I've waited three episodes in to The Sopranos because the end of the last season (which of course was not actually intended to be an end) confused me. I wanted to see if Chase would tie together all the threads that season left hanging loose.
And now I think it's happening...
INTO THE WESTERN LANDS? I was really pretty psyched at the beginning of last summer's new season of The Sopranos. Till then, I'd never felt the same way about the show as some of my friends. While I was always completely entranced from the first boom-boom chords of the theme song to the end, I generally didn't spend a lot of time reflecting on it afterward. I will admit to having had a bit of a crush on Gandolfini's Tony----I have kind of a (completely imaginary) thing for big teddy bear guys with keen minds and thuggish manners---but he never gave me the sort of butterflies I get from Ray Winstone's British equivalent. In short, I loved the show, but I didn't live and breathe it the way I did Six Feet Under, Deadwood, Rome, and----much to my surprise---Big Love. I'm just not that into gangster films I didn't even like The Godfather (the first was as far as I got) or Good Fellas.
But last season began in a way I didn't expect: with Tony's near death experience and "The Western Lands" by William S. Burroughs. The dream sequence that so irked some other viewers I know fascinated me. And it fascinated critics as well.
From Slate, a review dated 13 March 2006 by Troy Patterson:
[quote begins from Metaphysical Mobsters: The New, Ruminative Season of the Sopranos]
I believe that the words were from William S. Burroughs' The Western Lands, that they matched up what Burroughs had read in Norman Mailer's Ancient Evenings with his own mythology, that the voice was the writer's own oracular croak....
Perhaps the particulars of this view of the afterlife were less important than the timbre of Burroughs' voice, a noise at once world-weary and otherworldly. Maybe this was meant as a lens for viewing the signs that followed in the episode—people wondering what would be possible if the underboss passed on; Tony's telling his shrink that, were he losing his mind like Uncle Junior, he would hope for his family to euthanize him. Was this just a tip-off that the coming season—which makes room for Jesus, Buddha, theories of universal oneness, and meditations on Indian proverbs—will up the metaphysical ante?
[quote ends]
It's what I was hoping for and expecting, I can tell you that. I read somewhere that David Chase said the text of the voiceover revealed the theme and the direction of the remaining episodes, so I made sure to get hold of a copy of the full text and tried to understand how it applied to the episodes that followed. At the end of the first part of the last season (which is what last summer's run was), I didn't feel I really understood where Chase was going with the show, but now I'm starting to get it (maybe).
The Burroughs reading is about death as the process of losing your soul[s].
As you'll recall, it read as follows:
[quote begins from The Face Knife, The Sopranos 6.1 "Members Only" (2006)]
The ancient Egyptians postulated seven souls.
Top soul, and the first to leave at the moment of death, is Ren, the Secret Name. This corresponds to my Director. He directs the film of your life from conception to death. The Secret Name is the title of your film. When you die, that’s where Ren came in.
Second soul, and second one off the sinking ship, is Sekem: Energy, Power, Light. The Director gives the orders, Sekem presses the right buttons.
Number three is Khu, the Guardian Angel. He, she, or it is third man out … depicted as flying away across a full moon, a bird with luminous wings and head of light. Sort of thing you might see on a screen in an Indian restaurant in Panama. The Khu is responsible for the subject and can be injured in his defense-but not permanently, since the first three souls are eternal. They go back to Heaven for another vessel. The four remaining souls must take their chances with the subject in the Land of the Dead.
Number four is Ba, the Heart, often treacherous. This is a hawk’s body with your face on it, shrunk down to the size of a fist. Many a hero has been brought down, like Samson, by a perfidious Ba.
Number five is Ka, the Double, most closely associated with the subject. The Ka, which usually reaches adolescence at the time of bodily death, is the only reliable guide through the Land of the Dead to the Western Lands.
Number six is Khaibit, the Shadow, Memory, your whole past conditioning from this and other lives.
Number seven is Sekhu, the Remains.
[quote ends]
The episodes that followed---the dream sequence where Tony was living out his imaginary life as a salesman stuck between an unstoppable fire and a really creepy family party---were riveting. But the development of the themes that were suggested by the dream has been really, really attenuated. As a matter of fact, we're only really starting to see the pay-off now.
The Western Lands is about dying, but it is also about---literally---losing your soul[s]. In other words, about a kind of life-in-death. First to go: the pure parts that belong to eternity. We have to assume that these old mobsters let go of that part of themselves long before. Rebecca Traister did a piece at Salon about her sense of prospective bereavement over losing, in the same summer, both Harry Potter and The Sopranos. I thought at the time it was an odd juxtaposition, but in one respect it isn't: in the last, very dark book, "The Half-Blood Prince," Harry learns that Lord Voldemort achieved his power by dividing up his soul and that the way in which he achieved this was through a series of murders.
I didn't understand the significance of the Vito arc last year, which seemed like a digression. But now I'm starting to see: Vito, about whom we knew little beyond the fact he'd made Finn give him a blow job, had somehow escaped his earthbound New Jersey existence to become his true self....except that there wasn't enough left of him for that. He goes back to New Jersey knowing exactly what is going to happen to him. And so do we. The treacherous Ba---and Khaibit, his whole past conditioning--- betray him. Phil Leotardo emerges (literally) from Vito's closet, pool cue in hand, and gives Vito what he really wants. Vito's story was the capsule version of what all of these guys have in store for them.
The mobsters of The Soprano all treat death with the same outward jocularity and inward fear and loathing they feel for their bosses and their comrades in arms. I'm starting to see (or I think I'm starting to see) the extent to which each one's familiarity with its ugliest aspects has weakened every one. Watching last week's episode, I didn't understand why the writers went out of their way to bring in the Sydney Pollack character (the murderer who was formerly an oncologist) first to contradict Sacramoni's extremely poor prognosis, then to concede that Johnny was dying more quickly than ought to have been possible after all. Now I think I'm starting to see how his death fits with the Burroughs piece: when someone in Sacramoni's splintered moral state falls ill, the rot is too deep to allow him any power of resistance.
Paulie, who last season learned that he was adopted by his beloved mom, suffered a sort of psychic collapse as well. Unlike Johnny, he "beat" the prostate cancer, but the last episode brought out with piercing clarity that what's left of Paulie's self is eggshell-thin. He is to Tony as Tony is to Christopher, and we and Tony learned in the preceding episode what Christopher really feels about Tony. In the last episode Tony, not having the ability to express his feelings about Paulie on film, was a heartbeat away from killing him; and why? Because, as we saw, it was Paulie who presided over Tony's first murder, the killing of a pitifully thin, trembling black man----the man whose bones were unearthed at the beginning of the episode.
For the remainder of the episode Paulie goes on talking talking talking, reminding Tony of just how he got where he is, till his rage reaches the breaking point. He dredges up those old suspicions (accurate, in fact) about Paulie's unsuccessful courting of John Sacramoni as an excuse, but it's only one of all the reasons there are.
Even though he survived the fishing trip, Paulie is clearly on the way out. In a dream, he finds a reproachful Big Pussy standing in his kitchen, cooking a meal. Paulie asks Big Pussy if he, Paulie, will die standing up. I wonder too.
The Uncle Junior episode depressed me even more than the Paulie story. First of all, there was his young enabler, an Asian brainiac from MIT who I guess killed his own father (?) and who looked---though only when enraged---disconcertingly like the Virginia Tech killer, Cho, as seen on NBC (life imitating art more than usual). Second, there were those pitiful poker games among where the stakes consisted of candy bars and Cokes. So sad. Third, there was the moment of Junior's comeuppance, when the young man he befriended and corrupted turned on him with a viciousness and thoroughness that Junior seems unlikely to recover from again. Finally, that last scene: the abandoned Junior sitting in a wheelchair, arm in a cast, mouth hanging slightly open, petting and petting the only friend he has left; a Siamese cat. I think Junior's down to Sekhu, the Remains. Talk about pity and terror.
Sweet Bobby, who had somehow managed to keep himself intact, committed his first murder last week. You could see in his eyes on his return that it had killed off a part of him, and that he knew this.
It strikes me that Christopher's film, Cleaver, is a superb metaphor for the metaphor of the Burroughs reading . When you kill off your self in pieces, what's left? Sekhu, the Remains and a kind of life-in-death where there's no room for anything else.
YOU GO ABOUT IN PITY FOR YOURSELF---AND ALL THE TIME, A GREAT WIND IS CARRYING YOU ACROSS THE SKY (THE DREAM). I'm still trying to understand is how Tony's dream during his near-death experience fits in. The dream---as opposed to the Burroughs piece----was about Tony specifically rather than the family as a whole.
In his dream, he is a harmless, rather ineffectual salesman who loses his identity (Kevin Finnerty, which the show makes sure we understand is a play on "Infinity") and gets stuck in a dull California town with no money and no way to get back home. In the dream, his children are still at young, cute ages and he is a loyal family man who turns down the advances of a Melfi-lookalike who tries to seduce him. He meets two Buddhist monks (one of whom resembles, and perhaps is, the doctor---"Ba!"--who is then performing surgery on him) with whom he promptly gets into an altercation. He ends up in the E.R., where he learns (I think) that he has a brain tumor and is going to die. When he visits the monks at their temple, the monk with whom he had the fight laughs when he tells them this.
He decides to try to track down Finnerty so he can get back his briefcase. He drives to the country, to a beautiful house where a Finnerty family (Family) reunion is happening. (As he walks toward the house, we see silhouettes in all the lighted windows that definitely made me feel a bit uneasy---why? When I watched the scene again, I still wasn't sure, but perhaps there was the suggestion in some of them of violence going on?) At any rate, outside the house all seems quite innocuous; there are children running around and the porch is beautifully festooned with white lights. Tony walks up to the house carrying "Kevin Finnerty's" briefcase. From inside we hear soft laughter, clapping, and other party sounds, belying any impression of mine that the shadows on the screens looked in some way disturbing.
That is, it all seems innocuous until the valet approaches Tony and we see that it is his cousin, Tony Blundetto, whom Tony killed in order to prevent him from being caught and tortured by Phil Leotardo. Suddenly the idyllic scene looks a lot less idyllic to the viewer; but Tony doesn't recognize Tony Blundetto. Tony Blundetto tells Tony Soprano that everyone's waiting for him. He also tells him that he can't take the briefcase inside with him.
The wind soughs in the surrounding trees and we hear Meadow's voice---or rather the voice of Meadow when she was a child---calling to him from the trees not to go on. We also see a woman standing in silhouette on the porch, a woman who definitely evokes Livia. Tony approaches the house and the woman swiftly turns and enters before him. As Meadow's voice grows louder, he looks inside and sees a white wall with flowers on it, very similar to a tomb. At which point he wakes up.
Later on, as he's recovering, he finds that someone has left him a note that says "Sometimes I go about in pity for myself and all the while a great wind carries me across the sky." The note has come from nowhere and no one, but it becomes a sort of talisman for him. He constantly tells other people they are going about in pity for themselves. But the great wind part sticks with him as well. In subsequent episodes, and also in this season, we see him become very uneasy any time he hears the wind in the trees.
He often talks as if he has "escaped" death, though of course he has not, since death isn't something he can escape. He made a resolution to appreciate life, but is unable to do so because of the hollowness he feels inside. It almost seems in a way as if he's still stuck back in that purgatorial town, just a short drive from the house he described as a place he never wants to go again. But of course will.
It makes sense that he is too hollowed out inside to make more than blind motions toward some sort of redemption and that he is doomed to failure. I'm hoping for some further (and more explicit) development of the themes presented, or arguably presented, in that dream. And of course self-pity is the default stance of most of the gangsters we see on The Sopranos. Most of them never stop their self-justifying whinging.
If you have any thoughts about the meaning of the dream, I'd be interested in hearing them...
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