The Cleaver Movie

Cleaver is the fictitious horror movie that the Sopranos had released before Christopher Moltisanti was whacked by his family mob boss and cousin, Tony Soprano.

The making of the Cleaver movie really was a family affair, in a wonderful variety of ways.

The Cleaver movie was really Christopher's baby.  But Cleaver would not have gotten produced without Christopher's vision, his greed, his rather brutal, quite nasty and relentless insistence.

It seems both ironic and yet fitting that the Cleaver movie, which holds many parallels to Tony Soprano's (fictional) life in the mob, winds-up being Christopher's swan song. It started as an exploration of escape into the legit life for Christopher, but Chris' ruthlessness and greed are never actually left behind.

It is the Cleaver movie, and how he is portrayed as a cheat in the movie, that helps the sociapathic Tony Soprano find yet another pathetic excuse for his brazen murder of his own cousin, who is in fact the very man that Tony Soprano trusted more than anyone else in his family's criminal organization.  

And if you think about it, it may be that the writers use Tony's very elimination of Christoper to actually validate the final edisode of the HBO series of The Sopranos.  And they didn't even have to show a thing more than the setup, because by now we all understood what would go down.  This was not a question of morality, it was simply the universe righting itself from being so off-kilter for so very long.

Still, the anti-dramatic ending seemed to affect us all the most dramatically. Because we, as interested parties had been so consumed by this story, the fade-to-black episode told more about the Soprano family's impending doom and yet still managed to allow, for some, Tony's immortality (such as it is).

This interpretation allows us our own fantasies to the story's end. This may have been series director David Chase's real only option, considering the mafia's presence in New Jersey and it's distaste for the self-destruct scenario. But more importantly it allows us our own imagination concerning our individual relationship with these characters with which we have developed a relationship.

And so we are left with the very defined end that sealed Christopher Moltisanti's fate...

Because it was becoming a made man, and his devotion to Tony Soprano that ended Chris' relationship with his girl Adriana (with Silvio ending her life under Tony's orders because of her betrayal to the family), that really ended his career as a screenwriter and producer, and wound-up cost him his life well before its time.  Becoming made was his last act of free will, from then on all his decisions were made for him.  It's a wonder that he was allowed to make Cleaver at all.