Storytellersunplugged

Gerard Houarner

It’s been a while since storytelling made the news. I actually can’t remember the last time it did, though I’m sure it’s happened. Maybe back when literature was important. Or maybe when St. Elsewhere ended.

Yes, movies make headlines, but mostly for bringing in big bucks on a slow news day, not for characters and what happened to them and they did about the problem. So my mind was pretty much blown when the finale of The Sopranos became such a big deal, beyond the usual internet babble.

Of course, it’s been, what, a month? Old news, now. Forgotten, except for some lingering bitterness. I’m probably being transgressive by even bringing the subject up, but I wrote down a few notes and clipped a couple of articles….you know how writers get – hate to waste material.

I was never much of a Sopranos fan. They were despicable characters doing horrible things, and as much as I love dark figures and use them in my own stories, and as cynical and depressed as my outlook is, the characters just didn’t turn me on that much. I found the show, at best, hysterically funny, as in, how stupid are these people? How stupid are the people who choose to interact with them?

Kind of like Lucy, but without the empathy and endearing personalities.

A lot of people I know liked to watch the show to see who got whacked. That was the point. Not why, just the potential for violence realized. I can’t remember ever talking to anyone about the pointlessness of the whole mob life, or the relentless stupidity of so many living the life (hey, if they were smart, they’d be running corporations and stealing big money legally). A number of people also identified with Tony Soprano, which I found really scary. You know the line: It’s a hard life, nobody understands me, fuck you if your existence pisses me off right now. Even better: it’s just business, nothing personal (people have actually said this to me, and, alas, I’ve derived Sopranos-like satisfaction when my turn came to say the same thing right back at them).

I may have laughed in the wrong places when watching an episode on DVD. This kind of behavior makes other people uncomfortable, and I try not to make other people uncomfortable, except when I’m writing. It’s an outgrowth of the overdeveloped behavioral mechanics for nerd survival.

*****Tangential Rant Warning*****

I know this gut dislike of The Sopranos is a peculiarity that I share with very few others, like so many other things. I grew up with and around a few people who wanted to be Tony Soprano, whose main life choice was to either join the gang or the police, both viewed as being operationally the same thing, sanctioned by the community, or at least different parts of the community. They couldn’t wait to extort, either under the protection of the mob or hiding behind a role in government. They were affable, congenial kids when they weren’t beating the crarp out of you, or solid beer-drinking, barbecuing and baseball-playing adults who sometimes brought out guns to show off – I particularly remember the young lady who had just graduated from the policy academy displaying her honking big silver piece at the local deli. I suspected even then it wasn’t police issue, just as I suspected it was loaded and ready for bear. Some of the kids thought it was cool. Some of the rest of us didn’t know what to think. These days I think I should own a gun, but haven’t had the time to go through the process. Boy, will I probably regret THAT come the end of the world.

Nothing much has changed, essentially, since that time. We operate under a great many more laws, but functionally, there is more corruption than ever because, of course, there are more laws to get around. And not just in the city. Not just on the East Coast. Not just on Wall Street, or large corporations. There’s that constant five or ten percent of the population who know a good game when they see one and can play it like they just don’t care because, well, they really don’t care. And there’s that agreeable spread of people around the median of morality, like a pleasant beer gut announcing “I’m not dangerous, I just sit on a chair, drink my drink and watch football,” who don’t actively seek to be corrupted but, in the most surprising ways, are not above some pretty heinous shit under certain conditions. Pick any holocaust, or your average lynching party. I cross my fingers those conditions don’t suddenly materialize.

Like media-savvy supremacists, fundamentalists, and all the other flavors of terrorists, the predatory parts of the human race have merely upped their game, become slicker, found new language in which to hide their agenda of exploitation and destruction. They’ve adapted to their new environment.

They’ve become suburbanized. Or urbanized. We elect them. We can suddenly find ourselves doing business with them without ever having sought them out. It IS hard out here for a pimp.

Which is the message of the Sopranos. And since I’m already pretty much steeped in that awareness, I just don’t feel the need to seek it out in casual entertainment. Yes, I love noir, but I don’t want a poster of Tony Montana and his “little friend.” I really don’t do gangster films. Unless, of course, they’re Japanese and bear absolutely no relation to any kind of reality I’ve experienced. At all.

As a bonus rant: I read somewhere that the point of the Sopranos was that people don’t change. I’d edit that to read, stupid people don’t change. And there are a lot of stupid people. People suck to greater or lesser degrees, depending on the situation. As I said and believe, put the squeeze on, a little pressure, or opportunity, and suddenly stupid people, and the stupid parts of good people, take over.

(My apologies to those of you who live in a better world. I envy your reality.)

****end of Tangential Rant Warning****

But I still dig “Pine Barrens” the most, probably more for its bleak setting, perfect for the characters and their stupidity, and the mystery of the Russian (he’s in the trees, ya mooks), than the characters themselves and their conflicts. For me, it’s a perfect metaphor for the show.

Caught up in the media frenzy, I watched the last season faithfully, after catching occasional episodes on reruns or on DVD, just to see where it was heading and how it would end.
Like so many others, my initial reaction to the black screen was one of extreme disappointment.

But, you see, like a lot of other viewers, I wasn’t a fan of what was really going on. I was watching the show, when I watched it, for the wrong reasons – to see somebody get whacked, or for confirmation of my cynical outlook on humanity. I wasn’t really involved in the story and its world. I didn’t get it, didn’t know what to expect. It was all there, but I hadn’t signed on to the real story.

But then, after spending a little time with the Sopranos style of storytelling, I understood. The ending was perfect, once you got into what Chase was doing. Oh, yes, it’s all very artsy, ending without ending, delivering a few conclusions to individual character lines while leaving the main threads up in the air – like life. Right in the faces of people who complain, online, around the water-cooler, in the waiting rooms of life, about how life sucks and all they want is entertainment to get them through the day.

You know: I want the fantasy of justice and retribution and love wins over all. I want the bad guys to get whacked and the good guys (or gals) to get the money and the honey. I want the answers to all the mysteries. Because real life so often ain’t like that.

I want to be entertained. And The Sopranos ending didn’t entertain me. It wanted me to work. To imagine. Interpret and evaluate information, make a decision, come up with a conclusion all on my own.

Well, yes, you and I, as storytellers, may shuffle our feet Harlan Ellison style and suck on a tooth for a moment before saying, “But we’re illuminating life, you dumb fuck. That, in itself, should be entertaining if you gave the incredible reality of your existence a single percentage point as much thought as you do to your fantasy football league picks and the new waitress’ tits.”

We may say that, but so often that approach does not pry beer money out of hot, sweaty, eager-to-be-entertained hands and into your storytelling pocket, alas.

In fact, it may set up those conditions where people do unfortunate things to anyone asking questions. Not everyone wants to take a Rorschach test, and certainly not everyone taking the test like what they hear about their interpretations.

Chase never promised viewers a rose garden. They may have wanted or expected one, in part because of the media hype about who was going get whacked. But he pretty much delivered on his storytelling promise, I think.

Whatever your reaction may be, the shock of the ending lingers, and for that, I give Chase credit.

So. All this babbling leads to what?

An ending.

Endings are about fulfilling expectations. You as a reader may not know exactly what those expectations are, or you may have some you’re not aware of – yes, you want to the good guy to win (if you’re a particular type of reader), but you can live a bad guy surviving or even getting ahead if you’ve been prepared for that outcome through experiencing a bit of sympathy toward, or a touch of identification with, the character (any number of charming yet pathological characters like Spencer’s Hawk, Hannibal or Mosley’s Mouse). You want the mystery solved. The world saved. The grail found.

The writer fulfills the promise to the reader made in the story.

Be careful what you promise.

In the end, you want a pay-off. Satisfaction. A sense of closure, if not on a story level (because, as we’ve seen in The Sopranos, not every story gets that closure), then at least on a personal emotional level. You invested yourself in the tale. What did you get out of it?
Entertainment. A world-view confirmed. Reinforced. Reassurance that everything will be peachy-keen, or that everything sucks. Or, everything will go on just as it has. The story promised you, through its characters and action, even (Great Spirit help us) it’s cover, a certain kind of adventure. Did it deliver?

Naturally, somebody smarter than me referencing somebody smarter than him said it all: Charles McGrath of the NY Times cited critic Frank Kermode’s “The Sense of an Ending,” saying “we crave endings for the same reason that some religious sects look forward to the Apolcalypse – because it’s the ending that gives shape and meaning to the otherwise random events that precede it.”

But like those religious sects, we have to be invested in that meaning.

I guess what I’m saying is the pay-off depends on the reader’s expectations. What did the reader come to the story prepared to accept?

Part of that expectation is, of course, based on genre (and I include “Literary” as a genre). The approaches to stories in the New Yorker and Weird Tales are going to be different, and that’s no reflection on their objective merit or level of craft.

Part of the expectation is built on the story itself, the structure and characters and how they’re used to reinforce and/or subvert genre tropes, mix them up, recombine them into something surprising and perhaps even “new.”

The writer’s job is to set up those expectations. Plant clues. Point in particular directions. And then lead the reader down the path to that logical ending. Or, if the writer’s really good, the OTHER logical ending. Is it reasonable to expect a character will find love at the end of the piece? The surprise may come in terms of gender or species, yes, but essentially, if the writer promised love, and love was delivered, it’s a love story. Will something horrible happen to the characters that will change them forever, should they be lucky enough to survive? If survival means continuing your existence at the end of the story just scarred and wiser, or as Frankenstein’s montser, or even a zombie, then yes, you have a horror story. Is the world saved? Sure, but if you want to mess with SF people, it may not be the world as you know it. Perhaps it’s the aliens who are saved. It could happen.

If you want to get kinky, and you have the chops, you can even provide multiple endings, some delivering on the promise of a character’s heroic arc, others mining tragic flaws to deliver characters to terrible endings. You can play with levels of meaning to a particular end, so that one character’s joy is another’s devastation. Whatever.

At the end of the story, the story means something to the reader. The “type” of story told makes a promise, and the reader expects that promise to be fulfilled. But you can make one kind of promise — yeah, people are gonna get whacked — while still fulfilling a deeper promise about characters and the nature of life. All the great ones do.

It’s like the score at the end of a sporting event having a meaning for the people in the stadium. In my way of thinking, the “Superbowl” final score for The Sopranos ended in a tie, but only because there was never any promise made for a “sudden death” resolution. It was forever ending in a tie. Those were the rules the game — the act of playing the game was important, not the final score.

The ending for The Sopranos pissed off a lot of people. Maybe a lot of them are still pissed off. But I think the real fans of the show, even the ones who were disappointed by the ending, discovered a new meaning to the whole series if they took the trouble to think about what they’d experienced during all those hours of storytelling.

The Sopranos ended in a way that, for some, was a logical extension of the story, and for others, completely redefined the meaning of that story, for better or for worse. Even if you didn’t like it, that’s still a damn good way to end a tale.

****epilogue****

My favorite part was the dog.