On Sunday night, TV mobster Tony Soprano will probably be put to rest. But will he find peace? Does God’s mercy extend to such a man? I’m guessing “yes.” In death, Tony Soprano may find relief.
Clearly, like the folks in Chicago who used to ask Al Capone for autographs, longtime viewers of the HBO television series “The Sopranos” love this fictional mob boss despite the fact we’ve seen him savagely kill so many people. Worse still for me, has been watching Soprano psychologically damage his son A.J. (last week throwing him into a closet for reacting with emotion to the death of an uncle). Destroy his daughter’s relationships? Be unfaithful to his wife? Heh, that’s small potatoes for this program. You came to expect sinful behavior over and over. But those closest to Soprano always came back, and HBO viewers kept paying for more, never tiring of this burly bear of a man who’d come close to redemption and then waddle away from it.

Big “T” seemed to learn something from his recent peyote trip, but then he forgot about it. A “we’re all one” message has dotted the television program from the outset, fostering the presumption that parts of each one of us are Soprano-like. And that’s what was so amazing about the intimacy with which each murder was filmed. We could have been there. The hands on the guns, on the necks, on the knives could have been ours.
But in last week’s episode, Soprano’s own therapist turned him out of her office, telling him to look for help elsewhere after seven years of the talking cure. Soprano seems more lost than found, and in a hell of his own making. Is there grace, is there peace, is there hope for such a man? That seems to be what the HBO writers are asking us. Will God’s hand lovingly pass over the forehead of this charismatic killer this Sunday?
Remember that when real-life mobster John Gotti died, he was refused a Mass of Christian Burial by the Diocese of Brooklyn. Officials sited a church precept called “scandal” and stated that while it was up to God to judge the deceased mob leader, the church could not sanction a funeral for anyone who lived so obviously outside the church’s teachings. (Gotti is now buried in a Catholic cemetery–the church did grant him that much–next to his 12-year-old son who died after being run over by a neighbor. That neighbor subsequently disappeared and his body was never found.)
Since Tony Soprano has lived so close to death, since he has taken us into a knowledge of death many of us had never accessed previously, will his demise to us seem climactic or pedestrian? Are the writers saying: We’re all just blood and guts. Or are they saying we’re all touched by the divine?
There’s a ton a great blogging going on out there on the subject of the Sopranos. Look here and here and here and here and here.
And even if you don’t subscribe to HBO, find a friend who does this Sunday, and join the rest of us.