The Sopranos: Don't Stop Believing (Spoilers for series)

[Rhom]

The search function is disabled on the forum due to the TV Johnny Come Latelys annual pilgrimage to our site... so I went digging through 16 pages of the Entertainment forum to find the Sopranos thread only to find that it was locked. :bang:

But I thought this was worth discussing, in an interview with Directors Guild of America David Chase gives a detailed shot by shot analysis of the final scene of The Sopranos.

I'm no film geek, but even so I found much of the technical discussion to be fascinating. If you are a fan of the show or a fan of filmmaking in general, its worth a read.

I love the timing of the lyric when Carmela enters: 'Just a small town girl livin' in a lonely world, she took the midnight train goin' anywhere.' Then it talks about Tony: 'Just a city boy,' and we had to dim down the music so you didn't hear the line, 'born and raised in South Detroit.' The music cuts out a little bit there, and they're speaking over it. 'He took the midnight train goin' anywhere.' And that to me was [everything]. I felt that those two characters had taken the midnight train a long time ago. That is their life. It means that these people are looking for something inevitable. Something they couldn't find. I mean, they didn't become missionaries in Africa or go to college together or do anything like that. They took the midnight train going anywhere. And the midnight train, you know, is the dark train.

I just wanted the guy to look over. I didn't want him to look particularly menacing. And he glances off Tony so quickly. We worked on that quite a bit so he wasn't staring at him. The guy was like looking around the place in general. Tony doesn't acknowledge that he sees him. Tony leads a very dangerous, suspicious life and he's always on guard. But he's in this old-fashioned American sweet shop with those round stools and the counter and the football hero pictures and Cub Scouts. Everything that should make him feel at ease, and yet there is a slight ill at ease feeling which we bring to it because we know who he is and what he's done. And he can never be sure that any enemy is completely gone. He always has to have eyes behind his head.

I thought the ending would be somewhat jarring, sure. But not to the extent it was, and not a subject of such discussion. I really had no idea about that. I never considered the black a shot. I just thought what we see is black. The ceiling I was going for at that point, the biggest feeling I was going for, honestly, was don't stop believing. It was very simple and much more on the nose than people think. That's what I wanted people to believe. That life ends and death comes, but don't stop believing. There are attachments we make in life, even though it's all going to come to an end, that are worth so much, and we're so lucky to have been able to experience them. Life is short. Either it ends here for Tony or some other time. But in spite of that, it's really worth it. So don't stop believing.

I don't see how he didn't think that the cut to black would be controversial. :dunno: I remember how I felt when watching that scene for the first time, it did have a palpable sense of dread throughout the entire sequence. Every normal interaction was pregnant with danger. When it ended, yeah I kind of had that WTF moment; but as I looked back on it later I really did come to see it as a great ending to the show. Tony can't even go out to eat at a diner with his family without the potential of violence at every turn. A great scene in a show full of them.

[NestorMakhnosLovechild]

I think that article is a pretty good example of why artists are sometimes the worst people to talk about and analyze their own work. I've put my position out there at length in the previous Sopranos threads. While I acknowledge that ending to The Sopranos is deliberately ambiguous, I also happen to be convinced that the formal structure of the scene is such that there's only one compelling reading of an otherwise ambiguous text - Tony dies at the end, and the blackness replaces Tony's point of view shot of Meadow entering the restaurant.

Some of Chase's insights are banal - they synched parts of the visual of the scene up to Journey's "Don't Stop Believing," which is both obvious and kind of silly. The "midnight train" is the "dark train" - sure, okay, whatever.

But there are a couple of interesting nuggets that I think bear on some of the discussions we've had in previous iterations of the thread.

For one, Chase talks about the pattern of POV shots in final episode in terms of Tony walking into places. "Tony close-up, Tony POV, hold on the POV, and then Tony walks into the POV." Yet there's really no grappling with the (pretty obvious, to my eyes) series of POV shots in the diner itself, which follows the exact same pattern, minus Tony walking into the POV. The bell rings, Tony close-up, Tony POV, hold on the POV as another member of Tony's family walks into the POV. Well, he doesn't address it, except to say at the end that he just refuses to talk about whether the last shot was a POV shot. Okay, sure.

Second, Chase sort-of weighs in on the "is Tony forever paranoid?" reading of the final scene, in which some people argue that the "point" is to show that Tony is going to live the rest of his life in an endless state of paranoia. Chase is pretty explicit that the audience, through the formal composition of the scene, brings the paranoia into it - and that from Tony's perspective and the 'in character' perspective of the show - it's not a particularly worrisome of paranoid scene. In fact, Chase pretty much confirms a significant part of MasterOfSoprano's reading of the scene that the Members Only guy enters with AJ specifically so the audience and Tony would not focus on the Members Only guy "who might be there to do him harm." Chase is explicit that, in his mind at least, Tony does not feel threatened by the Members Only guy. The paranoia is in our head - not Tony's head - and it's deliberately constructed to be in our head. The "message" of the finale is NOT that Tony is going to live a life of perpetual paranoia.

Third, and I think this is pretty interesting myself, Chase specifically acknowledges that the repeated ringing of the bell is a deliberate call-back to Sopranos Home Movies and the scene after Tony's fight with Bobby, where he's sitting on the dock. Of course, the ringing of the bell draws Tony's attention to the boat that he and Bobby had been fishing in the prior day - which, unsurprisingly to me at least, was also the location of Tony's infamous conversation with Bobby about how mobsters end up, and Bobby's portentous line "You probably don't even hear it when it happens, right?" But, of course, Chase doesn't go that far.