The Finale

So, right after watching the series finale of The Sopranos I logged onto the the internet and went to Sean's blog to see what he had to say.

He only had this very short post, so I commented:

The only thing I'm really not looking forward to are the explanations about how we're "supposed" to interpret the ending as Tony getting whacked.

Sean replied:

I thought the EXACT same thing. What a strange way to engage with these kinds of things!

And, you know, this is a very strange way to engage with something. It's like: I'm watching and enjoying Sopranos the show, but, as soon as that's over, I'm thinking about and responding to Sopranos the media event.

As much as I like TV shows and movies and comic books, I'm becoming less and less interested in "Television Events", "Cinematic Events", and "Comic Book Events". Not only is the hype tiring, but I think it can warp your actual experience of the shows, movies, and comics in question. Like, The Sopranos finale is an Event, so it needs to be a Big Deal and make a Big Statement and everyone needs to have an opinion on it. In fact, having an opinion is probably more important than just, you know, engaging with the show on its own terms and just responding to what's actually on the screen* - positively, negatively, or however it is you responded to it.

One of the things I like about watching old movies (or old TV shows, etc.) is that there's really no hype surrounding them. Sure, they might have a reputation for being a classic (or whatever), but a historical/critical reputation is extremely passive (not to mention old-fashioned) compared to the constant cycle of media hype.

Hey - my prediction regarding this last season of The Sopranos, which a lot of the show's fans found "disappointing", is that people watching the show on DVD for the first time 10-20 years from now will be see Season 6 as a one of the show's strongest. Ok - maybe that's my prediction because it's also what I happen to believe, and maybe I'm being a little self-centered (not to mention delusional) in thinking that "Of course the world is going to come around to my POV", but I can't help feel that a lot of the disappointment has to do with the way the show played against all the predictions of the cultural commentators and the expectations of the show's fans. And, personally, I think these expectations at least were always a little at odds with what David Chase et al. were actually doing. The signpost moment: when in Season Four the big moment occurs when Tony decides not to do something (go along with Johnny Sack's plan to kill Carmine).**

My prediction was that the show would go out with a whimper and not a bang, and I was only kind of right. It went out on a quiet moment, but one that was extremely resonant, reaching back all the way to the very earliest episodes of the series.

But what I liked best about the last episode were the weird, throwaway moments that didn't have to be there and only added to the series in the most tangential manner, mainly because so much of what I loved about the show were its tangents and the creators' refusal to play connect-the-dots with narrative resolution (plot-wise and theme-wise).

My two favorite tangents:

A.J.'s girlfriend's reaction to listening to Bob Dylan for the first time (that he sounds like he's singing about right now).

Paulie pretending to sweep after Tony almost catches him hitting the cat with a broom. (I liked everything with the cat).

Oh yeah - maybe the most moving scene (aside from the ending) was when Tony goes to visit Janice. It's amazing: I don't think I've ever felt anything for that character before, and, all-of-a-sudden, you can see that she really is grieving (even if the scene ends with some heavy irony).

*I brought this up regarding Borat, too. Borat the Event seemed to cloud people's eyes (or maybe their minds) about what was actually going on in Borat the movie.

**I think that the people who approached the show from the "Who's Gonna Get Whacked this Week"-perspective were really missing the point. Like, I can't help but think that most of the show (and not just the sixth season) would have been really unsatisfying if that's why you were watching.

Holiday Weekend with the Family

Over the weekend my fiance and I watched the first two Godfather movies and then, pinch-hitting for part three, Goodfellas. She had never seen these movies all the way through and I was interested in looking at them again in light of the current Sopranos season and some of the things I've written about it.

After watching Goodfellas again, I'd alter and/or expand on my comments.

Goodfellas doesn't encourage us to identify with Henry Hill. Ray Liota's voice-over doesn't really help us get inside his character's head: it's more of a device Scorsese uses to expose Hill's hypocrisy and skewed vision of the world. There's a real feeling of moral outrage underneath the movie's slick surface. And while Goodfellas, to a certain extent, revels in the standard "power trip" aspect of the gangster movie*, both the screenplay and the set design emphasize that there's something small time about all these supposedly "big time" guys. There's nothing like Vito Corleone's sense of personal honor and his dedication to his family that allows the wiseguys in Goodfellas to transcend their thuggishness.

The Sopranos does want us to see things from Tony's POV, but, while he's drawn with more complexity and nuance than any of the characters in Goodfellas, he (a) is still pretty much a thug and (b) lacks that extra dimension that makes his story really tragic. Of course, the people who make the show seem to be aware of this: he's the mob boss of New Jersey after all, the castle he's built for himself is pretty tacky, and he doesn't really have many desires beyond the material comforts of modern American life**.

Unrelated to all of that, I was kind of surprised by how old-fashioned The Godfather felt. Now, if you're reading this blog, you probably know that I mean that as a compliment, but, to clarify: The Godfather really is a "well-made", classical Hollywood movie, with a style that's more like one of the best of William Wyler's than other "Hollywood New Wave" flicks.

*A part of the appeal of gangster movies has always been that we get off on watching people behaving badly - flouting law and common decency because they can. It's always been kind of a tightrope walk: being able to do whatever you want, to take whatever you want, to not have to take shit from anybody, and to solve problems through viscerally satisfying acts of violence are all really part of the appeal of the criminal lifestyle, so, of course, it makes sense for filmmakers to acknowledge this (at the very least), even if it means that a big part of the appeal of the movie will be the way audience members can vicariously groove on the outlaw lifestyle.

**Well, that's not entirely true. The entire series is, in a way, about his spiritual crisis, so he obviously has some desire to resolve that, but he's completely unwilling to own up to the probable causes of that crisis honestly.

Sopranos and X-Men-ification

I.

Ross Douthat quotes Alan Speinwall on The Sopranos...

Since this final season began, I've been warning everyone that Chase and company may not be going for an earth-shattering conclusion, but more of a life-goes-on finish. But the writers have spent so much time over the last five episodes hinting that some apocalypse is coming - whether it's Phil making war with New Jersey, Tony taking out Chris or vice versa, the FBI completing their RICO case, Muhammed and Ahmed up to no good - that if none of that comes to pass, every bit of anger from the fans is going to be justified.

There comes a point when the storytelling stops being daring and unconventional and starts being sloppy and cruel.

...and then adds his own comments:

Obviously, part of the genius of The Sopranos lies in how it confounds expectations (though if I read one more piece that references the missing Russian from the "Pine Barrens" episode as an example of this tendency, I swear ...). Over the years, Chase and company have taken Chekhov's dictum about the gun on the wall in the first act that needs to be fired by the third and said, well, maybe it does and maybe it doesn't, and it's more dramatic if the audience doesn't know which it is. But as Sepinwall suggests, if the final season of your show has about a dozen guns on the wall, all of them obviously cocked and loaded, you more or less have to pull the trigger. If you don't, you'll have sacrificed the very sense of realism that The Sopranos has labored so hard to build... [Y]ou'll leave the audience with the suspicion that you never had any idea what you were doing to begin with.

I've already talked a little bit about why I think the messiness of The Sopranos is a good thing. While I'm not a huge fan of entertainers intentionally pissing off their audience, there's definitely a place for TV shows/novels/movies/etc. that say to their audience: "Thanks for coming with us to this point. Now, we're going to go over there." In other words, it's fine for The Sopranos to ask more of its audience than it has in the past: part of the "asking more" might be that it isn't going to offer the kind of satisfying resolution we get at the end of, say, a season of 24. I'd even say that over the long term, a continuing series needs to be willing to leave part of its audience behind. For instance, my guess is that a lot of what has happened this season on The Sopranos has alienated some of the fans of the show who were drawn to the goombah hi-jinx that were featured more centrally in the earlier seasons.

Dealing with Alan's comments: it's "cruel" when you have a show that promises a certain kind of resolution (say, solving a mystery), but keeps moving the goalpost and/or pulling the rug out from under its audience (like, say, Lost or, alas, Twin Peaks). I don't think it's "cruel" when a show bucks convention by not tying up plot threads, especially when the show has never really bothered to tie up plot threads and where a lot of the best moments of the show have been of a "whimper-not-a-bang" variety (like when Tony finally makes the decision not to conspire with Johnny Sac: it's a momentous negative - the important thing is that nothing comes of it).

II.

I'd also like to comment on the idea that keeps coming up in this discussion that writers need to have an ending in mind when they start a series. That is, serial TV is best when the writers are always writing towards a goal. I'm not saying this is a bad way to work, but I think that it is certainly not the only good way and, in fact, it doesn't necessarily play to one of the major strengths of the serial format - i.e. that writers/producers/etc. can react and respond to ideas/themes/characters/etc. that grow organically out of the creative process.

The problem is that this kind of serial improvisation doesn't fit well with the mentality that all plot threads need to be tied-up neatly. As with most everything having to do with contemporary pop culture, we can get a good picture of this dilemma by looking at X-Men comics.

During the first half of his original run on X-Men, Chris Claremont introduced and developed almost all of the major X-characters and created most of the classic story-lines, including the "Dark Phoenix Saga" and "Days of Future Past". These stories were sprawling, messy, super-hero-as-space-opera pop epics.

Now, these stories - partly because they were churned out on a monthly basis under less than ideal creative conditions - tended to have their fair share of loose ends. Eventually, instead of creating more stories with more loose ends, Claremont and the X-Men writers who followed him decided that they could spend their time just tying-up loose ends.*

The problem with that has been that it trained a generation of super-hero comic book fans to pay way too much attention to loose ends and to place way too much value on whether or not they eventually were tied-up. (Compare this to the wild and woolly days of Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and Steve Ditko comics). These pop geeks can an inordinate amount of satisfaction over the little details at the expense of being able to get a sense of and enjoy the big picture. This POV has really done a number on super-hero comics, but, even worse, thanks to the triumph of the geeks, it's become a big part of American pop culture in general.

(The X-Men-ification of pop culture might best be experienced by looking through the Wikipedia pages on Lost: the entry for the character John Locke is longer than the entry for the real John Locke.)

So here's the thing: when you're dealing with serial narratives that aren't fully mapped out from beginning-to-end, like The Sopranos, try not to approach them like die hard comic wonks approach contempo X-Men comics.

*Comics wonkery aside: I've singled out Claremont because talking about X-Men suits my purposes, but Roy Thomas probably deserves a mention as the guy who really started this trend.

Currently...

What I'm Watching: More or less the same as before.

Veronica Mars came back from a break with a particularly bad episode about how discrimination is, like, wrong. It isn't so much that I disagree, but when a show does this kind of thing - see also the recent Battlestar Galactica ep with Bruce Davison which was also about how discrimination is wrong - I have to wonder why they even bother. I mean, do the people who make Veronica Mars and Battlestar really think that their audience wants a little civics lesson? Especially simple, cut-and-dried civics lessons like these? The problem with them is that they make it all so easy that it becomes boring: the characters get to do the noble thing and "doing the noble thing" doesn't really cost them anything. There's no drama because their choices turn out to be either (a) really easy and/or (b) free of consequences. Man, how I hate these "very special episodes".

More problems with Veronica: Scene-by-scene, the show has handled the relationship stuff pretty well, but the problem is that the writers have had pretty lame ideas when it comes to the bigger picture. Veronica Mars should not be The O.C., where characters are constantly jumping in-and-out of relationships every other episode. We already had Logan and Veronica breaking-up and getting back together and breaking-up and getting back together again, so, this season they should have tried to show us Veronica and Logan trying to work through their issues - to dramatize a relationship in progress rather than a relationship always on the verge of collapsing or reforming.

Now, about The Sopranos: I've read a bunch of internet critics complaining that Tony's gambling problem came out of nowhere next week and that Chase et al. should have (a) used something else to dramatize Tony losing his grip or (b) spent more time setting-up the gambling stuff. I don't know: I like to nitpick as much as the next blogger, but I think this criticism is off-base. I mean, would you really like The Sopranos better if it were a "well-constructed" show, carefully setting up all of its threads, developing and resolving them on cue, like, say, E.R.? Not a slam at E.R., a show I like quite a bit, but, even when it resolves things in an unexpected manner, it pretty clearly lays out all the conflicts and issues for you. The last three seasons of The Sopranos have been a lot messier. And almost all of the episodes from Season Six have featured some "out of nowhere" element that a more cautious show would have spent some time introducing. Part of why these elements work, for me at least, is that Chase et al. have already laid the groundwork. I mean, I completely buy that Tony would like to gamble, that he'd respond to stress by gambling more, and that his marriage would be vulnerable to the resulting financial strain.

I like that the show makes these big, bold choices, even though it means that sometimes you just have to go along with it.

My personal Sopranos problem recently has been that I don't think Tony Siricco and Stevie Van Zandt are good enough actors to do what the scripts have asked them to do. Sylvio's play for Tony's position from the beginning of this season fell flat for me because it required Van Zandt to do more than just mug, likewise the recent episode that Tony spends gauging Paulie's reliability. Siricco and Van Zandt are both pretty funny and they're good personalities to have around - they add to the show's color - but they don't bring enough to the table as actors to justify the (relative) importance of their characters. I've always though it was a big mistake that Chase et al. had Sylvio kill Adriana because Van Zandt can't really do anything else with it - i.e., can't turn it into something that comes up - or noticeably doesn't come up - in Sylvio's scenes with Christopher.

Finally, the difference between Heroes when it started - stumbling, badly-paced, erratically-acted, but with some good ideas - and Heroes now - written, directed, and acted with assuredness and a sense of style - is (in the debased context of contemporary pop culture) staggering, mainly because most of the time shows go in the opposite direction.

What I'm Reading: It was a bit of a chore to finish The Flying Inn, which didn't quite work for me, although I'm sympathetic to Chesterton's basic philosophy and what he was trying to do with the book.

I'm still reading A Fire Upon the Deep, which, I have to admit, I like a little less than I did 100 or so pages ago. The main problem I have is that there's really no reason for it to be such a long book. Yes, it's full of ideas, but Vinge spends too much time on narratively redundant details that, I guess, are necessary from a world building POV.

I also (finally) read Heinlein's Citizen of the Galaxy. I always see sci-fi fans recommending Have Spacesuit Will Travel when it comes to RAH's juveniles. I think that book is pretty enjoyable, but Citizen of the Galazy, IMO, would be a better choice: it has a more expansive scope, the world building is more interesting, there isn't too much of the "gee whiz rocketships" vibe, and it strikes me as being more in the mainline of the sci-fi that has come afterwards (esp. "New Space Opera" stuff).

And I'm rereading the Russell Kirk edited Portable Conservative Reader. I've just gotten through the opening section of Edmund Burke excerpts and am tempted to start posting some quotes that are particularly relevant to me and to the themes of this blog.

What I'm Listening To: Lots of classic rock, as I'm sure you could have guessed. Still looking for more podcasts.

What I'm Playing: Some Carcassonne with my fiance and a friend of ours this past weekend, plus more NASCAR 06. Still jonesing for RPGing and getting to the point where I'm actually going to have to, you know, do something about it. I was listening to a Durham 3 podcast today at the gym and that reignited my desire to play Sorcerer.

Easter Weekend

Apart from the new episode of The Sopranos, I didn't get a chance to watch much in the way of movies/TV shows/etc. over Easter weekend: I spent it with the family and, when we weren't too busy stuffing ourselves, we were watching the Masters. I did finish reading John Le Carre's Absolute Friends, parts of which I loved, but I want to hold off writing about it until I finish watching The Good Shepherd.

As for The Sopranos: this episode continues with one of my favorite themes from the last half-season - the idea that for Tony to be an effective boss he needs to be top thug as much as he needs to be a master of Machiavellian strategy. I knew that once they start playing Monopoly things were going to go bad, but part of what makes me like this show so much is that I didn't know exactly how things would go bad. Tony's eventual "punishment" of Bobby was really chilling and the final moments among the most moving in the show's history. Usually in The Sopranos, irony goes hand-in-hand with black comedy, but here the irony is played as a kind of small-scale tragedy.

TV Chat: The Sopranos

The Sopranos

I know I wasn't completely alone in thinking that the last "half-season" of The Sopranos was the show at or near its best: at least some of my friends agree with me.

For me, those episodes really saved the show for me. As much as I enjoyed the fourth and fifth seasons, I couldn't help but feel that Chase et al. were pandering to the "Bro" crowd: the people whose primary interest in the series was to watch charismatic, funny guys doing horrible shit to people, partly because, let's face it, there's something satisfying about the fantasy of being able to solve all sorts of problems by beating the shit out of the (putative?) source of the problem.

I'm not sure that I would have felt all that strongly about this, except that HBO had two other shows that (for the most part) avoided this kind of weaselly sort-of-glorification of sociopaths. Apart from The Wire's inexplicable romanticization of Omar (the gangsta Robin Hood), none of its criminals are presented as being particular pleasant or goofy or fun to hang with. There's also a dimension of real world tragedy to a character like Stringer Bell - diligently going to community college, trying his best to move into the big leagues, but utterly unprepared for it. And, in Deadwood, while Ian McShane's Al Swearengen is certainly charismatic, the show doesn't let that get him off the hook in the way that The Sopranos has, in the past, let the funny-guy antics and Tarantino-esque dialogue of Sylvio, Paulie, and Christopher cover up their sociopathic tendencies.

Al Swearengen is also great for another reason: the gangsters on The Sopranos are just hoods - violent guys who were too lazy or greedy to settle for living an ordinary, average Joe life. But tktk went into the wilderness and built something out of nothing: his accomplishment is tied up with his willingness to use violence.

But Season 6A changed that:

First, the opening Dennis Potter-ish episodes demanded more of the show's audience than anything in previous seasons. While I don't like it when a series says "screw you" to its audience, I do like it when it rewards a demand for a greater and/or different type of engagement. It's too bad that so many of the shows fans weren't interested in meeting this demand. Usually at this point I'd say something like "I don't blame them", but, in this case, I do blame them. What they wanted seemed to have been more of the same: edgy, violent, goombah hi-jinx and fetishization of mafia politics and power plays - i.e., a mix of some of the more superficial, yet distinctive, elements of Pulp Fiction and Casino. Watching mainly to see who's going to get "whacked".

Second, Chase et al. decided to tackle head-on the fact that, whatever else these guys are, they 're also (perhaps primarily) violent thugs, not heroes or funny "good-time" guys: that they're outlaws because they're greedy and not for any bigger romantic/tragic reasons (or even any bigger socio-economic reasons).

Anyway, I'm hoping that the remainder of Season 6 will continue to take a clear-eyed look at these characters and not revert to pandering to crowd who thinks that this is a good idea.

Playing Catch-Up

When I took a break from blogging, I also cut down on my blog reading. This gave me more time to do important stuff like reading Robert Heinlein novels, playing tabletop RPGs and tinkering with RPG design, posting on message boards, and watching lots of TV shows on DVD.

Now, I'm playing catch-up with all the great writing on blogs that I've missed out on over the last few months. It's a quixotic undertaking, but I'll keep at it in the hopes that I'll find more stuff like this excellent Sean Collins post from last month. Sean is again dealing with one of his favorite topics - violence and torture as part of our arts and entertainments - and, as usual, he's sharper (not to mention less hypocritical) than most other pop culture pundits.

This time, Sean comments on Eli Roth's claims that the graphic torture scenes in Roth's movie Hostel are meant to make the audience feel guilty about the current state of world affairs (Roth specifically mentions Iraq and the response to Hurricane Katrina).

Sean's response is one that I wish I had come up with:

The notion that your society, your era, your government, your audience is uniquely prone to evil--a notion almost always accompanied by the sort of clean-hands finger-pointing exemplified by Roth [and others]--is to me the absolute laughable height of narcissism in pessimist's clothing; it's the art-critical equivalent of doomsday prophesying. The fact that filmmakers and critics now feel they have free rein on the subject of torture and brutality because they see our government involved in it yet apparently had little or nothing to say on the subject when it was status quo in countless other countries across the globe for years and years and years (which it still is) is exhibit A.

There is nothing special about your pet target. On the contrary. All humans, from every country and time period ever, are terrible. That's what great art is about. I can see an argument being made that embracing this belief is a way of letting oneself off the hook; I submit that one who makes that argument proves in so doing that he doesn't understand the belief at all.

Well, I probably wouldn't have gone so far as Sean does here (it is the potential for terribleness that isn't unique to any time or place or culture) but I like the way Sean takes this right over the edge.

He also talks a lot about The Sopranos in this post, and what he says has helped me to get a better handle on my increasingly ambivalent feelings about this show. But that probably deserves a post of its own.