Why Tony Soprano Must Die
By James Lileks
Tony Soprano must die. There’s really no other way the brilliant HBO series can end. Consider the options:
1) He goes into the Witness Protection Program, gets a new life as an insurance salesman in North Dakota. How you doin’. You got enough term insurance? ’Cause things, I dunno, they have a way of happenin’. After six months he’d snap, and beat a waiter to death at the Olive Garden for passing off rigatoni as mostaciolli. Not that the guy had it coming. But, you know, things had been buildin’ up.
It wouldn’t be dramatically satisfying for Tony to sink into a new life of existential kinship with the infinite flatness of the prairie. Picture it: Tony unmanned, sitting on a patio in his robe in January in West Fargo, staring at the dead end of a cold cigar. Unbent, unpunished, unmoored, and powerless. History remembers the kings that abdicate, but not with much affection.
2) Tony just goes on and on as before. He has another affair with some cynical, bitter Russian stripper, spends a year agonizing over some hothead in the organization who doesn’t understand the way things are—Doesn’t he know some guy has to get clipped every season? This genre of ours, it has rules. He has a falling out with Paulie Walnuts over a Grecian Formula joke. He goes to therapy and complains about the new pills— They help with the anxiety, but doc, they give me gas. Guys in my line of work, we can’t get up all the time and leave the room, people get nervous. And if I stay, well, badda bing badda boom, you know? And so on, and so on. He plugs away until one day he has the big, whaddya call it, cardial infraction, and he drops hard. Just like everyone else. Larger than life, right up to the moment he was smaller than death.
3) Or Tony could go to jail. This would mean “The Sopranos” turns into a courtroom drama, and there are enough of those. It would also mean dragging up all the crimes and schemes and whackings, which no one really remembers very well. We remember the high-profile rub-outs—Adriana, Big Pussy, that one sleazy guy who was shacking up with Tony’s sister (like that wasn’t punishment enough)—but a trial would turn the show into a greatest-hits highlight reel. Besides, one of the peculiar charms of “The Sopranos” is the way it seems to operate entirely separate from the world of law.
No, Tony has to pay. But for what?
Well, for being a hero. That’s a peculiar description, since nothing Tony does is heroic; he is selfish and brutal, uncultured, a creature of appetites and passions. He’s bound by the necessities of his profession to certain standards, but they’re parodies of civilized norms. He is a thug and a parasite.
And how we love him. Hey, we do. There’s a reason “The Sopranos” is in its sixth season, and it’s not just the mob-boss-as-suburban-middle-manager conceit. It’s James Gandolfini, who has invested in Tony a horrible charisma, a canny animal vitality. It’s never directed at you, Tony never faces the camera, snarls You gotta problem? and punches you as you sit on your sofa. Instead, you’re by his side, which has the effect of making you on his side. Think of his character and you’re likely to remember the times a tiny grin lit up his beady eyes, not the slack face of the man in empty-soul post-rut drunken ennui. You remember the anger over the kids, or the interminable exasperation with his mother, not the mouth pinched in fury as he kicks someone half to death.
As they say: Guys want to be him! Gals want to be with him! Actually, that’s not quite true. But guys do like to think that if they found themselves next to Tony at the bar, they’d get a How you doin’ from him. Women like to think he’d give them a long look as they walked past, then grin and shrug.
The viewer’s relationship to Tony Soprano, in other words, is the same as someone hanging around a bunch of grizzlies, wearing a fur suit and calling them cutesy names, right up until the point where they maul him to death. Tony Soprano has to atone for being such a remarkable character, for making us feel fascination and sympathy for sociopaths and thieves. So he must die. His death will remind us: Crime Does Not Pay.
That is, unless you’re selling DVDs with a little extra commentary and some deleted scenes. Then it pays just fine. Few things make evil more attractive than a nice slip-case.
