Faith Works 6-23-07
Jeff Gill

The Sense of an Ending

If you don’t care for English lit analysis, don’t worry. It’s just that I’ve taken enough classes in that subject to have the name Frank Kermode stuck in my head, unfairly (since he’s written broadly and well on many topics, including Biblical study) tied to “The Sense of an Ending,” a work that takes a point that can only seem obvious after someone has made it.

Kermode goes through a series of illustrations to show us how our expectations and assumptions about where a work of literary craft is going shapes how we read and interpret the text, well before we get to “The End.” Disney movies will end with someone learning something, happy reunions, and an amusing evildoer getting a generally off-screen comeuppance. Oprah recommended books will see a protagonist through unbearable suffering to a point of rest, reflection, and stoic endurance. Jackie Collins novels will . . . nevermind, and no, I’ve never read any.

And I’ve not watched, other than news clips, a single minute of “The Sopranos.” Sounds like an excruciating show to watch, and we don’t have HBO at Chez Gill.

Many of us have been learning about the intense, if not widespread following that Tony and his family (and his Family) led through this final season. The final episode of the final season had an ending that, to some, lacked finality.

Perhaps another way to look at it is that the ending David Chase supplied subverted the ending we expected, and had been watching through the screen of that assumption. In the end, Tony would pay for his crimes, we would see his suffering as redemptive, or his final escape from justice would point clearly to some higher justice (a life lived looking over his shoulder, a life empty of meaning or lasting significance, outward contentment masking inner despair and decay).

Well, Sir Frank Kermode wrote a revised edition of the book that got him knighted, and his observations in 2003 following his 1967 original have to do with our seemingly endless fascination with “subverting expectations,” to the degree that the twist ending or upended conclusion is what we assume is coming, and we watch or read with that assumption in the driver’s seat.

I haven’t watched a minute of “The Sopranos.” Keep that in mind, as I offer this firm and unfounded opinion. C’mon people: Tony got shot in the back of the head, and there was nothing. Blackness. As had been suggested by the gangster chumps themselves, repeatedly and even reaffirmed in a recent re-run before the finale.

So the question to viewers, of whatever faith tradition, is, “So, how does that grab you?”

I suspect on very small but fairly emphatic evidence from the creator-writer-director that he’s saying “This is it. No justice, sorry.” As a person who watches even a fiction with a faith perspective, I feel a strong sense of “Nope, that isn’t quite it; there’s a further chapter to be written.”

But “it isn’t fair” is not the basis for faith in God or what is eternal. “It isn’t fair” is a child’s plea in the face of reality, when big kids steal ice cream and cool kids get the front and center spots. People, possibly David Chase, critique faith and religion as just that, a childlike plea which solid, cold, dark reality does not even notice enough to ignore.

Most of us have our set of truths that lead us away from simple, silent blackness to a further light where all will be revealed, and must be judged. Tony Soprano did not really believe in such an ending, and lived his life accordingly.

But in a conversation with a fellow pastor of a slightly different theological bent, we did agree that there is a strange, unavoidable hint of possibility beyond the scene of Tony, Carmela, A.J., and others framed in a window as the Last Supper, with Meadow still parking outside.

If Tony is killed in front of his family, that event may represent the one chance of redemption the rest of them have. If he lives, they have clearly indicated that in one way or another they will stay “in the life.” If he does, in fact (in fiction) fall face forward into his onion rings, then what may those three (and Paulie) yet make of their lives? Through Tony’s death could come their redemption. Did David Chase intend this, or is it just the power of a particular conclusion woven into our culture that has shaped, is shaping, our perception of this ending?

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; if you spot faith in a dark corner of popular culture, point it out to him at knapsack77@gmail.com.