Likely Wholly Unoriginal Holsten’s Diner Analysis
I go into this knowing full-well the futility of trying to say something original about The Sopranos. I’m especially aware of the futility of trying to say something original about the Holsten’s scene. Anyway, here goes nothing.
The most important shot of Made in America doesn’t happen in Holsten’s; it happens two scenes prior.
Fittingly, it takes place at the Soprano household. The backyard has always been associated with family in The Sopranos. Case in point, the opening shots of Season 5’s premiere–the episode after Carmela and Tony split–focus on the emptiness of the backyard, and by extension the family, absent its patriarch.
By this scene in the finale, Tony has reclaimed his place in both of his families. The content look on his face lets us know.
The camera then gives us a panoramic of Tony’s view, one which calls back many of the questions at the core of Tony Soprano, as well as the show itself:
Let’s dive in.
The Light
Light plays a major role in Season 6, generally appearing when Tony comes face-to-face with questions of life, death, and identity. Sometimes it comes in the form of a spotlight, sometimes an overhead light, sometimes a flashlight.
We’re introduced to “the light” in two critical episodes: the episodes of Tony’s coma-dream, 6x2 Join the Club and 6x3 Mayham. Kevin Finnerty (the “infinity” in his name emphasizing the universality of Tony’s condition), while cheating on his wife, is blinded by an unexplained light, which turns out to be a penlight from the real world. The scene immediately cuts back to the hospital room, the audience not yet sure what to make of it.
Flash forward to the final scene of the episode, we see another light (or maybe it’s the same light?), this time in a more digestible form. In a Gatsby-esque sequence, Kevin Finnerty stares down a distant gyrating light. Notably, this isn’t the first Gatsby allusion in the series. Seeing as The Sopranos stakes the same claim to the early 21st century as Gatsby did the early 20th, this shouldn’t be surprising. Ron Bernard of the brilliant Soprano’s Autopsy pointed out the background during a Season 5 conversation between Tony and Johnny Sack bears an uncanny resemblance to the iconic Gatsby cover.
It’s not a coincidence that the light first appears during a thinly-veiled allegory for Tony’s identity crisis. “Who am I? Where am I going?”. In the context of the coma-dream, the light presents itself as the place Tony must physically reach to find out who Kevin Finnerty is, and, by extension, where Tony Soprano must spiritually reach to resolve the contradictions within himself. It starts with his personal philosophy.
The run-in with the Buddhists in Mayham functions as the first real counterweight to Livia’s active nihilism. To Livia, it’s all a big nothing. To the Buddhist, it’s all a big everything. This idea is verbalized in the following episode, The Fleshy Part of the Thigh, the first full episode with Tony out of the coma.
The scene in Fleshy looks straight out of a sitcom. Tony finds himself in a hospital room watching a boxing match with Paulie, a rapper, and a rocket scientist.
The idea of connectedness quickly becomes the topic of discussion, with Paulie and rocket scientist John Schwinn at the fore. We know Paulie as a man of simplicity. He doesn’t view his life in narrative form, he seeks simple answers, and doesn’t look for anything in life beyond what life itself throws at him. As he tells Chrissy in Season 1’s The Legend of Tennessee Moltisanti, “I got no arc either. I was born, grew up, spent a few years in the army, a few more in the can, and here I am, a half a wise guy. So what?” There’s no use in looking for a deeper sense of belonging or identity. Living is the meaning of life.
Fittingly, Paulie–with his aunt’s “betrayal” still raw–interprets the boxers as two isolated beings, fighting for their lives in the ring. Our scientist of honor begs to differ.
He presents a case that it’s all a big everything, albeit somewhat heavy-handedly (the Schrodinger Equation reference feels like the Sopranos version of the wormhole metaphor in space operas). For John, the boxers are all part of the same entity, therefore making their appearance as separate entities an illusion. Everything is everything.
Tony intuitively brushes it off. “Get the fuck outta here”, he says, but wrestles with the idea for the remainder of the series. By the season’s eighteenth episode, he reconciles it all: his mother, the Buddhists, Christopher, everything. Is it all a big everything, a big nothing, or something in between?
The epiphany aptly takes place in Las Vegas, quite literally a contrived city. The more general notion of “the west” in the United States also evokes notions of finding oneself. After taking out his own nephew, Tony Soprano finds himself in an artificial city where naked desire reigns supreme.
During a cathartic fling with Chris’ Vegas goomar, Sonya, Tony has a peyote-enhanced experience with another blinding light, this time a chandelier.
The camera shoots Tony at a downward angle, the camera at an upward one, giving a celestial aura to the scene. Tony’s rendezvous with the sublime. The celestial, borderline religious quality bleeds into the following scene.
Tony stumbles into the casino with Sonya. A Pompeii-themed game dominates the foreground as he enters the shot, linking Tony with the forces which wiped out an Italian city. He eyes down an arcade-appropriate illustration of Satan before making his way to the roulette tables. The shot angles are similar to those of the previous scene.
We’ve seen imagery linking characters to Satan before, namely Ralph Cifaretto, but never this unmistakably. This feels more ominous. Tony’s inching towards his epiphany.
The ball whirling around the roulette wheel (especially when Chase momentarily slows down the shot) resembles a planet going about its orbit, and Tony notices. “It’s the same principle as the solar system”, he says as he lays down his first marker. Recall what our guest physicist had to say about the universe: “[it’s] just a big soup of molecules bumping up against one another”.
Tony hits a remarkable winning streak (in contrast to Chasing It two episodes earlier), the Caesars Palace logo apparent each time a new pile of chips comes Tony’s way.
Tony likens himself to the Romans, especially the Caesars, in a way the Corleones never had to. He desperately clings to whatever lineage he can lay claim to in an attempt to navigate, and stake a claim in, the alienating modern world. Caesar’s Palace is now the casino, and everything it represents. Tony’s revelation is in realizing this.
“He’s dead”, he says as he breaks a smile, which turns into a chuckle, which turns into howling laughter. He’s naturally referencing Christopher, and, on some level, God. He collapses to the floor, manically laughing, the carpet pattern a collection of connected circles. Everything might be everything, but not in Tony’s world.
The curtain pulls back. Tony sees now that what he’s long clung to as reasons he’s “a good person, basically” are bullshit. Family, honor, culture, loyalty, respect, all of it. Anything that transcends the vulgar material world which Tony inhabits–and exemplifies–is a cover.
Livia’s nihilism prevented her from making any real connections with anybody, including her own children. In severing all connections, Tony fully embraces his mother’s nihilism.
The episode’s final scene confirms this. Tony, standing over a vast Vegas desert, looks out at the blazing morning sun, another blinding light, and another shot with religious overtones. “I GET IT!” he shouts to the heavens. God is dead, and we have killed Him!
One last blinding light in the backyard reminds Tony, and us, of the revelation that’s been building up all these years. The fact that it sits behind a grove of trees makes it even more ominous.
Trees
Trees are less ambiguous than light in The Sopranos. They’ve always been associated with death. The list of examples is exhaustive, so let’s take a look at the most notable ones.
Isabella
In an extremely on-the-nose inclusion, this shot of trees precedes the first assassination attempt on Tony in episode 12 of Season 1, Isabella:
Pine Barrens
Pine Barrens is the one episode where trees truly dominate the hour. Not coincidentally, the hour is extremely dark and menacing (in addition to outright hilarious). It asks questions of mortality, death, and the unknowable, all while Chrissy and Paulie attempt to navigate the deep depths of the woods.
Long Term Parking
In one of the most emotionally taxing deaths of the series, Adriana La Cerva gets whacked amongst the trees. In a cynical move from Chase, the final shot of the episode takes place in a wooded area that looks exactly like Adriana’s place of death. It turns out to be the land for Carmela’s spec house, but the implication is clear. Everything the Sopranos have is built in blood.
Mayham
At the climax of Tony’s coma dream, he has to make a choice. He can either enter a gorgeous old colonial home–die and join the afterlife–or refuse and continue back on earth. By this point in the series, the viewer, whether consciously or unconsciously, has sinister associations with trees. Chase cuts between the house and rustling trees to emphasize the ominous nature of the colonial dwelling, as well as firmly link it with death.
We even get a shot of what appears to be Livia in the doorway, once again linking her (and her nihilism) with death.
Livia-like figures have haunted Tony’s dreams before. Recall this shot from the closing scene of Season 4’s Calling All Cars:
While both are similar in their architecture, the house in the coma-dream is a bright white, and in Calling All Cars it’s much darker. In Season 3’s Proshai, Livushka–the episode where Livia dies–AJ tells Meadow, “I thought black was death?”. “White too”, his sister responds.
By pairing the light with the trees, Chase is sending us a message. Death is in the air…
Pre Holsten’s Hints
Before diving into the scene at Holsten’s, let’s consider two pre-Holsten’s scenes that could shed some light on Tony’s fate.
In the safe house
While stuck in the safe house, Walden walks through the front door unannounced. This momentarily racks the nerves of the mobsters inside, including Tony, who gives a (soon to be) very familiar look up.
Of course, the final shot of the series is Tony giving this exact head movement. Here in the safe house, Walden presents no threat, much like Meadow in Holsten’s.
The threat in the safe house is already inside it: Carlo Gervasi. Carlo’s testimony will inevitably lead to the indictment of Tony Soprano. In Holsten’s the real threat isn’t at the door, either; it’s coming out of the bathroom. As Silvio would misquote Michael Corleone, “our true enemy has yet to reveal himself”.
At the sitdown
Another possible hint comes from Chase’s editing during the sitdown between Tony, Butchie, Paulie and co. Butchie sanctions a hit on Phil. “…you do what you gotta do”, he tells Tony. Paulie nods. Tony nods as a train passes by. Phil’s fate is sealed. And the sound abruptly cuts to silent.
Holsten’s
We can now analyze the terminally overanalyzed final scene.
Tony enters Holsten’s and takes a seat, towered over by mural paintings of high school varsity athletes, an especially devastating image considering his final, heartbreaking exchange with Junior in scene prior.
Holsten’s has an old school Americana feeling, the 70’s, I think. Or maybe it’s just the jukebox. Either way, it’s fitting that the final scene feels like it took place in the era Tony longs for. He inserts his coins and chooses Don’t Stop Believin’ on the jukebox. We hear the first notes as Carmela walks in. David Chase’s saga of an American family reaches its conclusion.
The song’s opening lyrics, “Just a small town girl…” ring as Carm sits down. We know she isn’t much of a “small town girl”. When know from Tony that she “grew up around Dickie Moltisanti and your Uncle Eddie”. Though, compared to the guys from New York, the guys who most gangster flicks would focus on, maybe all of our Jersey characters are small-town boys and gals.
The camera pans to Tony, then back to Carm as we hear “livin’ in a lonely world…” That’s one way to describe Carmela’s world. It’s basked in luxury, filled with guilt, but at the end of the day, “lonely” seems an apt descriptor.
Our view switches to Tony. “Just a city boy…” hammers home what we’ve known all along; there’s a little bit of Tony Soprano in us all. He’s one of us. “Our mobsters, Ourselves” as Ellen Willis put it in her 2001 article in The Nation.
We get a shot of an old-timer in a USA hat, adding to the classic Americana aura of the scene.
We’ve seen Chase use patriotic displays when commenting on the nature of America and the hopes and dreams of those who inhabit it (especially post-9/11). Recall this shot from Season 4’s Whitecaps, an episode which heavily leans into the idea of ethnic identity and the American Dream:
Tony then informs Carm that it’s Carlo who flipped, and he’s agreed to testify against him. As Mink told him earlier, there’s an “80 to 90% chance you’ll be indicted”. Interestingly, it’s “that fucking gun charge” which seems to be the key piece of evidence. By making the most important piece of evidence a gun Tony threw into the snow while running from the Feds, Chase suggests that Tony can’t outrun his past.
Moral accounting sits at the fore of the final episodes. We want to know if our mobsters will face any sort of reckoning for their actions. The previous episode, Blue Comet, suggests it won’t. We find out as an aside from Janice that Junior’s accountant has an artificial voice-box. As Ron Bernard points out, “By placing a voiceless accountant in the show now, perhaps Chase is suggesting that SopranoWorld is not a place where a final moral accounting can be heard”. Made in America reverses course.
Tony’s to-be assassin then walks in wearing a Members Only jacket, followed by his son. The presence of the latter distracts him from that of the former.
Discussing the significance of the Members Only jacket is like beating a dead horse, but, then again, so is discussing the Holsten’s scene (and, to an extent, so is discussing The Sopranos more generally), so let’s go ahead. In Season 6’s opening episode, aptly named Members Only, Gene Pontecorvo wears a Members Only jacket before whacking a guy with the initials T.S. (Teddy Spirodakis) in a diner. I’ll stop there. There are deeper dives into the Eugene stuff, pretty much all of which doesn’t interest me. This isn’t fucking Game of Thrones. Shove the tinfoil hat up your ass.
Meadow pulls in, or tries to. In an attempt to not put on a tinfoil hat myself, all I’ll say is that cars are a direct entry point into the American landscape for Chase. Three of the four most consequential deaths of the final few episodes take place in cars–Phil, Silvio (pretty much), and Christopher–while the other takes place surrounded by a bygone mode of transportation, locomotive trains.
One example of Chase’s car usage stands out. From Season 5’s Long Term Parking:
The contrasting cars underscore Christopher’s dilemma. He’s at the precipice of an enormous crossroad, as a certain boss’ son would say. Choose the enormous SUV, choose Tony, and the life of indulgence and decadence continues indefinitely. Choose the shitty little sedan, choose Adriana, and the fuckin’ regularlessness of life awaits. Where’s his arc then?
A less morbid use of cars comes from one of Meadow and Tony’s first rifs. In Season 2’s The Happy Wanderer, Meadow is initially appalled at the means by which Tony acquired her first car. She refuses to accept the blood money. As the series progresses, she becomes more and more like her mother, devising elaborate mental deceptions to justify her comfortable lifestyle, just with an Ivy League vocabulary. “You know you talk about these guys like it’s an anthropology class. But the truth is they bring certain modes of conflict resolution from all the way back in the old country. From the poverty of the Mezzogiorno, where all higher authority was corrupt”, she tells Finn after he questions why Gene smashed a glass bottle on little Paulie’s head in Season 5’s Unidentified Black Males. The failures to park the car could represent her attempts to “fit in” to a mob family, eventually succeeding. Or…
Trips
Of all the clues Chase leaves us, the emphasis on the number three is the most discussed. This ground has been covered before, so I won’t spend too much time on it, but it’s been covered for a reason, so it’s worth diving into a bit.
It all starts way back in Season 2. From his bed in From Where to Eternity, Chris gives Tony and Paulie a message from hell (or purgatory) from Mikey Palmice. “Three o’clock”.
True to his character, Paulie takes the message literally. Partly to ease his own paranoia, Paulie reasons with Christopher and tells him he wasn’t in hell, but rather in purgatory. Purgatory is apparently a physical place, where sinners spend a set amount of time before ascending to the gates of heaven.
Flash forward four seasons, to Season 6’s The Ride, 3 o’clock comes up again in Paulie’s tango with the supernatural. He wakes up restlessly at three in the morning anxious about a possible cancer diagnosis. The following scene sees him walk into the Bing, where, on the stage, he sees the Virgin Mary in the flesh.
It’s a fitting conclusion for Paulie’s final encounter with the 3 o’clock mysteries is something this literal. We know Paulie as someone who doesn’t view his life in narrative form. His inability to find answers in Pine Barrens left him as vulnerable as we’ve seen him. The encounter with the Virgin Mary on the Bing stage confirms for Paulie what he’s known all along; The Virgin Mary, like hell, heaven, and purgatory, is a literal, physical entity. It’s not symbolic. Neither is life. (Tony has similar important confrontations with the Bing stage, which may have something to do with the cut-to-black, which we’ll get to).
Back to Holsten’s. Meadow fails her parallel park twice and succeeds on the third time. There have been two hits on Tony’s life, and the first two failed. Is a successful third attempt moments away? The fact Tony’s assassin would have to exit the bathroom at his three o’clock gives us a hint. As Junior says upon his cancer diagnosis in Season 3’s Another Toothpick, “These things come in threes”.
We then get one of the more overt Godfather references in the series, when the assassin takes a page out of the Michael Corleone playbook and heads to the bathroom before the attempt. Objectively speaking, it makes little narrative sense for him to go to the bathroom here. The only reason Michael did was because he was frisked before he sat down and after he got up. He needed to store the weapon somewhere.
As he passes by Tony’s table, we see a photo of an old colonial house, the only shot of it in the scene.
The house from Mayham is more grandiose than the one in the photo, but it has the same feel as the house from Calling All Cars. In the Cars dream sequence, Tony is a non-English speaking Italian immigrant. It came in Season 4, when Tony still had himself convinced that his life carried on the legacy of the impoverished Italian workers who came here from Ellis Island, and from the conquering Romans before them. The house, and the dark spirit which inhabits it–some sort of Livia spirit–feels so foreign because Tony still consciously rejects his mother’s nihilism.
By the time we get to Mayham in Season 6, it feels a lot more appealing. The appearance of a Livia-like figure isn’t nearly as unsettling. In that moment Tony genuinely struggles with the choice of whether or not to embrace her and all she represents, the ultimate representation being death itself. In the end he chose not to. He wasn’t ready yet.
But he “gets it” now. He’s fully embraced the idea that it’s all a big nothing. He’s ready. The third appearance of an white colonial house signals Tony’s finally ready to enter the home.
The onion rings arrive at the table. Meadow finally parks her car, runs towards the diner and opens the door. Tony looks up. Cut to black.
Black
Chase is very tongue in cheek when it comes to television conventions. None of the first five and a half seasons ends with a cliffhanger, and you’d be hard-pressed to find an episode which does. Season 6’s second half, the part where the series is supposed to roar towards its conclusion, often meanders. Many of the developments in these episodes have little to do with the final plot.
He sometimes even flaunts the regularlessness of his characters’ stories. In Season 1’s A Hit is a Hit, a rap mogul and his crew confront Hesh over unpaid royalties. Chase almost laughs at our expectations for fireworks by making the final spoken line of the dispute, “I’ll see you in court”. The fuckin’ regularlessness of it all.
In this context, it’s fair to say the cut to black was one last expectation subversion. Television had always provided answers, the Sopranos asked questions. Why not leave off with the most open-ended question of all? This line of thinking certainly has merit, but it doesn’t paint the entire picture.
Black, darkness, and the absence of everything, describes Tony by the end of Season 6. The “black poison cloud” which plagued Livia fully engulfs him, as it engulfs our screen for an agonizing ten seconds before the credits roll.
Visceral representations of emptiness aren’t new for the show. After Tony whacks Ralph (for very personal and symbolic reasons) he faces down an empty Bing stage. So often an expression of the male desire and consumption more generally, it now reveals its ultimate truth. For Paulie, that meant a showdown with a literal Saint. For Tony, it means facing down the emptiness of the life he lives.
Ralph Cifaretto was just like all the other mobsters minus the hypocritical value system and obnoxious claims of heritage. Tony and the rest of the family hilariously see themselves as carrying on the legacy of the proud Italian people. Ralph substitutes Tony’s version of the mythologized Italian people for another kind of mythology: Hollywood’s version of the proud Italian people. Whereas Tony thinks of himself carrying on a tradition of a hardworking and resourceful people, Ralph sees himself carrying on a tradition of violent and outrageous people. Where Tony sees impoverished immigrants pouring into Ellis Island, Ralph sees the over-the-top pop culture violence of Gladiator. Ralph is a mobster minus the hypocrisy.
In beating Ralph to death, Tony tries to kill the part of himself which knows he’s more like Ralph Cifaretto than Gary Cooper. The stage reminds him, and us, that there’s no escaping it. Funnily enough, when Tony leaves the Bing a few seconds later, he’s hit with… a blinding light.
Unorthodoxly-filmed death scenes in restaurants aren’t new for the show, either. In one the series’ most meta episodes, Stage 5, we see Phil Leotardo’s protege Gerry Torciano get whacked like this:
The sound cuts out just prior to the shot, and we hear some sort of a metallic screeching sound, increasing in pitch. As Bobby Baccalieri says, “You probably don’t even hear it when it happens”.
Whodunit
Dozens of theories are floating around SopranosWorld concerning how the hitman received intel on Tony’s location. Guesses range from Paulie, to Patsy, to Little Carmine. Remember I told you to stick your tinfoil hat up your ass earlier? Keep it there. The Sopranos isn’t a show to spin convoluted webs in hopes of finding answers to a plot-based question like a whodunit.
Tony was causing instability in one of the five New York families, so any of them could reasonably have put a hit out on him, including the Luppertazzi family.
Regarding how the assassin knew to go to Holsten’s, he could’ve followed three people: Tony, Carmela, or AJ. We don’t know Tony and Carm’s whereabouts before Holsten’s, though the former said he “had to talk to someone” and would meet the family there. Either could’ve been followed. Season 3’s Mr. Ruggierio’s Neighborhood is an hour of FBI agents following the Soprano family from their home without them knowing.
The other possibility is AJ, coming from his entry-level job with Little Carmine’s production company.This agonizingly gives credence to the “Little Carmine is a genius” theory of which I’d rather not discuss. Again, the plot is secondary in the Sopranos.
Like with other works of art, you should ask yourself “why” instead of “what”. You’ll get a lot more out of it.
