Too comfortably with us...

The Sopranos is perhaps the finest dramatic work of contemporary culture. This is not news. The purpose of art is not to produce edifying material. The Sopranos does not do that. Nor is it at all sentimental. Amazingly, a television show which has managed to escape the common fatuity of that medium.

Watching last night's episode, Kennedy and Heidi, (also reviewed at Commonweal's blog) it occurred to me, perhaps The Sopranos has been portraying all along the limits and terrain of Kierkegaard's Aesthetic stage. Aside from the dramatic tension served by the varying successes of the mob business itself and its inner family politics, over the years we have seen these characters, now familiar to us, seek in repetition some lasting satisfaction. The murders and the farcical moments seem to fade to a gray background, but what is prominent and lasting is the spiraling emptiness, the terrible groping and strangling for every last thing. In the aesthetic stage, man is at most a consumer, seeking after this pleasure, that fancy, whatever momentary object that can distract and divert him from the emptiness and despair inside.

The reality this show presents to us is indeed a very real Hell, but more along the lines of C.S. Lewis's Great Divorce than other varieties. The glaring absence in this universe of The Sopranos, however, is the lack of a message in the bottle, a word from beyond, the possibility of salvation intervening from without. At least thankfully, there is no ridiculous liberal sentimental salvation from within, out of man's own resources. Note the comical import of A.J.'s final comment to his psychiatrist, "why can't we all just get along?" What was a punch-line fifteen years ago because of the L.A. riots, now demonstrates the poverty of what any humanistic salvation can do, to quote another infamous line, "like a patient etherized upon a table." There is a wickedness deep at root that psychology cannot even comprehend, that the mafioso throughout the seasons cannot really grasp; it is that heart of darkness that destroys all it touches. It is the naked selfishness of Tony, manifested in his libido dominandi, that cannot tolerate rivals, that cannot bear the delight of others. It is the avarice and vanity of Carmela, who knows the truth and yet loves the world and its comforts more than real freedom. It is the ressentiment of Christopher that ends in addiction and weakness. It is the feebleness and impotency of A.J., and the hypocrisy of Meadow.

What lies in this heart of man should not surprise. What is truly sad is that in this show's universe, God is absent and sends no message of salvation. I don't know if there is any character that really represents Kierkegaard's ethical stage in the show--but there is no possibility of a conversion to the religious stage, because there is no word from above. The closest thing is the partial omniscience of psychiatry, but that too is exposed by David Chase as ultimately sterile.

This last season, in my opinion, has been the best of them all. And I sense Chase building to something, subtly, a message. There may have been a peek in this last episode. Several devices, uncommon perhaps for the prominence in which they appeared, at last came out as hermeneutical keys: The Departed (the soundtrack of which Christopher plays), the song "Comfortably Numb" sung by Roger Waters and Van Morrison, and the Wordsworth sonnet "The World is too much with us". The Departed is noteworthy for a rare cross-media reference, especially in that it is a current one, so close to the show's intentions. It might normally be seen as a competitor, save for the obvious reverence Chase holds Scorsese in. And we know what his movies were all about: "My whole life has been movies and religion. That’s it. There is nothing else." The Departed is a vision of sin and the nihilism it can only bring: all the characters, good and bad, are brought down by their involvement in evil.

All the more in The Sopranos. Even though a casual viewer may delight in being titillated by the casual violence, the vulgar and comical dialog, and of course the gratuitous T&A shots, the thoughtful viewer will have seen sin de-romanticized. Goodfellas has done this in the venue of a feature film; The Sopranos has done it with far more depth in ten years of television.

And what are we left with in the end? "Is there anybody in there... is there anyone home?" Note the irony of Roger Waters's words: "I can ease your pain," if only you can "tell me where it hurts." Of course, this is the last thing Tony can do. Oh how he wishes he knew; if only he could diagnose the despair. But he cannot. Walker Percy spent his life as a philosopher and a novelist pointing out how we cannot objectify or figure out the self; despite all the knowledge of science, man remains just as much a mystery to himself, nor can he save himself from his own despair, the eventual inanity and boredom of a vain life. Christopher, for his part, has exhausted his resources: "the child is grown, the dream is gone." He has been, as Tony is becoming, "comfortably numb."

But unknowable to himself. Such is the nature of the repetition and rotation of the Aesthetic stage. It is a viciously circular movement of distraction. How interesting then that in those brief moments of transcendence (before the fall back into the sphere of immanence) afforded by drugs, A.J. and Tony have such disparate experiences. For A.J., his is a moment right out of a Walker Percy novel. In the equilibrium provided for by his anti-depressants, and the sudden word from without provided by the classroom, A.J. sees all in a sudden fury just how terrible the world is. "Getting and spending, we waste our powers." (Written on the board in A.J.'s classroom. Note the professor poses Wordsworth's sonnet as a question to the classroom, and of course, to us, the viewer, after which we are immediately transported to Tony's Vegas escape.) Yes, but even worse than Wordsworth imagined. Who wouldn't be depressed, who wouldn't go crazy seeing how screwed up the world is, this is A.J.'s prescient insight, one which his psychiatrist cannot share, as he merely plays his role as scientist, and does not see the world as man. But A.J. does. The utter poverty of his existence, laid before him after beating the Somalian bicyclist, cannot be explained or medicated away.

Tony has his moment of transcendence too. Indeed, in six seasons, the world has been too much with him. He has "given his heart away, a sordid boon!" Getting and spending. A heartless consumer. Death, as it often has, once again creeps towards Tony by means of the murder of Christopher and the mourning of his family. The abyss has stared back at Tony. Once again, a diversion. He flees like a child who cannot face reality, and flies in a surrealistic moment to Vegas. If Wordsworth saw all that was corrupt and fallen in the industrial decadence and malaise of the modern city, surely Las Vegas is the apotheosis of that symbol, the greatest production of our techno-industrial society predicated on consumption. There, better than any other place, man can even forget he is a self.

Tony escapes the sphere of immanence, first conventionally in sexual adventure with a new object of erotic satisfaction, without the complications of duty, sympathy, friendship, sacrifice--just raw physical sex. This movement of transcendence is brought to a pitch in the ingestion of peyote, a hallucinogenic. Then a Wordsworthian movement from the Technopolis to the D.H. Lawrence-esque desert can occur. The body is brought to the peak of its sensory powers by the drug, even overcoming the feeble mind in disorientation, so much so that the rules of life seem to bed--as Tony wins without fail in roulette. The final moment of the episode comes in juxtaposition to A.J.'s cruel insight and awakening: in the majestic sun of the desert and its awesome landscape, Tony is moved by nature (in direct opposition to Wordsworth's complaint), and cries, "I get it!" Has he had a genuine transition of the kind Worsworth advocated, a movement from the industrial darkness to the purity of nature? Perhaps in this fantastical moment he has grasped the gratuity of existence, even, creation--but I doubt it. I take those last lines, that last scene, ironically. I cannot but take it that way because of A.J.'s epiphany. Tony's ecstasy is provided for by a life built upon the very evil A.J. has despaired of. Most importantly, Tony's ecstasy is temporary and illusory--certainly it is not trustworthy. It is drug-induced, after all, twisted in the placid affection of a stripper.

Wordsworth has no answer or remedy, beyond a wishful longing for that lost age of paganism. We do not have to wait long to see how that fails. W.B. Yeats, more than anyone else, tried to seriously resurrect the pagan life and vision, and ended in defeat. Robert Frost eventually came to a Platonic contempt of the matter of which he wrote so beautifully. Romanticism as a movement is a lesson in exhaustion. Perhaps only T.S. Eliot, alone in his generation, successfully moved out of the Romantic tradition and recovered the metaphysical vision that he eventually received as "Ash Wednesday", courtesy of Dante, John of the Cross, and Pascal.

I don't think David Chase is up to that. But what was he up to in this, perhaps the greatest of all Sopranos episodes thus far? The world is too much with us--yes it is, and it cannot save us. But what else? Will there be a word from without, a message in the bottle, the possibility of good news? Will Tony end like Don Giovanni, plunging into hell consumed by his lustful passions, still striving after them? Will he descend into the freeze of Lucifer's jaw, having betrayed his closest friends? Or will his end be not a bang, but a whimper, into forgetful nothingness?

Only three episodes left.