With Emmy nominations out, there’s apparently some buzz that the inconclusive ending to the series might hurt its chances.
Personally…I thought the ending was brilliant.
First of all, anyone who thought that David Chase was going to provide *any* sort of conclusive or definitive ending to “Sopranos” just wasn’t paying attention. Chase not only delights in flying in the face of fan expectations, but apparently still treasures the fact that fans are STILL annoyed about the Russian mobster who escaped into the snow-covered forest, never to be seen again. I didn’t think for a moment that Chase would tie everything off because LIFE doesn’t tie everything off.
In the movie “Man on the Moon,” Andy Kaufman (Jim Carrey) asks a wise man what the secret of comedy is. The wise man replies, “Silence.”
Later Kaufman is shown delightedly coming up with the notion of bøøbÿ-ŧráppìņg his special so that, at about the mid-point, the picture would start rolling. His concept was that all across America, people watching the special would go to their TVs and start trying to fix the horizontal hold, and even banging on their sets in frustration. He thought that it would be funny.
Chase applied that sort of thinking to his finale.
I’m sitting there watching the conclusion in a hotel room (I was in LA at the time.) The tension is building, shot by shot. Everything seems innocuous, and so you just KNOW that SOMETHING is going to happen. Tony’s daughter is struggling to park the car; will her inability to parallel park mean that she winds up surviving a massacre? A spooky looking guy keeps glancing Tony’s way. He heads into the bathroom. Is he going in there for a gun? Tony seems oblivious, or is he? Tension build, tension build, almost to the breaking point…
Screen goes black.
I jump to my feet, and I’m shouting, “Son of a bìŧçh!” I’m convinced the cable’s gone out. I’m positive that everyone else is watching this and seeing the ending and my stupid cable has chosen that moment to go on the fritz. For ten of the longest seconds of my life I’m going out of my mind…and then the credits start to roll. It takes me a moment to register what I’ve just seen: I didn’t miss anything. That WAS the end.
Nothing that David Chase could have put in there–NOTHING–could have equaled, in terms of pure emotion, the mind-rending agitation I felt in those long seconds of silence. SIlence, which is apparently the secret to drama as well as comedy. Yelling at the TV, cursing my fate to miss the final moments due to technological ineptitude. Feeling that same frustration that viewers of the Kaufman special would have felt, but heightened. Just as “The Sopranos” was a deeply personal story for Chase, so was the ending a personal experience for every viewer, because everyone experienced their own level of frustration and angst by not knowing for long seconds what the hëll was happening.
And, of course, it’s destined to be unique. Short of riffing it in parody, no one can ever do something like that again. It’s “the Sopraonos ending.”
As I said…brilliant.
PAD
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The uncertainty and paranoia Tony demonstrated does not seem to qualify as a disorder. Evil is not a disorder. Evil does not mean dysfunctional.
I believe a dysfunction in psychology means an abnormality. From what I’ve seen of Tony (and I have not followed the show as closely as most here) he definitely displays abnormal personality traits that have caused serious harm to himself and his family.
It also seemed to me from what I saw that he is a somewhat tragic figure in that he desires some of the things that a normal person would want but he will never get it, due to his own fatal flaws. One could argue that his paranoia is not truly dysfunctional or abnormal since he is well justified in fearing for his life but it is his own thoughts and actions that have made that fear justified.
But back to the original bit that got me wondering–is it acccepted psychological thought that for a disorder to be disorder the supposed victim of siad disorder must derive no benefit from it? (The conventional understanding of sociopathy is that while the sociopath makes everyone around him suffer, the sociopath benefits personally from his sociopathy. That’s why sociopathy isn’t considered a mental disorder.)
Ok, I found the articles my understanding was formed by:
Sources for the above:
lovefraud.com/01_whatsaSociopath/psychopath_or_sociopath.html
lovefraud.com/01_whatsaSociopath/sociopaths_insane.html
lovefraud.com/blog/2007/06/10/is-tony-soprano-a-sociopath
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy
No. In fact, Jung denied there was such a thing as normalcy. He used the analogy of a bed of pebbles, saying that while the pebbles may average 1.4 grams, that average does not depend on any of the pebbles weighing 1.4 grams. He said holding people to a non-existent standard was ridiculous. Although Jung qualified as an anti-Semite, publicly denouncing the influence of Freud and other Jews on Psychiatry, the saving grace of his work is that its denial of standardization means it can’t be used to support a supremacist ideology.
Saying that behavior is dysfunctional because it falls outside of a range considered normal is categorically wrong. I can’t think of a single innovation that doesn’t depend on disobedience of some standard of normalcy. Innovation is not dysfunction.
What desire has Tony Soprano ever been denied other than sex with Dr. Melfi?
Most people want things they will never get. If anything, Tony is abnormal because of his desires fulfilled rather than the desires denied him. When you look at Tony Soprano, you are looking at the American Dream.
It also seemed to me from what I saw that he is a somewhat tragic figure in that he desires some of the things that a normal person would want but he will never get it, due to his own fatal flaws. One could argue that his paranoia is not truly dysfunctional or abnormal since he is well justified in fearing for his life but it is his own thoughts and actions that have made that fear justified.
What desire has Tony Soprano ever been denied other than sex with Dr. Melfi?
The impression I got from the episodes I saw was that he wanted his kids to have nothing to do with the mafia lifestyle and even hid his own involvement from them. By the end of the show it seemed unlikely that the kids wouldn’t get sucked in, as Tony himself was. This, of course, is right out of the Godfather’s playbook where Don Corleonewept at learning that his son Michael had joined the family business.
I’ll have to adress the rest later–thanks for the links. I have to say I find it facinating that not only is a homicidal sociopath who additionally suffers from depression and panic attacks not considered mentally ill but neither are psychopaths! Dr. Hare is setting the bar mighty high, it seems to me; but I have to travel to Montreal so it’ll have to wait.
One last thing though–my mentioning abnormality with dysfunction comes from wiki–type in dysfunction and in the disambiguation you get in psychology, an abnormality. Abnormality is further defined not merely as different from the norm but as Abnormality is a subjectively defined characteristic, assigned to those with rare or dysfunctional conditions. Defining who is normal or abnormal is a contentious issue in abnormal psychology. Clearly psyschologists do not generally consider the innovative to be mentally ill on the basis of their being better than the norm. Serial killers on the other hand, well…
The inconclusive ending didn’t totally surprise me, since “Oz” didn’t give us anything final either. Old characters died in the “Oz” finale, but new ones were also introduced and I think the idea was to illustrate that even though the series was ending, life was going to go on in the prison and a lot of stuff was gonna happen that we wouldn’t see.
I was okay with that. With the Sopranos, not quite as much.
For one thing, I never believed there was anything wrong with the cable so I didn’t experience the frustration described here.
For another, I’m all about the tied up loose ends, and I wish we’d been given more. Like if the screen went black and we heard a gunshot, or something else to give us a little hint about what happened next.
I’m also unhappy that they killed Christopher, they killed Bobby, they may have killed Sil, but Paulie, who I was actually looking forward to seeing clipped, survived.
But the way Phil died? BEAUTIFUL! That scene alone might deserve an award of some kind.
While I think the character of Tony would agree with you in his attempt in discouraging his kids from emulating him, I think Chase presented the dynamics of the characters as privilege being the core of why they are dámņëd. Artie wanted in, but it was his lack of privilege that saved him, and if Tony’s kids are dámņëd, it’s their privilege that will dámņ them: Tony’s kids will never hit a bottom to sober them as Artie did. The wives are sheltered by their deniability, and their participation takes the form almost exclusively in their indulgence of privilege, yet the show spent time to portray them as also dámņëd.
That’s why I think so much time in the series was devoted to the theme of addiction, and why I keep emphasizing the series as an allegory for America — if we don’t understand we share the same vulnerability, our best outcome will be the same dámņáŧìøņ: dominance with still no peace.
PAD, it’s good to hear a perspective that echoed my own. I so wish I could high five you right now. (Is there an emoticon for that?)
All this talk about endings and I’m reminded of Sondheim’s Into the Woods. I’ve known people (and I’m referring to the video here, I don’t know if this ever happened at a theatre, but I like to think that it did) who thought that everything was so nicely wrapped up at the end of the first act that they never saw the second.
First, no love for Blake’s 7 on fade-to-black endings?
Secondly, I saw the ending to the Sopranos, thought the cable went out (and we’ve had more trouble recently with that to make it plausible), and after seeing the credits, thought, “people are gonna be piiiiiissed!”
But what is said above: love it or hate it, the ending is part of the pop culture. Hillary parodied it, and many many others have made parallel endings to Harry Potter (I have two first-year Hufflepuffs snogging in the back and Voldemort’s head being crushed by the front wheel of the Weasley Ford Anglia).
Ok, I’m going to take a guess that the coining of the term “Abnormal Psychology” — which refers to what’s conventionally understood as dysfunction — took place after Jung dismissed of the notion of a standard of normalcy in psychology (the example I cited he published in the 1950s), and that my reaction to what I took as your general application of “abnormal” doesn’t apply here.
However, from the wikipedia article titled Abnormal psychology:
Abnormal psychology is the study of people who demonstrate an inability to adapt. As such, no, Tony Soprano displayed no abnormal personality traits in the formal sense of the term. Where he qualifies as abnormal in the general sense, he is not dysfunctional.
If nothing else, Hare’s quote still seems to confirm psychopathy literally does not qualify as a dysfunction. The terms and themes related in all this seem to be “dysfunction,” “abnormal psychology,” and “failure to adapt.” Evil and psychopathy still seem unrelated to those notions.
One scene of that last episode, that clues me into believing that Tony got whacked, but has been hardly discussed in other blogs, was the one where T and Paulie (sunning himself) are sitting in front of Satriale’s(?) and the cat.
They were lone survivors (from ‘upper management’) of Phil’s attack and if we are going to go by the credo that as a made man you can’t show any signs of weakness, then T’s position as victor was a Phyrrhic victory at best.
Which means he WAS vulnerable to a ‘hostile take over’ by someone even in his own camp. And due to his own hubris, he wouldn’t have seen that coming.
In general, abnormal psychology can be described as an area of psychology that studies people who are consistently unable to adapt and function effectively in a variety of conditions.
Abnormal psychology is the study of people who demonstrate an inability to adapt. As such, no, Tony Soprano displayed no abnormal personality traits in the formal sense of the term. Where he qualifies as abnormal in the general sense, he is not dysfunctional.
The definition given in wiki of abnormal psychology seems to be one that would possibly disqualify an awful lot of deserving candidates. Lots of perfectly insane peole are ‘able to adapt” if by that one means get along and possibly even thrive, even as they destroy the lives of others. A seriel pedophile rapist could be said to “adapt” well to his environment by successfully victimizing thousands of kids to satisfy a sickness that would be expected to earn him a swift lynching. Indeed, look how effectively pedophiles have adapted to the cyber age–we are possibly enduring the Golden Age of child molesters.
I would think that a better definition of abnormal society would be a failure to adapt to expected norms of a civilized society. A succesful psychopath is still a psychopath–his or her inability to change their psychopathic behavior is what makes them abnormal.
If we accept, as we should, that the lack of empathy (among other things) which would allow someone to commit a child rape is a sign of abnormal mental thinking, one that is contrary to almost all accepted norms in our society, the ability of a person to sucessfully satisfy that urge without getting caught and even profit from it by selling pictures to like minded weirdos should in no way disqualify him as abnormal in a very very bad meaning of the word.
But it seems as though an awful lot of the science of psychology is very ill defined. Is the human mind so complex that it defies any hope of classification except in the broadest sense?
As far as I know, Tony Soprano was never portrayed receiving sexual arousal from killing people. As evil as his killings were, they were still rational. He merely refused to place any interest above his own still-rational interests. As far as sex goes, it was sufficient for him to see himself in the role of a warrior, like when he fantasized himself as a centurion taking that Italian don’s wife from behind.
Your insistence on conformity only makes relevant the Jung example I cited before: There is no such thing as normal. Normal is a non-existent standard, and it’s ridiculous to hold people to a standard that simply does not exist. Saying that behavior is dysfunctional because it falls outside of a range considered normal is categorically wrong. I said I can’t think of a single innovation that doesn’t depend on disobedience of some standard of normalcy, and you haven’t presented anything to disqualify this observation. Innovation is not normal, and innovation is not dysfunction.
The reason I think it’s important to challenge conformity as the standard to measure mental health — as you’ve done — is because the latitude (for example) we allow people to have their clothes fitted to them, you simply are not allowing for the roles with which they interact with their environment. You, by advocating conformity as the standard to measure mental health, simply do not allow for customization where the free market does.
As such, the options people are offered are either fit a role society offers them, or have the likes of you, Bill, Jerry, and Micha use the standard of conformity to undercut someone’s trust in himself. This is not to be confused with using reason to undercut one’s trust his irrationality is rational, such implementation of reason is perhaps the worst you can say about me, but is using the standard of conformity — and conformity alone — to undercut his trust in the very nature Ben stein bows to when he says he bows to your Buddha.
This is how we nurture the monsters that prey on the most vulnerable segments of our population — by attacking the very resolve to live for those whose natures are merely different from our expectations, by holding them to a non-existent standard. Then the neglect of their individuality we encourage allows the natures of some to disintegrate into the ghostly worm-like things, hiding behind a public role they’ve learned to merely present themselves conforming to, who destroy the lives of others. Save the individual, the geek, the fág, save the world.
As long as we depend on linear representation (language) of our spatial experiences, the more our “sciences” depend on our reactions to our experiences, the greater the challenges are in establishing definitions.
However, Jung has presented personality classification, taking the notions of consciousness and unconsciousness from Freud, and portraying people as their consciousness favoring either their external or internal environment, and their unconscious favoring the other. Then after that, their consciousness either favoring either judgment or perception, and their unconscious favoring the other. Then, of their conscious or unconscious judgment, it either favors thinking (conscious judging) or feeling (unconscious judging), and of their conscious or unconscious perception, it either favors sensing (conscious observation) or intuition (unconscious observation).
Oliver Sacks said our actions are formed, and our perceptions are experienced, iconically. Language is nothing if not iconic, so there’s no reason to believe psychology is not a candidate for all linguistic implementation.
As always, any attempt to genuinely engage you in conversation goes off into Mikeland. ‘Tis a silly place, but at least they like you there.
You literally advocated for conformity as the standard for measuring of mental health, and my response was appropriate for the severity of your wrongness. Your response didn’t disqualify anything I said.
I think it was pretty obvious that Tony got whacked. During the episode “Sopranos Home Movies” earlier this season, Tony was talking with Bobby about dying. Tony even had a flashback to the conversation in the episode prior to the finale. Discussing what it would be like to get whacked, Tony said , “I mean, our line of work, it’s always out there. You probably don’t even hear it when it happens, right?” And that’s exactly how the series ended. Everything just went black.
I never watched “The Sopranos” but this kinda makes me wish I did. I’m in the “that ending rocked” side. Because with what little I know about the show, it seems like there couldn’t have been a definitive ending that satisfied everyone. You can’t leave the show in peace, it’s not a peaceable show. It’s impossible to tie up all the loose ends because if you do you’ll just create more threads.
I think one of my favorite TV show endings ever was the ending to “Dark Angel.” As monster-movie corny as the second season was in comparison to the first, the ending totally saved it. The crazy religious badguys are defeated and humiliated, but the threat that they brought on: the government, is unleashed. After chasing all of the Manticore survivors back to their territory, Max makes the call to fight. Realizing the threat is bigger than expected, the government backs off an immediate attack but barricades the whole neighborhood, presumably with angry mobs of mutant-haters just beyond. The last scene is beautiful, raising that new flag above the tallest building amid the waste and danger that surrounds them. It’s known that they will come into conflict with the government and angry mobs, but not how they’ll fair. And the crazy prophecy concerning Max is never fully explained. The series ends with her still not being able to even touch Logan, they’re holding hands while he wears a latex glove.
I love that ending because I just KNOW that if they had gone on to a 3rd season after that it would’ve sucked. I don’t want to know how things turn out, I want to dream about it. It packs a powerful emotional punch. No conclusive ending would have satisified me, because neither of the conclusions fit well. I think that’s probably how I would feel about “The Sopranos.” I don’t want to KNOW whether Tony lives or dies, I want to agonize about the ups and downs of either conclusion. I want to be able to make it up myself.
I was kinda hoping they’d at least finish off about the Russian Chris and Paulie shot who ran off into the Woods and Melfi Rape storylines.
Just seemed bit, well unfinished really.
The point of the Melfi rape story did conclude. That story wasn’t about punishing the rapist, it was about Melfi’s ethical quandary as to whether or not to let Tony know about it and go after the guy. She was faced with the choices of letting the guy go free or being complicit in his murder AND being indebted to Tony. She chose not to let Tony know, but took comfort in the notion that her attacker life was literally was in her hands.