The Hollow of a Murdered Explosion

Now we all get to see three or four songs by Van Morrison. He climaxes, as he always did in those days, with “Cyprus Avenue” from Astral Weeks. After going through all the verses, he drives the song, the band, and himself to a finish which has since become one of his trademarks and one of the all-time classic rock’n roll set-closers. With consummate dynamics that allow him to snap from indescribably eccentric throwaway phrasing to sheer pasion in the very next breath he brings the music surging up through crescendo after crescendo, stopping and starting and stopping and starting the song again and again, imposing long maniacal silences like giant question marks between the stops and starts and ruling the room through sheer tension, building to a shout of “It’s too late to stop now!,” and just when you think it’s all going to surge over the top, he cuts it off stone cold and dead, the hollow of a murdered explosion, throws the microphone down and stalks off the stage. It is truly one of the most perverse things I have ever seen a performer do in my life. And, of course, it’s sensational: our guts are knotted up, we’re crazed and clawing for more, but we damn well know we’ve seen and felt something.

Lester Bangs, “Astral Weeks” (1979) (buy)

I watched the final episode of the Sopranos in the same manner I’ve watched all of the last two complete seasons. I have to wait until Monday afternoon, or sometimes Tuesday, for the BitTorrent file of Sunday’s episode to finish downloading. I watch it on my laptop, full-screen, and either sit in my desk chair or, sometimes, lie on my couch. I don’t remember ever anticipating a television event as much as this episode, and it was all I could do to squint and put a hand in front of my computer screen every time I opened an email on Monday—I knew (and it happened twice, when I saw the word “Sopran—“ in the text through my fingers, that people were just dying to talk about whatever happened. I flipped through the radio dial at lunch, stupidly thinking I was safe, and wouldn’t you know it, some goddamn NPR reporter was blathering on about it right when I scanned through that station. I heard “and right before…Chase fades to black.” I didn’t have any idea what happened, but I knew then and there that nothing had happened. I think I might have smirked, I don’t remember. I was too busy wondering at my fucking luck. Seriously.

I watched the epidode on Monday evening, and toward the end, when Tony meets his family at Holsten’s and Chase deviously cuts quickly around the restaurant in an unmotivated fashion, building up suspense, I said to myself (or maybe my dog), “Nothing’s going to happen. Holy shit.” Even though I was relatively sure before watching that the episode ended in the most purgatory of fashions, I was still in utter disbelief and shock when my laptop screen abruptly cut to black, sat there for a few seconds, and then started rolling the credits. “Don’t Stop Believing,” with all of its forced, bloated passion (the exact kind that Tony relied upon to keep himself alive), was still ringing in my ears, like the firecracker pops and “Sister Christian” from the frenzied coke deal scene in Boogie Nights. And I knew what had happened, because VLC, the viewing application, was still open, showing me that there was about a minute left. But that immediate sense of shock, that lingering “p” from “stop,” hanging in the air like the sunspots that remain when you close your eyes at the beach, was throbbing in my head. It calmed down, and I realized how fast my heart was beating. My fists were clenched, and I was biting my lip for the last 10 minutes of that episode, and at that point, I just fucking laughed.

But not because I thought I understood what Chase was meaning to do with that technique, what Carl described as an avant glitch, even though I thought I might. No, I laughed alone for the same reason I chuckled at the final episode of season 3, with Uncle Junior serenading everyone at Artie Bucco’s restaurant. Because Chase, despite the knuckleheads who still assert that he’s taking the easy way out by not giving “full closure” to the story, is not directing a police procedural, nor is he directing a feature film. This is not “Law and Order,” nor is it even “The Wire” (which is also incredibly brilliant, but for completely different reasons). Not to cast stones, but I have a sneaking suspicion that those who wanted a nasty bloodbath in the final seconds of episode 86, those who wanted Tony to die at the hands of AJ, or Paulie, or for Tony to enter the Witness Protection Program, just don’t understand the show. Not that there’s one way to “get” the Sopranos, mind you, but come on. I remember suffering through so many hacked-out editorials, by so many bad entertainment writers, about how the Sopranos was washed up because of the inclusion of extended dream sequences, the lack of “narrative cohesion” (whatever the fuck that means), or, most egregiously, the lack of a sufficient body count at a certain point in the season. The Sopranos is not Scarface (either version).

The Sopranos is serial television at its finest; The Wire might end up ranking higher for me after its final season, but it can’t touch, nor does it try, the willies that Chase continually gave me during the 8 years he produced that show. How Alik Sakharov’s elegant, clean photography could be viciously edited, and how that sudden friction occasionally made me jump from my chair, even though it might have only showed Edie Falco’s stunned expression as she looked over her shoulder (one of the more stunning visages in television, or film, history, hers). And Chase’s utilization of the serial format changed the rules of television. I hate HBO’s mantra “It’s not TV, it’s HBO,” because, well, of course it’s television. But it’s HBO, too. Which means, along with incredible sex and violence, Chase can also tell a never-ending story. One that echoes through thousands of broadband connections with complaints, hosannas, and conspiracy theories. I’ll amend Carl’s notion of Chase’s post-modern techno-savvy with his appreciation for exactly those who wanted his head after they got off the phone with Comcast. Not only did he refuse to bring to a tidy end the untidiest (but also, visually speaking, very tidy) narrative in modern history (we’ll wait to see how Lost turns out—but remember that Lost wouldn’t exist without the Sopranos), he left it to the viewers to make up their own. And bless him for refusing to say anything much about it. 86 hours of television should speak for its damn self. Stop asking for a brochure at the art gallery, and just go wander around.

I have to admit that I was a) woefully wrong with my own prediction for the finale, and b) woefully vague with that prediction anyway. But I’ve never been too fond of (or good at) predicting things anyway, like Super Bowl teams or NCAA tournament teams, and especially how television shows are going to work out. Because it’s probably the absolute least fun thing I can think of to do, at least when television is concerned. And I’m talking specifics here—my prediction was way off, but it’s not because I was betting on who would die. It’s because I expected Chase to somehow punish Tony, which I now realize is pretty dumb; falling into the same category, more or less, as those who wanted a bloodbath with hookers and a Meadow nude scene or whatever. There’s no need for Chase to make Tony suffer for his sins; if he were going to do that, something as simple and dunderheaded as death would be the biggest cop-out of all time. I was hoping for a self-realization of his smallness and a life of pedestrian ennui; maybe a cut to black as he sits with a cigar by his pool (this may or may hot have eventually happened). No, why Chase is one of the greatest modern visual storytellers is because he knows that snapping us back to black, making us aware of our own palpitations, makes us suffer.

We suffer because we can’t know everything. Right now, we can know virtually anything we want about any person or event, living or dead. Pierre Levy has called it a “cosmopedia,” in which collective knowledge coalesces in Brittanica form, updated by the minute and available (theoretically) to everyone to read and contribute. And, in his own way, Chase partially subverted that by cutting to black right as Meadow walked in the door (it’s not a fade to black, either. Completely different effect.). It’s an interminable pause that brings out the worst in those who can’t fathom a story without at least a subtitled ending (oh god, can you imagine: “Meadow went on to complete law school, and is now clerking for a judge in Flushing”), without a big bang. It’s the most fitting ending to a show that’s dealt so much with the psychological and interfamilial ramifications of killing other humans: the hollow of a murdered explosion.