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And btw, once the masses exercise their right to criticize the art, then the person who created it (and was pretty clear about telling HIS story HIS way, fuck "the masses") can exercise their right to come back and tell "the masses" to go fuck themselves.
And he did. Whether you guys like it or not. Or whether you like HIM or not. He's not trying to win a popularity contest. He told a story the way he wanted to tell it. And ended it the way he wanted to end it. And was very stubborn about it.
And let me clear it up again, because I can see it coming: no, I don't want to meet/be/fuck David Chase, or work for him, or have his babies, etc. He's probably a pretty big prick, all things considered. But I'll be good and goddamned if I don't defend his right to finish his piece of art the way HE wanted to. Not you. Not "the masses." Not "the story" (more on that in a second). He ended it the way HE wanted to. It was his creation, and he earned the fucking right to end it the way he saw fit. This was the way he chose to end HIS story. Like it, or not.
All this "he owed The Story some closure" shit is bullshit, especially if he told you cats repeatedly that he wasn't going to give you guys (oops, I mean, "the STORY") the closure (in whatever form) you thought it deserved.
As if there's only one good, proper, and correct way to tell this story. FOH.
As if his decision to end the story the way he wanted to end it was somehow in logical opposition to "serving the story." I repeat, FOH.
And also, regarding this business about "he made a show about a mobster." I like how "... and his family" was conveniently left out of that sentence.
This circular pattern that we're going in is getting pretty boring, btw.
>For the moment, I'll... just say that what I personally find most surprising isn't how The Sopranos ended, but that anyone — least of all the show's supposed die-hard fans — would have expected anything different. Here is a series that, since its inception, has always taken the road less traveled, that managed to invoke a lifetime of mob-movie clichés while simultaneously transcending them. It was a meta-mob-movie in which the characters learned how to be gangsters from watching White Heat and GoodFellas and the Godfather trilogy, and in which family matters were forever intruding upon Family matters. Within the seemingly restrictive boundaries of an exhausted dramatic genre (Was it even possible to care about the petty tribulations of old-fashioned gangsters in the midst of the Enron era?), Chase managed to weave a great American epic about the burden of power, the indignity of old age, the terror of children that they will grow up to become their parents, and, of course, the inability of modern medicine to cure all that ails us (especially existential crises). And yet, people expected Chase to end things...how exactly? With the funeral of Tony Soprano? With Carmela and the kids joining the Federal Witness Protection program? With Artie Bucco deciding to sell the Vesuvio and the whole cast gathering together to sing "Auld Lang Syne"?
No matter what Chase did, of course, it was never going to be to everyone's liking. What he did do, however, strikes me as one of the boldest strokes in a series that was never short on radical gestures. Contrary to the abrupt plug-pulling that some have accused it of being, the final scene of the final Sopranos was in fact a carefully plotted and ingeniously executed distillation of Chase's three greatest themes: work, death and blood ties. Nothing hasty or unplanned about it. We are, as at the end of so many episodes, gathered for a Sopranos family dinner...
You can call that a cop-out if you so desire, but to my mind the failing of the final Sopranos isn't Chase's — it's the audience's. Reading those Monday-morning reports of disgruntled viewers assailing cable operators with reports of service outages, I was reminded of something the director David Lynch said to me last fall... "Some people really like to know what everything is," he said of viewers ruffled by his own penchant for loose ends and elliptical narratives. "I don't know how they go through life, because life has so many things that are abstract, but they do, and they just like to know — they've got that kind of mind, or being." The comparison is apt, I think, because outside of Lynch, Chase is one of the few contemporary American filmmakers to have actively embraced surrealism and abstract expressionism as part of his aesthetic...
What the reaction to The Sopranos finale rather dishearteningly proves is that many in the show's audience really were watching every week to see who might get whacked next instead of, you know, how David Chase would further push the aesthetic envelope of dramatic television storytelling. It also says something larger (and even more disheartening) about a culture that has been conditioned... to believe that proper stories have distinct beginnings, middles and ends and that anything which departs from this formula is, for lack of a better word, wrong. It says something about an audience that prefers a passive form of spectatorship to an active one, that wishes to sit back and be told exactly how to think and feel at every given moment — an attitude, I would argue, too often carried forth from the cinema or the TV room into the voting booth. And it says something about people who long for closure in things — like human relationships — that are by their very nature forever in flux. As David Chase applied the final strokes to his masterful canvas, it became clear that he had created a Jackson Pollack in a world that prefers Norman Rockwells.
- Scott Foundas, L.A. Weekly, June 12, 2007
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