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The Virgin Mary Dances at the Bada Bing
Walter A. Davis 
I’ll begin with the contrast that I’ll be told is illegitimate. Shakespeare in Macbeth asks us to invest ourselves deeply emotionally, psychologically, and morally in a murderer (two actually) who is horrified by what he becomes. Taking us deep inside that tortured psyche Shakespeare discovers (and we with him) the only ethics worthy of the name: it is through our deeds that we destroy ourselves—and we know it. Judgment doesn’t come in the non-existent afterlife but right now in the (self-) knowledge we can’t escape of who we are. And because Shakespeare asks us to invest in the process whereby Macbeth destroys himself –feeling for this man at the same time we are deeply horrified by him—his play must have an end organically consonant with the demands and expectations that the work creates in us, its audience. Death comes for Macbeth before the final curtain, comes in a great soliloquy that I assume you all know; and then it comes a second time on the battlefield at the hands of MacDuff. Now switch gears. Assume Shakespeare gets stuck trying to write that soliloquy: life’s a walking shadow (they never get that) a tale told by an idiot, full of a title from Faulkner’s greatest novel signifying…Then cut to the final battle. But render it all postmodern. Are Birnam Woods moving or is it just Macbeth’s “moral”—or paranoid—imagination? Was MacDuff really untimely ripped from his mother’s womb or is that just a rumor even he can’t confirm? Will the swordfight end in Macbeth’s murder or Phil Leotardo’s or in some kind of draw and a rematch in a future blockbuster? The ending of The Soopranos has produced confused responses in its primary audience, but almost universal praise from critics (even political luminaries such as Leon Wieseltier in The New Republic 6-18-07) and screenwriters, especially those who write ongoing TV dramas with complex plots. Look, let’s face it, the times have changed. Shakespeare wrote a tragedy; whereas today we are all postmodernist ironists and reject all “master narratives.” Life is tragic and comic and mundane and joyful and stupid and brutal and (hopefully) ongoing. Moreover, the psychological unity or coherence given to a character like Macbeth is a thing of the past. We all have multiple identities (isn’t it pretty to think so), which are determined by all the different social roles we play, desires we pursue, and the ways we feel today-- for the hell of it or because we’ve had too much caffeine or whatever. Anyone with half a brain can see the supreme advantage in this view. No guilty conscience will ever come to get me. There is no deep pattern or terrible unity to my deeds or my life. Let’s just say we’re taking a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut. It’s all a game—life, love, the self, responsibility, judgment—to be played with irony. And irony’s child—cynicism. (After all there is no better, cleverer way to “master” anything traumatic. Hell, try it on 9-11 or America today: you’ll soon find the true religion.) And so before criticizing the ending of The Sopranos consider a few glib readings of the ending. Ain’t artistic freedom great—not just for the artist but for the audience. Fade to black at the right time and everybody gets to write their own ending. Does Tony get whacked? Does the whole family? Is Meadow alone saved (because like Daisy Fay Buchanan she’s a bad driver)? No, all are saved, except from the cholesterol in the onion rings. No, I’ve got a subtler possibility—the fade to black is what happens to Tony in the split second the bullet enters his brain. We don’t hear the shot because presumably he wouldn’t. But he dies happy, doesn’t he, as he sees Cordelia moving toward him, spared the fate of Sofia Coppola. Or, if you’re one of those gory types, you can picture it (as I did) looking at that black screen: the hail of bullets and their four bodies bouncing about like the end of Bonnie and Clyde. (Rumor: DVD to include 5 alternative endings. Rashomon vivant.) And then of course there’s the superior smirk of the truly sophisticated viewer who knows we dolts are simply being set up for a possible sequel—on the big screen! There’s only one problem with all this richness. Chase works harder than anyone since Hitchcock to create an ascending set of expectations in that final scene counterpointed by Tony’s hopeful nostalgia choice of the Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin.” (Having only viewed the scene once I may not remember the sequence of shots in the perfect order.) There’s something ominous about this place. That guy with the baseball bat in the corner booth doesn’t look quite right. (No, this isn’t just Tony’s view a la subjective camera.) Tony sits alone as the ominous grows. That other guy sitting at the counter, now isn’t he one suspicious looking dude? Then Carmella arrives (Oh no is she gonna get hit too) and shortly later the son (preceded by another ominous looking person, and so for a split second the possibility that sonny spared will witness the carnage). And now the tension really mounts given the fact that this family finally seems to have resolved problems. (Think end of the remake of The Postman Always Rings Twice.) But that guy at the counter so looks like a hit man and that other guy in the corner…And now we get the truly maddening effort of our Driver Ed student Meadow to park her car. And with each failure the hope that she won’t bring it off because then at least she will be saved. This is played out not once but three times as cuts of her banging her tires into the curb alternate with shots of the ominous guy at the front counter. Finally he rises and makes his way to the bathroom and we all know this is an allusion to the great scene in Godfather I when Michael Corleone goes to retrieve the gun planted for him there. And just at that moment (though preceded by two ominous fellos lurching toward the jukebox) Meadow enter and smiling as never before moves toward her Daddy. …And nothing happens! Life is mundane and that’s why Mr. Chase ends his great work (and I am a longtime lover of this show) with that lesson. On the difference between art and life—or between works like Macbeth that fail to know that and ones like The Sopranos that bow to it. “Life’s that way.” Ahh, yes, but some works of art aren’t; and the last few minutes of The Sopranos with its meticulous choreography of coming catastrophe is one of them. That is, until in a failure of nerve or an exercise in cynicism Mr.Chase decides he’s been pulling our leg. The carefully nurtured expectations are a joke. At the expense of..?  
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At the expense I would argue of The Sopranos, which has, it turns out, a great deal in common with Shakespeare’s play. Tony Soprano isn’t Michael Corleone, but then he’s not Joe Pesci in GoodFellas either. He’s a man who begins to realize one day looking out at some ducks that have come to live in his swimming pool that there is something empty in him and something else crying out to live. Anxiety attacks follow and he seeks the counsel of a psychotherapist who tries to get him to see how strangled he is by a destructive mother and a father who exploited his love to get him involved in a life of crime. For a while the sessions with the shrink are among the most exciting things in the show precisely because they call up the same expectations that give Macbeth its power. Tony Soprano ain’t a post-mod play of multiple identities; he’s a man with a complex and buried psyche that has started bleeding into his life. Where will this take him? We don’t know—down the path Woody Allen brilliantly traced in Crimes and Misdemeanors or toward something more brutal, personally exacting, and yes, tragic. For there is a fate worse than losing one’s life. Namely, the loss of the very thing that makes one’s life worth living. And what if a man loses it as he is in the very process of trying to find it? Well that could be a tale more chilling than the one Martin Landau tells Woody Allen at the end of Allen’s film. Did The Sopranos begin to tell this tale and then abandon it? When? In Season 3, 5, or a few seconds before the end? It wouldn’t be the first time Mr. Chase cops out. One of the most distressing things about the penultimate episode is the way Dr. Melfi is disposed of. This too has been hailed as evidence of Mr. Chase having seen through psychobabble and revealed to us what a smarmy group psychotherapists are and how weak Melfi when confronted by social embarrassment and the betrayal by her own shrink which she quickly repeats with Tony. I assume by now you’ve all heard the story. The APA or some psychotherapeutic organization was giving the show and Lorraine Bracco awards, praising it for the first truly serious and thoughtful representation of a shrink on TV. In attendance Chase heard about a study (a pretty old one in fact) that “proved” that psychopaths don’t improve through therapy, but simply manipulate the therapist and in doing so actually become more nefarious. Voila and apparently that quickly a writer solved a problem that had begun to exceed his skill and knowledge. No need to develop the therapeutic relationship any further. For that could lead into deep stuff. Fart around with it from time to time and then when the time is right take a giant dump on it. (Since I spend a lot of time with them, I’ll confess here that psychotherapists—especially in Amerika—are a group much in need of criticism, but even the most craven would probably not dismiss Tony the way Melfi did but would take at least a few sessions to discuss termination.) The same thing that happened with Melfi recurred when Mr. Chase confronted the problem of following through with the development of Tony Soprano’s character as it moved toward its only possible end. Again Chase was in over his head. Depth psychology eludes him and so he glibly embraced the surface of things, making the mundane his haven. Which brings me to my most objectionable suggestion. What if the truth of the matter is that Shakespeare was right? That character is fate because we carry our deeds within us-- that there is a tragic unity to our psyche and our life that haunts us and that will one day present the bill? Postmodern irony and gamesmanship constitute a gutless flight from psychological reality! But then without their benefit we may begin to long for that hail of bullets killing them all not as some sado-masochistic pleasure but as one of the ways in which art is or can be the working of a justice, which can come to us in many ways—even out of the mundane. There’s one vacation you can’t take—from yourself. And that’s the one most people spent their lives pursuing. But great art knows better. It spies out all the lies and hiding places, revealing to us what we don’t want to know or see. One measure of the failure of the end of The Sopranos is that a show that so often aspired in uniquely compelling ways to genuine artistic, psychological, and ethical seriousness concludes with a cynical manipulation then contemptuous dismissal of its audience.
 Walter A. Davis is an actor, playwright, and cultural critic. His primary theoretical book on theatre is Get the Guests: Psychoanalysis, Modern American Drama and the Audience (U of Wisconsin P, 1994). His plays include An Evening With JonBenet Ramsey (Authors Choice P, 2004). His most recent work of cultural criticism Death's Dream Kingdom: The American Psyche since 9-11 has just appeared and can be ordered in the U.S. at The U of Michigan Press and in the U.K. at Pluto Press (London) Recommend this article...
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