Exploring the Final Episode of the Sopranos

Via Rude Pundit:

"The Fuck-You of the episode is to deny you catharsis. You want it all tidy, all the moralistic good and bad so neatly bundled into a final grand gesture, Tony dead, maybe his family dead, nice Shakespearean and unified. You wanted blood. But what the series told us is that, at the end of the day, we are all tainted by the immorality we're willing to endure, even "benefit" from, and that, no matter what the culture around us tries to force on us, most of the time we simply go on living with the evil that we do or are willing to overlook. The war won't just "end." It'll be this thing that haunts us, this thing that reconfigures how we exist in the world, re-creates what we believed to be our identity and morality. And, no, this ain't about some goddamn TV show or books or movies that explore the same thing.

"A writer once posed this question to a young Rude Pundit, after reading an early draft of one of his plays: "Do you believe that evil people are always punished?" That was when the Rude Pundit still held out the possibility of that kind of retribution. But he had to admit to the old writer: no, no, so often evil just maunders on, even after we've stopped looking."

That's why Summer Movies do so well. Because real life is too damn...real.