The Face Knife

William Burroughs - The Western Lands
The ancient Egyptians postulated seven souls.

Top soul, and the first to leave at the moment of death, is Ren, the Secret Name. This corresponds to my Director. He directs the film of your life from conception to death. The Secret Name is the title of your film. When you die, that’s where Ren came in.

Second soul, and second one off the sinking ship, is Sekem: Energy, Power, Light. The Director gives the orders, Sekem presses the right buttons.

Number three is Khu, the Guardian Angel. He, she, or it is third man out … depicted as flying away across a full moon, a bird with luminous wings and head of light. Sort of thing you might see on a screen in an Indian restaurant in Panama. The Khu is responsible for the subject and can be injured in his defense-but not permanently, since the first three souls are eternal. They go back to Heaven for another vessel. The four remaining souls must take their chances with the subject in the Land of the Dead.

Number four is Ba, the Heart, often treacherous. This is a hawk’s body with your face on it, shrunk down to the size of a fist. Many a hero has been brought down, like Samson, by a perfidious Ba.

Number five is Ka, the Double, most closely associated with the subject. The Ka, which usually reaches adolescence at the time of bodily death, is the only reliable guide through the Land of the Dead to the Western Lands.

Number six is Khaibit, the Shadow, Memory, your whole past conditioning from this and other lives.

Number seven is Sekhu, the Remains.

The use of source music in the Sopranos has never been particularly good; the producers of the show seem to have suspect taste or maybe it just doesn’t match mine. I normally wouldn’t bother to talk about it at all but the sixth and ultimate season of the show starting off with the voice of Bill Burroughs giving a guide to the shadowlands of Northern Jersey was incredibly shocking.

One of Burrough’s mantras is that “all agents defect and all resistors sell out” and it might be the first part of that statement that has the most bearing on this episode. The only successful Burroughs adaptation that I can think of, Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch is kind of like that principle applied to Casablanca.

In his review of “Members Only”, Matt Zoller Seitz (Film critic for the New York Press (among other outlets for his writing)) writes that he believes that part of David Chase’s project (if it indeed really makes sense to imply an architect for a TV series with multiple writers and directors (not even going so far as to say that sometimes the performances of the leads really supercede the writing - add a depth to the stories that we’re there on the page, which too often devolves into game playing (cf first line from this episode, crap episodes like “Christopher,” etc.))) is that Chase always believes that his characters, when faced with a moral dilemna, will always take the easy way out - the easy way being the most expedient, venal or profitable course of action. Chase has made a point to establish his debt to Bunuel, who had a similar view of humanity, but instead of embracing and even loving his characters faults, as I believe Bunuel to have done (I realize my view of Bunuel may be idiosyncratic, but I actual tend to lump him in with Bresson and Renoir in this way) Chase’s unrelenting savagery (to borrow an invective (or compliment, depending on your POV) often thrown at Bunuel) points to an unredeemable universe, a moral void that sucks like a chest wound.

I’m not saying that it would be necessary for the writers of the series to have us embrace and understand Tony’s faults - that would border on sociopathy. But it seems there is nowhere to go but more bleakness. This may actually be a consequence of one of the things I find most admirable about the writing on the Sopranos - the way the characters become more and more like themselves as time goes by. You won’t find any epiphanies, life changes or “character arcs” in the Sopranos. It’s a perfect example of what I believe in this proper mode for tragedy, and what I like to call the “you can’t unfry things” school of writing¹. After a career of making unforgivable pictures with a worldview as jaundiced as that of Chase, Todd Solondz really nailed the humanistic version of “you can’t unfry things” in the unfairly maligned (and Bunuel inspired) Palindromes. Maybe Tony can be “born again” in a way that recognizes his inherently corrupt nature but doesn’t discount it, but the way the writing crew has handled ’sympathetic’ characters such as Furio and Bobby does not give me great confidence.

¹After a very, very funny episode of Strangers with Candy in which Chuck Noblett (Stephen Colbert) says to Jerri Blank (Amy Sedaris) “Sorry won’t make these onion rings golden brown. You can’t unfry things! You can’t change who you are!”