After a brilliant run, Sopranos creator David Chase dropped from exhaustion at the finish line.
The non-ending ending, in which nothing about the major characters is resolved, was quickly praised after the HBO’s acclaimed series ended Sunday night as brilliant and triumphant.
The praise is as deserving as cheers for the emperor who paraded around sans clothes. It’s as if Chase ran out of ideas, threw up his hands and told his viewers to “take it from here.” We could understand exhaustion as an explanation; the series was one of television’s most masterful.
But many reviewers indeed took it from there, hailing the ending’s ambiguity as a metaphor for, well, everything in life. As if there’s something creative about concluding that “life goes on.” Or not.
We already know that, from our own mundane, drab lives, and so we turn to the lamp keepers of the imagination—writers, artists, performers, producers—to fill in the blanks. Chase had done the job wonderfully and consistently over the years, so we expected much.
Just like other great epics and works of art, skillful endings often are what have made great works of art deserving the honorific, “classic.” Without the final movement, Ode to Joy, Beethoven’s Ninth would be merely great symphony instead of the masterpiece it is. I seem to recall that Shakespeare’s great plays had endings. Movies, books—most have endings too.
We can argue the point. The ending is supposed to be a catharsis, explaining, releasing the tension, teaching, clarifying or enlightening the beginning and the middle. Perhaps Chase is saying that what came before—the violence, betrayals, the wonton self-absorption—was meaningless. But meaningless how? Meaningless as in it’s “all relative?” That no judgments are to be made. Or that each person’s judgment is as good as another?
Or perhaps that none of it has any consequences. Life just goes on. That’s all there is. An updated Waiting for Godot, an absurdist play in which the point is pointlessness. The mysterious Godot never arrives in Samuel Beckett’s play; two principle characters, Vladimir and Extragon, have patiently, but fruitlessly, on a roadside bench and in the closing lines in which one asks the other: “Well, shall we go?” “Yes, let’s go,” the other responds, and they then just continue sitting there. Beckett never revealed what he meant, and responded to various suggestions with a variant of “well, if that’s what it means to you, that’s what it means.”
So, it’s up to us to make up our own endings, and if we fail to come up with something creative, inspiring or eternal, then it’s our own fault. Or maybe the explanation is a lot simpler: Chase and his writers considered every possible ending, and none of them felt like they came up to expectations. None of them felt right. So, they took the coward’s way out and pulled the plug in the middle of a scene. As a writer, I think I know what they felt, and I leave the series feeling disappointment and pity.
