The Sopranos

It wasn't the type of sit-down one might have expected the Soprano clan to share, given the domestic-front turbulence of the six seasons that preceded this final scene of the series. — Tony, Carm, A.J. gather at Holsten's in Bloomfield for the kind of off-the-cuff gathering that might resonate for one of these characters in a moment of honest sentimentality some future day. Meadow's running late from picking up a new birth-control prescription, and as the other three wait for their food, she grapples with parallel-parking her uncompact car in a spot just outside the diner. After two tries (only last year Toyota brought the auto-park car to select markets), she guides the vehicle in flush and rushes through the front door of Holsten's, where the three others sit mid-nosh around a bowl of onion rings.

So mundane it's tricky... but we're seeing an unusual confluence play out with every shot, every cut. In fact, the point of convergence is also the overarching oddity: the locale of the diner, notable with regard to its position inside the culture (more than the public-house, the lunch-counter described social interaction for one-and-a-half American centuries, from demotic fraternity to lonely individualism — see Hopper or Rockwell or Siodmak) and in a way particular to this scene (all of Jersey seems to have convened here on this one night). But I don't want to talk more about this until I say something about the glide-into from the previous scene, glissando by a cut on motion (Tony striding through the diner door) that links those two aforementioned ideas, solitude (last glimpse of the state facility) and demotism (opening glimpse of the restaurant), and proceeds into the final combining-flourish upon the arrival of the rest of the family. This resulting equation of the two scenes exposes the lie of demographics, and announces, through Tony's presiding point-of-view, "We are alone together."

The Sopranos: Episode 86 by David Chase, 2007:


Nighthawks by Edward Hopper, 1942 (here's where we discover the origin of the "arbitrary" 1.85:1 cinema ratio) :


The Runaway by Norman Rockwell, 1958 (on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post) :


The Killers by Robert Siodmak, 1946:



Taking it from the top: David Chase gives us Uncle Junior in a mental ward (one of the great elegiac scenes of the show), all light weak in ebbed blue and beige, the nephew's resentment bearing down on the old man with every utterance — and then Tony realizes Junior's senses have shuttled — and he reflexively attempts to build the old gangster back up (Junior his would-be assassin, his contra-conspirator) by reminding him, "You used to run all of North Jersey." Junior responds with a smile, before a return to total non-register. Tony's disgust as he stamps out of the hospital is more confused, more shuffled (we could never quite charge Tony Soprano with "ambivalence") than when he entered. He encountered unexpected things — for maybe the thousandth time. From here, the cut to Tony entering the diner.

The Sopranos: Episode 86 by David Chase, 2007:



What other recent American creation in cinema/television have we been invited to judge as frequently as Tony Soprano? Always there were lapses and gaps and blanks or contradictions in his outward behavior, and always Chase et al framed the action as though to solicit the viewer to "do the thinking for Tony" when it seemed Papa Soprano could not operate with — let's not say morality — clarity of purpose. But what good did it ever do, these "Tony, can't you see you're being unreasonable!"s — nada, the same net-effect of suspense-film pleas that the sexy blonde "don't go through that door — !" Thus the super-rosa ascent that results in the diner-scene truly surprises, due in one part to the amount of metaphor aggregated here with such economy, in other part because Tony's point-of-view has become the initiatory agent. In recent cinema — from A History of Violence by Cronenberg to A Prairie Home Companion by Altman — we have been asked to consider a place of "repast" as a space of assessment. But a meal around a table is only a narrative (cosmetic) means of filtering other considerations — and a convenient one, because visually and aurally the filmmaker can place four people in a shot at one time, arranged more or less in a circular pattern (determined by the type of table), and this might activate a nexus, a concentration of concerns. Passing from Cro-Magnon man through space-station man, we bring on the food and we get down to business. The only remaining question is whether to charge the company account.

The Sopranos: Episode 86 by David Chase, 2007:


A History of Violence by David Cronenberg, 2005:


A Prairie Home Companion by Robert Altman, 2006:


A Prairie Home Companion by Robert Altman, 2006:


2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick, 1968:


2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick, 1968:


2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick, 1968:


2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick, 1968:



David Chase, on the other hand, took advantage of the Holsten's setting as a means to take account of his company — the Sopranos, America, and the viewing public. This climactic scene — probably the best of the series — entered, if only for two or three minutes, a prism-realm not unlike Bergman's Fanny and Alexander or Renoir's Eléna and the Men, two works assembled by their creators from shards of the respective oeuvres, collating the concerns of the previous work and shifting their contexts from the exterior world to the interior. In each instance, the preoccupation of the final gesture: synthesis. So even as The Sopranos established a cartography of America's supposed divisions — by race, class, sexuality, politics — the closing scene provides a bird's-eye-view of the interconnections, absent the borders and meridians. [So maybe Tony became an angel after all, and floating up to heaven, over all he surveys, he — — — ] America is in Bloomfield is in America; paranoia and serenity make conjugal visits to the last outpost of the American myth; myth is personal freedom, but "threat" of "miscegenation" is a myth; capitalism fosters personal success and community riches, but self-usurps too at which point capitalism, a myth, redefines the-American-myth; civics (Boy Scouts) and soldierhood (Iraq) interchange; USA-patriotism lurches toward pride-of-place-über-alles... until face-to-face sit-downs are had. One might also say that the prismatic diner-scene represents a mirror that reflects the staid-umpteenth-iteration dinner-party attended by Doctors Bracco and Bogdanovich in the penultimate episode, wherein the notion of demographics acquires a clinical taxonomy, and definition, diagnosis, plays out like a struggle in the same structure of shot-countershot as described Dr. Melfi's sessions with Tony...

Fanny och Alexander [Fanny and Alexander] by Ingmar Bergman, 1982:


Eléna et les hommes [Eléna and the Men] by Jean Renoir, 1956:


The Sopranos: Episode 86 by David Chase, 2007:


The Sopranos: Episode 86 by David Chase, 2007:


The Sopranos: Episode 86 by David Chase, 2007:


The Sopranos: Episode 86 by David Chase, 2007:


The Sopranos: Episode 86 by David Chase, 2007:


The Sopranos: Episode 86 by David Chase, 2007:



...who, positioned for maximum anonymity (like the eyed toy inside the mechanical-arm game one finds near the entrances of diners) and centered like a bullseye, imbues Holsten's by his mere presence with the atmosphere of a witness-protection "locality." No? So then who's that man in the Members Only jacket, and what does it mean? What's Members-Only's modus operandum? For all these glances Members Only casts, Tony, casting glances throughout the entire scene, the entire scene in effect created by his cast glances, nonetheless seems not to worry, seems not even to notice M.O.'s shifts of the eyes, to tell the truth — Tony, the spinner of fictions, the unconscious/metaconscious re-enactor of the fictions he's digested through a lifetime of movies and television — Tony, the digester of paranoia (many spun fictions and a couple documentaries) with serenity, that is, Tony, the great psychiatric case and narcissist and assassination-fantasist and supreme sublimator —

— "Members Only": mob warning, inside job, division drawn, "you're with us or you're against us" — "You're either with us, or you're with the terrorists" —

— until...

— "Members Only" is exposed as a reverberation of another movie watched and reminisced — Coppola's The Godfather, of course, when Al Pacino goes to a restaurant's men's room for the purpose of retrieving a planted pistol. And to underscore the fact that this man's murderous purpose maybe isn't "all there" (and he might not be, either), Chase deflates all the paranoia, all the diviseness of fictions, by enveloping this tensest of moments... in a dick joke. Men's room — members only, indeed.

The back-of-the-mind's really all toilet-muck anyway.

So "don't stop believing," the soundtrack urges (and cautions) us (and Tony). Embrace the totality of existence, hurtle toward potential. And make the most of our fictions — a "cut to black" in the middle of a shot isn't Tony's assassination so much as the reverse-shot taken from some dizzy aerie onto the abyss of Tony's fantasies — and a deference to our own. At its base, a "cut to black" is a cinematic device that precludes closure: "life" and "show" are one, and both simply must go on. We are alone together, yes, but this might be what makes things good.

The Sopranos: Episode 86 by David Chase, 2007:


The Sopranos: Episode 86 by David Chase, 2007:


The Sopranos: Episode 86 by David Chase, 2007:


The Sopranos: Episode 86 by David Chase, 2007:


The Golden Coach by Jean Renoir, 1953: