THE BIG DEATH SCENE.

A bad week for deaths, already -- Michael Hastings, Kim Thompson, Chet Flippo. And James Gandolfini. Gandolfini was a journeyman who got noticed by the Times (thanks @johnmcquaid) apartment-surfing in 1988 ("Mr. Gandolfini, 26 years old, has never had his name on a lease, never paid more than $400 a month in rent... 'Moving, to me, is no big deal,' said Mr. Gandolfini, whose calling is the theater but whose living comes mostly from bartending and construction...") and built a career before and after The Sopranos. Tony Soprano was his world-class achievement.

As @Mobute observed, "It's not his fault impotent suburban WASPs fetishized a sociopath and made the Tony thing kinda creepy." Much of the show's, and the character's, popularity was based on all that funny Bada-Bing bullshit. And Gandolfini's great gift for showing Tony's monstrously childlike glee at what he could get away with was part of the pleasure that drew us into the show. But his other appetites and his sufferings were equally childlike and monstrous, and as the bodies piled up and the walls closed in Tony became less likable. But still we watched him.

I talked about this a bit during the last Sopranos season -- how the endgame that revolted some people then made perfect sense from an artistic and a moral point of view. Gandolfini's contribution to this was very important. Chase didn't give him the sentimental glimmers that post-Code Hollywood gangsters got -- and Gandolfini, bless him, didn't try to stick them in. When Tony found something pleasing in a woman, or a sushi restaurant, or a big score, it eventually soured in his mouth, but he didn't stop to think about it -- he just went on looking for something else to devour, encouraged by custom, crap psychotherapy, an absurd caricature of family feeling, and the dream we are accustomed to call American.  Tony took every excuse not to notice that he had to change or die, and Gandolfini was given the task of showing us how a man could live that way. That he was a gangster made that life superficially exciting, but at bottom Tony was a small-town success who might intuit enough to despise, Babbitt-like, the cheap glow of his short horizons, but never found the courage to climb over them.

Gandolfini didn't sentimentalize this in the least. Over the course of the show Tony's life became a painful thing to watch. But we stuck with him. When Tony looked for an easy exit, we hoped he would find it. Like enabling relatives we ceased to wish for his redemption and came to wish only for his deliverance. Maybe Olivier or Gielgud could have sustained that over six seasons, and maybe they couldn't; Gandolfini did. It was a great piece of work.