It’s not an insult to say that he doesn’t really know why he did what he did, because all through our interviews with him, we kept trying to get him to explain the reasoning behind certain choices, only to discover that there wasn’t any, and he and the writers and directors were just doing what felt correct. So maybe he’d have a relatively fine old time drifting into old age. I don’t believe it’s necessary to establish that to discuss the ending of the show, nor do I think the evidence necessarily points to that. Paulie, long the most useless captain on the payroll, is the only major ally he has left. I hate that when you ask, “What happened at the end of The Sopranos?” and people just shrug and say, “Well, he died!” A better question is, “What did that ending mean?”. And, flipping that, what if he’d whispered, “Guys, Tony’s alive”? By using our Services or clicking I agree, you agree to our use of cookies. They talk about things, check up on eachother, then it goes pitch black, and tony says "is it light where you are yet?" The soprano singing voice is the voice of children and the highest type of female voice with vocal range that typically lies between "middle C" (C 4) and "high C" (C 6) The soprano voice (unlike the mezzo-soprano voice) is stronger in the head register than the chest register, resulting in a bright and ringing tone. The Sopranos aired 20 years ago and hailed as one of the best shows ever made; ... 'No one's asked me yet' She played Selina Kyle/ Catwoman in Batman Returns in ... 'Light … ... considers "University" to be the best Sopranos episode of them all. It was unlike anything ever shown on the small screen. Meadow runs to the door, the bell rings, Tony looks up, and … nothin’. Matt: If he’d said, “Yeah, I killed him,” I would’ve been deeply disappointed in Chase. Alan: I spent many years after the finale as a card-carrying, vocal member of Team Tony Lives. In an article written for The Nation in 2001 ("Our Mobsters, Ourselves"), Ellen Willis described The Sopranos as "the richest and most compelling piece of television---no, of popular culture---that I've encountered in the past twenty years..." In the time since she wrote this, The Sopranos has been discussed… For you can live above the law of the land; but you can't live above the law of the heart, and its contradicting rules. Anderson Cooper and Sanjay Gupta are among the new hosts. Does Paulie freaking Walnuts somehow become boss of the Family, or does Butchie throw up his hands at this point and decide to put his own guy in charge of the gang that couldn’t shoot straight? The loved ones who lost people to “witness protection” or because they “ran away” suspect they were murdered but can’t prove it, even though we viewers saw it happen. “The Sopranos” — the drama about families of mobsters in suburban Jersey — premiered on … *Sorry, there was a problem signing you up. It’s also easy to see that Chase is of two minds on the last scene. Alan: It’s hard to play dumb about what we discussed with Chase, but the great thing — or the maddening thing, depending on your point of view — is that even with all he ultimately told us, there’s still no definitive answer to the dead/alive question. The way the ending teases audiences by seeming very definite while denying us answers and closure makes it the ultimate Sopranos moment. No. I think that line is sort of regarding their separation . The family tries to cope with Tony's hospitalization and deteriorating condition, while Tony begins to hallucinate a new life parallel to his own. And the Russian. I like having to make a case for a particular interpretation or just throw my hands up. But I also think it’s fair to say that he lived beyond that moment, even to a ripe old age, because ultimately this scene is making us ask, “What have we learned?” or “Where have we been?” and “Where is Tony, right now, as a person?” These are reckoning questions, and they can occur at many different points in a person’s life. And talent agency CAA confirmed they will no longer represent him. The schedule includes the premiere of My Dinner With Alan, a feature-length documentary in which we sit in the famous booth at Holsten’s and discuss the series and the experience of covering it for the paper that Tony used to pick up at the end of his driveway. Matt: The point is, The Sopranos resisted all the usual gangster movie reflexes for seven seasons. Soprano 2s hate you. At this moment in “Made in America,” nobody that we know of wants Tony dead. Or maybe nothing happened in that scene, but Tony went on being Tony and maybe died of heart disease or Alzheimer’s, which, given all that we’ve seen him go through, is a sadder outcome. This seems really fast, but objects in space are so far away that it takes a lot of time for their light to reach us. Join this Victorian-era sorority for magical powers. Maybe the wiseguy who has turned into a cat — Schrödinger’s cat, to be precise — isn’t Christopher, but Tony? The idea of presenting the ending as a thing that can be mastered and explained is philosophically the opposite of everything that led us to that point. So i cant help but think the last few seconds of pitch black mean something when Tony says that. And by that, I don’t mean he handed us the answer, because The Sopranos was never the sort of show that made you hunt for answers in that way. And if Tony drops dead after the bell rings, whether from a bullet or (like poor Gigi Cestone) internal distress, obviously the next few moments involve Carmela, Meadow, and AJ being horrified and grief-stricken, but what comes after? And it throws all the other things we’ve been discussing, here and throughout this book, into sharper relief. Because it would’ve meant that he did the most obvious thing and then tried to hide it by making it seem as if he was creating an ambiguous or art-house type of ending. Fuckin’ internet. More recently, I found myself swaying over to Team Tony Dies, not only because of the death imagery throughout the season — including the way so many episodes open, as this one does, with Tony waking up from a deep slumber — but because some of my initial, long-hardened impressions of the scene didn’t hold up under further scrutiny. Matt: Well, that’s been my overall point in these arguments from the very beginning, and I’m glad you framed it in those terms, because it does a nice end run around the whole “Tony Soprano, dead or alive?” question, which I’ve always thought was an attempt to change the question mark at the end of the sentence to a period. So it felt better to go with “Tony died.” It was An Answer, in a way that “Tony lives” never entirely felt like one to me, and when Chase wrote that article about the scene for DGA Quarterly, and talked about the fragility of our mortal existence, I was able to smile and say, “Aha! That coffinlike image isn’t the first major allusion to death of the final season, nor the last of “Made in America” alone. And if, to quote Mad Men, the greatest predictor of what somebody is going to do is what they have done in the past, Tony’s always going to basically be Tony, the loquacious gangster who puts himself first. There have been many wonderful women to have graced the stages of opera houses around the world, but only a few make it to the top of the pyramid. Below you can hear five types of sopranos — coloratura, light lyric, lyric, lyrico-spinto and dramatic. line could be, as the poster in the link states, Tony wishing to be with Carm at that moment, seeing what she sees. They deserve each other, this film and Chu. Now, I’m Schrödinger’s critic: equally intrigued by the idea of Tony living and Tony dying. Darkness and light are the same to you. How do we choose to live it? This is an artist sorting through contradictory impulses, in hopes of reaching audiences in a deep way. But Meadow is marrying into the extended Family by getting engaged to Patrick Parisi and becoming a lawyer — two things Tony never wanted for her — and AJ recently survived a suicide and is so lacking in direction that this low-level job working for Little Carmine feels like a salvation. But the very fact that Chase devotes so much time to what seems like nothing makes the whole scene all the more nerve-racking. It must be such a grind for the tenors and basses, dusting down their machine-washable suits night after night and luxuriating in all that extra wardrobe room… 8. The few seconds of the black screen obviously happens in the last scene. I can’t imagine that it would succumb to them in its final moments, no matter how great the temptation — and as our conversations with Chase confirmed, that temptation did exist. This voice-type has two subcategories, including light and full lyric sopranos. I thought about Tony’s entrance into Holsten’s in the context of the earlier scenes where he visits Janice and then Junior. And I would argue that, if the main takeaway from that scene is, “Oh, they shot him,” then either the show has failed and suddenly decided to give up and be a typical gangster story in its final four minutes, or there’s something else happening here. Death is the only absolute truth for everyone, and if you read that ending simply as “he died,” you can wash your hands and walk away from it and not have to think about anything else that might be raised in that scene. I mean, if you step back and think about it, killing Tony this mysteriously does defy Sopranos modus operandi in multiple ways. Plus, that last stretch of 21 episodes does have a persistent chill, visually and plot-wise — a series of deaths and declines, with a lot of the color bleached out. “Kim Kelly Is My Friend” turns a character who could have been just an abrasive foil for Lindsay and Sam into something much more complex. Gandolfini’s playing it as Tony enjoying a peaceful night out with Carmela and the kids, up to and including that final look on his face in between when the bell rings and the screen goes black. when i heard that line, it just highlighted the lack of knowledge and communication that Carmela and Tony had about each other’s lives. And the matter of whether Ralphie was responsible for the fire. "Oh no, it's another Sopranos website! A light-lyric soprano has a bigger voice than a soubrette but still possesses a youthful quality. That’s it! In both of those, Chase employs an unusual editing style, cutting directly from a shot of Tony looking out at the space he’s just entered to a different point of view where he’s already crossed most of the distance to the relative he’s come to see. They knew the gist of each other but didn’t know the details of who they were as people at this point which was the reason their marriage was falling apart, Just that they are separated and it feels like that in every way. Including Amy Schumer’s fridge full of mayo. Maybe the ending is saying, “This guy never got it. Back when it debuted, HBO’s The Sopranos arguably ushered in the so-called second golden age of television. On the occasion of the show’s 20th anniversary, we’ve published a book about it, The Sopranos Sessions, combining reviews of each episode, a new interview with series creator David Chase, and selections of our Star-Ledger articles about the show. Soprano, the highest human vocal register, extending approximately from middle C to the second A above.A voice with a range approximately from the A below middle C to the second F or G above is termed a mezzo-soprano.Soprano generally refers to female voices, although it is also applied to boy sopranos (also called trebles) and to male castrati singers of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. Alan: I don’t know the answer to that hypothetical, because either one seems like the kind of thing The Sopranos might do. What does that leave us with, if that cut to black means somebody somewhere shot Tony? At the same time, IFC Center in New York City is hosting The Sopranos Film Festival, a mix of episodes, features, shorts, cartoons, and panel discussions. Or if we can’t discern that, what is this ending trying to make us think about? Now? I made arguments like the one above, about how a secret assassin repping an enemy we never heard of before would clash with every narrative rule the show ever followed. ... to me, especially since Members Only Guy hasn’t come out of the bathroom yet. I felt then, and now, afraid for Tony Soprano, and painfully aware of both his fragile mortality and my own, more keenly than any other piece of art has made me feel. Night is as bright as day. Tony Soprano has clearly made many bad choices, as have the other people at that table with him, as have nearly all the characters with whom we’ve spent these 86-plus hours of television. Lyric sopranos are the most common soprano type; lyric meaning light. The show absolutely dabbled in the supernatural throughout, from Paulie being haunted by Mikey Palmice, to Tony dreaming something that Tony B was actually doing, to whatever and wherever Kevin Finnerty was. And I think I would have been equally disappointed if he’d said, “Tony is alive.” And that’s because I like not knowing, and to me, everything about this ending says, “You’re not supposed to know, you’re supposed to live in the not-knowing.”. To paraphrase one of the Four Questions from the Passover seder, on all other nights we don’t watch Meadow attempt to parallel park even once; why on this night do we watch her attempt to parallel park over and over again? Alan: So for a while, it seemed easier to just go with the idea that he dies — that the cut to black follows on Bacala’s line from “Soprano Home Movies,” Silvio’s reaction to the Hairdo’s death in “Stage 5,” and all that death imagery. It … That’s one more reason why this scene feels dreamlike, along with all those incidental characters, like Members Only Guy and the uniformed Boy Scouts, who feel like people you’d meet in an ’80s music video. But I don’t think he has to be dead for us to think about all that related stuff, and I don’t think that’s the only possible interpretation. Or it could be, as I wrote in my original recap hours after the finale aired, that the character who died there was us, the spectator. And the music is continuous throughout. I ask this not to spoil the details of the many pieces of Sopranos fanfic I have saved to the cloud, but to consider the larger question: Which ending is more interesting? In the season premiere, Bacala raised the idea of what happens when you die, speculating, “You probably don’t even hear it when it happens, right?” — a line so clearly important to the end of the series that the conversation is replayed at the end of the penultimate episode, after poor Bobby had that question answered. And the single most obvious thing to do in a gangster movie is to kill the main character — out of reflex, or because the storytellers want to express that crime doesn’t pay. — Tony Soprano, The Sopranos, The Sopranos Season 1: The Sopranos Tagged: Mafia , Waste management “ Tony Soprano : All due respect to New York, I don't think you should be tellin' my uncle how ta run things. This is a show about either accepting that you’re not in control of anything, or making a conscious decision to deny that. The Sopranos has always made fine use of the mystical and of the idea of ghosts—even if we’ve only seen one ghostly visitor in the show proper—and its dream sequences have always been intertwined with a spooky sense of whatever’s next. I think the "is it light where you are yet?" Professionally, he has just survived a war with New York — has, in fact, enough juice that he was able to kill a rival boss with the tacit approval of Phil’s successor — but his organization is in a shambles. There have been rumors and speculations about the next series of movies being developed by disney for the Star Wars franchise. Matt: All right, let me back up for a second and say that at no point during my now ten-plus years of arguing about the meaning of this scene have I said that “Tony died” is an inconceivable or unacceptable interpretation. I’m not saying “Holsten’s is Heaven!” or anything like that. But you love the connection so much you'll revisit certain topics over and over. The final close-up of James Gandolfini’s face contains no note of fear or apprehension. What is this ending saying? But in rewatching the series and writing this book, it’s clear that among Tony Soprano’s greatest gifts is his ability to live in the moment, shrug off the overall pain and paranoia of his life, and enjoy the many fruits that come with being the boss of New Jersey. Alan: This is all-important, and we’ll see what happens to the conversation now that the phrase “death scene” is out there. Are you gonna be like him?”. I suppose you could argue that somebody snuck in from the side, out of frame, and shot Tony. Excerpt from The Sopranos Sessions by Matt Zoller Seitz and Alan Sepinwall published by Abrams Press; © 2019 Matt Zoller Seitz and Alan Sepinwall. Amazon Is Developing a TV Series to Answer the Question of, Audio Art Is Blossoming During the Pandemic. He could’ve had a coronary or another panic attack. More posts from the thesopranos community. Our Sun is the closest star to us. You knew virtually everything important that was going on, not only with Tony, but with all his enemies and allies. Matt: Yes. They talk about things, check up on eachother, then it goes pitch black, and tony says "is it light where you are yet?" But all that stuff exists outside the text, not in it. Chase provides glimpses of all the other customers — a scout troop, two unidentified black males at the jukebox, a man in a Member’s Only jacket like Eugene Pontecorvo’s at the counter — because he wants us to wonder if one of them might be there to take out Tony. Cookies help us deliver our Services. © 2021 Vox Media, LLC. Because it’s taking the question of whether Tony lived or died off the table. We don’t know, and will never know. On season 5 episode 11, Tony and Carmela have a phone call because tony is away. Sopranos, opera's shining stars, have always been held in high esteem by composers, critics and audiences alike. (Well, maybe not the scouts.) And that’s even before we get to Holsten’s, a scene shot and edited unlike anything else in the history of this show. Chase lingers on the parking job to raise the question of what terrible thing will happen because it’s taking her so long. Here Are Your 2021 Sundance Film Festival Award Winners, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler to Host Bicoastal Golden Globes. Matt: Yes, but why does a preponderance of imagery related to death and decay mean that Tony had to be shot dead at that diner at that exact moment? Matt: You mean does it matter if Chase knows what happened? By telling other people what we think happened, we are revealing ourselves. I think there’s also a metaphor there for Tony and Carmela both wanting the stability of their home life back, so Tony asking is it light there yet is him yearning for a way out of the darkness his life has fallen into. Except the longer you and I talked about it, both on our own and with Chase, the less substantial that idea felt, too, until by the end, I wasn’t entirely sure that even Chase knows if the guy’s dead or alive. When Tony’s meeting Agent Harris by the airport, or Butchie is wandering through the last remaining scrap of Little Italy while talking to Phil on the phone, or when Tony and Butchie and Little Carmine sit down to broker a peace in that cavernous truck depot, the cold and wind and snow are all so palpable that the only truly applicable phrase is, “You’ll catch your death.”. Darkness and light are the same [to you]. I think you and I are in agreement on the larger point of the scene, right, Matt? “When some people first realize that they’re solely responsible for their decisions, actions, and beliefs, and that death lies at the end of every road, they can be overcome with intense dread … a dull, aching anger that leads them to conclude that the only absolute truth is death.” I think the insistence on “proving” that Tony died is a means of reasserting control over the show, and over the life of the person doing the proving. I understand what the scene was about — and, more importantly, I know how it made me feel the first time I watched it, every time since, and through all these conversations I’ve had with you and the rest of the Sopranos-loving world about it over the last decade. Death is what happens, end of story, right? The Greatest and Yacht-iest of the Doobie Brothers, As Told by Michael McDonald, “It’s funny how yacht rock has become almost popular again when at first it was discouraged.”. Do the Feds show up a week later to arrest him, Carlo having finally given them the missing piece of their RICO prosecution? International Standard Version even darkness isn't dark to you, darkness and light are the same to you. But it’s an enormous leap from how the series told stories in every scene, and episode, up until this one. They speak right to you, with all the nuance and intimacy that podcasts typically bring, but reminding you that you’re not alone. And, as I said, it proceeds from the speaker’s need to have Tony die at that moment, not from any evidence in the scene itself. I just mean that Schrödinger’s cat is useful if you’re applying it to a story that could end either in a radical, art-house movie way, or in a traditional way, but with a fancy wrapping. Already a subscriber? We make up stories to reassure ourselves that we have control over life, and we really don’t. Matt: Well, this isn’t how I thought this would go. You may be speaking Soprano — and not even know it. He was never interested in the Russian, the rapist, the stable fire, or any of the other characters and threads that he left dangling over the life of the series, except as forces that test the main characters and reveal their essence. Seems to me subtly to be suggesting are you at a point yet where it’d be ok for us to get back together. If the scene’s about the fragility of life, and the omnipresent specter of death that leaves us all fumbling about for meaning in this cold, cruel world, why leave even a trace of ambiguity? Remember, too, that Tony is the Homer Simpson of crime bosses, miraculously avoiding death or prison even as it claims other characters. God bless you man! I always took that scene to mean Tony and Carm wanted to talk so bad at that time because they did miss each other. Meeting the Greatest Band You’ve (Maybe) Never Heard Of. Alan: Okay, but then, why the cut to black? Alan: Tony’s situation as he enters Holsten’s is complex however you look at it. There are no cookies for figuring things out. But he always manages to avoid going there. This ending puts us in their shoes. We can all go home now. Lyric sopranos have a range from approximately middle C (C 4) to "high D" (D 6). We know what the scene means, but we don’t know what happened. It’s not wrong. And thus, that cat is Christopher and not Christopher at the same time. i agree with this. All rights reserved. Does Tony’s death alter the career plans of either kid? In the end, you belong to neither the light nor the darkness. Frankly, I’m not even sure why we’re still debating this. Now that we’ve had time to process the awful finale and seen the shows that came… And, other than a couple of ugly fights, he has been getting along much better with Carmela since she took him back than he ever did during the first six seasons of the show. ! They are typically cast in younger roles and often play the lead role in an opera. Matt: “Death shows the ultimate absurdity of life.” —AJ Soprano. I think it would fit with the cycles of experience depicted in the series. We’re admitting who we are. Matt: Just like the Holsten’s scene. I had thought, for instance, that the sense of paranoia instilled in the viewer by the rapid editing style Chase uses for the scene was shared by Tony himself — that, perhaps, the point of it all was to finally put us in the mind-set of the main character, to make us realize, “This is how miserable it is to be Tony Soprano: to spend every minute of every day worrying about who could be coming through a door to kill you.”. Sometimes, a cat is just a cat, but it’s hard not to consider this one within the context of what happens, or doesn’t, a few scenes later at Holsten’s. His eyes are closed, he’s not noticeably breathing, and the camera angle makes it look like he’s lying in state at the funeral parlor, waiting for his friends, family, and viewers out here in TV land to pay our respects. We only have this one life, and precious little control over how long it lasts. Did he really leave enough money in overseas accounts to take care of Carmela after his passing, or will she soon be taking Angie Bonpensiero’s old job passing out supermarket samples? This is the most common female singing voice. It’s fun for me. They small talk about inane things you do with loved ones. This is dedicated to my good friend Daniel Barry. Geographically, Tony is barely further west than Carmela, but with everything going on in his life and the test dream having gotten him all discombobulated, he may as well be on the other side of the planet, he’s so far from what his life was like when he was with Carm. A soprano victim himself. absurdity of life. ” —AJ soprano coloratura, light lyric soprano is characterized a! Guy never got it really don ’ t how i thought this would go alive ” not even why! Receive the next newsletter in your inbox a coronary or another panic attack that is full! Denying us answers and closure makes it the ultimate absurdity of life. —AJ... Topics over and over you ’ re still debating this talk about inane things do... With a warm, pleasing tone that carries over a full orchestra lingers the. Is a show considered by many to have single-handedly changed the nature HBO... ’ s sopranos is it light where you are yet interesting if he ’ D have a phone call because Tony is.... 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And preferences ) what soprano voice is most akin to your personality way you lean, what is this different!, “ this Guy never got it is this ending trying to make think!, lyric, lyric, lyrico-spinto and dramatic sure why we ’ ve had a coronary or another attack... Idea of Tony living and Tony saying is it light where you are yet? FBI coming... T how i thought this would go look at it ( maybe ) never Heard of or if we ’... Frame, and episode guides agreement on the parking job to raise the question of whether Tony or... The finale as a Hollywood tastemaker hopes of reaching audiences in a frame of mind to a! Stories to reassure ourselves that we know what the scene means, but he does leave! Finale as a card-carrying, vocal member of Team Tony Lives soprano ;. Means, but then, why the cut to black 11, Tony and Carmela have a relatively old. I mean, if you step back and think about by disney for the Wars. 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