The Sopranos Sessions

by Matt Zoller Seitz

  Last, Orson Welles once called Citizen Kane “the greatest electric train set any boy ever had.” The train-shop scene is a jokey admission that filmmakers are overgrown kids playing God with life-size toys. As the series chugs toward its final destination, Chase is staging one collision after another. We shudder in revulsion, then try to guess what he’ll smash next. Bacala’s death (a virtual boss sprawled across a pile of model trains) ties in with the sight of those rubberneckers at the Bing recoiling from horror, then going back for more, all the while drawing no apparent distinction between a gangland hit and a car accident. They’re drawn to pain like flies to shit. It’s as if Chase is both celebrating and condemning his ability to mesmerize with suffering.

  Especially striking throughout are the parallels between Phil and Kupferberg, two men saying the right things for the wrong reasons. When Phil lays out all his problems with how the Jersey crew conducts its business, is any of it inaccurate? Especially after we see how badly they bungle whacking him?27 We know Phil’s really orchestrating this war because he’s mad about his brother and resentful that Tony never did any significant prison time, but again, is he significantly wrong to characterize Jersey as a bunch of bumblers?

  Kupferberg, meanwhile, is absolutely right about Tony using therapy to become a better criminal instead of a better human. But he’s badgering Melfi to dump Tony—in the most obnoxious, unprofessional manner possible, turning a dinner party into an intervention and revealing Tony’s identity to the other guests as a trivia question (“The answer is a female opera singer and gangster.”)—not because he’s concerned about her ethical well-being, or about what Tony might be doing to other people thanks to his therapy. Kupferberg’s just a snob—and, like Phil, a bully—who can’t tolerate the thought of a well-heeled colleague regularly interacting with a criminal. He can enjoy the Mob saga as an abstraction—as his favorite TV show, as it was for much of the audience—but it’s never sat well with him that Melfi was associating herself with “Leadbelly.” And the more violent and exciting this soap opera has become for Elliot, the more disdainful he finds the idea of her direct involvement in it.

  Across these final two seasons, the show has gotten progressively grimmer, and Chase has made it tough to mourn his principal characters for any reason besides their stillborn human potential. The episode’s bits of meta-commentary—on violence as entertainment and suffering as spectacle, and on the morality of those who watch—gain context in the scene where Melfi decides she’s had enough of Tony’s charismatic intransigence and kicks him out, using his theft of a magazine page from her waiting room as the pretext. This is the doctor–patient equivalent of Al Capone going to prison for income tax evasion, rather than his more serious crimes, but it gets the job done for Melfi, a mostly ethical person who has indulged a monster for far too long because she thought she was helping him, but also because—like Elliot—she got a vicarious thrill from his world.

  The final Melfi–Tony scene—which ends with her closing the door on him like she’s the Godfather and he’s poor Kay Corleone—might be the most explicit acknowledgment of Tony’s brutishness since killing Christopher. As he talks to Melfi about his son’s botched suicide and subsequent treatment, and his daughter’s decision to give up medicine for prelaw, he isn’t saying anything new; if we’re not moved, than we’re at least sympathetic. But because we’re seeing Tony through Melfi’s eyes, it looks like crocodile tears. Melfi wonders, as we’re supposed to, if this burly killer with a soft spot for pets and children feels anything, or if his emotionalism is overcompensation, a means of lying to himself and the world about his cauterized soul. (When AJ breaks down and starts to weep after learning of Bobby’s death, Tony drags him off his bed and callously hurls clothes at him.) Melfi has occasionally spoken bluntly to Tony, but never so disdainfully: “You miss appointments because you don’t give a shit, about commitments, about what I do, about the body of work that’s gone into building up this science. Go ahead, tell me again I sound like your wife.” It’s just tip of the iceberg of what Melfi now fully understands of her complicity, but it’s all she can directly confront him with, and the anger in her voice is enough to make up the difference for us, if not for Patient X.

  If Tony is Chase’s surrogate, Melfi is (or is supposed to be) ours. She’s saying she feels deceived and manipulated, that she’s had it, that this relationship isn’t really going anywhere, and for the sake of her mental health and personal honor, it has to end.

  And it will—with Tony outgunned, outmanned, outmaneuvered, and now lacking all the people whose counsel he depended on most, Jennifer Melfi included.

  “MADE IN AMERICA”

  SEASON 7/EPISODE 9

  WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY DAVID CHASE

  No Encore

  “It’s so amazing that it was written so long ago. It’s about, like, right now.” —Rhiannon

  In hindsight, maybe we should have seen it coming.

  Even for a series infamous for its anticlimaxes, “Made in America” proudly defies the notion of explosive endings. Long before the ice cream parlor door opens, Tony looks up, and . . . something happens—or nothing at all—the series finale sets us, and Tony, up for the idea of disappointment and confusion.

  Every time “Made in America” seems to be building to something big, even basic emotional closure, it falls apart. The war with New York ends swiftly once Butchie realizes Phil’s vendetta has gone too far and permits Tony to whack him. AJ’s SUV ignites while he’s in it with teen-model girlfriend Rhiannon (Emily Wickersham28), but both escape long before the ridiculous car blows up over a pile of burning leaves. Tony makes final visits to Silvio and Junior, but both their minds are essentially gone: the comatose Sil’s to bullet wounds, the childlike and paranoid Junior’s to dementia.

  Even the plot that consumes more screen time than the Mob war doesn’t so much end as stop, as Tony and Carmela are able to talk AJ out of his plan to enlist in the military, instead landing him a job as a development executive for Little Carmine’s production company29—a solution no one seems particularly thrilled with, even if it’s better than the alternative.

  Tony wins the war, but it’s a Pyrrhic victory at best. All his top guys are gone. Paulie reluctantly agrees to run the Cifaretto crew—the Family’s most profitable outfit, but also its most cursed, going back to Richie Aprile—because there’s no one else to run it, and the only reliable soldier he seems to have left is Walden Belfiore (Frank John Hughes), who kills Phil only a few episodes after his debut. Tony is able to return to his life, but his sister is now a widow,30 his daughter is marrying Patrick Parisi, and AJ is still AJ. And Uncle Junior’s sorry state—a shell of himself, barely subsisting at a dingy state-run mental hospital—reflects a sad alternative to Tony’s long-ago speculation that a boss like him will likely end up either dead or in the can.

  By the time Tony, Carmela, and the kids are all on their way to Holsten’s for the last supper we’ll ever share with them, it feels like the series is looping back in on itself, but in a deliberately more opaque fashion than we’re used to from Sopranos season finales.

  The show’s season-ending scenes always reaffirm certain core values, such as community and family, but with an edge of mystery or disquiet or a bitter ironic undertone. Season one ends much like season seven, with the Sopranos taking shelter from a storm (literal in “I Dream of Jeannie Cusamano,” figuratively in “Made in America”) at a restaurant (Vesuvio then, Holsten’s now). Tony ends season one nearly killing his mother and then being unable to discuss it with his mother-substitute, Dr. Melfi, after scaring her into the shrink equivalent of witness protection. Season two ends with a party at the Soprano house celebrating Meadow’s high school graduation, intercut with glimpses of sanitation and other Mob business being conducted; the final shots are Tony’s face as he lights a cigar and exhales, then an image of the ocean where Pussy’s remains are being picked apart by fish. Season three ends with Uncle Junior singing to much of the show’s co
re cast at Vesuvio; Meadow, distraught over Jackie Jr.’s death, storms out onto Bloomfield Avenue, and for a moment seems in danger of being run over. Season four ends with a shot of the Stugots anchored by the Jersey Shore, blasting Dean Martin to intimidate Alan Sapinsly into returning Tony’s cash deposit on a home that his wife no longer wants because she’s divorcing him. Season five ends with Tony emerging from snowy woods and walking through his own backyard—the happy wanderer, returned to a restored marriage that briefly seemed over. Season six ends with the extended Soprano family gathered in their home at Christmas. These endings all feel solid, settled, even as they provoke reflection. Against this pattern, season seven’s capper doesn’t feel like a proper ending. It feels like what a show might give us if it couldn’t decide on an ending. Or one that veers away from the idea of endings. A denial of endings. An attack on endings. A record scratch. A flipped switch.

  This is not what we wanted. It’s puzzling and infuriating. Like expecting a conversation and getting a sucker punch or a shrug instead. It is not what we expected. It’s something else. It’s not something you just watch. It’s something you grapple with, accept, resist, accept again, resist again, then resolve to live with.

  It’s absolutely in character for this show.

  Since season two, at least, and maybe before that, The Sopranos excelled at subverting our expectations. Sometimes it gave us what we didn’t know we wanted. Other times it gave us what we definitely didn’t want and over time we either grew to like it, rationalized our way into believing it was something else, or pretended it never happened. The show made us laugh at its audacity, its invention, its careful tending of expectations for an outcome it never had any intention of giving us. Other times it seemed to be regarding us with cool disinterest and proceeding with whatever it was going to do anyway, like David Chase snubbing Paulie in “Commendatori” after Jersey greets Italy with the episode’s title. There was never any question who was in charge of this experience. If The Sopranos were a band, it would be the kind that favored new material whether it resonated with the crowd or not, played its greatest hits only when it felt like it, and was fronted by a singer who turned his back to the audience. The final performance of a band like that might end with the musicians striding off the stage in the middle of what you know in your bones is their last song, the guitarist and bassist intentionally forgetting to unplug their instruments on the way out. Feedback. Sparks. Blackout.

  No encore.

  And here’s the thing: if you look back over everything leading up to the scene at Holsten’s, it’s impossible to claim that we weren’t warned the gig would end like this. This is Richie Aprile being set up for a showdown with Tony only to get shot at the dinner table by Janice. It’s Pussy’s treachery being uncovered not through careful detective work, but through dreams brought on by food poisoning. It’s the Russian who might or might not have made it out of the forest. It’s the employee of the month. It’s Gigi Cestone having a heart attack on the toilet, Ray Curto plotzing in the front seat of Agent Sanseverino’s car, Tony Blundetto getting ambushed on the porch. It’s Ralphie living through “University” at the end of season three and making it halfway through season four before finally being killed for a crime that had nothing to do with Tracee’s death, and that we’ll never know if he actually committed.

  As goes The Sopranos, so goes “Made in America.” While it’s structured like most of the previous finales, from Tony outmaneuvering one last enemy to the family gathering for a celebratory meal, nothing gets neatly wrapped up. Meadow’s wedding is discussed, but only in the abstract. We hear Carlo flipped to protect his son Jason, but we never see him flip, nor do we know whether his evidence could prove damning enough to bring down the Family. We hear twice that subpoenas are being handed out, but despite Tony’s depressed reactions, we never learn if they will lead anywhere. There are indications that the gun charge might finally bring Tony down, but there’s no closure on that, either. Tony visits Sil in the hospital, but we never learn if he’ll die soon or remain in that vegetative state for years. We hear Meadow had to go to the doctor to change her birth control pills. Did she have a pregnancy scare? Did she switch medicine to be extra-certain that she didn’t perpetuate the family/Family legacy with the son of a known gangster? Unlikely, since she tells her dad she went into law after seeing his treatment at the hands of cops and FBI agents—but we don’t know.

  Tony’s lawyer Mink sits there whacking that bottle of ketchup over and over until Tony grabs it out of his hands and tries to do it himself, and the ketchup still doesn’t come out.

  But if nothing works out quite how we, or Tony, might want it to, this seems part of the point of the episode, and the show. We go about the show in pity for ourselves while a great wind carries us across the sky. We all came in at the end, and can’t shake the feeling that the world (and our art reflecting it) should make more sense than it does.

  The pilot episode started with Tony telling Dr. Melfi that he feared the best of his business (and by implication, America) was over. The creeping sense of numbness and despair; the sense that the best (whatever that meant) was past; the concurrent sense that no experience that feels important to us is as important to history, or even to our friends and relatives, as we’d like think; that when we’re gone we’ll probably be forgotten, like 99.99999 percent of the human race: this is encoded in every second of “Made in America,” and was foretold throughout the run of the series, most notably in Carmela’s Paris monologue about individual woes being obliterated in the sweep of history, and in the gradual erosion of Junior’s memory, which reaches its piercing conclusion here.

  Junior doesn’t remember anything about his long, colorful, nasty life, including shooting his own nephew; he doesn’t even recognize that nephew by the time Tony consents to visit. As goes Junior, so goes the world. The widowed Janice seeks refuge in a house that used to belong to Johnny Sacrimoni. It’s surrounded by McMansions; Tony informs her that when Johnny built the house, the area was all cornfields—there’s no indication they ever existed. We learn that the key to finding Phil is locating a gas station with a pay phone in front of it; an attendant explains that few gas stations have pay phones anymore. It’s as if pay phones never existed. One of the Little Italy scenes begins with a shot of a double-decker tour bus zipping through the neighborhood, and we hear an announcer telling the tourists that Little Italy used to be a huge, thriving neighborhood, but now it’s been reduced to a handful of restaurants and stores. The scene ends with Butchie realizing he has wandered deep into Chinatown without even noticing. Where did Little Italy go? It was right there.

  “Fuckin’ A, I’m disappointed,” Phil exclaims at one point.

  To quote another episode title, join the club.

  Almost nobody gives a damn about your life but you, and according to Chase, there’s a good chance you don’t even give as much of a damn as you think. If you did, you’d already have done the hard work necessary to change yourself to match your idealized image. Most people aren’t capable of that. It’s too hard, we’re too lazy as a species, and life is just too long and too filled with problems that need immediate solving. And then, at some point, you’re not in the picture anymore, and it’s all a moot point, for you anyway.

  At Holsten’s, Tony looks up at the sound of the door opening. Cut to black. Wait, then roll credits. The story continues. You, the audience, are not around to see it.

  “When you go to a place you’ve never been before, it’s like all the people were imaginary until you got there,” Carmela told Rosalie in “Cold Stones.” “It’s like until you saw them, they never existed. And you never existed to them.”

  Tony’s final encounters with his sister, best friend, and uncle are all appropriately solemn, even if none provide quite what Tony is looking for. The Junior scene in particular—in many ways, the last proper scene of The Sopranos, before whatever occurs at the ice cream parlor—is hauntingly sad and beautiful, like the “Don’t you love
me?” conversation that ends “Where’s Johnny?” with the pathos cranked up. Junior has been dead to Tony since the shooting, but the Junior that Tony knew has vanished into snowy woods. When Janice comes to tell him about Bobby’s death, he recalls just enough of his life to assume that she’s Livia, Nica is baby Janice, and the murdered Bobby is Robert F. Kennedy. By the time Tony finally deigns to visit (in hopes of safeguarding Junior’s fortune for Bobby’s kids), even that speck of memory seems gone for good, until Tony has to take pity on the uncle who tried to murder him twice by telling him, “You and my dad. You two ran North Jersey.”

  Whatever’s in control of the vessel that was Corrado Soprano Jr. ponders this a moment and says, “Well, that’s nice.” His body isn’t dead yet, but his mind is.

  This is the road mercifully not taken by Tony Soprano. For all of his many failings, he has a wife who loves him and two children who will mostly turn out okay. He may die in that ice cream parlor. If he doesn’t, he may soon go to prison as a result Carlo’s ratting, or for the gun charge, or some old piece of evidence from the Scatino bust-out. If this is the end of his story, he’s been blessed with far more than he deserves. If it’s not, the tentacles of his life stretch out wide enough that he seems insured, Alzheimer’s chances aside, against sharing his uncle’s crushingly lonely fate.

  But “Made in America” is a story of familial disappointment for Tony, too. He never had a choice about going into the Mob, thanks to Johnny Boy, but he never wanted it for his kids: he figured Meadow could do better, and deserved to, while AJ was too lazy and dim to survive it. Yet the bulk of the finale is about Tony accepting Meadow’s decision to literally marry into the Family, and to pursue a law career inspired by witnessing her father’s treatment by law enforcement; and about Tony and Carmela coming to terms with the idea that a job working for Little Carmine is the best of a bunch of bad options for their dead-end son. Tony has tried to change both himself and his family, working—well, not hard, exactly, but a little bit, when he could spare the time, because you know how busy he is. And here he is, years later, basically in the same place. His family, too.