He's dead.
I have no time for these conversations going on everywhere online, at work, at home...
Here, on my blog, I'm making this definitive pronouncement:
Tony Soprano was shot dead, and anyone with even modest interpretive skills should be able to see that. The only room for left for interpretation is whether stray bullets managed to take out A.J. and Carmella as well. (I dearly hope so.)
Any comments expressing contrary views will get whacked as soon as I read them.
ADDED: Okay, I soften my position in the comments. Now I'm not saying he was necessarily shot, but I do think he's dead, or dying.
10 comments:
I've never watched the show, but it sounds like a perfect and definitive ending. Amen.
You know, I didn't watch it much myself. (Way, way too east coast for me.) But Guy liked it, and so it was on every Sunday. I did appreciate the visual subtleties, which were rather unsubtle much of the time, but still.
I don't believe that.
He and Bobby talked about how you'd never see it coming, right? Well, in that scene, Tony saw it coming all around him.
It would be way too obvious if the guy in the tight MO jacket pulled a Michael Corleone and stashed a gun in the john.
The show ended on way too hopeful a note, with the whole family having sold out again (AJ and his BMW, Meadow and her $170K, and Carmela with her freakin' spec house), for Tony's suffering to end right there.
It goes on and on and on and on, right?
Sigh.
You're assuming they want you to think someone they showed you onscreen shot Tony Soprano. There is no reason to believe that.
Tony's suffering is bogus--he does not suffer; he's a psychopath. His emotions, such as they are, work only to serve his interests. (And if he was feeling happiness, that's the perfect time to kill him.)
It goes on and on...for *us* because we want it to. We're implored to never let it stop. We'll pay (believe) anything to roll the dice just one more time.
Overwhelmingly, we are led to believe Tony is dead. We were in his shoes when it went black, and quiet.
It would be even be more appropriate if he'd had a heart attack.
There's your on and on... the guy comes out with a gun, but Tony's laid out unconscious and his heart's not beating. So the hit men scram, and the paramedics arrive and resuscitate him.
OK. It's too early for me to decide what I really think. The end of the show was upsetting to me. (The fact that it ended, I mean.) I barely slept Sunday night, and I've had the Journey song in my head every day.
I loved that show, and I even had a crush on that psychopath. We don't even have cable TV, yet every week for years now I've figured out a way to see it whenever a new episode was on. ("You have HBO? Great! I'll be at your house Sunday night.")
(Can I please brag at this point that I saw James Gandolfini in Michael Imperioli's bar in Manhattan one time, though that was before I'd seen the show, so I didn't get to get excited about it? The people I was with -- the only other people in the bar besides JG and his buddy -- pointed him out, and I only sort of recognized him from Sopranos ads.)
So I can't decide whether I truly don't believe what you're saying, Chuck, or whether I'm just in the denial stage of grief. I'll consider it again in a month or so.
People often walk by the pea patch oblivious to the fact that there are people gardening in the pea patch...
On Monday, a guy walked by with his iPod on, singing, badly, "...straaangerrss in the nii-ii-iight..."
It took me awhile to place the song, but then I knew, and laughed.
That was my immediate conclusion at the end of the show Sunday night: He was whacked.
The ending reminded me of that of the Joseph Conrad short story, "To Build a Fire." Same "ambiguity," same conclusion.
Not to mention the foreshadowing in the final episode.
He be dead.
Hmm. One blog has mentioned that Meadow could have been pregnant.
Carmela explained to Tony that Meadow had a doctor's appointment to "switch birth control." That's too weird and random not to be meaningful.
Maybe Tony died at the moment that Meadow walked in. And maybe she was carrying the Second Coming, its hour come round at last, slouching towards Bethlehem to be born.
Or something.
I don't even want to consider that he's dead! As far as I'm concerned, Tony & his family & crew have become like family for me. I was there for the 1st episode & I was there for the last (say it isn't so, David Chase!).
Since Sunday, I feel like I've been whacked. Post-Soprano Depression. I always hated that Journey song & now it's fated to ring in my brain forever, reminding me that my 9 year love affair with all things Soprano has come to an end.
You all may laugh, but I'm having withdrawal pangs already...
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