He wanted to let your own mind create, let everybody create their own ending. For me it was those two guys up at the thing who were coming in, those dark guys --- I thought, those are the guys that are gonna do it.

OK, I hate to disagree with Heather Havrilesky on anything, because I consider her a minor goddess, but I think the twenty seconds of black screen did signify Tony getting clipped. And what other "loose ends" did people want to see tied up? We know how AJ and Meadow are going to wind up, and Tony has made the rounds of his surviving family and associates (Uncle Jun the last among them, reminding us of what we come to in the end), and the NY-NJ war leaves two families decapitated. As for Havrilesky's objection -- "That's probably wishful thinking, like hoping that there really is a Santa Claus simply because it would make the holidays much more interesting. We've never seen things from Tony's perspective, so why would we start now? And wouldn't we at least know who killed him?" -- well, I think of the moment in Casino when Joe Pesci's character gets killed while doing the voiceover so that the voiceover itself gets cut off. You don't come across that narrative device every day, now, do you. It's an abrupt and jarring focalization (to use one of those barbaric terms from narratology), and it suddenly puts us right in Tony's place. But look at what happens as a result: we don't have to see the "reaction" shots from his family or from the rest of the patrons as all hell breaks loose. His life just ends. There's no catharsis for us at all, and that's part of what people seem to be angry at -- at least the ones who are complaining on the Sopranos message board that this ending ruins the entire series.

Now, the fact that Chase didn't even give us a gunshot to go on, no clue that Tony really dies -- well, so what? Are there really ghosts in The Turn of the Screw, or is the governess mad? (That debate has been going on for more than a century now.) We're left to wonder whether we've been duped into thinking that Tony dies because all the staging in that final scene -- the brief shots of each of the restaurant patrons, the focus on the guy going to the men's room, the closeups of Meadow having trouble parking the car -- feels like the generic suspense-creatin' mechanisms that precede a catastrophe. We stop and ask ourselves how much of our reaction depends on those narrative mechanisms. And so the ending becomes, in a meta- way, not Chase's "final fuck you" to the viewers (as so many pissed-off viewers have said) but, rather, a form of what did you expect? -- except that it's a real question, not a rhetorical one.

It might not be utterly brilliant or anything, but it works for me. . . .


Michael Bérubé