[lbo-talk] This is the End of Tony

[Jerry Monaco]

On 6/12/07, Dennis Claxton <ddclaxton at earthlink.net> wrote:
>
> Jerry wrote:
>
>
>
> >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.
>
>
>
> I think this is a little off.  Chase was largely
> drawing on his own family in the
> writing.  There's a nice long interview in Vanity
> Fair that's online now where he talks a lot about
> the themes in the show and also about television
> vs. movies, which is what he wanted to do before
> getting into television to pay the bills.  Here's an excerpt:
>
>
> >The pilot script would be a highly personal
> >story stitched together with bits and pieces of
> >fabric from Chase's own life. "Network dramas
> >have not been personal," he reflects. "I don't
> >know very many writers who have been cops,
> >doctors, judges, presidents, or any of that­and,
> >yet, that's what everybody writes about:
> >institutions. The courthouse, the schoolhouse,
> >the precinct house, the White House. Even though
> >it's a Mob show, The Sopranos is based on
> >members of my family. It's about as personal as you can get."
>
>
> http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2007/04/sopranos200704?currentPage=2
>
>
Hate is a potent emotion, often based on the necessity to love, the command
that love must be given, or the inevitability of intimacy, the
inescapability of closeness.

I still don't think I am wrong, about Chase's hatred of his characters and
those in his audience that identify with his characters.  Though I should
clarify that it is "the narrative/narrator" of the Sopranos that shows this
hatred.  Also, I am not sure how much the testimony of the creator of the
work of art is relevant here.  (Though it is _not_ irrelevant.  It is simply
another critical intervention that we should think about.... But you can't
explain the dance; you must  watch-it.  You can't just comment on the story
you must experience it.  This is as true for the "auditor" as it is for the
"author". I think I can agree with Brian on this much, though he would use
different concepts.)

Take Dostoevsky as an example:  No matter what Dostoevsky's "personal
opinion" of his own family members and friends might have been, he based
some of his most repulsive characters on those same family members and
friends.  He would have loathed to admit that he "hated."

In everyday life we may actually show our love, but art often can let loose
with our hate. Chase or Dostoevsky may create repulsive, engagingly hateful
characters embedded in compulsive stories in their art, and yet still "love"
the people who those characters are based upon.

And this brings up another point.  Let me suggest that Brian thinks that the
Sopranos is bad art in the same way that Nabokov thought that Dostoevsky was
a lousy novelist.  Nabokov believed in the intricate web made by story,
narrative and language... he believed in the "art" of it.  I love Nabokov
but he was wrong about Dostoevsky, while being correct in his criticism of
Dostoevsky from his own aesthetic point of view.  What make me interested in
what Brian is saying is that I think from Brian's aesthetic point of view he
is absolutely right on about the Sopranos.  It is visually "inept" in the
way that Dostoevsky is "artistically" inept... (read Nabokov on this and you
will understand what I mean).  But the stories (Chase, Dostoevsky) taken as
a whole defy the aesthetic judgments of Brian and Nabokov.

Jerry