Fifteen years ago, The Sopranos ended its six-season run on HBO, going out with neither a bang nor a whimper.
Much has been and no doubt will continue to be written about the show’s climax, which sees the family Soprano—troubled New Jersey mob boss Tony, wife Carmella and son AJ—seated in a booth at a popular Americana diner, chowing down on onion rings and listening to the Journey rock anthem “Don’t Stop Believing” from the table-top juke box. All around them, their fellow Jerseyites—families, couples, old timers, as well as one shadowy white loner in a Member’s Only jacket and two young African American men whom Tony seems to clock as suspicious1 —enjoy the relaxed atmosphere. Outside, daughter Meadow, running late, struggles to parallel park. She finally succeeds, then rushes, rather carelessly, across the street and into the restaurant, as the sense of dread builds to a crescendo alongside the soundtrack. We get one final close-up of Tony looking up towards the front door at the sound of the bell set off by Meadow then—nothing.
Smash cut to black. Hold for ten seconds. Roll credits.
Suffice to say, to an American television audience largely unacquainted with narrative ambiguity, that ending proved both instantly iconic and instantly contentious (as well as confusing—many a viewer thought their cable had cut out). Right away, fans debated what it all meant. Did Tony get whacked, the sudden cut to black signaling his exit from this world? Or is the lack of resolution meant to show that Tony simply continues to live his life in a constant state of anxiety and paranoia?2
The only thing that’s certain is that the ambiguity was the point, and I have no desire to re-litigate the matter here. Rather, I want to use it as a springboard into the show’s relationship with mystery in and of itself.
***
Along with being one of the greatest mob dramas to ever grace our screens, big or small, The Sopranos is also one of our greatest spiritual, and specifically Catholic, dramas. Mystery, particularly its relation to salvation, lay at the heart of Catholicism, and so it goes for the series. From the earliest episodes, we watch these characters struggle to rectify their immoral lifestyles—which, in the case of both of Tony’s families, lay atop a foundation of avarice and bloodshed—with their sincere faith in a larger moral universal order.
In this, the show wasn’t exactly breaking any new ground. Mob dramas have always come laden with religious symbolism, particularly those that, like The Sopranos—such as Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather trilogy and Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets—devote as much attention to the ethnic heritage and traditions of their Italian American communities as they do their criminal underworlds. But whereas those films explored the psychological effect of religion on their characters, The Sopranos flat-out embraces the numinous. The supernatural is real in the Sopranos; there is an afterlife, there are ghosts, and the hand of the divine routinely reaches into this world from beyond the veil of reality. While the full nature of these otherworldly forces remains mysterious, there is no question as to their existence.
Throughout the show, in both dreams and waking life, characters encounter the spirits of the dead, religious icons, and omens. Often, they take note of them (like when Tony’s doomed cousin Christopher Moltisanti notices a foreboding crow watching him during a profane initiation ceremony); other times, they hover around in the background, witnessed only by we the audience (such as the phantoms that hover around the background of Tony’s mother’s wake). Some of these instances might be regarded purely as figments of the characters’ imagination, other examples, including two scenes revolving around long-time capo Paulie Gualtieri—arguably the most reprehensible character in the show and yet the most sensitive to supernal forces—can’t be explained away so easily.
The first comes in the Season 2 episode “From Where to Eternity”: Paulie, rattled by Christopher’s near-death experience and vision of hell (more on this shortly), visits a medium. Despite initially coming off as a con man, the self-proclaimed psychic proceeds frighteningly specific details about Paulie’s homicidal pedigree. Paulie himself recognizes this, later telling Tony, “There’s no denying it: I’m dragging a bunch of fucking ghouls around with me…” Later, in Season 6, Paulie has a vision of the Virgin Mary floating in the air above a stripper stage. Before he notices the Madonna, we catch a glimpse of her in the reflection of a nearby mirror, which would seem to verify her existence independent of Paulie’s experience.
Still, a (generous) skeptical reading could argue that these examples remain purely symbolic; that even when we the audience see things that the characters don’t, it’s merely a visual representation of their psyche, the cinematic equivalent of close third-person narration in literature. However, this argument no longer holds water. Lest there was any doubt as to the literal existence of the afterlife within the universe of The Sopranos, it is confirmed by the 2021 feature length prequel, The Many Saints of Newark, which is narrated by the deceased Christopher, who tells us outright that he is in hell.
***
More than any other example of the numinous, the specter of hell haunts The Sopranos. The first mention of it comes in the very first episode when Tony, lying on an MRI machine following a panic attack, is told by an angry Carmella that he’s going there when he dies, an accusation that reverberates throughout the show.
Both Christopher and Tony are actually given glimpses of hell following their separate near-death experiences. For Christopher, hell is an Irish pub in which he and other members of the mob (including his father) continually lose at gambling and are taken out back every night and whacked. When Tony finds him stuck in purgatory (fittingly represented by Costa Mesa, California) after being shot by his uncle, he feels himself being pulled toward an apparition of his deceased mother (the second such time she appears as such following her death), the figure who tormented him most in life.
The great American writer (and devoted Catholic) Flannery O’Connor once wrote: “All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.” No modern work of art better captures this sentiment than The Sopranos. For all that its characters are shown, over and again, the terrifying prospect of what’s waiting for them on the other side, they find themselves incapable of doing the one thing that can help them avoid it: change.
***
It is interesting that the visions of hell found in The Sopranos don’t reflect the usual idea of it that most believers hold (Paulie himself dismisses Christopher’s experience because his vision of hell doesn’t adhere to the stereotypes). The interminable corporate interzone that Tony ambles through while teetering on the verge of death doesn’t resemble Dante’s Purgatorio, so much as the bureaucratic maze in Kafka’s The Castle and the faceless wasteland of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (both of which end on abrupt anticlimaxes similar to the series finale). The notion that he’s set to spend eternity with his mother recalls the infernal waiting room in fellow existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit. Hell is other people, indeed.
In fact, for as Catholic as the show is, Catholicism is hardly the sole prism through which the show deals with the numinous.
Outside of the closing moments of the show, no episode has inspired as much debate as Season 3’s “Pine Barrens”, in which Paulie and Christopher attempt to discard the body of a Russian mobster they’ve murdered deep within the snowy woods of the New Jersey forest, only for him to spring to life and escape from them. In the ensuing chase, Christopher manages to shoot the Russian in the head, but when they go to collect his body, they can’t find a trace of him.3
Anyone familiar with folklore and fairy tales knows that the woods are the most haunted places on earth. Nowhere is a person more likely to disappear into thin air than there—that’s just about the oldest story in the book. Which isn’t to say that the Russian was taken by the fae folk, but simply to acknowledge that the sense of mystery found within The Sopranos are so primordial that they predate even Christ.
***
Along with spirituality and folklore, The Sopranos loved to explore dreams. The depiction of dreaming within the show are loaded with Freudian and Jungian archetypes, as well as the post-modern surrealism found in the films of Alfred Hitchcock, Federico Fellini,4 and especially David Lynch, whose own groundbreaking television drama Twin Peaks was cited by David Chase as a major influence on The Sopranos.
Lynch’s influence extends beyond just those dream sequences. In a famous essay about the filmmaker, David Foster Wallace defined the term Lynchian as “a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former’s perpetual containment within the latter.” He might as well be describing The Sopranos, and it should take nothing away from the originality of Chase’s vision to note how certain scenes from the show—such as a deeply creepy encounter with a group of decrepit hitmen—feel like they came straight out of Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive and the like, so reminiscent of Lynch are they in their nightmare logic.5
***
The Sopranos debuted on the cusp of the new millennium and went off air right as George W. Bush—a figure whose malign presence, along with 9/11, lingers over the entire series—was finishing up his disastrous time in office. The fallout of that administration and the huge upheavals that resulted (or at least accelerated) from it—The War on Terror, the collapse of the economy, the continued devastation of the environment, new surges in violent racial animus—has brought America to its current state of catastrophe. More than ever, people are rejecting ambiguity, to the point where millions are willing to embrace patently ridiculous conspiracy theories and hate-filled zealotry in exchange for some small semblance of comprehension.
This same mindset has infected our engagement with art. One need only look at the plague of explainer videos on YouTube or the negative reviews a work is sure to meet with should it leave anything open to interpretation. This doesn’t even begin to cover the increasing unwillingness of audiences to distinguish between depiction and endorsement.
This leads me to wonder how The Sopranos would be received if it premiered today. On the one hand, that’s a useless thought experiment, seeing as the current TV landscape wouldn’t be what it is without The Sopranos. But if we assume, for the sake of argument, some other series would have come along to kick off the second so-called Golden Era of prestige television…would a show as mysterious, as surreal and ultimately as ambiguous be able to find and keep an audience? The success of Twin Peaks: The Return suggests that it might, although that came with name brand recognition. And compared to the numbers The Sopranos was pulling while it was on the air, that’s show’s fanbase is undeniably niche.
As we approach the finale’s fifteen year anniversary, only one thing is for certain: in the time since The Sopranos went off the air, it
___________________________________
(1) To add further fuel to the speculative fire, there are important episodes in the series titled both “Unidentified Black Males” and “Members Only”, both of which revolve around Tony facing grand reckonings.
(2) A scene at the start of the final season, in which Tony’s brother-in-law posits that, “You probably don’t even hear it when it happens,” heavily suggest that those are indeed Tony’s final moments. Series creator David Chase has since basically confirmed that theory, but one needn’t subscribe to Death of the Author to hold a different interpretation.
(3) The question of “What happened to the Russian?” proved so vexing to showrunner David Chase that he came up with a ridiculous answer just to get people to stop asking him about it. His lame answer goes to show why it’s better to simply—to quote a scene from the Coen Brothers’ similarly enigmatic suburban drama A Serious Man—“Accept the mystery.”
(4) The show directly homages both of these directors, first when Bobby visits Junior Soprano at home and finds him watching (and struggling to make sense of) La Dolce Vita, and later during an appropriately expressionistic sequence in which Christopher and a lover, both high on heroin, nod off in a theater during a screening of Vertigo.
(5) In a 2020 article for The Outline, Gretchen Felker-Martin makes a convincing argument that The Sopranos should be considered a horror series.
