Tag Archives: Sopranos

How to do an ending

3 Sep

It’s occurred to me many times as I’ve watched quality television drama, how few script writers manage a good ending.

I’m thinking specifically of the ABC TV drama Broadchurch, a series that finished last week.  It was pretty good I thought, and I hadn’t picked the villain. That revelation was an unpleasant shock (Oh, no! No! I cried) which I won’t reveal, in case anyone is planning to watch the DVD.

However, after the critical denouement, things went south fairly rapidly, sinking into a swamp of sentimentality that left me irritated and offended. It was as if the script writers didn’t quite know what to do next, and settled on an unrealistic coming together of an intolerably fractured community as their nod to catharsis. Obviously they felt compelled to attempt a resolution, in a situation in which such a thing would take decades to achieve, if ever.

The final scenes worked as an exposition of the kind of overwhelming public emotion experienced after a catastrophic event, the short-lived euphoria of  an intense and temporarily bonding experience. But it told me nothing about the morning after when everyone woke up to find themselves inescapably trudging through daily life in a bell jar of emotions, most of them necessarily dark.

The other ending that comes to mind is that of The Sopranos. No easy resolution for these scriptwriters: the Soprano family are seated in a cafe, Tony looks up, and everything goes black. What the fuck? I yelled. Then I thought we’d lost our power. However, I count this as one of the finest endings I’ve ever seen. Not even the merest nod to catharsis, bugger audience desire for resolution, everything just went black so figure it out for yourself.

My interpretation was that we were offered Tony’s perspective as his life abruptly and unexpectedly ended.

Of course, everything has definitely gone black now, with the recent death of James Gandolfini, who played Tony. There can be no change of plans and further episodes. It is ended.

Endings are rarely easy. The lovely innocence of Aristotle in Poetics, in which he declares his belief in a beginning, a middle and a cathartic end, seems in 2013 to belong with fairy tales and Hollywood, though in the latter case, innocence is long-lost. The ending has to be happy in Hollywood because that’s what brings in the money. There’s also an infuriating rush to resolution in most media: after the most horrific events, people are urged to seek “closure” and “move on” with what seems to me a most unseemly haste. Grief has its own unpredictable timeline, and Freud referred to the “labour” of mourning, implying the hard slog of it. If you’ve lost a sentient being under any circumstances, you’ll know the rewards of  “closure” and “moving on” have to be earned and they don’t come easy. And they aren’t the only losses some of us have to grieve: loss of health, body parts, hopes and ambitions unrealised. Sorrow is, to varying degrees, an inescapable aspect of human life, so why there is such emphasis on hastily tidying up the dark and difficult with such lack of due respect, is a mystery to me.

“I can’t believe it, I can’t believe I’m alive,” snarls Bob Dylan, in one of his many angrily grieving lyrics written for some woman who’s abandoned him, “but without you it doesn’t feel right…”

It doesn’t feel right. It doesn’t feel the same. Something has irrevocably changed. That’s endings for you. And that’s what I want the scriptwriters to show me. Bugger the confected catharsis.

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Game of Thrones, The Sopranos, Women.

6 Jun

I’ve just watched the first two episodes of Game of Thrones, the wildly successful HBO series set in faux Medieval times in what is now the UK and “across the Narrow Sea” in what we call Europe.  I was enthralled. I can’t wait for this evening when our household gathers to watch the next episode and in the words of Laurie Penny in the New Statesmen “enjoy the shit out of it,” despite its unexamined ‘racist rape-culture” ambience, and its appalling representation of women.

Life in Medieval times was not good for women, you might argue, and you would be right. There is no way of cushioning this reality, nor should anyone attempt such falsification. Women were for breeding and fucking. Relationships of all kinds evolved, because that’s what happens between humans regardless of class and circumstance. However, male allegiance is primarily to the King, or he who would be King. Women may not interfere with this requirement. No man would consider staying home from the slaughter because his woman asked it of him.

The wars fought between these opposing Medieval forces demand sacrifices from the top down, unlike our modern wars in which politicians dispatch the sons and daughters of others to do their killing while themselves remaining comfortably removed from trauma and death. This is only one of the differences between wars then and now, but that’s another story.

Reading Penny’s piece I found myself making comparisons between Game of Thrones and that other HBO success story, The Sopranos, in terms of their representation of women. The Sopranos is set in a very different world, that of organised crime in the US state of New Jersey in the present day. They have in common a ruthless hierarchical structure that demands total obedience from its male members to the King or the Captain. Mob women who do not comply with this requirement don’t last long, either in the family or in some instances, in this world. There is a divide between business and family that women may not cross.

That is not to say women in both series are entirely powerless, because they clearly are not. However, there are limits to the expressions of their power, and they exceed those limits at their peril. Overstepping the mark frequently results in physical retribution, sometimes death.

As in Game of Thrones, there are the women men marry and breed with, and the women men fuck. Occasionally there is confusion, and a “bastard” child results.

Sex is usually represented in both narratives as primarily for male gratification, urgent, hydraulic, and frequently performed from the rear, though in The Sopranos women are allowed to be on top a lot more. Women men fuck are generally less clothed in Medieval times and the present day, while wives and legitimate girlfriends get to wear expensive stuff.

In spite of this blatant and offensive sexism, and the highly aggravating madonna/whore complex that we just can’t seem to escape in our narratives, I was and remain enthralled by The Sopranos. In this and in Game of Thrones I’m willing to suspend my hard-won feminist critical faculties, and instead of righteously loathing the unreconstructed males who populate both worlds, I can’t stop myself enjoying the shit out of the shows. In particular, Tony Soprano remains a character of Shakespearian magnitude to me, his at times terrifying complexities holding my attention like a helpless deer caught in his headlights.  This series is littered with powerful characterisations, and I have not yet seen enough of Game of Thrones to judge if it achieves a similar standard.

At first blush, I suspect not. As Penny argues, Thrones is not subtle. After two episodes I feel I’ve got a decent handle on the characters and how they’re likely to behave. Be that as it may, I’m still enthralled.

There’s a critique of Penny’s critique here, written by Sarah Ditum.

What does intrigue me is my willingness, a willingness shared by millions of other women apparently, to suspend my outrage at the portrayal of women in both HBO masterpieces, and enter deeply into these created worlds, emerging at the end of each episode with a sense of having been transported to another reality and for better and for worse, being somehow embiggened by the experience.

I tentatively put this down to the difference between creativity and ideology. Ideology tells me things should be this or that way, and must be made to be.  Creativity tells me anything is possible, and while I might not like it, it exists and must be understood.

As Laurie Penny says: a piece of art doesn’t have to be perfectly politically correct to be fun, or important. We’re allowed to enjoy problematic things, as long as we’re honest about their problems.

Well, I’m honest about the woman problem in Game of Thrones and The Sopranos. The way we’re portrayed in both sucks, and is likely an accurate representation of  life for women in both those cultures.  Will that stop me watching, enthralled? No way.

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