Brandon sent me the following e-mail:

I was just reading an interview with David Chase (the creator of the
Sopranos) and he articulated something you’ve been talking about in class about directors tapping into the collective unconscious. Specifically it’s about the final scene of the Sopranos finale, which I’m sure you’ve heard about, and if he actively was referencing The Last Supper:

“The interesting thing is that, if you’re creative, there may be things at
work that you’re not even aware of: things you learned in school, patterns you’ve internalized. I had no intention of using The Last Supper, but who knows if, subconsciously, it just came out.”

I thought that was pretty cool, both that he accepts that it wasn’t an
intentional reference yet still a valid one, and that he recognizes that it
may well have been subconscious.

Here’s my response:

Hi Brandon, that’s amazing; thank you so much for telling me about it. I saw that last episode, and most of the earlier ones as I’m a fan. The
thing that struck me when I saw it was that here you have the most famous crime family on tv who live beyond the realm of the law, the paternal symbolic, and are named for the female voice — oral/aural — the imaginary, and what do they eat for the last supper? Onion rings.

Rings are everywhere in this class, The Ring, hamlet’s father’s signet
ring, and when we get to moses and the invention of the hebrew alphabet, we’ll see how they melt down rings to make the golden calf — an image — because Moses takes too long to bring them the symbolic, written law on stone tablets.

So, Onions make you cry and rings are of course the 0 half of the digital binary of 0/1, the female/male genital binary. So, if you must know, I think that scene plugs into the subconscious in another way not unrelated to christ’s last supper: it plugs into the cultural sadness associated with the loss of the maternal/analog/imaginary and the renewed ascendancy of the paternal/digital/symbolic. Not unlike the christian context, in which the cultural sadness being played out in the last supper has also a great deal to do with the loss of the imaginary to the renewed ascendancy of the symbolic. Certainly, by da Vinci’s time the church had become the most powerful patriarchal institution in the world and the protector of the symbolic, inasmuch as the church funded all of the scribal publication centered in the monasteries, and controlled what was written and read, and how it was to be read. It was christ’s death, foregrounded in the Last Supper, that is the founding moment of the codex-symbolic. Christ has no biological father, thus no last name — Kristos in Greek means annointed one, a ritual often associated with the crowning ceremony of a new King, thus Jesus’s status as king of the Jews, and his Davidic lineage. He is not the son of Joseph and Mary Christ. As such, he cannot have gone through the Oedipus complex, as Oedipus himself did, and thus can not enter the symbolic. This may be why the Greek Bible gives him a biological mother, but refuses to give him a biological father.

Surely the authors of the Greek Biblical text knew the Greek mythological system, and thus would have wanted to sidestep associations with that system (adopted largely by the Romans), though there is a substantial body of classicist scholarship that recognizes the links between Christ’s story and that of Dionysus, a very maternal imaginary deity who was the god of wine, agriculture, and fertility of nature. In the portrait of him provided by Euripides in The Bacchae, Dionysus is beloved by the women in the city, hated and persecuted by the city’s founding fathers, especially Pentheus, who at the end of the play is killed by Dionysus’ female followers and dismembered by his own mother, Agave. The early followers of Christ were mostly woman, and Christianity remained largely matriarchal till the rise of the Church patriarchy near the beginning of the fourth Century. Interestingly, the main reason for the Council of Nicaea in 325 — in many ways the founding moment of institutionalized Christianity — was because disagreements in the Church of Alexandria (Egypt) over what was the nature of Christ’s relationship to his Father had gotten out of hand. Central to these disagreements was a debate over whether Jesus was
actually physically related to God the Father.

More importantly, Dionysus could well be the missing link between Christ and Oedipus, though when we finally read Sophocles’ version of the Oedipus myth you’ll see that he rather astonishingly invents a system of salvation that will be appropriated by early Christianity for their King and savior. First, Dionysus is the son of the god Zeus and the mortal woman, Semele (daughter of Cadmus of Thebes). Thus, like Christ, his mother is human and his father is a God. Second, given this lineage, Oedipus and Dionysus are actually related to each other. Dionysus is the son of the daughter of Cadmus, Semele. Oedipus is the great great grandson of Cadmus.

Christ can not have a paternal rivalry with Joseph over Mary, because
Joseph hasn’t slept with her, and isn’t his father. No paternal rivalry,
no rupture of the imaginary and induction into the symbolic. Thus, we
should not be surprised that Christ only speaks, leaves no writings of his own behind, and that the central message of his reformation of Judaism is that the Jewish law has become obsolete, and should be replaced by one law: Love thy neighbor as thy self. But really, that’s not a law in thetradition of the symbolic systems such as the Ten Commandments or the Jewish law in the Hebrew Bible. Those, like the paternal law, are negational: Thou shalt not.Christ’ wants to replace those negations with one affirmation — loveothers. Rather maternal, no? Mom says, “Go play nice.” If you don’t, shesays, “Wait till your father gets home!” Mom affirms; Dad negates.

Thus my sense that both last suppers, Christ’s and Tony’s, constitue actsof mourning the loss of the maternal imaginary at a moment of
technological change in which a new symbolic/paternal Reign is being
ushered in. Codex/scribal publication on the one hand; the digitization
of reality on the other.