Drug War (2012, Johnnie To)

 

If the stars had lined up when I was born so that I could have the career of my dreams, I would be a story editor in the movie industry. Seriously. I care about logic and believability in stories. I care about characters making sense and acting like humans. I care about internal consistency. I would catch all kinds of problems at the screenplay stage with just one question: Why would he do that? 

Johnnie To's 2012 movie "Drug War", starring Louis Koo and Hong-lei Sun, is a mirror image of another Milkyway movie, "Expect the Unexpected" from 1998. Although To was not credited as the director of that movie, he was heavily involved and was the director in effect (according to To's own claim). In the earlier movie, a group of heavily armed robbers from the Mainland wreaked havoc in Hong Kong, ending in a massive shootout in the street. In the later movie, it is a group of drug dealers from Hong Kong who caused a massive and prolonged shootout with Mainland police. Both shootout scenes are obviously inspired by Michael Mann's "Heat", which was in turn inspired by the real-life bank robbery in Los Angeles. 

It is curious that, in both movies, the Mainland characters are wooden automatons, even though they are portrayed as dichotomous bad guys (1998) and good guys (2012), respectively. Although one could argue that he was constrained by the film censorship board in the Mainland, where "Drug War" was made, that the police must be morally unimpeachable, I don't think To and his writers would have been interested in humanizing them at all anyway. Instead, the only somewhat interesting character is the evil Louis Koo, who would do anything to survive. Ultimately, this character does not pass the "Why would he do that?" sniff test, but the underlying theme of surviving at any cost, by hook or by crook, willing to throw anyone under the bus (literally), has its own barely disguised meaning for the Hong Kong film industry as it was slowly absorbed into the Mainland system. One could view this character as an ironic personification of the once-brilliant Hong Kong filmmakers in the post-1997 world. 

Nevertheless, the action scene is completely ridiculous! While technically proficient, it is as nonsensical as the stoic Mainland characters. Even though I am all for cynical symbolism, I still need action scenes to be driven by human logic and well made. 

Sisyphus: The Myth (Korean, 2021), An Interpretation

 

"Sisyphus: The Myth" is by no means a perfect series. If we expect a fresh take on the time travel trope or a K-drama version of "The Terminator," we are destined to be disappointed. It has all the inherent problems of a 16-episode Netflix K-drama, such as mandatory romantic plot at the center (teary hugs alert!), inadequate action scenes (despite expensive sets and special effects), and casting popular actors and actresses who can't fight and have no time to train. Not to mention the impossibility of a logical solution to the time-travel paradox. It doesn't exist, as the movie "Primer" has clearly shown us. Either we make allowance for all the plot holes in the depiction of the "uploader" and "downloader" or we throw up our hands and dismiss the premise from the start. That's a lot to set aside, but if you can indeed set these issues aside, you would be rewarded with a moody story with a profound message. 

<Spoilers ahead>

By the end of the series, in the climax, the writers (the husband-and-wife team Lee Je-in and Jeon Chan-ho) reveal the true villain of the story, which is none other than the hero Han Tae-sul. I am willing to bet that the vast majority of viewers, regardless of whether they are steeped in the Eastern or Western culture, would never agree with or spontaneously realize this point. On paper, the line between the good guys and bad guys are very clear. The cause of all the mayhem and suffering is petty jealousy and insecurity of a couple of losers, aided and abetted by the selfishness of people around them. Perhaps many viewers are annoyed by the endless excuses made for every bad guy's motivation: Everyone has a sob story, childhood trauma, attachment to family, etc., etc., which adds up to the end of the world. Oh well, here we go again, just like other mushy sentimental K-dramas, always promising salvation through love and forgiveness and other trite stuff that nobody believes any more in the year of 2021. Losers are always full of excuses. It's their hatred and envy toward the winners in our society, ie, Tae-sul, that lead to all the crime and violence. In this familiar narrative, we identify with the heroic Tae-sul and the woman who loves him, Kang Seo-hae,  and goes back in time to save him, and lament his cleverness and sacrifice. Indeed, the chief villain, Sigma, has all the hallmarks of a supervillain, from the evil grin to shiny golden pajamas. We want the good guys to beat the bad guys. We want them to win win win.

And yet, the only solution to the time loop in which the nuclear disaster inevitably happens again and again, as the writers point out, is to kill Tae-sul. I wonder if everyone secretly lets out a sigh of relief at this most logical (and fairly obvious) end point. Even though the writers somewhat conceal their intention by making him likable, cute, in love with the heroine, and played by the irresistible actor Cho Seung-woo, and, most important, telling half of the story from his point of view, they also repeatedly finger him as the root of everyone's problems. Both the primary villain, Sigma, and the secondary villain, Eddy Kim, accuse him of hurting them deeply with the contempt in his eyes, which gives them the nudge down the road of death and destruction. Even if you dismiss this reasoning as the usual whiny trope of villain psychology, there is no denying that Tae-sul's invention is the root cause of everything, and killing him is the only correct answer to prevent war it will always cause. From the start, Seo-hae's missions to save the world and to save Tae-sul are incompatible, and she indeed fails, fails, fails. 

What is curious about the series is that it can be interpreted both ways. If you are a believer of social Darwinism and the virtue of winners in society, the portrait of villains as pathetic losers could fit neatly into this world view. If you enjoy stories in which villains have their reasons and sob stories and identify with Thanos and Killmonger and pat yourself on the back for seeing "both sides", there is plenty of material to validate this view, too. But I see a third approach to look at this story. It is a story about not only regret but also responsibility. 

In nearly every subplot, a character's desire for time travel (limited to backward travel) is rooted in regret. Most of the key characters, except Seo-hae, want to travel back in time in order to erase their old mistakes and problems, be it past humiliation and failures or errors and omissions. Some recognize their own assholery, such as the owner of the Chinese grocery store and the young policeman who join the border police; some want to avenge other people's assholery, like Sigma and Eddie Kim. Tae-sul's journey is his progressive self-reflection on his own assholery, which culminates in his final act of saving the world. With the ending, the writers are saying that the solution for regret is NOT time travel and the erasure of your past mistakes but rather taking responsibility and remedial action NOW. 

Throughout the series, despite the obligatory romance and action scenes, there permeates a sense of melancholy. It is perhaps the main reason that drove me to watch and finish all 16 episodes, even though I realized early on that the writers are not too concerned about plot holes and world-building. Usually I would have given up half way. Even though the premise is to change the past, the characters all demonstrate how their regrets and grief live on and on. The series would have been an interesting mood piece if it were only about regrets, but the writers elevate the theme by having Tae-sul go through the internal journey and arrive at the final act.

One might argue that haters gonna hate and losers gonna lose. Should Tae-sul be blamed for provoking envy and resentment and hatred in others less fortunate than him? Ah, but that is not the point. Tae-sul cannot control how other people feel about him, nor can he prevent others' envy, but he can and should remember Eddie Kim's birthday. That's on him. No one is blameless. Everyone's selfishness, blind spot for one's own flaws, and obliviousness toward other people collectively contribute to this world of the brutal border bureau and the ultimate destruction. 

I have been thinking about the issue of personal responsibility for a while now, especially watching "The Sopranos", in which nobody considers himself/herself a bad person. Everyone has their reason to stay in their personal hell and never leave. As long as we refuse to look ourselves in the mirror and see the asshole looking back, warts and all, we will keep pushing the boulder up the hill just to watch it roll down again. We will keep making the same mistakes over and over and blame other people for our regrets. We will not change. Hence the title. 

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It's so ironic as to be almost hilarious to compare this series with Disney's Marvel Cinematic Universe, in which superheroes do not die, and nothing is ever at stake, and any error or failure committed by you, dear audience who imagine yourself as a superhero, can be erased through magic stones that let heroes go back in time. You will always win win win.

Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

 

I am not interested in the rabbit hole of decoding all the symbols in the last movie by Kubrick. Rather, I'm going to side with the most obvious and straightforward interpretation of this movie: It is a dream. The movie is very closely adapted from a short novel by the Austrian Jewish author Arthur Schnitzler, who was heavily influenced by Sigmund Freud and associated with Stefan Zweig. He even titled the novel "Dream Story" (Traumnovelle, 1926). Let's not outright dismiss the author's clue right in our faces, OK? 

That the doctor is stirred by sexual jealousy due to his wife's confession of her fantasy over a stranger is not in dispute. Even when there are verbal warnings threatening his life, his mental images we see are always of his wife having sex with the stranger. He is enraged by her confession and tormented by jealousy, and goes out all night in search of some sort of "revenge" on her "infidelity."

It is not important to determine, specifically, whether each scene in his journey is either real or a dream. Freud has written that storytelling is a form of daydreaming, and fantasies are an integral part of our daily waking life. There is no such thing as an objective reality. The human reality is experienced through each person's own mind, which is distorted by our desires and biases, fears and shames, most of which subconscious.

If we explore the specific scenes in the doctor's dream, it becomes clear that they are a deeper examination of the nature of jealousy. What exactly is causing his rage? What is he frantically pursuing? His wife is obviously not planning to divorce him (even less likely in the 1920s Vienna) or have sex with another man for real, and he knows it. She has said nothing about being unsatisfied by her husband. In fact, her fantasy about the naval officer has nothing to do with her husband. Her fantasy is deliberately devoid of any implication of reality and is strictly an expression of her sexual desires, ie, a daydream, a collection of neurological activities caused by physiological/biochemical reactions in the body. It's something that everyone experiences from time to time, which cannot be regulated by any social forces and influences. I'm sure the doctor also fantasizes about sex all the time --- doesn't matter with whom. 

Just as the wife's daydream has nothing to do with him, the husband's reaction has very little to do with her either. Rather, it is a trigger that releases a bunch of feelings inside himself. What is generally tossed under the label jealousy is more complicated than cliches. In this case, it is less about possessing his wife, body and mind, and more about his fear of his own inadequacy and undesirability. This fear is externalized in his dream, in which he becomes the object of the desire of his dead patient's daughter, he is ogled by the costume shop owner's teenage daughter, and later a prostitute at the masquerade orgy heroically sacrifices herself to save his life. These elements are very typical wish fulfilment. He is in urgent need of being proven desirable to counter the threat of inadequacy, and these women in his dream serve such a function. 

What's curious is the frustration in his dream. Throughout the night, he watches other people have sex all around him, but he never gets any himself. He is either thwarted by circumstance or thrown out. When he propositions a (different) prostitute's friend in the morning, I could easily predict that he would be rejected yet again, but the excuse ("she is HIV positive!") still made me laugh out loud. 

His sense of impotence lies not only in sexual frustration but also social frustration. He is constantly reminded that a doctor is a service provider, ie, servant, to his wealthy clients. He is not Jewish (curiously, Sydney Pollack is, and so is Kubrick), which removes an important element of the original story, but the class gap is illustrated throughout the movie. It's unclear whether it was intentional, but the author obviously linked social status and sexual status, which is extremely interesting and, perhaps, beyond the realm of psychoanalysis. Indeed, the concept of jealousy is not only associated with possession (of one's spouse or partner) but also with the feeling of envy, which is rooted in social and economical stratification. Sex is never only about sex. As social animals, people often confuse social status and sexual attractiveness. 

Therefore, the story seems to suggest that the feeling of sexual jealousy is, deep down and/or in part, a sense of frustration and impotence. It is a feeling of separation between what you want to have (exclusive possession of your romantic partner's desire, for example) and what you actually have. The sense of frustration and impotence is rooted in the disappointment of realizing that you cannot have what you want. At this point, the common defense mechanism is to escape into fantasies, in which you do have full control of the entire world, which will give you everything you desire. Thus, the movie's title is "Eyes Wide Shut", with connotation of both sleeping and waking. The only path to waking is to accept one's limitations and the disappointment brought on by reality. That is the moment we awake and become a grownup person. 

In the first love-making scene, the wife looks into the mirror while being caressed by the husband. This suggests that, while love and sex involve two (or more) people, each person is stuck in his or her own world. Our desires and anxieties and fantasies are all about ourselves anyway, even under the illusion of converging minds. 

Nicole Kidman gives a complex and accomplished performance in the movie. Unfortunately, the story is not about her or her point of view. It is sad that a story merely acknowledging women's sexual fantasies and desires in a morality-free way is still pretty unusual 70 years after the original publication (maybe not so much in Europe?). When Kubrick made the movie, I suppose, it was impossible to resist the temptation of casting the real-life, high-profile, and physically beautiful couple with questionable sexual tension as the on-screen husband and wife. The downside is that Tom Cruise is not entirely capable of conveying the sense of impotence and self-doubt required by the character. His performance nearly turned the movie into a thriller, occasionally on the verge of bursting into the running lawyer in The Firm. 

The Black Dahlia

James Ellroy published the first entry of his LA Quartet in 1987, before he turned 40. Viewed purely as a murder mystery, it has a lot of plot but is not well plotted. Bucky Bleichert's reason for concealing the truth of the case (to cover up his initial misconduct with a witness) is very weak to begin with and further weakened by the ending, in which he is kicked out of LAPD anyway. The final few chapters feel super rushed in not only revelations but also characterization and motivation. Many discoveries are built upon coincidences and tenuous deduction. The last bit of revelation about Lee Blanchard's murder is particularly weak, using the silly "eaves-dropping outside the window" tactic that a serious mystery writer would be too embarrassed to adopt. 

While plotting is not a strong point, the novel thrives on Ellroy's way with words as well as the undertone of sexual perversion that is less about the crime itself but about the characters and, by extension, the author. Therein lies the real fascination: a muck of sliminess and self-loathing that pervades the world of LAPD and Hollywood. Ellroy has openly talked so much about his Oedipal problem over his mother, who was unfortunately murdered when he was 10, that I almost wonder whether it is (perhaps unconsciously) a cover for a different source of guilt and shame. In other words, cop to the lesser shame (having sexual feelings toward one's parents) to avoid something even "worse." Sure, the Oedipal subtext is explicitly displayed in Bucky's love triangle with his partner Blanchard and both men's lover Kay Lake: The younger man comes into the established relationship of the older couple and treats them as symbolic parents. He lusts after the mother figure (Kay), who is sexually unsatisfied by the father figure (Lee). Eventually he replaces his father to become his mother's lover, while his father dies in Mexico. The author shows an unusual restraint (repression?) by avoiding the archetypal patricidal imagery, thus maintaining a questionably affectionate father-son relationship. I am not imposing Freudian theory on Ellroy; this is textbook stuff writing itself. 

God knows I too relish in stories of police corruption and the approach of a total lack of morality, and the first half of the novel is well done in this respect, but the author does not delve too deep and only half-hints at the perverse masculinity as the root cause through the Vogel father and son pair. Bucky's endless descent into the psychosexual darkness in the second half seems half-baked as characters lose their internal logic and consistency, ultimately leading to an unsatisfactory conclusion. The only thing of note in the ending is its expression of his hatred of the mother figure, coexisting with the fantasy of male salvation through mother's life-giving. Such is the problem with women, isn't it? This leads me to wonder whether his worse-than-Oedipus-complex shame is in some ways associated with either his father or a symbolic father-son conflict. Or perhaps the panic is homoerotic, considering all the homosexual references peppered throughout the novel, which in turn is also related to the culture of masculinity. All the sexual desires in this novel are problematic -- I don't mean in terms of moral judgment but rather in its reluctance. I suppose the secret relationships within the Sprague family were considered shocking in 1987, even though they hardly exceed the noir crime novels of the 1940s. Yet they seem underdeveloped and rushed, as if the author just wants to get it over with.

It does not seem like Ellroy has ever undergone psychoanalysis, which is a shame (no pun intended). 

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Adding a note about the real-life Black Dahlia case. 

I used to believe that humans are inherently violent and people killing other people is a more-or-less constant phenomenon. As I grow older and learn more about society, my view is slightly modified. I still think humans are inherent violently and there will always be some people who would kill other people, but context also matters. Depending on social conditions, killings can either spike or decline, and the types of killing also fluctuate. Of course, this is nothing but conjecture on my part, since I am too lazy to read up on sociology studies and textbooks on this subject. 

Regardless and nevertheless, I often think about the difference and connection between sanctioned killing (eg, war, executions) and unsanctioned (eg, illegal) killing throughout human history. There are a couple of notable points to me about this case: 1) It occurred in 1947, soon after WWII, which the American public was very much aware of and involved in. The likelihood is high that the killer had killed before in a sanctioned context. 2) The murderer obviously sought attention through his contact with newpapers, which very much fit the pattern of many later serial killers. 

Kiru/Destiny's Son (斩) (1962)

 

I became interested in the enormously prolific author Renzaburo Shibata (柴田錬三郎) through the Nemuri Kyoshiro (眠狂四郎) series, which was made into movies and TV series several times, the most famous of which was the 12-movie series released in the 1960s, starring Raizo Ichikawa (市川雷藏). In 1962, Kenji Misumi (三隅研次), who directed loads of chanbara movies (剑戟片), including a couple of Nemuri Kyoshiro entries, helmed this gem and proved that he was much more than a chanbara-churning machine. 

As a fan of Japanese chanbara movies of the 60s and 70s, I have seen well over a hundred of them over the past few years. Never, however, have I seen a movie that is closer to the spirit of the Nemuri Kyoshiro novels --- and the style of Shibata --- than this 71-minute gem of a movie. 

While jidaigeki movies with swordfights come in buckets, what I particularly like about those from this period, right before television sucked most money and talent out of the movie industry, is the real or realistic period scenery and gorgeous art designs in even the pulpiest products. The contrast between the beauty of pre-industrial Japanese society and the bloodthirsty death scenes is at the heart of this aesthetics, which celebrates the co-existence of life and death. Nowhere have I seen this life-and-death aesthetics better expressed in Renzaburo Shibata's novels; and nowhere is Shibata's theme more prefectly realized in this movie. 

While everyone acknowledges the extreme (and deliberately constructed) beauty of the cinematography --- indeed, each frame is perfectly composed --- some criticize the episodic structure of the plot and nihilistic mood. These are features not bugs. The Nemuri Kyoshiro novels (although I have read only the first series) are built on a series of independent but interconnected short stories. Characters may burst into a chapter and gets killed off or disappear forever within a few pages; or they may leave and return some chapters later. Like Camus' Sisiphus, Kyoshiro is both immersed in and detached from the absurdity of life and the inevitability of death. Presented as episodes of love and death, Shibata heightens drama and mood with few sentences, permeating each chapter with katana-sharp tension. Therefore, the short format is necessary to maintain this tension, while Shibata has an endless bag of plots to personify his view of life, which is essentially "short and meaningless." 

The movie's plot gently subverts genre tropes, such as honor and revenge. While the hero remains undefeated in all the swordfights, he is defeated again and again by petty villains and powerful conspirators, finally swept away in the tide of times. In the novels, Shibata frequently resorts to the term "nihilism" to describe the hero's state of mind, but only this movie is fully able to interpret it on screen, particularly in the hero's father, who spends his final years as a monk by his wife's tomb, and the woman who rushes into death as naked as the day she was born. Perhaps, as the generation that lived through WWII and Japan's defeat, Shibata and Misumi have a shared understanding of nihilism that we can only taste in their works. 

Of particular note is the fight choreography (宫内昌平) and filming style. Chanbara movies had not reached the camp level of bloodshed of the 1970s, but one of the duel scenes foreshadows the later outlandish violence. An earlier brawl, on the other hand, is the earliest single-shot fight scene I have ever seen in this genre. These exquisit fights echo the overall extremely Japanese visual style and elevates it to the height of the beautiful annihilation. 

Thoughts on Artificial Intelligence (4)

Empathy from AI is apparently the next big thing. Last week I heard about a study in which blinded readers judged AI to be more compassionate than human doctors in responses to medical questions. A closer look at the study methodology, however, does not seem to condemn human doctors as many news writers did in reporting the study. The researchers compared ChatGPT's responses with human doctors' responses on Reddit. Perhaps it is true that humans writing anonymously on an online forum in response to questions from patients who they don't know personally are not as friendly or compassionate as algorithms with built-in polite phrases. It does not evaluate the degree of empathy between a doctor sitting face to face with a patient, who may have been visiting him or her for years. 

Nevertheless, one of the advantages of AI is obvious: Its performance in displaying empathy and cordiality is highly consistent and unwavering, unlike humans who have vastly differences in background, bias, temperament, education, and more. Even the same person can have good days and bad days. I played around with the free Microsoft and Google chat bots a bit, sometimes faking irritation and frustration and sometimes attacking them with "angry" expressions. The chatbots, obviously, have no emotional reactions to my attacks and maintain thoroughly neutral and patient responses, peppered with psychologically informed empathic phrases like "I can see why you might feel this way." Since there is no feeling behind the screen, it is not possible to hurt their feelings. 

Human medical professionals can never be as unfailingly unflappable as machines, that is for sure. But the study revealed another insight: Recipients of the medical responses were satisfied with AI-generated empathy. Perhaps the reason is that humans are ultimately self-centered individuals. What matters the most is how "I" am being taken care of, especially in the health care context, when I am very likely ill, anxious, suffering, or vulnerable. My capacity to recognize and forgive the doctor's emotional limitations may be next to nil. A robotic doctor who will not yell at me or judge me for my shortcomings or lose his patience seems pretty compassionate. 

This leads me to a further question. Is there a fundamental difference between real human empathy and a machine-generated "empathy"? The latter could be described as the recipient's own projection of empathy, or an imagined empathy. As long as the recipient feels being empathized with, it is in a sense real, regardless of what the machine actually gives him (ie, programmed sentences). The former, however, involves two (or more) people; it is a psychological phenomenon that bounces between two (or more) people, and both of them feel something. 

Considering how much projection humans do everywhere every day all the time, machine's empathy is hardly a brand new thing. How many people feel their hearts flutter by looking at a celebrity on TV or a singer on stage? How many people believe the "dear leader" knows them and will "fix their lives without knowing who the heck they are? Our natural tendency of projection and transference has led us to invent machines that provide scripted, automatic "empathy," removed of all unpredictability, to quench our thirst and sooth our mind. Can we even tell the difference? 

The Sopranos (1): A Mechanistic Explanation of the Ending

 

Twenty-five years after its premier, I finally came to The Sopranos and binged all 6 seasons in a couple of weeks. I'm sure I'll rewatch it at some point. It is a rich and complex piece of art with profound observations and commentary on the American society and culture. Maybe I'll write more about its themes and throughlines, but right now I only want to examine the ending.

Tons of people have dissected and analyzed and interpreted the ending, in which the screen is cut to black just when Meadow comes through the door of the diner and Tony looks up. Is he killed by an assassin in that moment and the blackout is the abrupt end of his point of view? Is this just an arbitrary artistic device for the audience and signifies nothing? Does Tony live happily ever after with his family? (No.) A very cursory look online gives me an impression that the majority opinion is that Tony is killed there, but a sizable minority believes otherwise (such as TV critic David Bianculli). There are other interpretations, such as the one based on Schrodinger's Cat by the highly detailed site Sopranos Autopsy. Your guess is as good as mine, but below is mine. I cannot guarantee that mine is a unique view, but I am not going to do a thorough literature search to make sure that no one has said the same thing before.

I thought about it from David Chase's point of view. The series were initially not planned for 86 episodes long (with Season 6 split into 2 parts) but were renewed again and again by HBO due to its critical acclaim and popularity, until Chase decided to end it. So we can be certain that Chase definitely had thought about how to end the series for at least a year. This was not a rushed ending due to a last-minute cancelation like Deadwood. Imagine, for a moment, that you were Chase and knew that this was your magnum opus. How would you approach the ending?  

All threads in the entire Season 6 foreshadow basically 3 possible outcomes: 

1) Tony is assassinated by the Brooklyn rival gang. This would be a natural conclusion of the story arc of the season and parallel the demise of Phil Leotardo, Silvio, and Bobby. This outcome is also the most heavily implied in the diner scene and perhaps the most "logical" in terms of story-telling and logically inevitable in the universe of The Sopranos. This road has been illustrated again and again through the dozens of deaths throughout the series. No suspense there.

2) Tony is indicted by the FBI and probably convicted and jailed for the rest of his life. As the lawyer Mink tells Tony, Carlo has flipped and there is an 80-90% chance of an arrest. This outcome has been hanging over Tony for the entirety of the series. The plot devices that had got Tony out of trouble was becoming a bit too contrived. What's left of Tony's life will be more or less the same as the fate of Johnny Sacrimoni or cousin Tony B. 

3) Nothing happens to Tony. He continues to rule his mafia family and evade the feds for a few more years, and then enter retirement with his offshore money. He will most likely repeat Uncle Junior's final years. The best case scenario is a fairly peaceful end, which, in the indifferent universe of David Chase, would be in a place like Green Grove or the posh prison psych ward at best. His dominance may last another 5 or 10 years, tops. Then what? We see the "then what" in Uncle Junior's blank, unrecognizing eyes. Or perhaps his golden years would be more like Mother Livia's, full of bitterness, hatred, and despair for his children. 

All 3 likely scenarios of Tony's future have been described in other characters throughout the series. If Chase was to give us the whole thing, he would be just repeating himself yet again. There is already quite a bit of repetition in the series -- Tony B., Vito, and Christopher (among others) all had multiple opportunities to escape their gangster fates, but they chose to stay in their track to a violent death. Feuds and assassinations happen again and again. Best case scenario? Little Carmine who detaches himself from the family business and goes into the porn business. Worse case scenario? Being beaten to death with baseball bats. One of the criticisms of the series is indeed a sense of repetition, a sense of "been there, done that." The characters are stuck in the same destructive choices over and over, killing others and being killed, or ending up in jail. But that's intentional and a part of the series' theme: People rarely escape their destiny, even young ones like Meadow, Anthony Jr, and the Jasons. 

Which of the 3 outcomes occurs to Tony Soprano is not that important; they are merely variations on the theme of hell. What's important is that he is not able to quit and become a healthier and more ethical person. The path to salvation, presented as a possibility when he walked into Dr. Melfi's office in the first episode, becomes increasingly narrow in season after season, until it is permanently shut off, like Dr. Melfi's door in the penultimate episode. The moral death of Tony Soprano is basically written in block letters for the entire Season 6 and sealed long before the screen goes black. 

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One question remains: Does the ending have to be undefined? Why not choose one of the 3 scenarios anyway? If nothing else, the undefined ending is more artistic and provocative. The reactions since its airing on June 10, 2007, prove that Chase made the right choice. Why shoot one definitive ending when you can have all 3 live on in people's imagination?

Beyond the artistic value, I can see a case against explicitly presenting any of the 3 outcomes explicitly. Do we really want to see Tony being killed, jailed, or dying from the cruelty of old age? The certainty adds nothing. Showing him killed may seem like the hand of God (Chase) doling out punishment on Tony Soprano. Putting him in jail may turn The Sopranos into another episode of Law and Order. Watching him grow old and decrepit is just too boring. More important, Chase and the writers have demonstrated throughout the series a tendency to avoid the appearance of straightforward judgment or revenge, as nothing is worse than leaving the audience with a false sense of TV justice to sooth their anxious heart. Instead, they much prefer to use ironic twists that achieve the same effect. For example, the escalating conflicts between Tony Soprano and Richie Aprile lead us to believe Richie will be whacked before the end of Season 2 by TV conventions. It eventually does happen, but not in the way we expect. This is a trick that the series use over and over and eventually got a little old. Such plots rarely conclude at the end point of their "natural" progression, but they don't veer off too far either (it's not like Richie, Ralphie, or Christopher had a chance to survive in the Sopranos world).

If none of the 3 potential endings feel satisfactory, the natural conclusion is not to use any. In some ways this impossibility stems from the series being a little too long, exhausting all possibilities on other characters than Tony. Of course, a couple of non sequitur outcomes theoretically exist, such as Tony retiring (escaping) immediately to the Bahamas or turning witness for the feds, but they do not fit into the logic of this world. 

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In a media interview in 2021, David Chase admitted that he had intended for Tony to be killed, albeit in a different setting. However, it is hard to imagine how he would have designed the post-death scenes to wrap up the series. A funeral showing shattered family members and young gangsters jostling for the Don's throne? The New Jersey crew being taken over by the Brooklyn management? Title cards outlining each major character's fate in the next decade? ("Carmela moved in with Meadow who is a junior lawyer in some small firm in rural NJ. Anthony Jr. was killed in Iraq.") Ducks flying off in the sky? I have to suspect that all of these scenarios had gone through Chase's mind and been discarded. 

That Tony was to die sooner or later without a taste of relief from his anxiety and depression is never in doubt. He may or may not die at Holten's diner, but his days are numbered, just like all of us. The difference from Tony is that we, like the man in the Indian folk tale who is licking honey while dangling from a tree and surrounded by beasts, can still have moments of joy and love, if we so choose, before the screen cuts to black.