Yesterday, an article appeared on Vox from a writer who claims to have heard been told by The Sopranos creator himself, David Chase, that Tony Soprano did indeed survive the ambiguous finale of the HBO series after the screen cut to black seven years ago. It's a question that's kept fans debating and speculating for years, so hearing that Chase actually said Tony did not die — something that seemed extremely likely to happen, considering all the evidence pointing to it — is a huge deal. But, it also isn't something we should focus on, because that was not the point of The Sopranos or its finale; after the article went live, David Chase wrote a response to it through his publicist to Vulture to clarify:
A journalist for Vox misconstrued what David Chase said in their interview. To simply quote David as saying, 'Tony Soprano is not dead,' is inaccurate. There is a much larger context for that statement and as such, it is not true. As David Chase has said numerous times on the record, 'Whether Tony Soprano is alive or dead is not the point.' To continue to search for this answer is fruitless. The final scene of The Sopranos raises a spiritual question that has no right or wrong answer.
If you haven't caught the Vox article yet that fired up all this debate, you can check it out here — according to the writer, Chase simply said "no, no he isn't," when asked if Tony Soprano is alive. The answer was kept short and curt (or, as the writer described it, "laconic") for a reason: The viewers were never meant to know what happened, and we weren't meant to break it apart either.
As I said in my previous piece about the subject, boiling down that scene that said so much about the Sopranos and Tony Soprano himself to whether or not the guy lived and died is a very superficial way of looking at it. The show itself was never black and white, so why would we start to look at it as such during its final moments?
Image: HBO
