To the Editor:
Re “Tony’s Blackout” [June 18]: Peter Bogdanovich doesn’t know the half of it.
Indeed, when he lauds The Sopranos’ last picture show for its contrarian ending, Dr. Melfi’s shrink fails to understand that David Chase has been toying with his audience all along. Sadly, it is a sign of our coarsened times that a pretentious program predicated on ethnic prejudice has been elevated to the heights of Shakespearean drama.
Forget the breathlessly idolatrous media. The Sopranos is nothing more than an improbable fiction played in malice by counterfeiting actors. What’s more, this sordid series has served as a forum for its creator to vent his Oedipal ire and an unrelenting Italophobia.
I should know. I was whacked by Mr. Chase in the final episode.
Minutes before Phil Leotardo, Tony’s archrival, meets his maker under the wheels of a Ford Expedition, he instructs his wife to contact a physician by the name of “Dr. Iaconis.” This is hardly coincidental. As Italian monikers go, mine is a most uncommon one.
Having spent the better part of the last eight years denouncing The Sopranos in print and on the air, I became Mr. Chase’s bête noire. Mr. Chase chose the program’s finale to both taint and taunt me. What is this if not a deliberate dagger of the mind?
Unlike Tony Soprano, however, I will not fade to black. For as Iago would say: I bleed, sir, but not killed.
Rosario Iaconis
Vice Chairman, The Italic Institute of America
Mineola, N.Y.