The TrueTalk Blog

Obi Wan Soprano

If you're one of the very few who did not watch last night's finale of The Sopranos on HBO but still intend to, go elsewhere, quickly.

All clear? OK.

Those of us who did watch the show...mostly loyal fans, all...approached the finale with great anticipation and trepidation. After all, we've spent eight years (but only six "seasons") with Tony and his two "families"...bio- and crimino-logical...and had become more than a little attached to them.

Over the final season's past eight episodes we've watched Tony and Carm struggle with botched get-away weekends (Monopoly in the country, anyone?), parental crises (AJ's suicide attempt and Meadow's academic and romantic choices) and pure terror (Bobby and Syl's shootings).

In the early moments of last night's episode, we saw Tony rally as a leader (with a little help from his friends at the FBI) squishingly eliminating Phil Leotardo from the scene and regaining a measure of "normalcy" in his life over a plate of "best-in-the-state" onion rings, while possibilities swirled everywhere. Tension mounted. Meadow couldn't park. Mysterious characters converged.

Then...nothing.

Black.

Credits.

Over.

I felt "had." Not as bad as I would have if the whole thing was a "dream," mind you, but had, nonetheless. With that, I grumblingly trundled off to bed.

Et tu, David Chase?

Then, the dreams started.

Now, I'll spare you all the details but at roughly 2:33 AM I awoke with a start with a name on my lips: "Henry Jenkins...huh!..." I dimly remember smiling before falling back into an unsettled sleep. "Henry Jenkins...damn!"

If you don't know Henry Jenkins you're missing one of today's most insightful media thinkers. Jenkins doesn't just understand media, he in-corp-o-rates it, literally taking it into his body and processing it in unique ways. One of his strongest lines of thinking has to do with the new roles/relationships of "producers" and "audience."

We all know that we've gone from being passive recipients of media "content" to active appropriators and "re-mixers" of all we see and hear. Nothing is safe (copyright be damned!) from the deft touch of our digitizing digits. But we're doing more than simply lifting portions of works and putting them in unlikely contexts.

We're also continuing to write the stories. No matter what a story's originator intends, fans today simply appropriate the characters and put them into whatever worlds they choose. The Star Wars saga is perhaps the best example of this phenomenon, with hundreds of fan sites cranking out all manner of tales of Luke, Han, Leah, Yoda and the like.

I know this is heresy of the first order (hey, living in heretical times makes one cheeky), but in some manner or other, last night's Sopranos finale was somewhat akin to this: it's Act V and Hamlet's been through plenty. Ghosts, stabbings, drownings, skulls...the whole megillah.  Cue the duel. Places...poisoned epees at the ready...cue Journey...and, cut!

It's Chase as 21st century Shakespeare saying, "hey, you guys figure it out from here...have fun!"

And, we will, too. My son-in-law has already posted his interpretation of the post-fade-to-black, and I'm sure many, many more will do so before today ends. And that's just a start.

What David Chase has done is to take the new world of Convergence Culture and applied it to one of the most popular of popular culture franchises. The open-ended narrative is now officially the form du jour.

Endings? You want endings? That's so 17th through 20th century!

Tony Soprano now belongs to us all...for the ages!

Is It Possible To Treat Fictional Characters Unfairly?

That's Jennifer Melfi and Tony Soprano up there, talking in Dr. Melfi's office, as we've seen them do scores of times since the show debuted on January 10, 1999. That's a long time to develop two characters as sophisticated and nuanced as Tony and Jennifer, a long time revealing their respective zones of predictability and unpredictability. In one sense, watching The Sopranos has been an exercise in judging characters: how crazy is Richie Aprile? does Paulie's sentimentalism ever last more than a few seconds? how does Carmela keep her dignity?

That's why Sunday's episode was so jarring. Well, one of the reasons.

Fans of the show know that Jennifer's supervising analyst, Elliot, (very well played by Peter Bogdonovich) has frowned upon her treating Tony ever since he first came on the scene. Soprano was an affront to everything Elliot believed; gritty, violent Newark meets the effete, vacuous Upper West Side. Each despised everything the other stood for.

After years of trying to subtly persuade Melfi to come to her senses and drop Soprano, Elliot finally succeeded on Sunday through a chilling combination of academic one-upsmanship (referring to a damning study of "talk therapy" with the psychopathic personality which Melfi hadn't read) and profoundly unethical social manipulation ("outting" her treatment of Soprano at a dinner-table-full of fellow "professionals"). After a late night reading of the journal piece (dramatically depicting all the ways in which Soprano's 8 years of therapy could be viewed as simply the calculating operations of a crafty psychopath bent on honing his manipulative capacities), Melfi systematically slices Soprano to ribbons in her office, terminating her relationship with him via a cold stare as frightening as any given by the best of psychopaths. For his part, Soprano does a masterful Oliver Hardy/Jackie Gleason inspired bit of magazine stage business and departs the scene, confoundedly bemused.

As were the rest of us.

"What the hell was THAT all about?" most of us wondered. How could series creator David Chase allow Melfi's final scene (if, indeed, she is not to return on the last-ever episode this coming Sunday) to be this betrayal of her own clinical experience and just ruthlessly (there's really no other word for it) terminate her professional relationship with a patient she's been working with for a very long time?

Most of us with experience in the field (I did, after all, practice as a psychotherapist for just about 20 years) had to be appalled at this behavior.

Then, today, I heard that New York City psychotherapy patients were complaining to their therapists, vehemently, that they found this depiction deeply disturbing. It was as if they were saying,  "if Melfi could do that to Tony..."

"Countertransference," we therapists call it, gussying up the pig of our own foibles to make them more tolerable. But Tony had another word for it:

You know, I'm gonna be fuckin' honest. As a doctor, I think what you're doin' is immoral.

Who would have ever thought that at the end of the day, Tony Soprano would actually get to take the moral high ground from Jennifer Melfi?

Heroes?

The NBC show, Heroes, was one of the biggest hits of the current season.

Why?