This past Sunday’s episode of The Sopranos was certainly the most anticipated and discussed series finale since Seinfeld’s, and certainly better than most television we’ll ever see. Less than 24 hours after its showing, reaction falls into two broad camps: praise for series creator David Chase’s genius, and disappointment at the putatively open-ended nature of the denouement. Indeed, the final scene rivals David Lynch’s finest for spurring interpretation and debate. (Not for nothing did Chase call his creation, “Twin Peaks set in New Jersey.”) If you’ve not seen it and want no spoilers, read no further.
As the Sopranos’ (biological) family gathers at a diner, brutish patriarch Tony warily eyes incoming patrons. Tension builds — is a hit imminent? — and then, with a final closeup on the eponymous mob boss, a cut to black.
Plenty of viewers have commented that Tony Soprano’s death is implied: Chase stated that the cardinal clue to the series finale could be found in the first episode of this season; and in that, the now-deceased (as of the penultimate episode) Bobby Bacala remarked that when death comes, “You probably don’t even hear it when it happens.” We didn’t hear it, and Tony didn’t hear it — and when he ended, so did his universe. In this sense, the close of The Sopranos is wholly fitting. It was his tale, and there is nothing to see once he departs from it.
But this is not the whole of the series finale, nor even the major event within it. With so many plots, subplots, and narrative threads woven in the tapestry of Chase’s mob New Jersey, it is easy to lose track of what matters: namely, family. The advertising for the first season of the show played this up to an almost absurd degree, to the point that the then-new series appeared as a sort of black comedy. “If one family doesn’t kill him,” read the HBO marketing, referring to Tony Soprano, “the other will.” But the implied equality between the two “families” was always false. Time and again, the most difficult choices are always forced upon Tony by his real family — as is his ultimate tragedy. He was surely a psychopath in the classic sense — a remorseless killer of friend and foe — but what moral feeling he retained was for his own blood. His rough and often cruel solicitude for his children, Anthony Junior and Meadow, was quite nearly the only meaningful solicitude he had for anyone at all.
We can therefore assess the enduring moral worth of the series’ central figure by the moral trajectory of his children. The tragedy of The Sopranos is that in its final episode, we are brought to understand that this trajectory is irrevocably downward. The tremendously intelligent Meadow and the oafish A.J. are both shown to be their father’s children: calculating, rationalizing, and utterly amoral. In the finale, we are given hints that Tony Soprano himself is dismayed at this: Even the monster does not wish to produce more monsters. And yet he has done it, and on the surface, this is surely because of the moral erosion produced by a lifetime of exposure to his other “family” and its works.
Chase titled the final episode “Made in America,” and the easy inference is that the milieu of The Sopranos is just that. This is untrue, of course: Organized crime as such exists in nearly all cultures. On a deeper level, the idea of a society run by kinship ties and otherwise anarchic violence is deeply pre-democratic, and hence fundamentally anti-American. Some, including John Marini, a professor of philosophy at the University of Nevada-Reno, have said that the Western film genre is essentially a retelling of the story of America itself: the bringing of order into the wilderness, and the concurrent decline of the rough code of vengeance and force as law and true justice emerge. From this comes democracy, and America. If the Western genre is the making of America, then the mob genre is its unmaking: the subversion of law and justice, and the replacement of order with the family and tribe. Indeed, in an unconscious bit of irony, the tribe — the mob, this thing of ours — is itself called family.
What, then, is “Made in America” in Chase’s telling? Tony Soprano’s children give the answer. The classic Jeffersonian concern, beyond the rule of the people, is for the new generation, lest it be chained by the dead to things past. It is a concept born of Rousseau and his “state of nature,” an Enlightenment trope that holds that the young are inherently uncorrupted. This is not, surely, a belief shared by any orthodox Christian who believes in Original Sin; nor is it shared by the conservative who thinks man needs institutions to guide his course. When children are corrupted, the Jeffersonian/Rousseauian view holds that family has done it, and the Christian/conservative view holds that it was intrinsic from the start. Neither is the more American, we being a Whitmanesque container of multitudes, but David Chase’s fictional world comes down on the Jeffersonian side. What is made in America is the unmaking of America: not merely the regression from democracy, but the children of the generation who rule, who themselves are unfit to sustain the existing order.
Here we get political, because we must. The end states of A.J. and Meadow are easily summarized — he works on the set of a low-budget film, she prepares for a law career — but it is the rationale behind each that is revealing.
Anthony Junior spends the entire episode mouthing rhetoric straight off the pages of Daily Kos. In one unprovoked outburst following the funeral of his uncle, he declares, “You people are f*****. You’re living in a dream! You’re still sitting here talking about the f****** Oscars? . . . The world — don’t you see it? Bush let al-Qaeda escape! In the mountains. And then he has us invade some other country.” Then, waxing philosophic, he turns to his own country and its purpose: “It’s like . . . America. This is still where people come to make it. It’s a beautiful idea. And then what do they get? Bling? Come-ons for s*** they don’t need and can’t afford?” It is pitiable in its way, as this character raised by a man whose very existence was dedicated to the subversion of civic life attempts to grasp his way to civic virtue and meaning — and arrives at the clichés of the modern Left. Having lost his car to a brush fire, he blandly comments, “Actually, it’s good. It’ll force me to take the bus. We have to break our dependence on foreign oil.” Tony Soprano, murderer and mob boss, looks on in mounting disgust.
A.J. was always something of a comedic character, a Tony without the will to power or the physical strength. Daughter Meadow was different: the hope of the family, and, in the early run of the series, the ostensible moral voice when morality was flouted. Yet by the end, she is more profoundly corrupted even than her brother. He simply repeats rhetoric and is bought off with toys; her fall is more profound. Her chosen course in life is predicated on a fundamental lie, and in this, she is more like her father than anyone else. Explaining to him her decision to abandon medical school and enter law, she says, “The state can crush the people — the government, specifically the Federal government. . . . You know what really turned me? Seeing the way Italians are treated. It’s like mom says, and if we can have our rights trampled like that, imagine what it’s like for recent arrivals. . . . If I hadn’t seen you dragged away all those times by the FBI, then I’d probably be a boring suburban doctor.” Incredibly, she believes her father a victim — perhaps influenced by her mother, Carmela, who long ago wailed at FBI agents visiting Tony in the hospital, “When will you stop persecuting him?” Even Tony Soprano, a man who could rationalize any crime, and justify any action to sate any desire, is reduced to speechlessness at his daughter’s proclamation. Meadow Soprano is a thoroughly ordinary leftist professional, convinced of her crusade to save the downtrodden from the institutions of her own country, and utterly oblivious to the reality before her. Here, the end of the Soprano line as a moral force in America. Here, the end of his last hope for redemption by proxy.
In this light, if Tony Soprano indeed dies at episode’s end, it is merely the playing out of an end that came long before.
Moral ruin comes to the Soprano children, and continued infamy to the Soprano line, because of their father’s chosen course and his other “family”; but the terror beneath it lies in the recognition that countless American youths suffer the same ruin under the tutelage of perfectly ordinary parents with respectable jobs, and without fictionalized mob ties. Here the genius of David Chase shines through, not in cinematic tricks or narrative twists, but in the stark exposition of cause and effect. At first glance, the downfall of Meadow and A.J. is the result of an upbringing tinged with extraordinary violence and theft. But when we turn off the television and look around us, we see that we have their like among us without the mobster parentage. Instead, they grow up in utterly ordinary homes in utterly ordinary neighborhoods. If daughter and son on television can emerge as recognizable inheritors of their father’s worst traits, then what does it say of us when we produce the same without that father? The inescapable conclusion is that the fall is intrinsic to us. If David Chase’s fictional world is Jeffersonian or Rousseauian, then his real world is Christian or conservative. Watching Tony Soprano cut to black is a sobering and tremendous reminder not only of why this show was great — but also of why it is a warning.
— Joshua Treviño is the vice president for public policy at the Pacific Research Institute in San Francisco, Calif.