In the Flesh: The Sopranos 6.21: 'Made in America'

It’s been eighteen years since I first saw the now-infamous “cut to black”, the end of over half a decade of turmoil, resentment, self-sabotage, and slow decay within and around the Soprano family. Earlier today I watched the scene for what must have been the twelfth or thirteenth time, but far from feeling stale it seems only to have grown in power. My heart pounded as Journey’s ‘Don’t Stop Believin’” built toward a crescendo that would never come. My hair stood on end as the bell over the door in Holsten’s restaurant jangled with each new arrival. Even the very start of the scene, the shot-reverse-shot in which Tony looks over the restaurant and then appears suddenly at a table in the background of his own perspective, is intentionally uncanny and off-putting. It’s far from the only confrontational image in the episode. Even in its lighter moments, as when Paulie Gualtieri contemplates his fear of the supernatural as he assumes control of the “cursed” Cifaretto crew, the sense of devastation permeating ‘Made in America’ remains palpable. What is Paulie’s tanning mirror, first seen in the series pilot, but a reminder of all the men no longer alive to sit with him outside Satriale’s as he battles the specter of mortality in his own ridiculous way?

Never has the show’s message about the cultural decline inherent to the mafia’s parasitic way of existing in the world, explicitly paralleled with the federal government’s open Bush-era corruption, felt more direct than it does when series creator and episode writer/director David Chase places Carmela squarely center frame eating catered lemon fish in front of a middling wall mural of Mount Vesuvius. The shuttered, freezing chop shop where Tony meets with Butch also invokes a sense of disembowelment both literal, in its clear visual reference to the final scene of the late Christopher Moltisanti’s slasher movie Cleaver, and figurative. Engine blocks hang from chains overhead. Car parts litter the concrete floor, recalling another ghost: Salvatore “Big Pussy” Bonpensiero, who managed a body shop as a mob front for many years. Food and water are brought in, but nobody eats, and nobody drinks. It’s the food of the underworld, the least glamorous incarnation of Persephone’s pomegranate seeds imaginable.

And Junior? Once his nephew’s surrogate father, later his nemesis, the one-time boss of the family isn’t really there at all. When Tony visits him in psychiatric lockup to try to secure his money for Bobby Baccalieri’s children, Junior has no idea who his nephew is. He doesn’t remember his own brother, or even Bobby, his caretaker for years. When Tony tells him that he and Johnny Boy used to run North Jersey, Junior’s only response is a vague, “Well, that’s nice.” All the jealousy and scheming and vindictive hatefulness of his life, washed away by time and illness. That’s what’s waiting for Tony beyond that cut to black, whether it’s a bullet to the head, the FBI serving their long-awaited warrant, or just the future stretching out ahead of him, unchanging and immutable now that he’s given up on self-improvement. Emptiness. Nothingness. The graveyard of his own atrophied spirit and the trail of destruction it’s left through the world. It’s hard not to think, as that final darkness switches off the light of our time with Tony, of another void he once confronted shortly after leaving therapy, of the spectral, silent form of his mother Livia standing faceless on the stairs of a strange house. Whatever happens to Tony in that blackness, we know who he is, and where he’s going.