& in response to my query: "And there is also the yet-to-be-tackled question of what defines a "good and strong" story?
> Unfortunately, your last question is, I think, unanswerable.
One of my problems with your argument is that my response to the "story" of THE SOPRANOS was modest. It struck no chords with me; the fact that it was sociologically accurate elicited no hosannas from my throat (there are films I love which are anthropologically inaccurate).
But I get the impression that a) story is extremely important to you; and b) that you had a particularly visceral reaction to this one. Story for me is important, but not the be-all-and-end-all. I may have had a disadvantage in that I knew the story of THE SOPRANOS before I watched the show (I went through the dvds over a two-week period and then watched the last season as it aired). Since I already knew what happened, there were no surprises in terms of narrative and I found that Chase's mise en scene added nothing to the experience Hearing someone tell me the story and watching it unfold on television were identical.
Now maybe I am old-fashioned in hoping for aesthetic pleasure when experiencing a work of art (and the experience can be disturbing or disorienting and still be pleasureable for me), but if Chase had written a sociological treastise about the the psychopathologies and contradictions of middle class American life, reading it would have evoked the same response in me as watching the show did (maybe even more positive since Chase might have greater command of the written word than the visual image).
For me, the aesthetic experience of great visual art cannot be replicated in another medium. Hildy Johnson's strut through the newsroom at the beginning of HIS GIRL FRIDAY; Annie's funeral at the conclusion of Sirk's IMITATION OF LIFE; Lidia's wanderings around Milan in LA NOTTE offer aesthetic experiences that another medium could never duplicate. Chase with THE SOPRANOS offered nothing of this caliber of experience.
> and Chase kept on trying to show you that people who identify with
this way of life, are somehow missing something in their characters.
But ultimately I think this reverts to self-hatred on Chase's part.....
If we don't agree on this, all I can say is that maybe I'm wrong or maybe
we see things differently or maybe you only wish to see the "art" of it
all.
What you say might be true, but it necessitates a degree of mind-reading on your part that I am leery of. Chase's self-hatred may exist. But even if I grant that premise, the next leap is that this self-hatred pushed him in this particular aesthetic direction. The final jump is arriving at a conclusion concerning Chase's opinion of people who identify with Tony (in which you now have Chase doing some mind-reading of his own). There are just too many leaps for me to be persuaded.
As for me just seeing the art in it: I respond to both art and story; form and content. I am not sure whether Buddhism inspired my aesthetic or my aesthetic drew me to Buddhism, but I love a balance between story and formal pleasure most of all. The greatest films for me are a perfect blending of form and content so that when I view them my experience is of watching a narrative film simultaneously with a non-narrative one, both being shown through one projector and becoming entwined in that magical beam of light cast from the projection booth.
However, THE SOPRANOS fails as being long on story and short on art. Your defense of Chase's incompetencies was striking: you took the work's liabilities and argued that they actually supported your view of the show -- intentional incompetencies which were actually conscious challeneges to existing standards (though you went back and forth on whether this was part of Chase's design or just a happy accident).
I experienced no intentional incompetencies. Occasionally, they lined up nicely with the story -- bad manners being echoed/amplified by bad images. But this did not occur often enough to give me the sense of Chase capitalizing on his deficiencies. Then there were the dumb luck moments when Chase got something right which further weakened this argument in my eyes.
I have a similar response (but in reverse) with Scorsese's THE AVIATOR -- wonderful images, but a dumb story. As much as I love the images, they ultimately do not redeem the dialogue, just as Chase's dialogue cannot redeem the images (though I realize that many film critics take the exact opposite tack and argue that the well-handled elements in a film redeem whatever infelicities may exist).
As for story itself: it seems the occupy an important (and fluid) place within your aesthetic. The story of THE SOPRANOS was powerful for you and seemed to make missteps forgiveable. But if my question is unanswerable, then the power of the story becomes the big joker in your aesthetic: it trumps all other concerns and yet exactly what you mean by "story" remains undefined.
I have often wondered if there is a narrative impulse in the human brain that causes people both a) to value narrative art over non-narrative art and b) to create narratives where there aren't any. I get in trouble on some of my film lists (which include members whose formalist approach dwarfs my modest gestures in this direction) when I float this idea from time to time.
> And you should indulge yourself in "The Sopranos" if only because this would be
something interesting for you to hate.
I have little time to hate. But I think we both have time to turn our attention to those lbo miscreants who dared to mock THE DICK VAN DYKE SHOW. Within self-accepted formal constraints more rigid than those of a Pertarchan sonnet, Reiner (with the able assistance and input of Van Dyke) was able to produce poetry for 158 episodes over five years.
Brian