There's an excerpt from David Chase's new book (or an excerpt from an interview about the book… I'm not entirely sure which) in last week's Entertainment Weekly. In it, he talks about how surprised he was at the reaction to The Soprano's finale ("I knew they'd be angry, but I didn't realize they'd be THAT angry) and his contempt for those who, after following and cheering Tony Soprano for seven seasons, all suddenly wanted to see him punished for his "sins".
And all I've got to say to that is bullshit.
The problem with the Sopranos finale isn't simply that it's one of those seemingly ubiquitous non-endings that directors are so fond of lately. I think he's right that there's a certain number of fans that would be dissatisfied with whatever ending he came up with for the series, since everyone has their own idea of how these stories should end. But what he's done here is to build up the tension in the closing scene, to make you EXPECT a climax to that scene, and then cut to black, leaving you with a case of viewer interruptus. He's a video prick tease that's left his audience with a nasty case of blue balls of the optic nerve.
If he didn't want to 'resolve' the Soprano's story (forgetting for the moment that this IS a work of fiction, so the argument that 'in real life, stories don't have endings' should never apply), he could easily have ended the story a few beats later, with Meadow finally parking the car, entering the diner, and the family eating together. He could even have the shady-looking guy still lingering at the bar, leaving you with the feeling that maybe something was still going to happen. Doing this would have dissipated some of the tension he'd built ramping up to this moment, signaling to the audience that this moment was over, and they could relax while they waited for the next moment in the story arc. Cutting at that point would still have left us all hanging, but it wouldn't have felt as abrupt and jarring as cutting to black when he DID cut ends up feeling.
And any attempt on his part to deny that he was looking for this, that he was surprised at the vehemence of the audience's reaction, or that he hadn't planned and hoped for that is, as I've already stated, bullshit. He ended the show this way, jerking the rug out from under his audience, specifically to cause this kind of uproar… to keep people arguing, discussing and debating the end of the Sopranos long after they would have had he simply offed Tony, make him king of the New York mobs, or left him quietly eating dinner with his family, unsuspiscious of the shady-looking guy at the bar. Any claim to anything less is simply disingenuous. And bullshit.
IMHO, of course.
And all I've got to say to that is bullshit.
The problem with the Sopranos finale isn't simply that it's one of those seemingly ubiquitous non-endings that directors are so fond of lately. I think he's right that there's a certain number of fans that would be dissatisfied with whatever ending he came up with for the series, since everyone has their own idea of how these stories should end. But what he's done here is to build up the tension in the closing scene, to make you EXPECT a climax to that scene, and then cut to black, leaving you with a case of viewer interruptus. He's a video prick tease that's left his audience with a nasty case of blue balls of the optic nerve.
If he didn't want to 'resolve' the Soprano's story (forgetting for the moment that this IS a work of fiction, so the argument that 'in real life, stories don't have endings' should never apply), he could easily have ended the story a few beats later, with Meadow finally parking the car, entering the diner, and the family eating together. He could even have the shady-looking guy still lingering at the bar, leaving you with the feeling that maybe something was still going to happen. Doing this would have dissipated some of the tension he'd built ramping up to this moment, signaling to the audience that this moment was over, and they could relax while they waited for the next moment in the story arc. Cutting at that point would still have left us all hanging, but it wouldn't have felt as abrupt and jarring as cutting to black when he DID cut ends up feeling.
And any attempt on his part to deny that he was looking for this, that he was surprised at the vehemence of the audience's reaction, or that he hadn't planned and hoped for that is, as I've already stated, bullshit. He ended the show this way, jerking the rug out from under his audience, specifically to cause this kind of uproar… to keep people arguing, discussing and debating the end of the Sopranos long after they would have had he simply offed Tony, make him king of the New York mobs, or left him quietly eating dinner with his family, unsuspiscious of the shady-looking guy at the bar. Any claim to anything less is simply disingenuous. And bullshit.
IMHO, of course.
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