The Rude Pundit: Regarding The Sopranos and American Evil

The uproar over the final episode of The Sopranos is on that idiotic side of hilarious, the place where you look around at all the goobs and no-brain fucks and wonder why you all get to say you're members of the same species. The Rude Pundit's one-line review of it: a brilliant "Fuck you, America." Don't worry - this ain't gonna be some jerk-off fanboy parsing of every goddamn clue and every character's final scenes, looking for where a movie might be made. Series creator David Chase would think you're a tool for doing that, anyway.

Here's one of the things we got: A.J., Tony Soprano's son, has been a whiny little bitch since his girlfriend dumped him, and he had all of a sudden discovered there's bad shit going on in the world, even attempting suicide over it all. After a period of getting into watching Frontline and checking out political websites, the hot teenage girl he's been hanging out with turns him on to Bob Dylan while sitting in his SUV. The SUV catches fire as he's about to bang the girl, with Dylan singing in the background. They escape, the SUV blows up, Dylan melts, and the explosion and thrill of the violence is just really cool to A.J. He announces he wants to join the military to go to Afghanistan, become an Arabic translator, and fight terrorists. The most telling part of his conversation with his parents about it is they don't want A.J. to go fight in Iraq, as if it's understood without saying so that that war is a useless waste of life. At the end of the talk, Carmela and Tony tell A.J. that they've gotten him a job working on a movie about a detective who has to solve virtual murders inside the Internet. And A.J., distracted from his noble calling by the stupidity of the movie business, takes the job, and he ends up laughing at YouTube videos with the girl, driving around in a studio-owned BMW, the American dream, man.

So why should you give a shit, you who may not have watched The Sopranos all these years? The other things that the Rude Pundit looked at this weekend include the Council of Europe Report on CIA Secret Prisons in Eastern European countries, where you got to learn that America kept men who had never been convicted of or officially charged with any crimes in squalid cells, nude, with freezing cold or burning hot air blown in, with loudspeakers that would blare the sounds of screaming women and children as punishment if the men didn't show their hands fast enough when the guards demanded to know if they were alive, where they were hung on the wall by shackles and forced into stress positions. No, no, dear right wingers, they were not being skinned alive or boiled in oil, but is that really the standard by which we want to measure our humanity?

And the Rude Pundit also read the report by several human rights groups about the 39 "ghost detainees" kept by the United States in the secret prisons. Here's the Rude Pundit's favorite little bit: "In September 2002, Yusuf al-Khalid (then nine years old) and Abed al-Khalid (then seven years old) were reportedly apprehended by Pakistani security forces during an attempted capture of their father, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed...After Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s arrest in March 2003, Yusuf and Abed Al Khalid were reportedly transferred out of Pakistan in U.S. custody. The children were allegedly being sent for questioning about their father’s activities and to be used by the United States as leverage to force their father to co-operate with the United States." But don't worry. An American official says, "We are handling them with kid gloves. After all, they are only little children...but we need to know as much about their father's recent activities as possible. We have child psychologists on hand at all times and they are given the best of care."

The reason that people are so upset about the finale of The Sopranos is that the show just ends in a quick blackout as Tony's family gathers for dinner in an all-American diner, ominous people walking by, constant threats in the air, the aura of impending doom never abating. And then that's it. Silence. Sure, we could argue about whether or not what it "really" means is that Tony was shot dead. But that doesn't matter. And it misses the point.

The Fuck-You of the episode is to deny you catharsis. You want it all tidy, all the moralistic good and bad so neatly bundled into a final grand gesture, Tony dead, maybe his family dead, nice Shakespearean and unified. You wanted blood. But what the series told us is that, at the end of the day, we are all tainted by the immorality we're willing to endure, even "benefit" from, and that, no matter what the culture around us tries to force on us, most of the time we simply go on living with the evil that we do or are willing to overlook. The war won't just "end." It'll be this thing that haunts us, this thing that reconfigures how we exist in the world, re-creates what we believed to be our identity and morality. And, no, this ain't about some goddamn TV show or books or movies that explore the same thing.

A writer once posed this question to a young Rude Pundit, after reading an early draft of one of his plays: "Do you believe that evil people are always punished?" That was when the Rude Pundit still held out the possibility of that kind of retribution. But he had to admit to the old writer: no, no, so often evil just maunders on, even after we've stopped looking.

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Sopranos, although I'm fully aware of its existence. I assumed it was a long drawn out rip-off of the Godfather. I read this review with interest and I rather like the description of the ending - a kind of final "up yours" to the viewers.

this is one of the best one he`s ever written...

the FBI agents going after some "Arab-lookin' guys Tony fingered because they were redirected to focus on the WoT; AJ coming to believe that terror had to be fought in the ME while the real terror, the real danger was always right under their noses. And when it came right down to it, AJ wasn't going to join the Army because he is privileged; his parents have the means to keep him from getting his hands dirty. Meanwhile, Tony and his associates ARE terrorists.

My take on it.

me and virtually bonding with these bad guys was just too rightwing for me. That said, I'm glad the ending was, um, Un-American or Un-Hollywood, because it validates what we live. We often fantasize that the real world bad guys will get theirs, but we know in our hearts that it's just a fantasy.

sound good. Why not end it so?