Tony Soprano vs. Aristotle

Hey guys, it's Tom Guarriello. If you're like me and you've watched the HBO series The Sopranos for the last 8 years, 6 seasons, 8 years, you looked forward to the grand finale this past Sunday night with great anticipation and interest. And in the last couple of days, those of us who are fans of the series have been both experiencing our own reactions to the finale and listening to and reading about the reactions that other people had to it. Now, the word finale establishes some pretty firm expectations in our mind because it, it's supposed to be final. And the idea that stories have final aspects to them is a part of the structure of story that goes back a couple of thousand years. Aristotle wrote the Poetics, and in the Poetics he established what is still to this day the structure of a story as having a beginning, a middle, and an end. Now, stories are very important to us. Stories are— we tell stories to one another, we tell stories here on YouTube, we tell our children stories from the time that they're very young. And so all of us, from the time we're children, grow up with an expectation that a story is going to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. And when something is called a finale, as the The Sopranos final episode was called, we expect that finale to have certain characteristics. Now, um, The Sopranos finale did not have those characteristics. Instead of being a closed ending, you know, Tony Soprano dies, or Tony Soprano goes to the Witness Protection Program, or Tony Soprano whatever, the final episode ended with an open ending. And since then, people have been— many, many have been complaining that they felt cheated, they felt robbed, they felt had. I did initially had that same kind of reaction. Uh, I wrote a blog about this on Monday, which I'll put I'll put up over here, uh, in which I describe an experience of waking up in the middle of the night, Monday morning, about 2:30 Monday morning, and having the name of Henry Jenkins pop into my head. Henry Jenkins is a media theorist, brilliant media theorist, who's been talking about how we now live in an age in which the producers and the consumers of content are converging. We are all remixing, rethinking, rewriting, uh, everything. And, um, here we had David Chase of The Sopranos taking a very 21st century approach to the final episode of this very popular and very compelling television series. So when I think about what happened on Sunday night in this episode, I think about the, uh, sort of the struggle between our Aristotelian heritage, you know, the order, predictability, having things be the way they're supposed to be, versus the way things are today, which is they're not the way they're supposed to be. There is no sanctity any longer in traditional structures, things that have been the way they have been for thousands of years. Everything is suddenly turned over to all of us to work with in ways that we've never had the opportunity or the responsibility of working on them before. And it's an uncomfortable, uh, transition for many of us. Many of us are are extremely uneasy when these kinds of transitions take place because we no longer know our place in the world. You know, we were supposed to be— I mean, take a look at Shakespeare, for example. This is an example I used in my blog. You know, it's Act 5 of Hamlet, and you've been through everything you've been through, and here, okay, here comes the duel, and everybody's there and, you know, the swords, the poison has been placed on the tips and everything's ready to go. The duel begins. Curtain. Shakespeare essentially saying, you guys figure it out. You— that's not what we're used to. And there'd probably be a lot of tomatoes thrown at the stage in Shakespeare's time if that were the case. What we're seeing over the last couple of days is a lot of people throwing a lot of tomatoes at David Chase for once again doing something transgressive. He has broken the rules, and a lot of us are not happy about those rules being broken. If you're a Sopranos fan, I'd be interested in hearing your reactions, your thoughts about that final episode. Um, I continue to, to, to get a kick out of people, uh, who have asked me, well, what do you think? What is the ending? And did he die or didn't he die? Um, uh, he didn't do either. He didn't do anything. He is a character who has been left in this ambiguous state, which makes us very uneasy and at the same time is tremendously engaging, as we see by the amount of conversation that's going on about that, uh, that final episode. So that's my thought. Take care. I would love to hear your thoughts on that as well. See you soon. Bye.