Vox created a bit of a non-story story yesterday when they published a piece in which Martha P. Nochimson claimed to have David Chase on record explaining the ending of The Sopranos.
For those of you who don’t know—well, those of you who don’t know about the ending of The Sopranos should probably just go and watch The Sopranos. But basically [spoiler alert!], the show ends with mob boss Tony Soprano sitting in a diner with his family, with a mounting sense of unease in the scene, a sense that something might be about to happen…and then the episode and the series end with a cut to black.
The question that has preoccupied some Sopranos fans since is: did Tony get killed in this scene, or is he still alive? And Vox, yesterday, claimed to have the answer from Chase’s own mouth: Tony Soprano is alive.
Well, sort of. In the article, Chase isn’t quite as straightforward as the headlines that spread across the Internet might have led you to think. Later, via his publicist, Chase issued a statement that what he said was misconstrued by the journalist, and reiterated Chase’s refusal to answer the question—and his opinion that the answer to that question doesn’t really matter.
I won’t bore you with my reading of The Sopranos season finale. But I do think the whole kerfuffle illustrates a few points that I’d like to take this opportunity to get on the record:
• Authors/auteurs are not gods of the worlds they create. Even if David Chase had offered the definitive “answer” to the final episode of The Sopranos, it wouldn’t have mattered. He was instrumental in creating the text that is the show, but he doesn’t get to micromanage what interpretations and meanings arise when that text encounters an audience. Same goes for J.K. Rowling’s statements on who should have married whom in her Harry Potter books. After the work goes out into the world, the author fundamentally loses control over it, and they no longer occupy any place of privilege when it comes to interpretive authority.
• Art is not a puzzle, and the answers aren’t in the back of the book. There’s a tendency among some people to treat art as a sort of crossword puzzle, where if you correctly read all the clues you can come up with the correct solution. This is related to the first point I made: part of the problem is the notion that authors/artists create art to get across a single “point,” and that if you decode their clues correctly you can figure out what that point is. This attitude is dead wrong. It actually devalues art—if The Sopranos, say, is nothing more than a problem to be solved, then the series itself can be discarded as soon as you arrive at the correct solution: Tony’s dead. But art isn’t a puzzle. The answers aren’t in the back of the book. The durability of art comes not from the cleverness from which its puzzles are constructed, but by the ambiguity that remains and creates new meanings long after you think you’ve solved all its mysteries.
