Over at Movie City News, Larry Gross posts one of his occasional and quite brilliant critical essays, this time on those eight seconds of black at the end of The Sopranos. And although Gross sees in Sopranos creator David Chase echos of Tolstoy and Balzac and not the Joyce or Kafka of The Prisoner creator Patrick McGoohan, it’s occurred to me that the conclusion of Chase’s series has inspired the same level of audience vexation that the famous final episode of The Prisoner caused back in the ’60s.

Gross’s article is long and fascinating in its consideration of the aesthetic issues Chase must have been grappling with when deciding how to end the show.

An excerpt:

This is to say that the grand contradiction inside Chase’s creation was its own ambivalent participation in cultural history. It dealt with an outmoded 20th century world-view (specifically the nostalgically remembered decades of the sixties and seventies) colliding with 21st century ambiguity and the artist, whether he fully knew it or not, caught right in the middle of the same thing in his own aesthetic process.

Click on the link above to read the rest… highly recommended.