I was just watching the final scene of
The Sopranos, and for the first time I noticed that the last song the camera shows before cutting away from the jukebox a final time is a Tony Bennett song. Then a few seconds laters we see Tony sitting alone at the table
Don't Stop Believing starts playing, just like we all remember from the finalé. And then, one by one, his family trickles in.
I might be over-thinking things here, but was there a point to sticking on the Tony Bennett name for a moment before starting the Journey song? As in Bennett is an Italian-American, while Journey is about as white-bread American as you can get. Is this something symbolic re: Tony moving away from his mob/Italian roots into a more suburban, straight American life?
Hmm.
1 comment:
There is the possibility David Chase might have been indicating something about the mainstreaming of Italian-American stereotypes, but what can we surmise about those stereotypes from a guy who Anglicized his own name (DiCeasare) and whose only viable work is a sometimes compelling, sometimes patently exploitative look at a Mob Family. I thought the most honest part of the show was towards the end when they really began using the word sociopath frequently, and talking about the characteristics of (violent) sociopaths. If Chase and Gandolfini and the writers were trying to suggest that all Americans evince those qualities, they were very wrong. If they were not, then they came pretty close to thumbing their nose at the audience who spent ten years glued to a sociopathic protagonist, who, in the end, never did a single good thing. I thought the Sopranos ended up becoming far more compelling at the end than in the first five seasons where the formula seemed to be, Wiseguy comes back into the fold, causes Tony problems, Tony whacks him. That trope got REAL fucking old.
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