Tony, Lars and Smokey

The Sopranos: Final Episode (prediction) The most prominent element in Citizen Kane, for me at least, wasn’t the sled. It was the tiny snowglobe for which Kane was so fond—the one that Greg Toland probably spent two months building a lens in order to get the ridiculously deep-focused shot of, in Kane’s hand, as he dies. My prediction: the last episode of The Sopranos, due to air in but five short days, will end in the same manner. It will end with the realization, as much on Tony’s part as ours, that the entire world we’ve become so used to over the past 8 years, just as he has, is nothing more than an overblown construction of Tony’s overblown ego. A world comprised of sycophants who do whatever he tells them to, and in which he can expunge any remnant of self-doubt dealing with his family at his therapist. A therapist (an entire industry, perhaps?) that we’ve just learned is a fraud, a completely unethical and self-absorbed (not just “human and frail” as we’ve come to believe) person who leaves Tony in the lurch at the most crucial time of his life. And all because she read an old-ish study that seems logical to me, sitting here without a medical degree. But it’s not a script flaw. No, it’s Melfi. And that’s how Chase has to have planned it. Because he’s a genius. The two most important components to Tony’s (and our) insular, overexpanded worldview and sense of self—his yes-men and his therapist—have been slowly flaking off across the season; shed like the piles of asbestos that resemble what’s left of Tony’s false empire to himself. And this, if it ends up being the show’s ending (oh please, let it end this way!), would be a perfect revelation for us, and for Tony. His empire is, as Phil Leotardo put it, nothing more than just a “glorified crew,” a bunch of mugs with steel hearts, but low rent compared to the New York crew. Why else would Chase stage Bobby’s unfortunate demise as cross-cut with a miniature train-wreck? He’s just as tied up in his childlike world of toys (he’s the sweetest guy on the show) as Tony is with is microcosmic New Jersey-as-New York. We’ve not been given much access to the size or force of the New York guys, and with good reason: neither has Tony—or, he’s fooled himself into believing the opposite, by surrounding himself with people who tell him so, holing up in a Xanadu and . And the revelation that the past 8 years have been an extended, serial, trompe l’oeil is just extraordinarily magnificent, and frightening in a way that David Fincher and M. Night Shayamalan could only hope to be. We’ve been watching this show, for this long, from the perspective, more or less, of a complete sociopath, but one who’s learned to cope with and participate in reality, bringing everyone along with him in the process. I can’t see it ending any other way—this past episode (one of the most intense hours of television I’ve ever seen) crystallized it for me. Anyone else?

—————-

“The stage drama, when it is meant to do more than entertain—though entertainment is always one of its vital aims—is a metacommentary, explicit or implicit, witting or unwitting, on the major social dramas of its social context. Not only that, but its message and its rhetoric feed back into the latent processural structure of the social drama and partly account for its ready ritualization. Life itself now becomes a mirror held up to art, and the living now perform their lives, for the protagonists of a social drama, a ‘drama of living,’ have been equipped by aesthetic drama with some of their most salient opinions, imageries, tropes, and ideological perspectives.” (emphases in original)

Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre (buy)

Lars Von Trier The Boss of It All I’ve recently read several books, preparing for exams, dealing with a rather fascinating subject—performance—in an often equally-fascinating way. Essentially, I’m talking about Victor Turner (above) as well as Erving Goffman, who, in divergent ways, discuss the intertwining nature of everyday activity and performance. In other words, how the two phenomena are essentially at different points on a continuum—in our daily activities, we slip into and out of “characters” and performances in much the same manner that actors do. Taking this to its ultimate philosophical end, as I bet Von Trier is wont to do at some point, would mean questioning the nature of reality as we know it &c, you know, what is “real” and what is put on, and how cinema interferes with, heightens, and/or denies this slippage. Anyway, after opening The Boss of It All with a brief episode (reminiscent of Godard’s “this is how a film is financed” entre de Tout Va Bien) in which he tells the viewer what they’re going to see, and why (why not?), he segues into a wonderful story of a man (whose deadpan only barely disguises the fact that he looks dead-on like Ian McKellen) forced to play the part of “the boss of it all,” with absolutely no knowledge of the elaborate backstory that his puppetmaster has cooked up in the past. Von Trier’s film is only different in tone and intellectual content from any number of comedies in the past (Dave, The Three Amigos) that have dealt with the transition between self and performance by those paid to act, and it’s all the better for it. Like Matthew mentioned here, Von Trier used a computer program to “shoot” the feature, distancing (cutely, I might add) himself from the proceedings, and making an uber-Office in the process.

—————-

Okay, now let’s rock out for a while. Sort of. Okay, not really.

Smokey Robinson & the Miracles “More Love” (mp3) This song was a sign of things to happen, for Motown and Smokey. I wrote earlier, somewhere down below, that Smokey was working his way toward a determined end of Quiet Storm slow jams, and the core of same was visible from his first moments as a songwriter. Well, “More Love,” recorded in Los Angeles (where Gordy would move completely by 1972) with a bassist not named James Jamerson (listen to how light that bass sounds), sounds almost completely out of time for 1967, doesn’t it? Preternaturally calm, mostly due to that piano, right?
(Tamla, 1967 | Buy)

The Marvelettes “Don’t Mess With Bill” (mp3) and “The Hunter Gets Captured By the Game” (mp3) Remember how I was talking here about Smokey being on some Vertigo shit re: his mirroring of himself, voice and all, in the female artists he wrote for and produced? Well, the Marvelettes benefitted as much as Mary Wells from his (over?) use of extended metaphors, smooth jazz arrangements and understated, cool romanticism. Especially for a group originally pegged to be Motown’s teenyboppers. (Tamla, 1965 & 66 | Buy)