JM: My comments will be brief. Perhaps I will write more at some other time.
1) You reduce "story" to "plot." Telling and making a story is not the same as the plot.
2) You reduce the story making aspects of a narrative art to the "plastic elements" of the medium of television. Further, whether you realize it or not, you further reduce the "plastic elements" to your own particular visual aesthetics and then (I think) reduce that to what is in control of "the director."
3) Television is a writers and show-runners medium and vision and sound count, but they don't count in the way that you seem to want them to count.
Brian wrote:
But every
> instance that hinted at visual intelligence was
> buried under an avalanche of moments where the
> camera was disported with little sense of logic
> (and I will admit upfront my suspicions regarding
> the "incompetencies-were-intended" aesthetic
> argument).
JM: Chase is simply not good (in fact he is lousy) at the kind of visual aesthetics that you prefer. The visual incompetence was not intended but it was necessary. Let's put it another way. Dreiser was a lousy "writer", one of the worse prose stylists who ever wrote a novel. He was also a great story-writer and wrote two novels that I wish all educated United Statsians would read. Chase was a lousy visual stylist. But who cares? He made his stories to poke you in the eye with grotesque jokes, and if I can be over intellectual about it, alienation effects that had strong impact.
Let make clear. I am not a Sopranos fan like Doug. I was fascinated with the show because I thought Chase was actually _writing_ against the grain, and constantly dissing all of the people who loved the show. And most of those people never "got it." Chase hates and despises Tony Soprano. It is in every episode of the show. And it is a big joke that so many people love the character. I also thinks he hates the kind of Italian American I grew up with. My fascination with the show first came from the fact that the kind of Italian American Chase so obviously despises simply loved the show. So I gave the show a tried. (I don't own a television so I will let your imagination run wild on how I gave the show a try.) From the beginning I hated the show in a way that made me realize that it was a great television drama. A great narrative of family life -- and a great continuing joke on the audience. The house (visual) style of the show was born out of the fact that Chase is simply bad at this kind of thing -- but it was also turned into a sick joke on the audience.
The Sopranos is the intellectuals version of "Jackass".
Brian wrote:
I can swallow quite a lot, including narratives
> that I am aloof from or even those which repulse me.
> I recognize that I do not identify with or have any
> warm feelilngs about Tony (or any feelings whatsoever
> as a matter of fact.
Maybe if I shared Jerry's shocks of recognition or
> Doug's love/hate relationship with Tony,
Oh, gods! I guess my shock of recognition is more self-hatred for "my people" than anything else. But again, think that it gave me insight into what the show was doing, and how the story was meant to impact us. (My interpretation of the Sopranos is a bit peculiar no doubt.) But I do think that it is an accurate reflection of a certain kind of American culture. But that is only one aspect of the show. The real impact of the show for me was in how alienating and sickening it was supposed to be. If you don't go away from this show repelled and sickened, then you are the kind of person that Chase so obviously despises. I insist upon the "narrative's" hatred of its audience, because I think that is one of the most fascinating and great aspects of the show. Not seeing that hatred and self-hatred, pity and disgust is like reading "Anna Karenina" and concluding that it is a novel about romance and adultery. (Interestingly, this is exactly what Tolstoy concluded about his greatest novel when he decided that all fiction was an offense to God, and thus he would give up novel writing. Talk about self-hatred.)
THE SOPRANOS may be quite interesting from an
> sociological point of view (I often find that many
> old movies/television shows provide more anthropological
> insight than aesthetic pleasure). But the claim of
> greatness for THE SOPRANOS seems to rest on limited
> aesthetic evidence: a) it tells a good story I can
> identify with; and b) I can get involved with the
> characters. If only somebody had told Shakespeare: he
> needn't have bothered mastering blank verse.
>
> Brian
>
> Brian, you are the one that seems to need to always have blank verse.
Ibsen did not need blank verse, and sometimes Brecht did need blank verse.
Reducing the narrative art of the stage (the making of stories in drama) to
blank verse is equivalent to reducing the narrative art of moving visual
pictures, to your sense of space and time. There are hundreds of ways of
making good and strong stories for the stage, and not all of them are
Shakespeare's way or Sophocles's way or Brecht's way. There is a poetics of
the stage, but a stage narrative-drama cannot be reduced to its poetics.
It should be clear that I don't think that "identifying" with Tony Soprano, or the story told by the show, is the best way to watch the Sopranos. I have never watched a show that tried to get its audience _not_ to identify with its characters. When ever a character gains the audience's sympathy that character becomes nasty, stupid, brutish, racist, and repelling. The joke was always on the people who identified with the story.
The show was a strong work of art. Whether it was great or not only time will tell. If you can be patient for 20 years then you should watch all 6 seasons again and see if I am write about how much the show despised its audience for loving Tony Soprano.
As a poetic analogy to the Sopranos I would pick Rimbaud. Rimbaud's self-hatred and hatred of his reader is a similar "artistic" stance in a very strange way. And on many occasions Rimbaud was as "poetically" inept as the Sopranos was "visually" inept. Great work though.
Jerry