like this in a couple of sittings: I'm a writer -- it's what I do, all day, almost every day. Any chef can chop vegetables really fast. It doesn't make them a good cook, but speed is part of the gig, good or bad, if you want to make a living. Same deal.)
This was a freaky experience.
Suppose you scribbled down a lengthy, rambling essay about why, I dunno, the Dodgers need better pitching, and all of a sudden you've got traffic coming from TV networks, major newspapers, and national magazines, with many of them under the false impression that you consider yourself some sort of expert, and judging you accordingly? Man, that was weird.
In all honesty, I've been both amused and a little horrified ever since by the thousands of people who seem to have completely ignored clear caveats and decided that (a) this was the answer, and (b) that I truly intended it as such. (Are people really that uncomfortable with open-ended questions, playful hypotheses, and simply appreciating the sense of wonder at an unresolved mystery? Apparently so.) The deluge of email that followed eventually became depressing, even though most of it was always extremely friendly and positive.
Here's the thing: every new note increased the growing realization of my own role in all this energy being wasted on a fictional character, as I alluded to in the follow-up post (which now follows this one, before the original post begins).
Hey, uh, guys? The US is in the middle of two wars and considering a third, the dollar is dropping faster than senatorial trousers at a Cub Scout camp, and a year before elections, our broken political system has already winnowed the presidential field down mostly to candidates half of us can't even stand.
That's the stuff worth bothering with, and that's the stuff I write about the vast majority of the time. (In fact, I have a whole new book out with maps and brief essays summarizing conflicts all over the world. You may have noticed the ad at the top of the page.) And that's the stuff that attracts my giant low-four-digit readership.
So you can see how the massive surge of traffic, nice as it was, was also an unpleasant reminder of how much more millions of people seem to care about a fictional murderer than about real criminals dishonoring this country with illegal surveillance, waterboarding, rendition, and so on... depressing, really.
So if the article is accurate, and David Chase really says, "there WAS a war going on that week, and attempted terror attacks in London... but these people were talking about onion rings," hell, yes. I agree utterly. Which is why I turned down numerous interview requests (it wouldn't have been appropriate anyway, obviously) and never wrote about the subject again.
Still, I'm leaving every word that follows intact, of course. Read on and judge for yourself if you like. Although I'd really rather you enjoy the Union of Concerned Scientists' video on the probable failure and horrifying consequences of a unilateral US attack on Iran.
Or you can watch this YouTube video of all the other major stories the media ignored on the day Anna Nicole died, and realize just how far out to sea the "news" media really is.
Or, if it's truly more important to you, you can read this lengthy post goofing around with why I thought Tony Soprano was killed, including several layers of repeated sincere disclaimers.
When you're done, scroll back up and check out the other two links, though. And maybe a thousand other more important things. Thanks.
