"Cut to Black"

Leave it to David Chase to conclude The Sopranos with a narrative gesture that is likely to raise more questions than it answers. My guess is that just about anyone who has taken the trouble to write about this series will have a different opinion about the ending, and I have to believe that this is what Chase wanted. Rather than try to catalog exhaustively the many variations of interpretation, I would like to examine Frazier Moore's relatively straightforward account for Associated Press and counter it with my own reading. For the most part I would agree with Moore's summary of the plot, most of which involved an almost systematic leave-taking of all the secondary "family" characters (having taken leave of the psychiatric community in a previous episode), saving all the violence for the dismissal of Phil Leotardo. It is only the final scene that is likely to prompt energetic disagreement among the fans. Here is Moore's text:

Not that Chase (who wrote and directed this episode) didn't tease viewers with the threat of death in almost every scene.

This was never more true than in the final sequence. On the surface, it was nothing more momentous than Tony, his wife, Carmela (Edie Falco), Meadow and A.J. meeting for dinner at a cozy family restaurant.

When he arrived, Tony dropped a coin in the jukebox and played the classic Journey power ballad "Don't Stop Believing." Meanwhile, every moment seemed to foreshadow disaster: Suspicious-looking people coming in the door or seated at a table nearby. Meadow on the street having trouble parallel parking her car, the tires squealing against the curb. With every passing second, the audience was primed for tragedy. It was a scene both warm and fuzzy yet full of dread, setting every viewer's heart racing for no clear reason.

But nothing would happen. It was just a family gathering for dinner at a restaurant.

Then, with a jingle of the bell on the front door, Tony looked up, apparently seeing Meadow make her delayed entrance. Or could he have seen something awful -- something he certainly deserved -- about to come down?

Probably not. Almost certainly a false alarm. But we'll never know. With that, "The Sopranos" cut to black, leaving us enriched after eight years. And flustered. And fated to always wonder what happened next.

From my own point of view, that "cut to black" (which sustained over at least fifteen seconds, although I did not measure it), was not quite the spacer before the final credits that Moore seems to have made it out to be. I almost wonder if Chase was not thinking about Comcast customers (like myself), whose initial reaction would probably be, "Of all the times for those guys to screw up the signal!" However, having learned my music lessons from John Cage, I was willing to sustain the hypothesis that this was "visual silence;" and this turned out to be the case.

What do I think Chase was doing? Without sounding too frivolous, my initial reaction was that he went out with a gag based on Shakespeare: "The rest is silence." Shakespeare himself was playing with language in this sentence, folding together two interpretations of "rest," one for remaining time and the other for respite. The two fuse in the concept that a respite that endures over the remaining time is, of course, death. After the eruption of the usual violent acts on Leotardo, it's just "lights out" for Tony. The rest of his family may have also succumbed; but, since we experience that final scene from Tony's point of view, we never know (and, from that point of view, it no longer matters). There may also have been a nod to Gertrude Stein's sense of play, having to do with the way she wrapped up The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas in one self-describing sentence. In the spirit of that kind of gesture, it felt as if Chase were reading to us from a book, saying, as he closed the book, "And that was the end of the Sopranos," leaving us with a double reading of the object of the preposition, Tony's family and the series itself.

Under the shared guidance of Shakespeare and Stein, I hardly feel "fated to always wonder what happened next." Like these authors I have great respect for closure in literature, and I have every reason to believe that Chase shares that respect. I have no reason to "wonder what happened next" because the rest is silence; and silence does not fluster me. It is just another part of the natural order of things, and Chase's approach to closure fit very comfortably into that natural order.