Friday,
June 15, 2007
"The Sopranos" Fans Get What They
Deserve..... That Empty Feeling ! :)
The
ANNOTICO Report
Chase
tells us, have we learned anything?
He
mocks our demands for an ending, for meaning, for purpose and laughs at his
great joke.
All
that remains is more sex, violence and absurdity.
And
cruel stereotyping of Italian Americans.
An
Ending with No Meaning
By
Andrew Greeley
June
15, 2007
I
must confess a temptation to complacent laughter at the frustration of all
Why did it end
not with a bang but a whimper? It was also a powerful critique of corrupt
capitalist American culture. Academics and intellectuals -- and
pseudo-academics and intellectuals -- had searched the weekly bloodshed and vulgarity
for wisdom hidden from the ages. How could the series stop without ending?
Ordinary viewers,
satisfied with the violent whacking of "Uncle Phil" Leotardo, were disappointed by the conclusion, which was a stop and not an ending. The intellectuals should have
been ready for David Chase
"Post-modern"
literary theory holds that an ending to a story is a "fallacy." An
ending tries to impose a meaning on a story, either an optimistic ending that
says there was a purpose in all these pains and sufferings or a tragic ending
which provides a "catharsis." Post-modernism (which can mean
everything and nothing) insists that life is neither comedy nor tragedy but a meaningless series of events that stops eventually for
everyone in the story when they die.
Eventually Tony
will die, so will Carmella, so will Meadow, so will
A.J. Maybe the thugs in the men
The Soprano family, around the dinner table, know nothing and have
learned nothing. Vanity of vanities, as the biblical book Qoheleth
says, and all is vanity. Neither, Chase tells us, have we learned anything. He
mocks our demands for an ending, for meaning, for purpose and laughs at his
great joke. All that remains is more sex, violence and absurdity.
And
cruel stereotyping of Italian Americans.
He has tricked
us. He lured (some of) us into addiction to the series by the sex and the
killing and the Italian stereotypes (and the vulgarity) to close the trap of
absurdity on us. Yet he has also asked us to identify with the absurd life of
the Sopranos and to re-examine our own stories.
The background
song tells us "Don
I
Maybe
Another book in
the Bible says love is as strong as death.
(http://www.suntimes.com/news/greeley/429068,CST-EDT-GREEL15.article)
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