The Unknown Woman

  This unflinching film about sex trafficking is as far from the sentimental nostalgia of the director’s Cinema Paradiso as you could imagine. 

“Hitchcockian thriller,” quoth NYT on the dvd jacket. Sure enough, it has The Master’s obsessive spiralling staircase, the jangling shrill violins and post-Frenzy sexual violence. The graphic sex has to be in that flashes of flashback format or it would be paralyzing.

Irena is a Ukrainian cleaner and maid in Rome. She’s, trying to keep tab on the affluent young couple that has adopted one of the nine babies she has been forced to bear (in 12 years of sexual exploitation). 

The film traces the horror and range of exploitation of women even in cell-phone contemporary Europe. At the mild end, to get the job she has to pay a percentage to the apartment manager who lands her work. That percentage rises to half to ward off his molestation (aka “I love you”).

Irena’s perils surpass any Paulines. To secure that job she has to paralyze the woman she has befriended to replace. The pimp she thought she despatched (and robbed) resurfaces more sadistic than ever, with murderous consequences. Even as she tries to toughen up her young charge Irena herself is propelled into unmotherly brutality. She’s violently mugged by two Santa Clauses! 

Yet Tornatore manages a happy ending. Irena comes out of prison to meet the girl she tended, thinking her her daughter. The girl is beautiful — but in a taut, non-binary way. Instead of the curves the pimps would peddle she’s all muscle and sinew, a warrior, her nursemaid’s protege prepared for the harsh world that almost destroyed Irena.

Coup de chance

  Coup de chance is clearly an 89-year-old’s movie. If you’re going to have a stroke, let it be “of luck.” Filmed entirely in France — and in French — it’s the slandered genius’s possibly final assertion of his art and soul against the calumny he unjustly endures in America. 

As well, the spectacularly autumnal forest in the dramatic conclusion evoke the golden age of the survivor. This is prefigured in the lovers’ first meeting, accidental (fated?) in the street. There they quote some high school Prévert: ”Dead leaves picked up be the shovelful. [You see, I have not forgotten.] So are memories and regrets.” The lovers take the chance to deal with their regrets.

So too the film’s summary wisdom. Heroine Fanny reads from her murdered Alain’s novel the philosophy by which he lured his high school goddess into an affair: “She has come to the conclusion that life was a random event and that the odds of her existing were one in 400 quadrillion. Hence everyone’s life was a miracle, everybody alive had hit the jackpot. It was important not to squander this miracle and she was prepared to take full responsibility for her choices. Still, it terrified her how big a part luck played in it all. And how much it helped to be lucky. But not to dwell on it.”

She tries to hide Alain’s lottery ticket gift from husband Jean but it starts his suspicion.

In emphasizing the importance of hair-breadth chance Allen’s Paris film specifically evokes his London film Match Point (2005). The latter opened with a tennis ball suspended in mid-bounce over a net. It could fall either way. This time it falls over, to score a point. Life and lady luck are like that. At the end the killer throws a stolen wedding ring from a bridge to the Thames. It hits a rail, bounces up and then — down to the ground. Unknowingly, the killer’s intention has been thwarted. 

But no. Another murderous burglar finds that ring, which ultimately frees the real killer from suspicion. In Allen's later French forest an innocent hunter commits the fatal accident that the villain had planned for his own excuse. Fate, justice — it’s all chance, all luck. That makes life neither comedy nor tragedy but “a farce; a black farce.”

The new film also echoes the earlier one’s romantic triangle, with variations. Fanny works for an art auction house and is married to a very successful but only “practically legal” investment counsellor, Jean. That harmony is disrupted when she meets and falls for the writer who adored her in high school. 

In Match Point Emily Morton’s heroine Chloe marries Tom, a tennis pro promoted into her father’s elite business. That marriage is threatened by Scarlett Johannson’s struggling American actress, Nola (‘alone’ in reverse). Nola loses her engagement to Chloe’s brother Matthew but falls into an affair with and pregnancy by Tom. In the Paris film the opening shot follows a blond ponytail down the street. She evokes Johannson but turns out to be Fanny. Plus ca change…. This time the killer doesn’t get away with it. But neither husband is an innocent victim. 

That’s not the only cultural allusion in a film that ripples with pertinent French culture. The heroine’s maiden name is Moreau — and she has a Jeanne Moreau mouth to match. Several names evoke French culture: Fanny, Camille, Jean, Sorel, Blanc, etc. In particular the auteur shadow of Claude Chabrol drops across the wealthy upper class family shivered by betrayal and murder.

The hot lovers fear turning into Mallarme’s “swan frozen in ice.” Alain buys Fanny The Secret Garden, a fantasy novel about a child’s redemption. The title puts a cultural frame against all the floral wallpaper — pale leaves behind Jean’s office desk, lively branches behind Alain’s bed — and the autumnal forest where at least poetic justice finally descends. In his refuge from America Allen luxuriates in his adopted French culture.

The auction house in passing provides an even more dramatic allusion: Caravaggio’s painting of the boy David flaunting Goliath’s harvested head. Goliath is famously painted as the adult Caravaggio, and David after his own youthful mien. Like that painting, here Allen is the old man hanging on the arm of his past.   

One last touch. The charming but evil Jean exults in his colossal model train set. This opulent doodad grows out of some boyhood trauma. It reveals him still rooted in its insecurities and desperate for a power beyond even morality. While it shows off his wealth it reveals his insecurity.

        Like the Caravaggio connection from the past artist to the present, this train also evokes Mia Farrow’s slandering of Allen, which crumbled on the implausibility of his alleged assault on their daughter in their attic and evidence that Mia was coaching their young daughter in her testimony. The story included the problematic presence of a model train set. The detail seemed to root the allegation in a song by a Farrow friend. So Jean's lavish train set implicitly recalls why Allen is shooting in France — 32 years after that false rumour, still poisoning the air.  Allen in effect blows up the lingering allegation against him.  While Allen is largely silent in his own defence — leaving the field to Farrow — the train scene here is a dramatic but tacit reaffirmation of the aging artist’s innocence.

Under the Skin -- Take One (initial review, 2013)

 From darkness comes vision. The pre-title sequence is an abstraction of galactic travel, with a total eclipse culminating in an eye. The narrative details the similar intersection of aliens and earthlings.

The aliens have taken the shape of male motorcyclists, but make one of their team a woman (Scarlett Johansson) as bait to seduce human males for the harvest of their skins. One reading of the title is that under the skin people can prove as different as (i) humans and aliens, or (ii) the innocents the heroine seduces and the vicious logger who tries to rape her and destroys her (and as a logger, plunders the natural world in which she seeks refuge). People on this globe live as if on different planets.

Where we expect a sex scene we usually get something metaphysical. The naked bodies operate stripped of any physical background. The first time, the woman found by the roadside is being slowly stripped — we expect by the motorcyclist who will rape her. But it's the naked Scarlett (unnamed in the film, Laura in the novel), plundering the body for her woman's outfit. Having donned a woman's skin and face she now dons the clothing. When she leads men to their doom they follow her into the dark pool she strides across. Led by their erections they literally go in over their heads and are trapped as in aspic, while she treads the surface. Eventually the men implode leaving their emptied skins to be harvested, presumably for the next UFO of aliens. 

The setting is Glasgow in 2014, when Scottish independence is coming to a vote and where the representative society are famously binge-drinking young women and lecherous brutish lads. Those are contrary attempts to find the comfort of a community, an identity. With their incomprehensible dialect, the Glaswegians seem more alien than Scarlett. They help us to identify with her. 

In one of the film's many twists, though, the laddish brutality is represented only in the intersection lout who taunts the heroine and the group that attack her van. Her victims are rather charming innocents. They are not the aggressive drunks on whom we expect extraterrestrial justice to be wreaked. Indeed in most cases Scarlett has to be the aggressor not just in the initial engagement but in the sexual invitation. 

The alien Scarlett also works as a human allegory. Initially she functions without any moral compass. So she kills the Czech visitor who tried to save the drowning father. She feels no compunction about abandoning the crying baby. And again, the men she kills are nice guys, not lechers. 

When she picks up the misshapen solitary, the heartless alien discovers human feelings. Though she leads him to his appointed doom she changes her mind and releases him. What prompts her change is her sight of herself in a mirror, where she sees how alien to herself she looks. Then she can feel for him. The freed victim wanders home naked, where her colleague finishes him off. But Scarlett has discovered human emotion, especially the feeling of being alienated and vulnerable. The other aliens, sensing she is AWOL, hunt for her.

This new sensibility is so foreign it discombobulates her. Human emotions are as strange and unmanageable to her as the black forest cake she chokes on. She has no human appetites, so can't eat even dessert. She ends up confused and alone in the rain, on a bus, helpless and cold, until a man offers her help, warmth, comfort, a meal of fried egg and beans that -- understandably -- she doesn't touch, and an equally alien cultural experience in the gibberish TV clown. 

When the generous, unselfish man leaves her in her room, with a heater, she for the first time discovers and enjoys the beauty of her body. Under the skin she is the alien but her experience with the misshapen man has opened her to the warmth of the helpful stranger. Not just acting but now feeling human, she welcomes his kisses and sexual approach. But their intercourse is thwarted by her lack of vagina. She looks for it with a lamp, uncomprehending. She can't let him in. Her humanity is skin-deep.

Under the skin she remains the alien, as the rapist logger discovers when he claws her skin off with her pants. As she has discovered human warmth and feeling, though, it's apt that the logger destroys her in a gas-lit fire on the snow. In the last shot, low angle up through the falling snowflakes, her smoke seems to be rising toward a white-framed portal (unless that's a flaw in the Cineplex screen). 

For all it's sci-fi trappings, then, this is a very human and immediate story about the vulnerability of the emotional, the inhumanity of the selfish and destructive, and — in human and alien alike — our quest for completion, to connect with someone both on and underneath the skin

Under the Skin -- Take 2: Zone of Interest

Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin was better received by critics than by audiences upon its 2013 release. Perhaps audiences were surprised when a promisingly sexy thriller turned into sci fi, without having the en route mysteries explained.

I any case, Under the Skin gains considerable interest from Glazer’s next film, the extremely successful 2023 Zone of Interest. The illumination is mutual. 

Both films open with an eerie, barely musical sound track and ambiguous abstract imagery. The effect is disturbing and suggestive of an other-worldly context, an abnormality.

Both films follow an outsider’s experience of an alien world. Here it’s the heroine’s exploration of Earth. She seduces men to harvest their internals. Somehow the severely disfigured victim escapes. When she encounters a non-predatory man she deepens her vulnerability. Drawn into sexual intimacy she is shocked to discover herself unable to admit her lover. She is ultimately destroyed by a frustrated rapist.

    In the later film it’s the Nazi commandant and his family who are coldly detached from normal human feelings and responsibility, as they try to marginalize their concentration camp.

     Indeed both films center on exposing the central woman as an inhuman. One is an alien whether from outer space. She proves a first draft of that completely selfish and heartless Zone of the Nazi functionary’s Interest. 

The Palestinian Hoodwink

  Maybe it’s my charming boyish naivete, but I’m still surprised by how pervasive the Palestinian lies have become. Case in point: the sumptuous DK/Smithsonian book History of the World, Map by Map (2018). Here are the (to put it mildly) distortions in the two-page “Israel and the Middle East” (pp.332-3).

Captions 1, 2: The five Arab states are reported to have attacked Israel on its foundation in 1948, with Israel’s “seizing 50 percent of the area allocated to an Arab state.”

We’re told of Israel then “sacking” “up to 600 Palestinian villages” but nothing on the Arab attacks either then or from the 1920s on. No mention of their collaboration with the Nazis. This — typically — disguises the Palestinians’ genocidal project as a land dispute. It's all a matter framing. The Palestinians are presented as victims by framing out the roots of the culture clash.

By the way, those Arabs did not call themselves “Palestinian” until 1965. They had always rejected the term for fear of losing attachment to the Arab states. Russia then suggested that ploy to match the Israelis’ claim to being a distinct culture worthy of statehood. The “Palestinians” have no language, cultural, historical, religious or any other difference from the other Arab states. (See ‘land dispute” above). None of the PLO leaders were Palestinian (Arafat an Egyptian, etc.). Since the Romans, “Palestinian” referred to the area’s Jews. The Arabs’ claim to the historic “Palestine” expands even to include their ownership of Jesus, the nice Jewish boy who did so well. 

“As a result more than 700,000 Palestinians…fled their homes and went into exile in neighbouring countries.” Omitted: the neighbouring Arab states’ commanded the Arabs to leave Israel so as not to impede their “driving the Jews into the sea.” That compliance, the abandonment of their homes on their neighbours' orders, was the original meaning of their term "naqba," or "the  catastrophe."  Those “neighbouring countries” then largely refused entry to those refugees, preferring to leave them stateless for 75 years (and counting), strictly to create problems for Israel. 

Of course, there is no mention of the 800,000 Jews at that time expropriated and expelled from the Arab states and largely taken in by Israel. Only Israel is reported to have erred and transgressed in such a banishment. But only the Palestinians are heard demanding reparations and the "right to return," not even that original number but with all their descendants, to swamp and destroy the Jews. 

The text elaborates a bit. Immediately after Israel’s declaration of independence ”Israeli forces promptly captured swathes of Palestinian territory and drove many of its people into exile.” No, that happened after the Arabs started the war. And the local Arabs fled, as ordered. The Arab nations attacked, Israel defended herself. Then as now. 

After the 1967 and 1973 wars “Israel has failed to make peace with its Palestinian population.” First, making peace is just Israel’s responsibility, not even in part the Palestinians’? Anyway, the Palestinians rejected all six of Israel’s peace offers since 1948 and two others, with no negotiation or counter-offer. 

Second, Gaza and the West Bank are governed by Hamas and the PA, respectively. They are not part of Israel’s population. Their liberties are curtailed and their economy in ruins because of their governments, not Israel’s. Given that the Palestinians insist on replacing the Jews, not living with them — “Free from the River to the Sea,” etc. — Israel’s “failure” to oblige may not seem so evil. 

The text nods at that: “Israel’s intention to cede land for peace has proved difficult to put into practice, with the result that relations with the Palestinians remain fraught.” The text leaves the Palestinian in the passive voice, accorded no responsibility at all for their own demand for the Jews’ genocide.

Oh, yes, given the consequences of Israel having vacated Gaza in 2005, perhaps there should be no mystery why “Israel has been reluctant to relinquish Jerusalem and the West Bank.” The wording suggests Israel should be giving up “Jerusalem” entirely, not just what Jordan renamed the West Bank after its illegal 1948 grab of the historically Jewish territories, Judea (get it?) Samaria and East Jerusalem. 

Given this mess of prejudice and ignorance I’m not inclined to read any other parts of this book. Perhaps I’ll tear out those pages and stuff it into one of those Little Libraries. But who knows? Perhaps the rest of the book is fine, not so discoloured by racial and cultural prejudice posed as fact.

        Here is the worst part. I see no Arab names attached to the credits. These lies have become mainstream Western thought, parroted sans judgment, against history, against humanity, supporting their genocidal campaign. Antisemitism runs that deep.

Zone of Interest

  So in what zone do we focus our interest? Are we entirely self-absorbed or do we engage our views and responsibility beyond us? And how far will we range our commitment?

Hard to image a more dramatic example than this film, purporting to record the daily experience of the historic Rudolph Hoss family. They enjoy their plush garden and manor smack next-door to the Auschwitz concentration camp where Herr Hoss is the excellent Director.

Opulence, power, self-satisfaction, right smack dab against arguably mankind’s most horrible exhibition of inhumanity. The Holocaust. You know, the unprecedented 20th Century German atrocity that the Gaza government tried modestly to emulate on October 7 in Israel.

Herr Hoss may be slightly troubled by this disjunction in his humanity. Perhaps that’s why he rides a horse to work, so that “next door” might seem “distanced.” His weird haircut can be read as his trimming of his hair (=self) to match his officer’s cap (=role). Ironically, it could pass for the Jew’s skullcap -- a quiet reminder of their shared humanity. It’s also another reduction of his self in wrong-headed discipline.

No such qualms for his Frau. She’s a deft mistress of the house, sufficiently broad-minded to employ Jewish slaves. “You have Jews in the house,”  her mother marvels. Frau Hoss even lets her maids choose some underwear from the loot delivered from the prison. For herself she saves the fancy fur coat, showing off secretly in her mirror. 

Less happy, her mother still resents having been outbid on the curtains, when the rich Jewish woman for whom she cleaned had her possessions auctioned off. Somewhat consolingly, that woman is now in the camp.

But the matron is mercurial. Infuriated by news of her hubby’s transfer away from that idyllic appointment, Frau Hoss turns sharply on one maid servant: “I could have your ashes spread on the garden if I wanted.” The good woman knows what’s going on next door, on what others’ suffering her lavish comfort is based. It only enhances her delusion of power, her pleasure. 

The film’s brave premise assumes we too know what’s going on next door and will be appalled by these characters’ indifference, indeed exploitation. The agents or instruments of that inhumanity carry on nonplussed. We hear some of the telltale sounds they hear but we pause to read them — and are appalled they don’t. 

The film’s basic conceit is that we find cheap comfort in remoteness. Dramatizing this, the film characteristically shows us something that it allows to fade away, leaving us haunted by the lingering score.

That begins with the opening title. We read it, it fades away and we hear the music over a black screen for a spell — a spell well cast — before the plot opens on the Hoss family enjoying a sunny lakeside picnic. The framing music moves from sombre chords into a culminating scream. 

So, too, an action is implied but not shown. A helpless young girl enters Hoss’s office and routinely prepares for his use. Like the Auschwitz enormities, we don’t see the sex. Cut to Hoss going into some deep downstairs for his shameful post-coital cleanse. 

For her part, Frau Hoss invitingly gives a manly worker a fag and they stand eying each other. Her dog enters, knows what’s happening so turns tail and leaves. So does the camera. But we’re left knowing even in their marital intimacy these characters live on the edge of a reality they are determined to ignore. The Hosses sleep in small twin beds with no exchange of physical affection. Their marital ardour is as false as their affected honour.

Does it work? 

It does insofar as the Hoss couple’s comfort and career ambitions go. But we catch strains of failure. One of their sons has picked up the Cruel Guard role and tortures his kid brother in the greenhouse. 

The oldest daughter lives another compulsive retreat from comfort in her sleepwalking. She hides in closets, as her family hides from the reality they serve in the day. Hoss’s nightmare evokes the Hansel and Gretel story, the witch’s oven an echo of the death factory and the Hoss family life just another Grimm tale.

The adults’ self-deception may also be wavering. The visiting Frau Hoss’s mother waxes exuberant over the luxurious house and garden. But when she can’t sleep at might she peers into the darkness and perhaps sees and hears the deeper darkness. Impulsively she leaves. Her explanatory note is read by her daughter, then flung into the fire. As if that solves it.

That internal gnawing may also explain Herr Hoss’s vomiting when he learns his transfer has been rescinded and he will stay in his happy home to supervise the Hungary operation. A medical operation found him hale. But now alone he vomits in the hallway, as if finally unable to contain the vile basis of his life and fortune. 

In that scene the marble floor is a sequence of boxes within boxes, like prisons within prisons, or contexts within contexts. This elaborates upon the film’s central theme — ignoring the tragedy outside your box.

As it happens this film is made poignantly pertinent by the current Jewish situation, with Israel’s existential threat ramifying into  a global resurgence of antisemitism. As the Hosses’ moral condition is defined by their detachment from their context, so we can be read by our response to the Gaza attack on Israel and her response. For many responders to the current war, history begins on October 9.  

As usual Keats springs to mind. Heard melodies are sweet; those unheard are sweeter. Holocaust imagery is harrowing, yet what we know is happening but refuse to witness or acknowledge is even worse.

The Sopranos: That Last scene

      This marks the 25th anniversary of that brilliant groundbreaking TV drama, The Sopranos. Wow! 25 years. It really did revolutionize TV drama.

    At the time I published three editions of episode-by-episode analyses of the drama, by Continuum Books. The Sopranos on the Couch. Check Abe/Amazon for them. Go for "The Ultimate Edition," which was ultimate at the time, preceding the 7th season, which I covered in an essay anthology on lulu.com. Here is a paper I unloaded at a Sopranos conference in NYC.

Unpredictable But Inevitable: That Last Scene 

I know, I know, David Chase has avowed that Tony Soprano does not get whacked at the end of The Sopranos. And even if we set aside the allure of a Sopranos movie sequel or twelve, Chase might be expected to know because he conceived the whole drama and supervised every instant, every component, across the seven seasons, and in fact both wrote and directed that controversial last episode. But as the reverend D. H. Lawrence has exhorted us -- Trust the art not the artist. As we return to the Art and look very closely at the last scene and the last episode and the last season and indeed at the whole motherjumpin’ series -- Does Tony Soprano get whacked? My conclusion is unequivocal: Yes and No.  

The No is obvious because, as Mr Chase acknowledges, we don’t see Tony get killed. We get that notorious blank screen. Nor do we see either the conception or delivery of Meadow and AJ -- yet we infer those occurred because the context of the drama suggests as much. And as the later action suggests the earlier happened, the earlier action may strongly suggest what happens behind that blank screen. Context counts.

  A plethora of evidence in the drama and around it sets up our expectation he will be killed. This architecture compels the inference that Tony dies in the diner -- and probably not from indigestion. 

For one thing, high art and popular culture have always been obligated to assure us that crime does not pay. The hours and the per diem may make up for the lack of tenure – but crime does not pay. In life and in politics perhaps but in art, nope. So our killers have always been brought to boot heel, even when they are Good Guys like Shane, leave alone the gangsters in David Chase’s primary models – The Public Enemy, The Godfather trilogy and most pertinently the schnook’s mortal boredom at the end of GoodFellas.  

As well Chase has established a tightening noose around Tony. Over the course of the two-season epilogue we see Uncle Junior disintegrate, lovable Bobby killed, Silvio near-fatally wounded, Phil Leotardo squashed, AJ flub his suicide, and even Tony’s beloved Christopher – snuffed by Tony himself. In the lingo of the presidential race and the other Super Bowl, Big Old Moe Mentum has switched from Survival to Death. 

Chase leaves Tony’s fate ambiguous not because Tony escapes death but because Chase – as he has all through the seven seasons -- rejects closure, would rather unsettle than pacify his viewer, and again declares his independence from narrative convention. To the end more like life than like TV, this one last reticence settles nothing – and everything.

Consistent with the drama’s penchant for lifelike paradox, Chase’s ending is both happy and tragic. Tony’s survival would be happy for him -- but is tragic insofar as it extends and validates his moral failure and his damage to others. His death, which would be perhaps not that positive to him, would be the broadly happy ending because it would betoken justice, not just civil but poetic. The ambiguity of that blank screen admits both endings. 

That suggests that whether Tony lives or dies is ultimately insignificant. His human failure leaves him in the state of Death-in-Life. This balances off Tony’s Life-in-Death experience at the beginning of the drama’s epilogue, Season Six, when his near-death leads to a spiritual awakening and a harmony with the universe – that through Season Seven disintegrates. In the last episode at Bobby’s wake Paulie encapsulates this introspective ambiguity: “In the midst of death, we are in life. Huh? Or is it the other way around?... Either way, you’re halfway up the ass.” 

Perhaps Tony has to be left in limbo because he has come to personify the contemporary American pragmatic capitalist – and that just carries on. Indeed The Sopranos could have carried Orson Welles’s working title for Citizen Kane: “The American.” As the last episode title, Made in America, confirms, the general mix of idealistic pretense and corrupt practice, delusions, denial and defeat, covers a considerable stretch of contemporary American culture. More innocent national satires, the current Little Miss Sunshine and the classic Twilight Zone, play respectively on the comatose Silvio’s TV and in Tony’s safe house. 

Tony’s failure appears in his children’s moral decline, like the fast flare and funk of AJ’s idealism. At Bobby’s wake AJ contends that enlisting to “go kill some fuckin terrorists” would be “more noble than watching jerk-off fantasies on TV if I were kicking their asses.” He echoes Tony’s immigrant idealism: “It’s like – America, this is where people came. To make it. It’s a beautiful idea. And what do they get? Blame? And come-ons for what they don’t need and can’t afford.” AJ tells his new therapist that his SUV’s explosion felt like a cleansing. “We have to break our dependence on foreign oil,” he recites. But even as AJ buys Arabic lesson CDs his idealism remains materialistic. When the army’s helicopter training could get him a job with Donald Trump his ambition stays in the TV fantasies (Trump’s “reality” show) that he spurned. 

AJ readily abandons his military sacrifice for a film job – that brings a sporty new BMW. This career puts AJ on the film course that doomed Tony’s adoptive “son,” Christopher. AJ’s film project is about a private eye who’s sucked into the internet to solve the murders of some virtual prostitutes. Chase has consistently teased the relationship between life and fiction, between actor and role. A real character’s need to solve the murder of fictional prostitutes reflects upon the conventions of fiction suspended by Chase’s open ending. 

Like AJ, Meadow’s legal career reverts to her past. She switched from medicine when her father’s arrests proved “The state can crush the individual.” Echoing Carmela’s denial – which she used to reject -- Meadow blames Tony’s arrests on anti-Italian prejudice -- as if his guilt were irrelevant. As well, she moves from her volunteer work defending oppressed minorities, like blacks and Moslems, into her fiance’s big law firm –where she will start at $170k – that defends a politician against corruption charges involving bid rigging, bagmen and whores. In contrast, her bulemic classmate Hunter (played by David Chase’s daughter) has straightened out and is in second-year Medicine. That is, Hunter escapes her dysfunction while the healthier Meadow relapses into her father’s. 

The other supporting characters, trapped in their selves, confirm the Death-in-Life pattern. Janice tries to inveigle Uncle Junior of his missing money and claims improvement: “I had therapy. I’m a good mother. I put Ma and all her warped shit behind me…. Not that I get any thanks for it.” Within a breath her Livia element rebounds. So, too, Uncle Junior doesn’t recognize Janice or Tony but he proudly remembers “This thing of ours”: “I was involved in that?” As patterns persist, AJ’s new therapist is a Wasp Melfi who crosses her long, lovely legs and evokes both Tony’s old claim  -- an unloving mother who “was a borderline personality”--  and Carmela’s denial: “Maybe the army’d be great for [AJ], if there wasn’t a war going on.”

In fact the only major character to change is the once virtuous FBI Agent Harris – as he sinks into Tony. By the old proverb, whoever touches pitch is defiled. After the FBI surveillance protects the Sopranos at Bobby’s funeral, Harris fingers Tony’s nemesis Phil Leotardo. Harris reacts to Phil’s death as if he were on Tony’s team: “Damn, we’re gonna win this thing.” As Big Pussy Bonpensiero came to see himself as an FBI agent, Harris has turned Soprano. As he betrays his wife with his colleague mistress, he betrays his colleagues with his support of Tony. 

The scene where Tony leaves Paulie sunning himself outside Satriale’s replays the II, 11 ending where Agent Harris drops by to introduce his new partner to Tony. Paulie’s antagonism towards the cat that stares at Christopher’s photo coheres with his superstition-based religion. To his claim he saw the Virgin Mary at the Bada Bing (presumably after hours), Tony shows limited support: “Why didn’t you say something? Fuck strippers, we coulda had a shrine. Sold holy water in gallon jugs, we coulda made millions.” Paulie’s reluctant acceptance of his promotion – “I live but to serve you, my liege” – raises the suspicion he could (again) betray Tony. 

Tony’s soft spot for the stray cat – an antithetic reminder of his ducks in I,1 – and his pause to enjoy the air as he rakes round his pool, recall his post-surgery spirituality in Season Six. Season Seven traces his relapse into his selfish brutishness and his consequent isolation. Perhaps Tony’s last emblem is his last supper’s onion ring– unhealthy, flavourful but indigestible, and hollow at the core. Indeed, as the Sopranos swallow the whole ring sans bite or chew, it suggests a profane deep fry communion.

 The closing restaurant scene feels ominous. As we get Tony’s perspective on the bystanders we taste the crime boss’s restless fear. They are the “schnooks” to which Harry Hill, the turncoat hero of GoodFellas, was reduced, so even as innocents they embody Tony’s dread. While Bobby’s wake was at Vesuvio’s, the Holsten’s diner suggests cheap comfort not class. It images Tony’s decline from Artie Bucco’s restaurant and self-realization. As Little Italy is “now reduced to one row of shops and cafes,” the diner is another comedown, like Carmela’s refuge here, an old house reeking with the previous owners’ urine. 

Tony takes a booth from which he can watch the door –and not just for his family’s separate arrivals. In a medley of metaphors, from the tabletop jukebox he plays Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin’. Journey sing off the end of Tony’s, and Chase’s. The lyrics point to the ambiguous end: “Some will win, some will lose, Some were born to sing the blues. Oh, the movie never ends. It goes on and on and on and on.” 

As Tony scans the juke, the song’s flip side explicitly assigns the ending to the viewer: Any Way You Want It. Tony also lingers over Heart’s Where Will You Run To? and Magic Man, and over Tony Bennett’s I’ve Gotta Be Me and – for Tony -- the synonymous A Lonely Place.  As the titles summarize Tony’s condition and like his perspective on the other diners, the very last shot, the no-life blackout, signifies his last view. That makes it the reverse of the episode’s opening shot, where Tony wakes up, resumes consciousness, in the safe house. 

Though AJ cites Tony’s valediction from the end of I, 13 -- “Focus on the good times.” -- we project Tony’s educated suspicion onto the truck driver in a USA cap, the strong young man with a date, the black duo who enter last. Even the man with three boy scouts disturbingly recalls the customers at the hobby shop where Bobby is killed (VII, 8). 

Most importantly, the man who walks past the Sopranos to the WC behind Tony recalls Michael Corleone’s Family initiation, when he retrieved a gun from the toilet box. His “Members Only” jacket repeats the title of the opening episode in Chase’s two-season epilogue, VI,1, after the jacket Eugene Pontecorvo wore when he killed a man in a diner like this one. Tall dark and lanky, the man resembles Eugene, who killed himself when Tony wouldn’t release him from the mob. Earlier Eugene’s wife said someone should “put a bullet in [Tony’s] head” – perhaps setting up a contract fulfilled now.

Meadow’s difficulty in parking her car establishes a suspense we assume is life or death. As Hitchcock contended, dramatic power lies not in the explosion but in its expectation. Will she get there in time to die or late enough to be saved? The last words, as Tony sees someone approach -- maybe Meadow, maybe not -- are Steve Perry interrupted at “Don’t stop.” But as art –whether a song or an epic TV drama – can’t control life the show and I suggest Tony’s life both do stop. We’re deprived of Perry’s last “believin’.”

Reading the blank screen as Tony’s death also fulfills Bobby’s remark about assassinations in “Soprano Home Movies” (VII, 1): “You probably don’t hear it when it happens, right?” In “Stage Five” (VII, 2) when Gerry Torciano is killed “He did not hear a thing” and didn’t realize anything “until it was over.” That’s how Bobby himself got it (VII, 8), how Phil gets it here, and by extension Tony now. 

Further, this is one of only three Sopranos episodes without music over the end-credits. Where II, 8 ended on the beep of the wounded Christopher’s life-support system, Tony at the end has no life-support. VI, 1 ends with Tony shot by Junior, unconscious, and no sound over the end credits. The endings of the first and last episodes of Chase’s two-season epilogue take their cue from Hamlet: “The rest is silence.”  

Nevertheless all this remains surmise. We don’t know Tony has been killed because we haven’t seen it. The conclusion spares/deprives us of the sensation, thrill or more cerebral satisfaction of his death, as Chase denied us Melfi’s vengeance against her rapist (III, 4). Because we have suspended our moral rigour to cheer Tony on all these years Chase won’t give us any easy way out. This reticence is a moral imperative. Knowing Tony is dead could give us false confidence that such unfathomable evil has been controlled. However directed his conclusion, Chase leaves Tony in limbo for the same reason Shakespeare leaves Iago alive and silent -- because such massive evil remains a living danger. We may assume he’s dead but assurance lies elsewhere. As John Allemang put it, “For closure, look to M*A*S*H or Friends/ But Tony’s torment never ends.”  And yet… Tony has to be killed.  It can’t be over till the fat Soprano croaks.