The Essential Sopranos Reader (Essential Readers in Contemporary Media)

The Essential Sopranos Reader

Essential Readers in Contemporary Media and Culture This series is designed to collect and publish the best scholarly writing on various aspects of television, film, the Internet, and other media of today. Along with providing original insights and explorations of critical themes, the series is intended to provide readers with the best available resources for an in-depth understanding of the fundamental issues in contemporary media and cultural studies. Topics in the series may include, but are not limited to, critical-cultural examinations of creators, content, institutions, and audiences associated with the media industry. Written in a clear and accessible style, books in the series include both single-author works and edited collections. Series Editor Gary R. Edgerton, Old Dominion University

THE ESSENTIAL

SOPRANOS READER Edited by David Lavery, Douglas L. Howard, and Paul Levinson Foreword by David Bianculli

THE UNIVERSITY PRESS OF KENTUCKY

Copyright © 2011 by David Lavery The University Press of Kentucky Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth, serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Historical Society, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University. All rights reserved. Editorial and Sales Offices: The University Press of Kentucky 663 South Limestone Street, Lexington, Kentucky 40508-4008 www.kentuckypress.com 15 14 13 12 11

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The essential Sopranos reader / edited by David Lavery, Douglas L. Howard, and Paul Levinson ; foreword by David Bianculli. p. cm. — (Essential readers in contemporary media and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8131-3012-5 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 978-0-8131-3014-9 (ebook) 1. Sopranos (Television program) I. Lavery, David, 1949- II. Howard, Douglas L., 1966- III. Levinson, Paul. PN1992.77.S66E88 2011 791.45’72—dc23 2011019762 This book is printed on acid-free paper meeting the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials. Manufactured in the United States of America. Member of the Association of American University Presses

Contents Foreword by David Bianculli

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Introduction 1 David Lavery

Part 1. The Sopranos, David Chase, HBO, and Television The Sopranos as Tipping Point in the Second Coming of HBO 7 Gary R. Edgerton From Made Men to Mad Men: What Matthew Weiner Learned from David Chase 17 David Lavery The Sopranos: If Nothing Is Real, You Have Overpaid for Your Carpet 23 Martha P. Nochimson Author(iz)ing Chase 41 Robin Nelson

Part 2. Characters “Half a Wiseguy”: Paulie Walnuts, Meet Tom Stoppard 57 Paul Wright Christopher, Osama, and A.J.: Contemporary Narcissism and Terrorism in The Sopranos 65 Jason Jacobs “When It Comes to Daughters, All Bets Are Off”: The Seductive Father-Daughter Relationship of Tony and Meadow Soprano 81 Marisa Carroll

Part 3. Gendering The Sopranos “Blabbermouth Cunts”; or, Speaking in Tongues: Narrative Crises for Women in The Sopranos and Feminist Dilemmas 93 Kim Akass and Janet McCabe

Honoring the Social Compact: The Last Temptation of Melfi 105 Nancy McGuire Roche A “Finook” in the Crew: Vito Spatafore, The Sopranos, and the Queering of the Mafia Genre 114 George De Stefano

Part 4. Cinematic Concerns The Producers: The Dangers of Filmmaking in The Sopranos 127 Cameron Golden Comfortably Numb? The Sopranos, New Brutalism, and the Last Temptation of Chris 137 Glen Creeber

Part 5. Dreams and Therapy Fishes and Football Coaches: The Narrative Necessity of Dreams in The Sopranos 149 Cynthia Burkhead From Here to InFinnerty: Tony Soprano and the American Way 157 Terri Carney “Whatever Happened to Stop and Smell the Roses?”: The Sopranos as Anti-therapeutic Narrative 166 David Pattie

Part 6. Ethnic and Social Concerns Mangia Mafia! Food, Punishment, and Cultural Identity in The Sopranos 183 Michael M. Grynbaum The Guinea as Tragic Hero: The Complex Representation of Italian Americans in The Sopranos 196 Frank P. Tomasulo “All Caucasians Look Alike”: Dreams of Whiteness at the End of The Sopranos 208 Christopher Kocela

Part 7. Images of Justice and The Sopranos Representations of Law and Justice in The Sopranos: An Introduction 221 Barbara Villez

Lawyer-Client Relations as Seen in The Sopranos 229 James M. Keneally “This Isn’t a Negotiation”: “Getting to Yes” with Tony Soprano 232 Sharon Sutherland and Sarah Swan The Price of Stereotype: The Representation of the Mafia in Italy and the United States in The Sopranos 243 Antonio Ingroia The Image of Justice in The Sopranos 246 Fabio Licata

Part 8. Narrative and Intertextuality “Funny about God, and Fate, and Shit Like That”: The Imminent Unexpected in The Sopranos 257 Robert Piluso The Sopranos and History 266 Albert Auster Silence in The Sopranos 277 Steven Peacock

Part 9. Cut to Black: The Finale and the Sopranos Legacy “What’s Different between You and Me”: Carmela, the Audience, and the End 289 Joseph S. Walker Unpredictable but Inevitable: That Last Scene 297 Maurice Yacowar No Justice for All: The FBI, Cut to Black, and David Chase’s Final Hit 303 Douglas L. Howard The Sopranos and the Closure Junkies 313 Paul Levinson Acknowledgments 317 Appendix A: Characters 319 Appendix B: Episode Guide 323 Appendix C: Intertextual References and Allusions in Season Six 327 Appendix D: A Conversation with Dominic Chianese, The Sopranos’ Uncle Junior 339

Bibliography 363 List of Contributors Index 383

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Additional Essays Available Online at http://davidlavery.net/sopranos Tony’s Menagerie: Animals in The Sopranos (Paul Lumsden) “Even Brendan Filone’s Got an Identity and He’s Dead”: Christopher Moltisanti and the Reflexive Subjectivity of the Constructed Self (Carl Wilson) Carmela Soprano as Emma Bovary: European Culture, Taste, and Class in The Sopranos (Elizabeth Mauldin) The Sopranos as Art Cinema (William Siska) Tony and Dora: Mastering the Art of Countertransference (Bruce Plourde) The Sopranos: Asleep (Sven Weber) Hospital Scenes, Nursing, and Health Care in The Sopranos (Dianna Lipp Rivers) The New Serial Television Narrative: The Sopranos and Relay Race Structure (Ilaria Bisteghi)

Foreword Sopranos Snapshot #1: June 2007. It’s the night of the telecast of the much-anticipated final episode of David Chase’s The Sopranos, and at its Manhattan headquarters, HBO has invited a small select group of TV critics to view the final episode an hour or so early in a private screening; they are then ushered to separate cubbyhole offices to write breakingnews reviews for their respective newspapers. I was then TV critic for the New York Daily News, and the review was, literally, front-page news, trumpeted with the big, bold headline “ONE WHACKY ENDING.” When the screening ended, with the now infamous cut to black during the diner scene, at least we knew, in the comfy isolation of our HBO screening room, that the cable hadn’t gone out. But we also knew, just as definitely, that Chase had thrown us all a wicked curve ball—one that we had to process, describe, and evaluate instantly, on deadline. None of us said anything as the lights came up and we went our separate ways. I remember, however, a chuckle and a groan or two, and, most of all, the sound of silence. “Whether you laughed later,” I wrote then, “depended on your sense of humor, and sense of betrayal.” I spent much of the review tracing the ending’s foreshadowing in Chase’s various musical selections. To Bob Dylan’s “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” the week before, with the line I thought echoed Chase’s feeling at the time: “I got nothin’, Ma, to live up to.” To the use of Vanilla Fudge’s version of “You Keep Me Hangin’ On” in the finale opener—a nod and a wink, perhaps, to what Chase had in store with his now iconic use of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” as the series cut to black. I even quoted from the penultimate episode’s use of “When the Music’s Over” by the Doors, with the Bada Bing girls dancing topless as Jim Morrison sings, “When the music’s over / turn out the lights.” “Last night, to put a final punctuation to The Sopranos,” I wrote, “that’s exactly how Chase ended things.” Sopranos Snapshot #2: May 2008. At The Sopranos: A Wake, an international symposium held at New York’s Fordham University and

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copresented by West London’s Brunel University, I chair the four-day event’s final panel, “Fade to Black: The Finale and The Sopranos Legacy.” Paul Levinson and Douglas Howard, eventual coeditors of The Essential Sopranos Reader with David Lavery, are on the panel, and their papers—like the questions generated afterward from the audience— make it clear that these are people who truly, lovingly, Know Their Stuff. If daily television critics, covering The Sopranos as it unfolded, were writing the first rough draft of TV history, these enthusiastic academics were taking a wider perspective, a deeper look, with no less passion and professionalism. The title of Levinson’s presentation, “The Sopranos and the Closure Junkies,” was only one indication of the defiant and detailed analysis offered at this intellectual yet sometimes heated gathering. The opening session, which included Lavery’s “Made Men to Mad Men: What Matthew Weiner Learned from David Chase,” shrewdly connected the dots between two of the most influential cable series of the first decade of the twenty-first century. And just as no academic Mark Twain symposium is complete without at least one session debating the use of the N word in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, future meetings of Sopranos scholars may have their C word equivalent, thanks to Kim Akass and Janet McCabe’s intentionally outrageous, immediately controversial, and intellectually fascinating treatise “Speaking in Tongues: Narrative Crises for Women in The Sopranos and Feminist Dilemmas,” presented under the set-to-stun alternate title (a quote from the series), “Blabbermouth Cunts.” Some of the Jesuit hosts at Fordham had a problem with that title— but hey, it’s The Sopranos. Look closely and you’ll see lots and lots of profanity. And food. And dream sequences. And other topics well worth examining, from Italian identity to Freudian and Oedipal obsessions— all parsed and prodded and dissected by professors and independent scholars who come well armed for a shootout of ideas. It was an invigorating “wake,” as well as a wake-up call. The Sopranos, like a handful other of TV’s finest works, not only could be debated and analyzed at length and in depth; it must be, for all of us to understand and appreciate these shows at the high level at which they’re conceived and realized. Sopranos Snapshot #3: February 2011. Here, at long last, I have before me (as you now have before you) a compendium of the best papers and presentations from that seminal Sopranos “Wake,” complete with a new introduction by David Lavery, an episode guide, and an

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invaluable and addictive “Intertextual References and Allusions” appendix, where you can lose (but not waste) minutes and hours reading the instances and meanings of such Sopranos shout-outs as nods to Beowulf, W. B. Yeats, and American Idol. Begin with Lavery’s introduction, then peruse the table of contents, start anywhere, and dive in. No matter where you land, you won’t be disappointed—and, if you’re a Sopranos fan, you will be fascinated. Enjoy. Mangia. David Bianculli

Introduction David Lavery

The essays that compose this volume were originally given as talks at the Sopranos Wake held at Fordham University, New York, on May 22–25, 2008. The editors of this book—Doug Howard, Paul Levinson, and myself—were the co-conveners of the conference, which sought (as its name was intended to suggest) to both mourn the passing of and celebrate the landmark HBO drama and to provide a definitive final assessment of one of the most important television series ever made. For me, this book constitutes the completion of a multiyear, threevolume project. The first volume, This Thing of Ours: Investigating The Sopranos (2002), covered the first three seasons of the series. Reading The Sopranos: Hit TV from HBO (2006), the next volume, considered the first five seasons of the mob drama. Now, in a new decade, The Essential Sopranos Reader takes as its subject the entirety of a series that helped define the decade just closed. In a recent essay in the Atlantic Monthly on Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men (AMC, 2007–), a series that in many respects may stand as The Sopranos’ televisual and cultural heir, Benjamin Schwarz finds to be “a tad much” Virginia Heffernan’s “avowals [in the New York Times] that The Sopranos premiere was ‘like the publication of Ulysses’ and that the series ‘may have required more patience and effort from the lead characters than drama ever had, from Euripides to Artaud to Stoppard.’” Nevertheless, the reluctant-to-give-television-its-due Schwarz acknowledges that the series “warranted, and received, careful analysis,” noting that “at least 20 books have taken on The Sopranos.” As someone who has followed Sopranos critical commentary and scholarship for some time, I regret to report that Schwarz has exaggerated.1 I count only eight volumes: The New York Times on The Sopra-

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nos (2000), Regina Barreca’s collection A Sitdown with the Sopranos: Watching Italian American Culture on T.V.’s Most Talked-About Series (2002), Glen O. Gabbard’s The Psychology of The Sopranos: Love, Death, Desire, and Betrayal in America’s Favorite Gangster Family (2002), Richard Greene and Peter Vernezze’s collection The Sopranos and Philosophy: I Kill Therefore I Am (2004), Maurice Yacowar’s multiple-edition The Sopranos on the Couch: Analyzing Television’s Greatest Series (2003–2007), my two previous volumes, and Dana Polan’s monograph The Sopranos (2009), the only major study published in the past three years. Not exactly twenty.2 The Sopranos, for all its critical acclaim, is not the most widely or intensely studied television series,3 which is not to say it doesn’t deserve the in-depth consideration it receives here. The Sopranos’ beacon brought together scholars from the United States, Australia, Canada, Sweden, France, the United Kingdom, and Italy for the Wake at Fordham University (the group included academics both made and unmade, junior and senior, published and unpublished) and led their contributions to this book.4 The editors had a wealth of essential essays to choose from and are delighted to make them available, both between the covers of this book and on a website that constitutes an online extension of the book’s conversation: http://davidlavery.net/sopranos. In part 1, “The Sopranos, David Chase, HBO, and Television,” Gary Edgerton offers a definitive overview of The Sopranos’ role in the making of HBO; I consider the influence of David Chase on the creator of Mad Men (and former Sopranos writer) Matthew Weiner. Martha P. Nochimson contemplates Chase’s (and the series’) politics; and Robin Nelson takes a hard look at the idea of Chase as an author and offers a comparison with British playwright Steven Poliakoff. Part 2, “Characters,” presents essays examining various Sopranos dramatis personae: Paul Wright on Paulie Walnuts, Jason Jacobs on Christopher Moltisanti and A.J. Soprano, and Marisa Carroll on Meadow Soprano. (In online essays, Paul Lumsden writes on Tony Soprano and Carl Wilson writes on Christopher.) In part 3, “Gendering The Sopranos,” Kim Akass and Janet McCabe complete their three-part examination (begun in This Thing of Ours and Reading The Sopranos) of the series’ surprising relevance to feminists; Nancy McGuire Roche analyzes Dr. Jennifer Melfi; and George De Stefano reflects on the “queering” of the Mafia genre in the final season of the series. (Available online is Elizabeth Mauldin’s comparison

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of Emma Bovary and Carmela Soprano.) Cameron Golden and Glen Creeber both take The Sopranos to the movies in “Cinematic Concerns,” the book’s fourth part (as does William Siska online). Then, in an extensive section on dreams and therapy (part 5), Cynthia Burkhead, Terri Carney, and David Pattie get inside the series’ head, both on the couch and in bed. (So, too, do Bruce Plourde and Sven Weber in online essays.) In part 6, “Ethnic and Social Concerns,” Michael M. Grynbaum digests the role of food in the series; Frank P. Tomasulo takes on the series’ controversial depiction of Italian Americans; and Christopher Kocela, like Akass and McCabe, completes a scholarly trilogy—on whiteness in the series. (Online, Dianna Lipp Rivers offers an overview of the role of the Sopranos health care system.) In part 7, French media and justice scholar Barbara Villez (who also edited the section), New York defense attorney James M. Keneally, Sicilian Mafia jurists Antonio Ingroia and Fabio Licata, and television and law critics Sharon Sutherland and Sarah Swan contribute essays to part 7, “Images of Justice and The Sopranos.” Part 8, “Narrative and Intertextuality,” offers Robert Piluso, Albert Auster, and Steven Peacock the opportunity to analyze both paradigmatic and syntagmatic aspects of Sopranos storytelling. (Ilaria Bisteghi continues this in the online essays.) With part 9, “Cut to Black: The Finale and the Sopranos Legacy,” the book proper comes, appropriately enough, to an end, as Joseph S. Walker, Maurice Yacowar, Douglas L. Howard, and Paul Levinson offer complex meditations on the megacontroversial and unforgettable final episode (“Made in America,” 6.21). A substantial “taste” of a conversation Paul Levinson and I moderated with The Sopranos’ Uncle Junior, Dominic Chianese, completes the book, as it completed the Sopranos Wake. (The entire interview, including video, can be found at http://davidlavery.net/sopranos.) In this volume’s back pages, the reader will also find a list of major characters and actors, an episode guide, and a catalog of intertextual references and allusions in season six, completing similar compendia in This Thing of Ours and Reading The Sopranos. (A composite catalog for all six seasons is available online.)

Notes 1. See the introduction to Reading The Sopranos—“Can This Be the End of Tony Soprano?”—for a review of the then existing scholarship. 2. Any complete Sopranos library would probably include other volumes as

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well: Gary Edgerton’s TV Milestones book on the series (forthcoming), Brett Martin’s The Sopranos: The Complete Book (2007), Allen Rucker’s incomparable The Sopranos: A Family History (2000, 2001, 2004) and The Sopranos Family Cookbook, as Compiled by Artie Bucco (2002), and such ancillary texts as The Sopranos: Selected Scripts from Three Seasons (2002), John Weber and Chuck Kim’s The Tao of Bada Bing! Words of Wisdom from The Sopranos (2003), Chris Seay’s The Gospel According to Tony Soprano (2002), and even David Simon’s sociological treatise Tony Soprano’s America: The Criminal Side of the American Dream (2004). Although all would merit shelf space, none is really a study of The Sopranos. 3. That would be Buffy the Vampire Slayer (WB, 1997–2001; UPN, 2001– 2003), a series that has generated over a score of books and more than two hundred articles and essays (see Wilcox). 4. The distinguished American television historian Gary Edgerton; the dean of British television scholarship Robin Nelson; Cineaste’s Martha Nochimson, an influential film and television critic; Sopranos expert Maurice Yacowar; noted media and communication scholar and science fiction writer Paul Levinson; and major figures in television studies such as Glen Creeber, Jason Jacobs, Steven Peacock, Kim Akass, and Janet McCabe were all there—and they are in these pages as well. A review of the contributors page reveals that the authors of these essays have written or edited more than sixty books between them.

PART 1

The Sopranos, David Chase, HBO, and Television

The Sopranos as Tipping Point in the Second Coming of HBO Gary R. Edgerton

By the early years of the twenty-first century, HBO was the most talked about, widely celebrated, and profitable network in television. On September 19, 2004, it made TV history by winning a staggering 32 Emmy Awards after receiving a record-setting 124 nominations (Weinraub B11). “This will never happen again,” admitted HBO’s newest chairman and chief executive officer (CEO) Chris Albrecht, who had replaced Jeffrey Bewkes in July 2002 when the latter was promoted to president and CEO of Time Warner because of his accomplishments over the previous seven years at HBO’s helm (Bauder). The Sopranos (1999–2007) also garnered the Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series in 2004, the first ever cable-and-satellite program to be recognized this way. The show won the award again in 2007. Furthermore, Home Box Office Inc. posted nearly $1.1 billion in annual profits in both 2005 and 2004 for its parent conglomerate, Time Warner, up from its previous record-setting amounts of $960 million in 2003 and $725 million in 2002 (Dempsey 1; Flint B1; Peterson; Umstead). These figures were the highest annual yields ever earned by any network in the history of television. After 2004, however, HBO was no longer the beneficiary of the expectations game that it had been a decade earlier. Most industry watchers now assumed that the network would keep producing popular and critically acclaimed programs. Back in the mid- to late 1990s, no one other than HBO insiders expected the network to emerge as the gold standard for original television programming. By 2005, though, TV professionals and critics alike were expecting HBO to create one breakout hit after another. Dozens of original series are tested each year

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by the broadcast and cable-and-satellite networks, handicapped by critics, and sampled by audiences. Most of these shows fall rapidly by the wayside: an estimated 75 percent never make it beyond the first season. Still, breakout hits do occasionally transform a few select networks into the hottest destinations on TV—and The Sopranos did just that for HBO during the winter and spring of 1999. Given their longevity, NBC, CBS, and ABC have all climbed to the top of the broadcast television world more than once during the past half century. In the cable-and-satellite TV sector, HBO was the first service to break away from the pack by adding satellite to cable distribution in 1975, causing its subscriber base to skyrocket from a mere 287,199 at the close of that year to 14.6 million a decade later (Mair 26, 158). By 1995, however, HBO had stalled at around 19.2 million subscribers (Stevens 77). Over the next decade, the HBO leadership decided to “jump fully off this cliff,” recalls Jeffrey Bewkes, the then newly appointed chairman and CEO of Home Box Office, referring to his staff’s total commitment to “produce bold, really distinctive television” (quoted in LaBarre 90). HBO set itself apart from the competition for the second time in its short history by deciding to emphasize innovative, original programming. From 1996 through 2001, HBO increased the proportion of original programming from 25 percent to 40 percent of its entire schedule (Bewkes 62). In retrospect, HBO’s founding was a harbinger of something new and innovative that was happening to television as an industry and a technology during the early to mid-1970s. Cable entrepreneur Charles Dolan first conceived of the network in 1971 as the Green Channel with seed money from Time Inc., hiring thirty-three-year-old Wall Street lawyer Gerald Levin as part of his startup team. Dolan and his associates renamed their channel Home Box Office, reflecting their conception of a theater-like subscription television service that would offer primarily first-run movies and sporting events to its paying customers. HBO was based on an entirely different economic model than the one followed by the three major US broadcast networks (NBC, CBS, and ABC), their affiliates, and the country’s independent stations, which all sold specific audiences to sponsors. Unlike this advertiser-supported system, HBO’s subscriber format focused all of the network’s attention on pleasing and retaining its viewing audience. HBO and the other forty-five aspiring local and regional pay cable channels then trying to survive in the media marketplace were shifting the center of gravity in this sector of the televi-

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sion industry away from advertisers and more toward serving the needs and desires of their monthly customers. HBO debuted on November 8, 1972, telecasting Sometimes a Great Notion (1971), starring Paul Newman, and a National Hockey League game to just 365 cable-subscriber households in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Three months and $1 million in losses later, Time Inc. fired Dolan and instated Gerald Levin as the new president of HBO. Levin kept HBO afloat for two more years before betting the network’s future on a six-year, $7.5 million contract that allowed the channel access to RCA’s newly launched communication satellite Satcom 1 during the fall of 1975. On October 1, 1975, Home Box Office inaugurated its satellite-cable service with the much-hyped “Thrilla in Manila” heavyweight boxing match between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier. This brutal fourteen-round bout, won by Ali, was a hugely popular success for all concerned, especially the struggling three-year-old pay-TV company that carried the fight live from overseas. In one fell swoop, HBO became a national network, ushering in television’s cable era (1976–1994) with its first full year of regularly scheduled satellite-delivered programming. According to influential television critic Les Brown, HBO became “the engine that was pulling cable” (Brown 316). The network’s soaring subscriber base (reaching thirteen million by 1983) had a hand in the increasing adoption of cable in the United States from 15.3 percent of TV households in 1976 to 21.7 percent in 1980 to 39.3 percent in 1983 (Leddy 35). Gerald Levin’s plan for HBO to combine cable with satellite delivery was the final innovation needed to usher in the cable era. A second television age was officially under way by 1976, as Channels magazine dubbed Levin “the man who started the revolution” (Brown 316). With the rise of cable-and-satellite TV, CBS, NBC, and ABC were caught in a kind of freefall, sharing just 67 percent of the available prime-time audience by the end of the 1980s (down from a high of 93.6 percent in 1975), with no end in sight to their spiral downward (Robins 73; Sloane F1). During the early 1990s, the ascent of cable television and the descent of the traditional broadcast networks was an unmistakable and irreversible trend. Cable penetration in the United States rose from 42.8 percent in 1985 to 63.4 percent in 1994 (Sterling and Kittross 871). At the beginning of the 1990s, basic cable attracted 20 percent of all prime-time viewers, and premium channels such as HBO added another 6 percent to this total (2000 Report on Television 17). The executive team that directed Home Box Office in the late

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1970s—Gerald Levin, Frank Biondi, and Michael Fuchs—realized even then that restricting their activities to merely being the wholesaler or intermediary between the movie studios and the nation’s growing cable companies was a dead-end arrangement for HBO. They decided that Home Box Office needed to situate itself squarely in the content development not the transmission business. Being both between and a part of the television, motion picture, and home video industries, Home Box Office was perfectly positioned to diversify into original TV and movie production, home video, and international distribution, even as these once-separate entertainment sectors were beginning to converge into one globally expanding entertainment industry by the mid-1980s. Long before the term became fashionable, HBO as a brand became synonymous with subscription television during the 1970s. More specifically, HBO’s original image or utility brand was linked primarily to its function of providing Hollywood motion pictures to cable viewers in the comfort of their own homes, despite the fact that it also produced and telecast occasional stand-up comedy, sports, and music specials. In 1983, HBO led the way in this regard by producing its first original series, Not Necessarily the News, and its first made-for-pay-TV movie, The Terry Fox Story, which were followed by its first miniseries, All the Rivers Run, in 1984. When Michael Fuchs assumed the top job at the network in 1985, after Levin was promoted to a vice presidency at Time Inc. and Biondi became head of Columbia Pictures, his dual emphases were to increase the amount of HBO’s original programming and to establish a growing presence for the network overseas. Over time, he succeeded on both counts. Fuchs made a concerted effort to enhance HBO’s brand awareness by launching the company’s first ever national image advertising campaign, “Simply the Best,” in 1989. This initiative started the lengthy and expensive process of changing the overall impression of HBO from that of a first-run movie service to that of a premium network that produces and presents the most innovative original programming on television, in addition to offering its usual lineup of contemporaneous feature films. After his eleven years at the helm, Fuchs’s controlling, top-down managerial style proved inhibiting for his colleagues, as did his longstanding belief that “HBO has to offer subscribers a wide range of programming they couldn’t see anywhere else” with a continuing emphasis on movies. Fuchs’s stated preference was for “commercial rather than artistic” program development (Mair 106). In contrast, his successor, Jef-

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frey Bewkes, who had always enjoyed a good working relationship with Fuchs as his talented financial vice president and manager, brought a more collaborative bottom-up way of doing business to the company, unleashing a great deal of creative energy and a new era at HBO (Bewkes 62). The turnaround is usually attributed to a two-day executive retreat called by Bewkes and Chris Albrecht, his new programming chief, who came to the network in 1985 to produce the first Comic Relief special, which telecast the following year. Albrecht immediately set the tone at the meeting by asking, “Do we really believe that we are who we say we are? This distinctive, high-quality, edgy, worth-paying-for service?” Bewkes and Albrecht remember that the silence in the room was deafening. The executive team at HBO then began the slow and deliberate process of “building an outstanding one-of-a-kind programming service” because being an “occasional use” cable channel was “no longer sustainable” in the survival-of-the-fittest world that was then materializing with the emergence of digital television and the widespread adoption of the Internet (Carter 1; Power 77). The pivotal innovation that shifted consumer interest beyond just cable TV into the wondrous new world of cyberspace was the introduction, on December 15, 1994, of the first commercially available graphical browser, Netscape Navigator 1.0, which made web travel relatively easy for the vast majority of Americans. For its part, HBO transformed the creative landscape of television during the first decade (1995–2004) of TV’s current digital era. It pursued the unusual and atypical strategy for television of increasing its investment in program development (from $2 million to $4 million per prime-time hour), limiting output (thirteen episodes per series each year instead of the usual twenty-two to twentysix), and producing only the highest-quality series, miniseries, madefor-pay-TV movies, documentaries, and specials. Along with a handful of other channels, such as MTV, ESPN, CNN, and Fox News, HBO established as strong an identity brand as any on television, spilling over into its overseas expansion (beginning with Latin America, Europe, and Asia), its DVD sales, its theatrical releases, its syndication of its own series on other channels (starting with The Larry Sanders Show on Bravo in 2002 and Sex and the City on TBS in 2004), and its production of original programs for other networks (such as Everybody Loves Raymond for CBS from 1996 through 2005). The tipping point for HBO was the extraordinary success of The Sopranos. Whereas Oz (1997–2003) enjoyed a promising debut with 2.6

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million viewers in July 1997, and Sex and the City (1998–2004) garnered 2.8 million viewers in June 1998, The Sopranos pulled in 7.5 million viewers in January 1999 (“Six Feet Above,” 62). These were robust numbers for any cable-and-satellite network at the time; for HBO, though, these audience figures were even more striking when seen within the context of a subscriber base that then totaled slightly more than 25 percent of U.S. television households. The first season of The Sopranos lasted thirteen weeks, from January 10 through March 4, 1999. The subsequent popular and critical response was unprecedented for a cableand-satellite TV series. Only three months after the show’s premiere, Paul Brownfield of the Los Angeles Times remarked that The Sopranos had “fast become the most talked about series on television” (1). Stephen Holden of the New York Times went even further, famously writing that “The Sopranos, more than any American television in memory, looks, feels, and sounds like real life. . . . It just may be the greatest work of American popular culture of the last quarter century” (“Sympathetic Brutes,” 23). HBO’s latest spike in popularity and prestige was just beginning. At the start of its third season in March 2001, The Sopranos attracted 11.3 million viewers (de Moraes C7; “Six Feet Above,” 62). HBO was certifiably white hot in September 2002, when The Sopranos opened its fourth season to an audience of 13.4 million—not only winning its time slot, but placing “sixth for the entire week against all other primetime programs, cable and broadcast,” despite HBO’s “built-in numerical disadvantage.” Even though Home Box Office followed an entirely different economic model than most of the rest of the U.S. TV industry, it had beaten all the advertiser-supported networks at their own game. More significant, it was asserting once and for all that “the underlying assumptions that had driven television for six decades were no longer in effect” (Castleman and Podrazik 419). The momentum in the industry had shifted irrevocably away from the traditional broadcast networks and toward the cable-and-satellite sector of the business, with The Sopranos providing HBO the kind of breakout hit it needed to compete for viewers with any channel on television. In turn, the success of the show “transformed cable television into its own television universe” (Weinman 48). There is little doubt in hindsight that The Sopranos struck a responsive chord with TV audiences at the turn of the twenty-first century. The fantasy lifestyle of Tony and Carmela captured the zeitgeist, parodying the out-of-control consumerist tendencies of contemporary America.

The Sopranos as Tipping Point in the Second Coming of HBO

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Viewers easily related to a protagonist who has troubles at work, a complicated marriage, two spoiled children, and a mother from hell who can no longer live alone but resists any kind of assisted care. Such depictions of familial and workplace dysfunction rang true with many audience members during the past decade. Chris Albrecht remembers that when he first saw the pilot in 1998 I said to myself, This show is going to be about a guy who’s turning 40. He’s inherited a business from his dad. He’s trying to bring it into the modern age. He’s got all the responsibilities that go along with that. He’s got an overbearing mom that he’s trying to get out from under. Although he loves his wife, he’s had an affair. He’s got two teenage kids and he’s dealing with the realities of what that is. He’s anxious; he’s depressed; he starts to see a therapist because he’s searching for the meaning of his own life. I thought: The only difference between him and everyone I know is he’s the don of New Jersey. So, to me, the Mafia part was sort of the tickle for why you watched. The reason you stayed was because of the resonance and the relatability of all that other stuff. (Biskind) HBO had actually been laying the promotional groundwork to take full advantage of a breakout hit like The Sopranos ever since Bewkes allocated “$25 million a year just to advertise the HBO brand.” The executive vice president for marketing, Eric Kessler, and his team kicked off a new ad campaign on October 20, 1996, to reinforce the network’s renewed focus on original series production, featuring “one of TV’s alltime great tag lines—It’s Not TV, It’s HBO” (Stevens 77; Gay 2). This branding line marked a transitional moment in the industry when cableand-satellite channels became the first place to look for breakout programming on television, rather than the traditional broadcast networks. HBO had already established Sunday night as its own must-see-TV evening of viewing with such innovative original series as The Larry Sanders Show (1992–1998) through the debut of Sex and the City in 1998 and then, most emphatically, with The Sopranos in 1999. Moreover, these three series were simply the tip of an iceberg that would include such dramatic series as Six Feet Under (2001–2005), The Wire (2002–2008), and Deadwood (2004–2006); made-for-pay-TV movies such as A Lesson before Dying (1999), Wit (2001), and Elizabeth I (2005); miniseries

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such as Band of Brothers (2001) and Angels in America (2003); comedies such as Curb Your Enthusiasm (2000–); sports shows; six Oscar-winning documentaries between 1999 and 2004 alone; and theatricals such as American Splendor (2003) that were telecast on HBO after their initial runs in movie theaters. After more than three and a half decades, HBO had grown from being mainly a domestic movie channel to an international cableand-satellite network with a wide-reaching global presence as well as a full-service content provider known for its own distinctive brand of programming. Since The Sopranos’ premiere, HBO has aggressively expanded its worldwide presence from forty countries in 1999 to fifty in 2004 to seventy in 2007 (Kumar; Power 77; Clarke 10; McDowell G25– G26). Instead of just syndicating its programming to other international television services, HBO has recently launched one branded channel after another in Britain, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, and Japan to go along with its subscription services in eighteen different Latin American countries (Argentina, Bolivia, the Caribbean Islands, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Curaçao, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, and Venezuela) and six Central European nations (Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia), as well as HBO Asia and HBO India (Clarke 10). More than ever before, HBO is a global brand that is stamped onto an array of distinctive and generously funded series, starting with The Sopranos, which in turn reinforce and strengthen the network’s name recognition and reputation around the world. HBO’s widespread domestic influence on its fellow broadcast and cable networks is a given. “In a now famous letter” written in summer 2001, for example, “NBC chairman Robert Wright challenged his colleagues to consider what they might learn from HBO’s extraordinary success” (Haley 3A). In response, NBC produced Kingpin, a tepid clone of The Sopranos set within an international drug cartel à la Traffic (2000), which lasted for just six episodes as a midseason replacement in February 2003. At about the same time, the real Sopranos was “recouping the entire production costs” of its first three seasons “from DVD sales alone.” By early 2006, HBO had collected an additional “$190 million or a record $2.5 million an episode for The Sopranos” from A&E (Moss, “Original Shows Add Fuel to Cable’s Syndie Fire”). When The Sopranos debuted in 1999, the conventional wisdom was that the series had limited syndication potential because of all the swearing, nude dancers, and

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slow-motion blood and gore. When the series finally debuted on A&E in January 2007, however, it “drew 4.3 million total viewers, making it the most-watched off-network series premiere in cable history and prompting a sigh of relief from A&E executives” (Becker). Over the past decade, The Sopranos’ aftereffect has been so widespread and pervasive on a variety of other pay-TV, cable-and-satellite, and broadcast channels that in a sense the program paved the way for its own syndication. A&E executive vice president and general manager Bob DeBitetto admits that there was little need to edit The Sopranos given the increasingly explicit nature of today’s sexual and violent portrayals on TV (“A&E Treads Lightly on Sopranos Violence”). Tony Soprano, too, has provided a new kind of model for the “rogues gallery” of flawed protagonists that now populate the small screen, beginning with the often heavy-handed police detective Vic Mackey of FX’s The Shield (2002–2008), through the caustic though compelling Dr. Gregory House of Fox’s House M.D. (2004–), to the surprisingly sympathetic serial killer Dexter Morgan of Showtime’s Dexter (2006–), among others. The Sopranos “prodded broadcast and cable networks alike to be more daring and creative with their scripted dramas.” The show also helped attract some of Hollywood’s most distinguished talents to HBO, because it raised the unspoken “bar of quality” for what was now creatively possible on television (Moss, “Fuhgetabout ‘The Sopranos’? No Way”). In the late 1990s, for instance, there would have been “no way Al Pacino and Meryl Streep would have considered doing a movie there,” explains Cary Brokaw, co–executive producer of Angels in America, “but their consistently good shows starting with The Sopranos made it possible” (Horn A1). According to TV Guide critic Matt Roush, “The Sopranos took TV to a new level.” Roush asserts that “this is one of the cultural benchmarks for dramatic television, much like Hill Street Blues helped TV grow back in the ’80s” (Moss, “Fuhgetabout ‘The Sopranos’? No Way”). Similarly, the high quality of The Sopranos established HBO as the prevailing standard by which the rest of television would be judged during the late 1990s through the early to mid-2000s. The series won a record-setting twenty-one Emmys over six seasons, tying it with ER (NBC, 1994–) for the most Emmys awarded (Haugsted; Wyatt). Since the premiere of The Sopranos in 1999, moreover, HBO has increased its number of subscribers by nearly 50 percent to twenty-nine million, with no evident drop-off since the series finale in June 2007. Furthermore, The Sopranos also

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spearheaded an HBO aftereffect that remains readily apparent in the signature programming choices on many other pay-TV, basic cable, and broadcast networks. Above all else, though, HBO has emerged as the TV equivalent of a designer label with The Sopranos as its most identifiable product, generating unprecedented word of mouth for the network, creating multiple revenue streams for Home Box Office Inc., and helping to brand the channel’s latest incarnation like no other program before or since.

From Made Men to Mad Men What Matthew Weiner Learned from David Chase David Lavery

To no one’s surprise, the arrival of 2010 saw The Sopranos (HBO, 1999– 2007) included in many lists of top television series of the first decade of the twenty-first century.1 On virtually all of these lists, The Sopranos was accompanied by the multi–Emmy Award–winning Mad Men (AMC, 2007–), a basic cable series about a 1960s Madison Avenue advertising agency created by Matthew Weiner, the first major Sopranos contributor to carry the series’ legacy into a new imaginative universe. Weiner wrote or cowrote fourteen episodes for (and sometimes with) Sopranos mastermind David Chase in seasons five and six before going on to create the first original series ever to be produced by AMC. The script for Mad Men’s pilot had been his calling card when he had applied for entrance to The Sopranos’ writing room; it was Mad Men that convinced Chase that Weiner deserved the chance to become a coauthor of the Sopranosverse. The series that was The Sopranos was created by a television veteran of more than twenty-five years who has made no secret of his “loathing” for the medium. Chase has admitted to loving television as a kid, although he says the affair didn’t last: “I fell out of love with TV probably after The Fugitive went off the air [1967]. And then when I had my first network meeting, that didn’t help. . . . I hated everything that corporate America had to offer.” He has remained an “in-house renegade” (Lavery and Thompson 19). Thanks to several candid and forthright interviews with Chase, we know a lot about his always iconoclastic and sometimes idiosyncratic views on art and narrative.

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By his own admission, Chase had always “had a bad reputation.” In both the film and television worlds, the word on the street was that “he’s very talented but he’s too dark. His material is too dark.” “You know,” Chase explains, “it’s that thing out there that once you’re in the club it takes you a while to wash out. And so even though I had deal after deal after deal, in which nothing happened, I still kept getting hired because something had happened once” (Lawson, 207). As I showed in my Sopranos entry in Glen Creeber’s 50 Key Television Programmes, Sopranos DNA, inherited from its bad-boy father, exhibited a number of distinctive traits: departing from many of the conventions of television drama, opting for more and more time between seasons, casting against the norm, and, in its narrative, eschewing cliffhangers and exhibiting little urgency about resolving its many arcs. Asked in an interview on NPR about the complaint of network television series that The Sopranos (and HBO) had an unfair advantage (with no language restrictions, nudity permitted, and so on), Chase replied that those things were not what made his series unique: “All of us have the freedom to do story lines that unfold slowly. We all have the freedom to create characters that are complex and contradictory. The FCC [Federal Communications Commission] doesn’t govern that. We all have the freedom to tell stupid, bad jokes that may actually turn out to be funny. And we all have the freedom to let the audience figure out what’s going on rather than telling them what’s going on” (“‘The Sopranos’ Writer and Director David Chase”). “You know,” Chase insisted to Martha Nochimson, “when it comes down to it, I just try to entertain myself and solve creative problems. My major impulse is try never to do the same thing. To run away from what was done. To run away from what other people are doing” (Dying to Belong, 245). So how did Matthew Weiner, one of the Wesleyan University Mafia (see Loewenstein),2 who had previously written only for sitcoms like Becker (CBS, 1998–2004), get a job working for David Chase? In BillionDollar Kiss, Jeffrey Stepakoff, speaking from experience, observes that “what most showrunners really want is a writer who has a fresh and distinctive voice; but at the same time, they want a writer who can suppress his or her fresh and distinctive voice and conform to the voice of the show.” Chase’s admiration for Weiner’s Mad Men spec script, we may assume, had more than a little to do with Weiner’s fulfillment of the Stepakoff dictum. It was a monumental step for Weiner, who has spoken of joining The Sopranos’ staff as like being called up to play for the Yankees.

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Weiner would write or cowrite a variety of important episodes for The Sopranos’ last two seasons: “Rat Pack” (5.2), “Sentimental Education” (5.6), “Unidentified Black Males” (5.9), “The Test Dream” (5.11), “Mayham” (6.3), “Luxury Lounge” (6.7), “Moe n’ Joe” (6.10), “Kaisha” (6.12), “Soprano Home Movies” (6.13), “Chasing It” (6.16), “Kennedy and Heidi” (6.18), and “The Blue Comet” (6.20). It was Weiner who convened the mob wife movie night (to watch Citizen Kane); who put Carmela in bed with Mr. Wegler; who authored Tony’s comparison of therapy to “taking a shit”; who took Tony to dreamland at the Plaza; who had Paulie almost talk Tony to death; who called Tony back to life with Meadow’s voice from the woods; who mugged Lauren Bacall for her swag; who broke up Vito and Johnny Cakes; who made Johnny Sack “allocute” for his crimes; who had Tony bested by Bobby in a heavyweight fight and then get revenge by making his sister’s husband kill for the first time; who put Christopher out of his misery; who gave Tony peyote and had him yell “I get it!” at the desert dawn; and who whacked Bobby in a model-train shop. This admittedly-too-quick tour of Weiner’s contributions to The Sopranos makes abundantly clear that even as a relative newcomer he was assigned some important narrative tasks. Working often with Chase himself, Weiner became, after Terry Winter, the most important Sopranos writer in the show’s last three seasons. We should hardly be surprised, then, that Weiner would give us arguably the best television series since that cut to black at the door of Holsten’s. The ever-angry Chase, who recently signed a movie deal, wants never to make television again. But many interesting sensibilities, including Weiner, are finding great potential in television—and not just on HBO. We have recently seen the rise of Showtime as a premium channel rival, its most successful series, Dexter (2006–), created by Sopranos alum James Manos Jr., who had coauthored “College” (1.5). Even more surprising has been the emergence of basic cable quality TV, to which Weiner has not been the only Sopranos veteran to contribute—Todd Kessler (“D-Girl,” 2.7; “Funhouse,” 2.13; “Fortunate Son,” 3.3; “University,” 3.6; “He Is Risen,” 3.8) made substantial contributions to seasons two and three before cocreating Damages (2007–) for FX. What exactly has Weiner brought to his new series? Like Chase, Weiner revels in a television series’ unpredictableness: “One of the things I’m most proud of, and [this applies to] a lot of episodes, is that you can go back and look at the first frame . . . and have no idea where you’re going to go.” Weiner takes pride in making Mad Men’s plots

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“very elaborate.” “They are real plots,” he has told Maureen Ryan. “They are like the plots we did on The Sopranos. I hide it a lot. I hide it the way they do on The Simpsons and The Sopranos. By saying here’s the show, it starts off and you think it’s going to be about this, but it’s about that.” Like Chase, Weiner wants to create anything but normal television. Like him, he has created characters who are utter strangers to the Socratic maxim, None know themselves. “A lot of what I’m doing is trying to not do a typical TV show. . . . One of the things I really wanted to show was that [Betty Draper’s] not conscious of what she’s doing a lot of the time. And she’s lying to herself about what’s she doing” (Ryan). As in The Sopranos, where silence is as important as speech (Howard, “Soprano-speak”; Peacock, this volume), Weiner places tremendous importance on what is not said: And I can only do that because the audience is [seeing a lot of this world]. It goes to the pace you were talking about—there are a lot of private moments on the show. They cost more to shoot, it’s 30 seconds of silence, it could be five or six shots, it costs the same as five pages. But those private moments inform [everything else]. One of the scenes I’m most proud of is when [Betty tells Don she’s quitting a modeling job]. We know what Don knows, and we know what Betty knows, and nothing is said. (Ryan, her additions) Like Chase, Weiner wants to create a show that demands careful attention: “When you’re telling people a story that they don’t know— they find it frustrating if they’re not paying attention. What I’m trying to do when I draw them in is say, put your checkbook down, turn off the phone, watch it on TiVo when you know the kids won’t be around. And really let yourself go into this world but take it seriously” (Ryan). Sometimes, Weiner and his mentor Chase would seem to be reading from the same script: Chase: [Northern Exposure was] propaganda for the corporate state . . . it was ramming home every week the message that “life is nothing but great,” “Americans are great” and “heartfelt emotion and sharing conquers everything.” (“‘The Sopranos’ Writer and Director David Chase”)

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Weiner: The truth is, I think the biggest difference between this and a lot of what’s on TV now is—and I will tell you right now, it hasn’t always been this way—TV is an escape for people in a different way. It’s an escape that reconfirms [that your life is OK]. I am not reconfirming that you are OK. I am reconfirming that you are having a hard time. (Ryan, her addition) Like Chase, who dreamed of being a filmmaker,3 Weiner had other options than doing a television show: “I had a feature that I had written and cast that I would have been able to get off the ground. I would have gotten one of those gigantic, multi-million dollar development deals, and I would have been making a lot more money than I’m making now, but I wouldn’t have a show” (Brancato). Unlike Chase, however, Weiner would, blasphemously, choose TV, where, in sharp contrast to Chase, he finds a natural home: Chase: I loathe and despise almost every second of [network television]. (Rucker, “An Interview with David Chase”) Weiner: I’m not bashing TV. I have every kind of Law & Order on my TiVo. (Ryan) The name of the final DVD chapter of “Mayham” (6.3)—written by Matt Weiner—an episode in which Tony, saved by his daughter’s summons back into the world, does not go into the light, is “Toward the Beacon.” This beacon would seem, in one sense at least, death itself, the ultimate guiding light, even if you don’t subscribe to the Heideggerian existential conviction that life is “being toward death.” The beacon, however, is not just a figment of the Finnertyverse, and reappears later in the season when Carmela, a free woman in Paris, takes a final stroll through the City of Light in “Cold Stones” (6.11) and discovers its powerful presence, a searchlight probing the sky over the Eiffel Tower. For Weiner, however, the beacon might well have another, televisual significance, one appropriate, I think, for this book. In an interview with Weiner in the Writers Guild of America West publication Written By do we not find the following? Written By: Will it be possible to replicate [The Sopranos’] writing experience?

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Weiner: That’d be insane to think there will ever be another Sopranos. I will tell you this: I have tried to take everything good that I can about it. I got to sit here and watch how good ideas happen. I’d like to think that in some ways I will carry as much as I can from The Sopranos, but The Sopranos is a beacon. (Lee 55, my emphasis) The Sopranos may have ended on a cut to black, but its beacon still lights the skies.

Notes 1. For example, Television without Pity named The Sopranos number 2 in its Best Scripted Shows of the Decade list, and Newsweek placed it third in its list of best TV. Matt Zoller Seitz in Salon even named David Chase (along with film’s Charlie Kaufman) as number 1 in his Directors of the Decade series. 2. Weiner’s classmates at Wesleyan included the film director Michael Bay and cult television master Joss Whedon. 3. See Robin Nelson’s discussion of this elective affinity, this volume.

The Sopranos If Nothing Is Real, You Have Overpaid for Your Carpet Martha P. Nochimson

There is something fragile about the brutal world of The Sopranos. Threading the bouts of violent physical action, ostentatious wealth, emotional savagery, and shameless lies are uneasy dreams, unexpected fatal disease, therapeutic probes of the mystery of identity, and a pervasive fear that the world is “all a big nothing.” Clearly this is not the fragility of the delicate but rather of the unstable. In that sense, there has always been something fragile about the movie gangster, who has ritually feared and found “a big nothing” just beyond the moment of his conquest.1 However, if the mummified corpse of Tommy Powers (James Cagney) in The Public Enemy (William Wellman, 1931) teeters in a doorway opening on a dark abyss as the film ends, and the Hollywood gangster protagonists who followed in his footsteps each found his own private hell in the emptiness of the void, Sopranos creator David Chase has designed a twenty-first-century gangster story in which the nothingness that the characters fear is visible to the audience as a delusion we need not share. Rather, The Sopranos points toward the exhilarating possibilities just beyond the entrapping circle of plunder and payback of the North Jersey gangsters. Theirs is a closed materialist landscape; but the series envisions an open universe. Both timely and timeless, The Sopranos gives its characters intimations of the vast opportunities the world offers, but they doggedly settle for the bankrupt perspectives that characterized the Bush administration, with which the characters are frequently associated

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through references to George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, the Katrina debacle, and bungled homeland security policies. Character myopia serves provocatively as a challenge to an audience engulfed by a culture of greed and sterile consumerism. Playing against the tenor of the times in which it was born, The Sopranos takes us on a journey toward self-awareness, truth, and poise by the unlikely means of the gangster express, a vehicle formed of the mob’s fear, intense self-delusion, and violence. Light-years ahead of the astonishingly backward American media, which, all too frequently, would like to suck its collective thumb inside a reassuring box of platitudes, The Sopranos ironically distances itself from the gangsters. It unsettlingly conveys the way they themselves have created the angst and dishonesty by which they live by evoking the relativity of our world and, most importantly, by encouraging the audience to ponder the freedom from which Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini), his family, and his crew have cut themselves off. The series evokes that potential for individuals and cultures to eternally create and re-create life anew by means of an explicit evocation of the relativity of reality, as theorized by cutting-edge particle physics, cutting-edge psychology, and cutting-edge literature alike. With The Sopranos, Chase adds a little Einstein to the gangster genre. Or maybe he allows us to see that Einstein has always lurked behind Hollywood’s old-fashioned dualistic polarities Despite the strident voices of detectives, policemen, and FBI agents that have been grafted onto the gangster genre over the years, behind these stick figures who enunciate unconvincingly simple moral positions, the American gangster film has always (if mostly inadvertently) blurred its absolutes through its equivocal attitudes toward its disturbingly charismatic gangster protagonist. His (most often) deviant energy has always been too close to the powerhouse perseverance of the American can-do hero, his achievement troublingly like what is generally understood as the American Dream. In part, The Sopranos, making the fullest use possible of current media freedoms, confirms the worst fears lurking in the subtext of the traditional Hollywood gangster movie that the American Dream has somehow become interchangeable with gangster greed. The series repeatedly shows the emotional and spiritual poverty of gangsters and straight citizens alike who have been mistaken in regarding the Dream in materialist terms, the clichéd pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, our material reward for hard work—never mind what that work consists of. At the same time, it suggests a hope. The Sopranos, through its depictions of dreams, and as itself a cultural dream

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that we all share, redefines the American Dream as a pluralistic process, one by which the audience, which may be every bit as resistant as the gangsters to the relativity that open process implies, can join in a quest for a more truthful and authentically optimistic American self-portrait. In every episode, among the lies, violence, abuses, self-deception, betrayals, and greed, relativistic dissonance surfaces. This dissonance, which reveals the limits of the gangster take on living, would open the way to individual creativity, freedom, and honesty, were the characters to make use of the larger vision. Over the heads of the characters, through dreams, situations about which there are patently multiple interpretations, or life-changing experiences like travel, therapy, or trauma, the viewer is shown the invigorating multiplicity of reality the gangsters reject. The meaning of this parade of disregarded insightful moments points toward a relativity that is actually spelled out for us in the series, but only once, and then only late in the series, when a physicist named John Schwinn (Hal Holbrook) shows up in the sixth-season episode “The Fleshy Part of the Thigh” (6.4). Schwinn, a patient in the hospital in which Tony is recovering from being shot by Uncle Junior (Dominic Chianese), becomes a resonant part of the Sopranos landscape during an astonishingly mismatched gathering in the room of yet another patient, a black gangsta rapper named Reginald G. who has invited Tony and Schwinn, along with his own friends and family, to watch a televised boxing match. Paulie (Tony Sirico), who is visiting Tony, is also part of this group. Schwinn, who has made his career in the prestigious Bell Labs in New Jersey, is a person unlike any other in the series. Possibly named for Christian Schwinn, a real-life particle physicist, this character articulates the structure of the world according to The Sopranos.2 As the television images of the fight flicker fitfully because of a damaged antenna, the conversation unexpectedly turns from the spectacle of physical action on the screen to the nature of reality. Paulie bitterly makes an analogy between the boxing match and life: with a darkly comic selfpity, this remorseless murderer decries a world in which we fight ceaselessly and alone. Schwinn quietly dissents. In reality, Schwinn explains, the world is composed of a soup of anonymous particles. Separate shapes are a result of the way we look at those particles and group them into forms. The spectacles of gangster action we have seen throughout The Sopranos’ seasons suggest exactly the image of the world Schwinn evokes of a seething cauldron of matter and energy subject to the shaping imagination.

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To those who are dubious about the emphasis given here to Schwinn’s brief appearance in the last season of The Sopranos, I would suggest that Chase’s placement of this telling dialogue among gangsters, gangstas, and a physicist is emblematic of his vision of himself as an entertainer rather than a preacher, although he combines his role as a storyteller with a tenacious belief, honed in the course of a long career in the mass media, that entertainment can be substantial as well as captivating. It would have been premature to give the Schwinn lecture (or something like it) in the first season. But clearly Chase also felt that his series would be missing something if it never surfaced in so many words. The relativity explicitly asserted by Schwinn in his concise summary of particle physics implicitly beckons the viewer from the very first moment in The Sopranos to the final blackout. The riveting opening shots in Dr. Melfi’s (Lorraine Bracco) waiting room in the pilot episode, of Tony and the statue of a female nude, construct a relative world in which Tony is both bound and free, depending on what details the camera picks out. The first image, once seen never to be forgotten, tightly frames Tony between the legs of the statue, evoking a sense of him as a man who is stuck even though there is clearly free air around the enclosing sculptural limbs. Moreover, immediately, the image reveals how the same statue can also suggest freedom and openness. The camera pans to the upper body of the nude, its arms clasped behind its head like wings, the breast open and receptive. When this part of the statue is foregrounded, Tony is in the presence of an invitation to freedom. Tony’s consternation as he gazes at the statue is another form of invitation: to the audience to ponder the puzzle of relativity that he cannot fathom. In this way, Melfi’s waiting room is not only an entrance for Tony into his first therapy session, but also an entranceway for the audience into what will become a revelation of how we create form from the soup of particles. The very fact that The Sopranos replaces with a therapist the clichéd cop and FBI bureaucracy as the main sparring partner of the gangster protagonist shifts the playing field to one of relative perception from that of the absolute rules imposed by the legal system. Here, as in almost every other aspect of the series, Chase pushes mass entertainment toward something more interesting and more honest. Therapy in the American mass media has, in too many cases, functioned as a euphoric fiction that miraculously grants immediate health once the patient says a few magic words about his or her past.3 In contrast, from Tony’s first ther-

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apy session in the pilot episode to his last in “The Blue Comet” (6.20), the series plays against Hollywood’s idea of the Cure, turning the attention of the audience from goal to process. As the sessions between Tony and Dr. Melfi thread the series, they provide a running commentary on how the mind processes events, as though the action part of the episodes were a churning cauldron of particles that are shaped and reshaped by both Tony and Dr. Melfi as they talk. A facile Hollywood notion of progress and change through the talking cure is replaced in these running commentaries on the action with a sense of imminent change that never occurs despite many aha! moments of insight. Tony’s therapy may enlighten the audience, but it bears witness to his intransigent defense of his perspective, no matter how much evidence accumulates in opposition to it.4 But if Tony’s therapy explodes media cant about magical cures, it also has some home truths to tell about the therapist. When, in the pilot episode, we watch Melfi inform Tony that she is required to inform the authorities if a patient is about to commit a crime, her description of this responsibility as a “technicality” anchors her willingness to treat a criminal in a notably cavalier attitude toward the law (which we later find out is paired with a similar disregard for the evidence gathered by the profession about the tendency of the talking cure to create better criminals instead of curing them). David Chase calls this Melfi’s “deal with the devil” (Nochimson, Dying to Belong, 247). I would prefer to describe it as a sympathy for the devil that grows out of a personal grandiosity about her role as a social engineer and redemptive therapist. Melfi’s fantasy of herself as a social reformer against all odds is vividly established in season two when she takes Tony back as a patient after previously rejecting him when it becomes clear that his criminal life is a patent threat to herself and her other patients. Her reunion with Tony is based on a dream she has had, which she interprets as a call to assume a responsibility for the mob boss. In her dream, she sees herself as the only witness of a car crash that leaves Tony prostrate on the hood of a car. At the same time, she hears Munchkin voices singing, “You’re out of the woods,” from a song in The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939). Ignoring the voices, a part of her that celebrates her release from this train wreck of a patient, she is conveyed over the rainbow by the seductive dream image of Tony in need of rescue. Her rescue. In “The Blue Comet,” after years during which Melfi clings to her missionary attitude, we watch relativity in action, as she reads an article on “the criminal per-

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sonality” by Samuel Yochelson and Stanton E. Samenow and changes her deal by at last integrating important evidence about the therapeutic treatment of gangsters into her outlook.5 Although the article recirculates ideas with which she is already familiar, these ideas become the basis of a new reality only when her mind gives them a new emphasis. We are afforded a privileged look at how we create our realities from bits of matter as the camera magnifies many times over certain words in the article and Melfi’s reality vis-à-vis Tony is reframed. We never really know how Melfi understands the change in herself; still it appears that her new, absolute belief that Tony cannot be treated is as iron clad as her previous certainty that he could be. In other words, in her own way, Melfi may well be as much in denial about the relativity of her role in constructing her reality as Tony is. But in its relationship with the audience, the series is not. Dreams are often a means Chase uses to provide the audience with a vision of the world as the creation of the human mind as it shapes and reshapes the fragments that constitute reality. At their finest, the dreams reveal to the audience, in a variety of interesting ways, the illusion that Schwinn points out when he speaks of the conflict between the two boxers on the television set as appearance rather than reality. In fact, by the time Schwinn speaks, a similar spectacle has already been presented to us in Tony’s dreams—with particular clarity at the end of “The Test Dream” (5.11), when Tony’s subconscious places him in the locker room of his old high school, face-to-face with Coach Molinaro (Charley Scalies), his old gym teacher. In Tony’s dream, Molinaro mocks him for his criminal life, a criticism to which Tony takes so much exception that he raises his gun menacingly. But, unlike in his waking life, Tony’s “weapon option” proves insubstantial, absurd; the gun comically falls to pieces on the floor, where Tony tries in vain to reassemble it, as the old coach growls at him, “You’ll never shut me up!” Unarmed, chubby Molinaro, chomping on a cigar and making his way through a pile of gym socks, is the last man we might imagine intimidating big, bad, virile, alpha male Tony in a fictional landscape in which violence has proven all too effective. This huh? moment should and does shift the audience into questioning mode, as it plunges us below the surface of Soprano life on the streets. But it is not easy to discern what haunts Tony to the point of unmanning him in his imagination. Molinaro is an unforeseen figure in every respect. Not only have we never heard of him before, but the previous scenes in the episode,

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as well as a number of the previous episodes, have prepared us to expect that, at the end of the tunnel in this dreamscape, Tony will encounter his cousin, Tony Blundetto (Steve Buscemi), who has been preying on his mind. Blundetto has become a threat to mob income in North Jersey, the biggest threat there is to mob life. Or is it? The big encounter in this dream is the disruption of Tony’s gangster narrative by Molinaro’s, whose reality is based on assumptions that are the obverse of Tony’s. But Molinaro is Tony, the part that only surfaces in his dreams. Tony is not one; he is many. In all his dreams, everyone he has known becomes some aspect of him, for dreams are a place in which the strange “everything is everything” truth of particle physics can be manifest. Specifically, Tony’s recurring “Molinaro” dream pursues him down the years as part of a complex process involving competing claims within American culture. An unsparing look at our culture suggests that Tony’s internal contradictions, as he imagines himself confronting Molinaro, reflect the United States at its extremes: the vexed American coexistence of a rigid moral puritanism with a practice of giving free passes to criminal behavior at the highest levels of society. Like America, Tony is caught between conflicting pressures from his internal laundry lists of clear moral precepts and his acceptance of the spectacular prosperity that has resulted from heinous crimes he has committed. This is a particularly American cultural schizophrenia, to which the media has generally reacted by spinning fables that hide the conflict: criminals are hateful, Sam Waterston has it covered, and we can all go to sleep on the couch peacefully. The captivating, disturbing Sopranos is a muchneeded exception. The therapy sessions inside Melfi’s office, highlighting the relativism of the individual processes of Tony and Melfi, complement the relativism of the American landscape outside her office. The landscape outside of the therapeutic cocoon is crucial in this series because the therapy sessions yield a microcosmic portrait of the individual creation of reality; this is not the entire picture. Schwinn’s discussion of human creation of forms from a primal soup is most authentically read to mean that, although every individual does some of this, the lion’s share of that creation is cultural. That is, we never create our own realities in a vacuum. Each culture configures the context within which each member of a society has some latitude to carve out a personal reality, and The Sopranos quite vividly evokes the American cultural context within which Tony, Melfi, Tony’s wife Carmela (Edie Falco), and all the other char-

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acters have cobbled their patchwork lives. In the macrocosmic context, we witness a divided American national psyche split by a war between the judgmental Conservative Imagination, rooted in the old traditions of Western culture that once conferred upon society the authority to create order, and the newer free-wheeling Romantic Imagination, rooted in the events in Europe at the end of the eighteenth century, which went a long way toward displacing that order with individual vision. It has been generally agreed upon that The Sopranos is about America, so it is time that we recognize that the series is profitably read within the larger philosophical schism that created America, that cataclysmic break in the time of Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats between the old understanding of the individual as a subset of the authoritative community and a new understanding of community as valid only when it is the creation of free individuals, as reflected in the works of the romantic poets, the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau—and the Declaration of Independence. However, neither the architects of English romanticism nor those of the Declaration of Independence ever imagined the liberated individual as he or she has been all too often misconstrued in twentieth-century American discourse, by Hollywood in particular. A pathetic and cruel distortion of the Romantic Imagination has become the keystone of the “reality” foisted on us by Hollywood movies in the person of the standard Hollywood hero, the adolescent man-boy whom we are supposed to admire because he has use for neither traditions nor limits nor doubts in his pursuit of his immediate goals. The importance of the gangster genre has been that virtually alone in media entertainment, the screen gangster has reflected the darker side of Hollywood’s version of the Romantic Imagination as what it is: a worship of the individual run amok in a context in which the old pieties are generally little more than sound and fury (Nochimson, Dying to Belong, 186, 191). The screen gangster’s violence and anarchy are mass culture’s only sustained recognition of the problem of a childish translation of romanticism into an endorsement for heedless instant gratification, a misprision foreseen as a possibility by the great English romantic poets, as well as the great American novelists, such as Hawthorne, Melville, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner, some of whom are directly referenced in the series.6 American literary giants benefited from the new power of romantic claims, but also recognized and warned against a threat hidden in the liberation of the individual from the “dead hand of history.” And that threat is solipsism, the self without a perspective on a reality larger

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than its own desires.7 Through its depiction of the excesses of Tony, the other gangsters, and many ordinary citizens who take some gangster-like liberties, The Sopranos drives to new heights the potential of the gangster genre for exposing the hidden, solipsistic side of American individualism, the consequences of which play out in both the absurdities and the violence the criminals regard as business as usual in The Sopranos’ narratives. At the same time, the series quite brilliantly demonstrates the failure of the Conservative Imagination, both in America as a culture and in the gangster genre, as a force for coherence and ethics. The portrait of the Conservative Imagination in The Sopranos is of particular interest, given the history of the genre, which, until 1972, attempted to imagine the conservative force of lawmen as keepers of the absolute truth. Post-Godfather Hollywood has gone a long way toward suggesting the complex position of traditional law in Romantic America, and The Sopranos has taken the genre to the next step by unmasking the pseudoconservatives who have proclaimed themselves the guardians of American values as a particularly shifty breed of solipsistic romantics. In fact, The Sopranos frequently directly identifies the Bush administration neocons with the solipsism of the gangsters—recall the hilarious letter that Uncle Junior writes to Dick Cheney about the trouble they both have with firearms. By contrast, Chase positions the Conservative Imagination in a way that can be better understood if we make an acquaintance with the late Peter Viereck. Viereck, a historian and poet who is not widely known today, was brought to my attention by Chase himself, who discovered him in a New Yorker profile of October 24, 2005 (Reiss). Viereck is not the source of Chase’s portraits of the Conservative Imagination. However, I think Chase was taken with him because he saw in him a kindred understanding of the differences between a valid conservative perspective that he built into characters like Coach Molinaro and the excesses of the neocons who market themselves under that name. Viereck began his career as World War II was raging, and it was his observation that the American liberal community was too infused by romantic euphoria to be able to defeat Nazism and Communism, because they were all—liberals, Nazis, and Communists alike—variants of the romantic position. To be sure, he saw liberals as having much more socially benign and positive goals than the Nazis or Communists, but he believed that there was a mutual disregard for tradition and the rules in the way each group pursued its goals. Viereck sought to fos-

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ter a conservative regard for tradition and rules in America because he thought that was the only way America could effectively defeat Nazi evils. He saw a dangerous capriciousness in postwar McCarthyism that passed itself off as conservative, and, as the sham neocons rose to power, Viereck denounced them for the same reason. It is Viereck’s emphasis on rules and traditions, not the unprincipled, gangster-like lust for power and money of the Cheneys of the world, that serves as a lens on the Conservative Imagination in The Sopranos. However, that said, Chase has not written a series that promotes Viereckian conservatism. The attractively principled stances of the characters formed by a Conservative Imagination in Chase’s series are undercut by their failure to deal effectively with the romantic realities of the American culture. The value of principles, traditions, and laws that Molinaro represents in Tony’s imagination may haunt Tony’s dreams, but Molinaro is reduced to what may be looked at as impotent shouting in the context of the America we see in the series. In the America of The Sopranos, Tony wakes from his recurring dream to kill again (and again) with impunity while providing the best of everything for himself and his family, and all manner of “ordinary citizens” play almost as fast and loose with the law as he does. Consider Alan Sapinsly (Bruce Altman), the neocon lawyer who appears in “Whitecaps” (4.13). Sapinsly jettisons at the drop of a hat his existing agreement with a buyer for Whitecaps, the house Tony and Carmela want, when Tony makes him a proposition that is only a slight improvement over the financial transaction already in place. Only when Tony is similarly cavalier about his legal obligations does Sapinsly become a strict constructionist of contracts. In the hands of Sapinsly and his ilk, the rules, laws, and traditions become stubborn ghosts of time past: written on the wind yet always in the air. Ah, but these ghosts are very stubborn. The real action of the series is not in the shootouts, but in the clashes between the gangster version of the Romantic Imagination and the ghostly Conservative American Imagination, providing a mind-spinning spectacle of relativity, American-style. One particularly stunning example can be found in a cluster of scenes in “Second Opinion” (3.7), which is filled with acts that relativize judgments on all manner of situations. Two of the most striking sequences juxtapose a consultation between Carmela and Dr. Melfi’s teacher, a therapist named Dr. Krakower (Sully Boyar), in which Carmela is looking for a new angle on her marriage, with scenes in which Tony attempts to get a second opinion from Dr. John Kennedy (Sam

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McMurray), the self-promoting surgeon who has treated Uncle Junior for cancer. This scene cluster begins when Tony and one of his soldiers, Furio Giunta (Federico Castelluccio), seek out Dr. Kennedy at his country club while he is playing golf. Kennedy has washed his hands of “Uncle Jun” because he asked for a second opinion from another physician about a treatment plan. Tony and Furio succeed in getting Kennedy to reconsider his decision to abandon Junior through threats of violent consequences if he doesn’t. In the scenes between Carmela and Dr. Krakower, Carmela tentatively explores a second opinion about her marriage to a mob boss, which the Church insists cannot be dissolved. But Carmela gets more than she bargained for when Krakower tells her unconditionally that her only hope for living a life that is not weighed down by guilt and selfloathing is to take the children (“what’s left of them”) and leave Tony and the blood money that supports her luxurious lifestyle. It is of interest that when Carmela continually tries to reframe his words in a way that would pave a way for her to keep the money and dump Tony, it is not her religion that surfaces as the primary reason for her lack of inclination to do as Krakower demands, but her materialistic priorities. She pushes and pulls at the doctor’s words so that she can justify continued financial support from Tony. Krakower refuses to give an inch, again and again forcing her to repeat what he has actually said, and concluding, “One thing you can never say: that you haven’t been told.” The upshots of both the Kennedy and Krakower scenes end the episode. Kennedy visits Junior, a testimony to Tony’s effectiveness, and Tony returns home to find Carmela prostrate on the couch after her grueling session with Krakower, a scene that shows that he who lives by the sword dies by the sword, so to speak. Carmela gives Tony her own “second opinion,” which is a dose of his own medicine. Although Carmela’s last words to Krakower are, “You’re right. I see,” by the time Tony returns home she has shifted 180 degrees. In a tour-de-force of gangster-like individualist intimidation, Carmela uses her dejection at Krakower’s revelation to her of her self-deceptions as the basis for more self-deception in the form of prying more blood money from Tony for a donation of $50,000 for Columbia University. How can we understand her manipulation of Krakower’s home truths into their diametrical opposites? If it stood alone, the scene between Krakower and Carmela would be a sharply etched critique of romantic American solipsism, as seen through the lens of the Conservative Imagination. It would evaluate the

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Soprano family in purely ethical terms, from the perspective of solid Judeo-Christian values. Carmela’s self-serving reformulations of Krakower’s Old Testament ethics would appear purely mealy-mouthed. But Chase does not provide the scene in the inner sanctum of Krakower’s office as a feel-good solution to the problem of Tony and Carmela. Instead, he braids it with the romantic excesses of the outside world and its power politics. If Carmela’s behavior fails from a moral perspective, which seems so powerful inside Krakower’s domain, it is, we are reminded by the juxtaposed scenes, completely consistent with the way the world works outside his inner sanctum—for characters and viewers alike. What if the United States were “run by gangsters”? Chase asked ironically as he accepted his final Emmy Award for The Sopranos on September 16, 2007. (Or by people who are effectively like gangsters, I would add.) Suggesting that in some ways it is, Chase uses the scene cluster just discussed to illuminate the unholy marriage between conservative rigidity and romantic obsession at the end of the episode. Carmela has melded her grief at hearing Krakower’s judgment of her and her undying lust for possessions and status into a complete solipsism that enables her to transform Old Testament absolutism into a way to extract more blood money from Tony. The American Romantic Imagination, at its most solipsistic, cooks traditional rules to feed its greedy hungers. As the song “Baby’s in the Black Books” rises on the soundtrack over Carmela’s strange victory, the insatiable, heedless self seems to be everywhere. While Tony capitulates to his wife, the song on the nondiegetic soundtrack speaks of how “Baby” leaves her lover not because there is anything wrong with him, but only because, in the words of the song, there are “too many dreams to satisfy.” Baby “wants new shoulders to cry on, new backseats to lie on, and she always gets her way.”8 Baby. Infantilized America. There is so much romantic excess bred into the bone of the United States that we must in all conscience ask ourselves where the hard-edged clarity of Dr. Krakower can possibly anchor itself. At the same time, America seems to have painted itself into such a desperate corner that we cannot help but long for that anchor. However, The Sopranos is not nostalgic for the conservative haven of tradition that Peter Viereck imagined and Krakower demands. It offers a progressive brand of hope. When all is said and done, the series portrays the gangster as the sine qua non of the infantile version of the great romantic rebellion that

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made modern democracy possible and asks us to distinguish between the dangerous childishness of Tony and company and the true American birthright of individuality at its best. Carmela’s seamless stitching of Krakower’s message into her old pattern of behavior is endemic to the romantic solipsism of the gangster milieu in which there is no progress, change, development, or growth, only a stale recycling of old dynamics and behaviors. The series asks us to know the difference between greedy gangster solipsism and the courageous romantic attempts of our forefathers and mothers to free the human mind from shackles of conformity. Chase insists we acknowledge romanticism at its worst so that we can appreciate it at its best, which sees the potential in the free individual if there exists the kind of self-awareness necessary to avoid solipsism. My belief is that self-awareness is the goal of Chase’s series. That is, the larger effect of Chase’s Sopranos is its endorsement of a potentially nonsolipsistic Romantic Imagination, a goal toward which we may strive, even though it is never fully achieved by any character in the series. As always, Chase remains honest with us as he nudges us into position to imagine the nonsolipsistic Romantic Imagination. There is not yet any conclusive body of thought on how such self-awareness evolves in a relativistic world, and so in The Sopranos the few, but important, moments when the liberated American self uses its freedom to take some sort of responsibility for what it creates are rendered as mysterious avatars of hope that depend on our free interpretation of what the series has revealed. Among the parade of characters unable to achieve growth, development, or even an introspection in productive conflict with the stasis imposed by the infantilism of solipsism, two characters stand out as impressive yet enigmatic examples of the romantic ideals of the series: Hunter Scangarelo (Michele DeCesare) and Dr. Melfi. For each of these characters there is change, although whether it is accompanied by growth and development is open to interpretation. There is a deliberate evocation of rich ambiguity when Melfi deals with her impulses and her beliefs on two occasions in this series; in both instances, she models for us a paradigm of individual choice that can be differentiated from gangster romantic solipsism. In the first instance, in “Employee of the Month” (3.4), she refuses to give in to an impulse to woo Tony to avenge her rape. In the second, in “The Blue Comet,” in the last season, she changes her mind about whether Tony is treatable as she reads the famous Yochelson-Samenow article about sociopathologi-

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cal behavior and therapy. Chase virtually abandons dialogue to give us all that he can honestly give us in both these scenes. Melfi’s decision not to appeal to Tony for vengeance when the police bungle the prosecution of her rapist is entirely conveyed by Lorraine Bracco’s superb evocation of Melfi’s inner processes, which culminate in her sublime “No” that ends all possibility that she will give in to an infantile desire for the selfaggrandizement of vengeance at whatever cost that so characterizes the gangster milieu. Similarly, when the words of the text that assert that sociopaths are made better criminals by their therapists remind Melfi forcefully of things she has seen in Tony during their sessions, her mind is graphically visualized in process without explanation. We see into her head as her reality undergoes a sudden alteration, but not why these words suddenly take on the meaning they have not had before. She has had previous pressure from her therapist Elliot Kupferberg to terminate Tony’s treatment, but at this moment she chooses to reconfigure the soup of particles. In both of these instances, Melfi frees herself from Tony, in the latter event more irrevocably than in the former. However, perhaps we ought not to be too enthusiastic about her decisions, much as we may want to. Neither choice is accompanied by any recognition of her responsibility for enabling Tony’s criminal activities, including murder, during their seven-year therapeutic relationship. The most convincing example of growth and development on the show occurs offscreen, where we can see nothing of its dynamic. The character who represents this miracle is, with no small irony, Hunter Scangarelo, played by Chase’s own daughter. Hunter pops back into the series in what at first may seem like a sentimental gesture on Chase’s part, nothing more than a little farewell cameo for his daughter. Not so. Hunter is a visible sign in this world that change is possible, although her elliptical presence in the finale of the series, “Made in America” (6.21), is also a testament to how little we know about the way human beings go through positive changes. Hunter resurfaces in the finale, after a long absence, as a reformed character, now in her second year of medical school. Might we say that the invisibility of the small miracle of her metamorphosis, after the very visible failures to change Tony, Christopher Moltisanti (Michael Imperioli), mobster Vito Spatafore (Joseph R. Gannascoli), and Carmela, implies that what Hunter has accomplished is beyond our current comprehension?9 Indeed yes, if Carmela’s reaction to Hunter’s news is any indication.

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In fact, it is Carmela’s absolutely uncharacteristic reaction to Hunter in this small moment of large import that makes us aware of its significance. When Carmela enters her daughter Meadow’s room and sees Hunter there, we are reminded of how socially crafty she typically is. She evokes Hunter’s past failures with obvious relish, while couching her words in seemingly tactful phrasing: “I haven’t seen you since you [calculatedly tactful pause] left college.” And when Hunter declines to hide her former problems by speaking honestly of how she failed out of college because she drank and partied, Carmela murmurs demurely, “Well, I didn’t want to say.” This typical Carmela behavior, by means of which she can both assert her superiority and maintain an air of generosity, makes it all the more strange and remarkable that she is stopped dead in her tracks when Hunter goes on to reveal that she has changed. When Carmela learns that Hunter is in medical school, she is unable to force out even the simplest social pleasantry on the scale of “how nice.” What has so disconcerted Carmela about Hunter’s success? It would seem that Hunter is a living reproach to Carmela, who could not change her guilt-ridden though materially rich reality and is unable to deal with anyone not as trapped as she is by the lust for possessions and the crudest understanding of social status. Again Chase avoids simplistic direct statements. It is through Edie Falco’s flawless embodiment of Carmela, her mind going into denial before the example of Hunter’s life, that the show evokes the girl’s metamorphosis as an unbearable challenge to Carmela’s gangster-influenced life, and thus as a message of hope for the audience. Still, we know so little of this transformation outside of Hunter’s willingness to take responsibility for who she was as she changes that it would not be appropriate to regard her with unconditional approbation. Rather, the most shining example of the free individual is our own best relationship to the series. The highest form of romantic honesty in the relative world of The Sopranos is in the way the series continually offers us a wide-open, relative vision that invites us to see beyond both social and individual constructions of reality. This is the rhetoric of the last scene in Holsten’s restaurant, as fine a demonstration of what the nonsolipsistic Romantic Imagination can accomplish as has ever been. Here, Chase jettisons all the traditions of closure in gangster films—the shootout, the death of the protagonist, the agon of the mobster—to transport the audience beyond the industry’s clichéd certainties. Instead, he ends the show with a reproduction of the soup of reality, that we may know it and make our own sense of it, as people who might be threaten-

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ing, reassuring, or neutral move into and out of the restaurant. Meadow’s parking of her car and dash across the street to Holsten’s replicate the random motion of the physical object. And, the famous terminal blackout? Well. As the series begins, the Hollywood baggage we bring to all movies and television inclines us to root for the possibility of a complete solution to the gangster problem, through therapy, law, or ethical codes. The series ends by refuting not therapy, but the notions of total closure with which we have saddled it. Not ethics and law, but the absolute authority they once came packaged in. There is no easy solution to the problem represented by Tony Soprano. The statue at the beginning, positioned to emphasize the multiple perspectives art can offer on a humanity neither bracketed irretrievably by limits nor buoyed endlessly on the ecstatic wings of possibility is aptly matched by the blackout at the end of the series. They both respect the audience by acknowledging our freedom. They are both emblems of a series that reminds us of our own powers in relationship to the particle soup. We may see Tony in many ways at once: through his own vision of himself as a man who has “put bread on the table,” through the eyes of the law now seeking to indict him, and through whatever complex amalgam of the two we ourselves create. The blackout is an elliptical space in which the nonsolipsistic Romantic Imagination—that is, the imagination encouraged by the series toward self-awareness—is invited to play. Relatively speaking, this series could not have ended otherwise. Unearthing the relativity at the heart of The Sopranos—which teaches us that freedom, choice, and change are part of a hard-won, difficult, and not totally understood process by engaging us in the irony that the icons of the unapologetic American obsession with instant, easy material gratification on a large scale are gangsters—is not an end in itself, but rather a necessary prologue to a larger exploration of the many splendors of this series than we have yet seen. In one of Woody Allen’s short stories, his central character muses, “What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists? In that case I have definitely overpaid for my carpet” (10). By giving us insight into a free world that we and our society can shape, Chase plays with the way the gangster is an extreme example of how we have all overpaid for our material goods, the price of which he examines in the vast array of absurdities and violence in the gangster’s pursuit of material wealth. That understanding gives us a new lens on more than the material-

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ism in the series. It also provides another angle of vision on the charges that The Sopranos defames Italian Americans. Exploring the series’ depiction of ethnicity as a part of the way we create our own realities inevitably undermines all suggestions that any form of behavior is innate to any group of people.10 Moreover, focusing on the underlying view of the world Chase has drawn promises to free us to explore in greater depth the innovative use he has made of the structure of serial television, a narrative form more suitable than film for depicting the world according to Schwinn, since serial television can, after all, be understood as a replication of the world of particles combining with other particles to make a whole. Criticism, it would seem, has only begun to scratch the surface of David Chase’s magnum opus, which, at the same time that it is a dazzling commercial hit, also has the power to lead us deep into the restless and troubled soul of the modern world. There has never been a series on American television that has exhibited such sustained, well-wrought artistic control over such a long duration. In this respect, it may be alone in world television, as well.

Notes 1. In Dying to Belong, I explore in detail the illusions of materialism that are exposed by all the great Hollywood gangster films when the gangster protagonist finds himself on the edge of nothingness as a result of his mob success. 2. Christian Schwinn is a well-known particle physicist associated with the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Aachen, Germany. 3. The magical curative words in the media psychiatric scenario are inevitably associated with a buried memory; for example, in Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945), John Ballantine (Gregory Peck) regains his identity when, under the care of psychiatrist Constance Petersen (Ingrid Bergman), he remembers the death of his brother. It is quite possible that Hitchcock is mocking the Hollywood idea of therapy in this film, but if so, most moviegoers have not gotten the joke. However, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (Herbert Ross, 1976) is a textbook example of this therapeutic myth. In this film, Sherlock Holmes’s sanity and the solution of his case depend on his therapeutically induced memory of witnessing his mother’s infidelity. 4. Nochimson, Dying to Belong, 201–2. One of the most impressive examples of the series’ evocation of the power of the human mind to create its own reality occurs in “Employee of the Month” (3.4), when Melfi and her therapist Elliot Kupferberg (Peter Bogdanovich) are attempting to interpret her dream after she is raped. They argue about the words she used when describing a sign on a door in the dream. Viewers, who have witnessed the dream, know that both of them are wrong. 5. Yochelson and Samenow are real authorities on the effect of therapy on

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criminals. They have evolved a therapeutic approach to social deviants based on assumptions that they are not sick but influenced by environmental circumstances they cannot control. They focus on the tendency of the criminal to see him or herself as the victim and prescribe methods for leading their criminal patients to the discovery that the people they hurt are the true victims. 6. There are many references to American and English romanticism in the series. Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose work is virtually a long, cautionary warning about romantic solipsism, is referenced in “College” (1.5) in a quotation taken from his short story “The Minister’s Black Veil” carved into the wall of Bowdoin College where Meadow Soprano (Jamie-Lynn Sigler) is speaking with an admissions officer: “No man can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude without finally getting bewildered as to which may be true.” Herman Melville, generally considered an American romantic, is referenced when in “Eloise” (4.12) there is a dinner discussion about homosexual subtexts in his novella Billy Budd. English romanticism is also invoked in “Kennedy and Heidi” (6.18), when A.J. Soprano gets a lecture about the protest against materialism in English romantic William Wordsworth’s sonnet “The world is too much with us” in a college English class. 7. William Blake’s poetry offers the richest possibilities for exploration of romantic concerns about solipsism. See The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. 8. The context of these lines from the song “Baby’s in the Black Books” is as follows: “One last time from Freddie’s joint / We drove out to lover’s point / Shared our last kiss eye to eye / Spoke of tender times long past; said they weren’t meant to last / Too many dreams to satisfy / She wants new shoulders to cry on / New backseats to lie on / And she always gets her way / She wants to see other guys / Get lost in other eyes / Baby’s in the black books / Yes, she’s in the black books today.” 9. It must give critics pause that the failures of other characters to change, despite their best efforts and the demonstrably urgent need for change, is played out in detail before the eyes of the audience, whereas Hunter’s evolution is completely invisible to us. This is particularly true of the repeated attempts of Christopher to rid himself of his drug and alcohol addictions, failed efforts reflected in episodes in the first season until his death in “Kennedy and Heidi” in the sixth season. Similarly spectacular is the failure of Vito to leave the mob and make peace with his homosexuality, although he is offered something close to paradise in several episodes in season six. 10. Charges that The Sopranos is an insult to Italian Americans have been made since the show went on the air: in informal settings, in academic papers, in the news media, and in the courts. In 2001, Michael Polelle, a law professor at John Marshal Law School in Chicago, unsuccessfully sued Time Warner on behalf of the American Italian Defense Association for violating the Illinois state constitution, which protects individuals against violations of their individual dignity. Establishing the series perspective as a relativist rejection of essentialist beliefs renders these charges absurd failures of the imagination, as well as the mark of an inability to read a complex televisual text.

Author(iz)ing Chase Robin Nelson

In critically evaluating, and ultimately celebrating, the achievement of David Chase and The Sopranos, this essay assumes a critical distance and takes a somewhat circuitous route. It is prompted by a widespread disposition among fans—and, as it appeared at the Sopranos Wake conference, many academics—to construct a discourse around Chase himself as the series’ author and around the series itself as a cinematic text, a film. This essay seeks to unpack both of these constructions, since they seem to me to be at best missing an important point and at worst valorizing Chase and the series on anachronistic terms. The Sopranos is not an avant-garde film, it is a postmodern television text of some eighty hours’ duration. As series creator and a key producer, Chase by all accounts had a strong guiding influence on The Sopranos, but he did not write (or author) all the episodes. Indeed, he was supported by a large team of additional producers and writers as well as the many persons required in the complex industrial process of making a television series. Thus, the sense in which he might be considered the series’ author (or auteur) at least requires some exploration at a time when, in critical contexts, the very idea of textual authorship has been roundly called into question. In respect of what a rare television auteur might be today, I bring to bear a British perspective to discuss the instance of writer-director Stephen Poliakoff. But the essay begins by placing the notion that “Chase Is God,” as articulated in the user name of a Sopranoland Forum website poster, in the context of Roland Barthes’s seminal problematizing of the author-god’s text: “The text is not the ‘message’ of the Author-God but a multi-dimensional space in which a number of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture” (146).

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Discursive Constructions The deconstructive bracket in my title phrase, “author(iz)ing Chase,” is intended to draw attention to a complex process of discursive production. Three major discursive forces—each separately well established in critical study of The Sopranos but not to my knowledge brought together— collude in the construction of David Chase as the series’ author. These three forces are HBO’s marketing strategy; David Chase’s avowed, and much-publicized, aversion to network television and his preference for film or cinema; and the self-construction of fandoms, notably on websites, as elite appreciation forums. These discursive forces could not have functioned in mutual reinforcement except at a particular historical moment in the television industry. The first of the three discourses arises out of contemporary industry circumstances under which HBO took advantage of a rapidly expanding, multichannel environment. HBO recognized that the days of “Least Objectionable Programming” (LOP) of the “network era” were well and truly over (see Nelson, State of Play). In TVIII—as Rogers, Epstein, and Reeves, after Behrens, have dubbed the decade following the mid1990s—the name of the game is branding, that is, branding of channels overall and also of distinctive products within their schedules. In Timothy Todreas’s neat formulation, TVIII has witnessed “a great value shift from conduit to content” (7). As a subscription channel in this context, operating beyond the regulators, HBO constructed itself not only as a distinctive television channel and, particularly in its “premium” output, as a channel that challenged the very boundaries of the television medium. To repeat the mantra, “It’s not TV, it’s HBO.” Moreover, aiming at the higher end of the market, HBO sought to align itself in respect of its premium output with a dimension of high culture. And, for the new petite bourgeoisie—as Pierre Bourdieu might label the target market of ABC1s—cinema, and in particular European avant-garde cinema, has exactly the right cachet. From the perspective of viewers, literally buying in to the HBO brand at some expense, the cachet fuelled their disposition to affirm their social distinction. They asserted their superior taste formation as manifest in a capacity to recognize and appreciate the textual complexity that HBO Premium series afforded. There came a time in American culture when not to subscribe to HBO indicated a lack of social distinction. The second discursive strand appeared on fan websites—another

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feature of contemporary media industry circumstances. Fan sites, such as the Sopranoland Forum cited earlier, afforded the ideal fora for the development of a discourse of collective identity valorizing creativity and originality. Studies of fandoms of other television series (Hills; Jenkins) have noted the pleasures of engaging in the social experience of sharing one’s close investments in a particular television text with a community of like-minded others. But the age of the Internet affords an opportunity to mobilize, build, and disseminate worldwide a valorization of a TV show. Moreover, as fans assert their own sophisticated reading capabilities, their focus of evaluation is upon a disposition to celebrate the imagination of the shows’ creators. In an unpublished doctoral study of Sopranos online fandoms, Jeanette Monaco demonstrates how Sopranos fans manifest a devotion to David Chase as auteur, a genius with a unique vision. This is not Chase’s or HBO’s doing—though it coincides with their discursive positions—because, as Monaco points out, Chase is often applauded when others have actually written the episode in question. So Sopranos fandoms were a significant factor in the discursive construction of Chase specifically as auteur. It might be similarly inappropriate also to credit—or blame—Chase with the third discourse contributing to the construction of himself as The Sopranos’ cinematic auteur, since it is journalists and academic critics who have widely disseminated his aversion to television. Much cited is his loathing of network television (“I loathe and despise almost every second of it”) and his early love affair with cinema, having seen Fellini’s 8 1/2 at Wake Forest in the 1960s (Lavery and Thompson 19). Glen Creeber’s essay “TV Ruined the Movies” is one of several academic articles, drawing upon interviews with journalists, that document Chase’s long-term commitment to cinema and his belief in Creeber’s title quotation. As related in the much-cited early interview with Allen Rucker, Chase “saw television take over cinema”: “I saw TV executives moving into movies, I saw the pandering, cheerleading, family entertainment shit dominate everything. Low attention span stuff. It all came from TV” (quoted in Creeber, “TV Ruined the Movies,” 124). There is no need further to elaborate Chase’s well-established disposition for the purposes of my argument. Given Chase’s well-known contempt for television, it is perhaps not surprising that Sopranos fans take his lead in thinking of the series as “not television,” but, as this essay argues, they are mistaken in so doing. The summary point thus far simply is that a critical discourse has emerged around Chase that aligns with the other two discourses cited

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to talk up the distinction of the HBO channel, and The Sopranos as one of its flagship dramas, in terms of cinema (“It’s not TV”), and a godlike auteurism, and it is this latter formulation which I will now proceed to unpack.

Auteurism and Cinema As John Caughie notes in a retrospective essay on the concept of “auteurism,” film studies has come a long way since the heady days of the 1960s when the impact of the politiques des auteurs that emerged in Cahiers du Cinéma in the 1950s was most powerfully felt in Britain and America. But it is worth recalling, in the context of my concern with the construction of Chase as author of The Sopranos, that, particularly in respect of avant-garde practices, the filmmaker was seen at this time as an artist with a distinctive signature in the postromantic, modernist, or avant-garde tradition. As Caughie reminds us, as early as 1948, Alexandre Astruc located the filmmaker in the cultural vein of the literary writer with his notion of the camera-as-pen, the camera stylo. A film artist, as Astruc put it, “can express his thoughts . . . exactly as he does in the contemporary essay or novel” (quoted in Caughie 7). There were various schools of thought on the function of the filmmaker as artist in these formative years of film theory and practice, and Caughie is at pains in his retrospective “to rescue [the avant-garde] from automatic association with a simple and infantile romanticism” (11). He nevertheless acknowledges, “It is a commonplace that auteurism is a romanticism and can be traced to the aesthetics of the nineteenth-century Romantics” (10–11). In its most effusive formulations, auteur-oriented film criticism celebrated the distinctive directorial signature of the auteur above everything else. Cahiers took it as axiomatic that “cinema is—self-evidently—an art which can be discussed in the same way as the great monuments of European culture” (13). And it is an implicit appeal, by way of the distinction of European cinema, to European avant-garde culture that resounds through the construction of Chase as author of The Sopranos. Although I am not suggesting a conspiracy here, there is an audible resonance between HBO’s sense that it is “not TV” and Chase’s widely published aversion to network television. HBO consciously eschews the LOP characteristic of television’s former years, while Chase relates his seminal experience of Fellini and subsequent love particularly, though not exclusively, of European cinema as an implied critique of cultur-

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ally low-grade product. The fandom’s construction of Chase as creative genius, moreover, is additionally echoed in journalism and academic commentary. There is even, in Chase’s account of network television as “propaganda for the corporate state” (Rucker interview, quoted in Lavery and Thompson 20) an alignment with a countercultural politiques des auteurs. If The Sopranos approximates to art, the argument implicitly runs, it cannot be television, therefore it must be film, and authored cinema at that.

Authoring under the Constraints of Industrial Television Production There is, of course, an irony in celebrating Chase as a radical artist when HBO is a vast corporation, itself part of the even bigger Time Warner international media conglomerate. Although it might be seen as a paradox of TVIII, however, television producer (and Chase mentor) Stephen J. Cannell articulates a more old-fashioned, “network era” sense of Chase as a man fighting not only against industrial odds but against a dominant cultural malaise, devoid of art appreciation. Cannell writes: “I think it is a sad commentary on the last two decades of television that this man [Chase], who was well known to all the networks for almost twenty-five years, could not get his fresh, totally unique ideas past the guardians of our public airwaves” (quoted in Lavery and Thompson 20). Indeed, this “artist against oppressive institution” refrain echoes back not just to TVI (roughly 1948–1975) but beyond to the late nineteenthcentury romantics, resonating with those accounts of the generation of The Sopranos that foreground a distinctive, authentic, personal vision located in the experience of the creator. Although there are various noted germinal sources of The Sopranos, one important strand lies within Chase’s Italian American upbringing, his relationship with his own ultra-negative mother (the model, of course, for Tony’s mother Livia), and his own long-running therapy. Grounded though it is on the one hand in the supposed authenticity of lived experience, on the other hand a poetic vision of the world is nevertheless inspired. In the nineteenth-century romantic “wise seer” tradition, the vision typically involved a cultural critique. In the case of The Sopranos, the conceit of a mobster seeing a psychiatrist becomes a vision of the egoistic depravity of corporate America, if not corporate capitalism itself. “The kernel of the joke, the essential joke,” as Chase told Peter

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Bogdanovich, “was that life in America had gotten so selfish—basically selfish, that even a mob guy couldn’t take it any more” (quoted in Lavery and Thompson 21). While not doubting that The Sopranos is not regular TV fare, and having traced those features of Chase and the promotion of the series that tend toward an auteurist account, I want to suggest that authorial vision in film and other arts, where it might be deemed to obtain, typically runs across a body of work, not just one creative output. And, of course, in television the opportunity for creative control over a single series, let alone an oeuvre, is nigh on impossible, as Chase’s overall career attests. If Chase is indeed the author of The Sopranos, he manifestly failed to gain authorial control over his former network output. Indeed, it is a commonplace that television production is a complex collaborative process, involving designers, lighting camera personnel, make-up artists, composers and sound engineers, and many others besides writers and directors. Moreover, it is also a commonplace that if anybody has control, it is the executive producers, not the writer or director. There is a pointed joke in this regard at the premiere of Cleaver when the two executive producers say a few words prior to the screening. But, after Christopher Moltisanti has thanked Tony, his wife, and everybody who knows him, the director steps forward, notes in hand, only for the microphone to be whisked away as the houselights darken and the movie rolls. If the director is secondary to the chief execs in film, the powerful writerdirector is even rarer in the age of corporate television. The situation in the United Kingdom is not so different from that in the United States in this respect, with many writers particularly bemoaning the loss of the alleged freedoms of earlier “golden ages” (see Brandt). However, as in America, there have been exceptions. Dennis Potter, with his distinctive non-naturalistic treatments of the 1930s (in Pennies from Heaven [1978]), the 1940s (in The Singing Detective [1986]) and the 1950s (in Lipstick on Your Collar [1993]) is a case in point of the rare auteur. But another such auteur, operating in TVIII, whom I use by way of comparative illustration in this essay, is Stephen Poliakoff. I recognize that Poliakoff is little known in the United States, perhaps because of the distinctive personal and European signature that marks his work. However, because I believe a comparison between him and Chase is instructive, I here briefly summarize Poliakoff’s approach, first to make a specific point of contrast in respect of auteurism based on working with genre, and second to draw a point of similarity in a shared

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defiance of the drift of contemporary television to a fast-paced, hightemperature dynamic.

Stephen Poliakoff: A Rare Television Auteur Stephen Poliakoff began his career as a playwright and became resident writer at the National Theatre in 1976 at the age of twenty-four. From the outset of his career, he was thus associated with high culture, and he still writes for theater, as well as film and radio. In recent years, however, he is best known as a television dramatist who both writes and directs his plays—or films as, interestingly in the context of this essay, he prefers to call them. His impressive output since the late 1990s includes Shooting the Past (BBC1, 1999), Perfect Strangers (BBC1, 2001), The Lost Prince (BBC1, 2003), Friends and Crocodiles (BBC1, 2006), and Joe’s Palace (BBC1, 2007). Thus, over the period that Chase was producing The Sopranos, Poliakoff wrote and directed a number of miniserial dramas, most of which ran for three to four hours over three episodes. Although it doesn’t quite equate to the eighty-six episodes of The Sopranos’ output, it is nevertheless a substantial body of work, an oeuvre, in the TVIII period. Paralleling the grounding of The Sopranos in Chase’s biography, Poliakoff’s work is even more overtly informed by his family history. His upper-middle-class family escaped the Russian revolution with the family’s wealth condensed to a diamond concealed in the heel of a shoe. In The Lost Prince, Russian history and the shooting of the Romanovs in the process of the revolution feature overtly, but, in most of his work, Poliakoff reveals more obliquely a deeply ingrained sense of European history and the present being informed by the past. Shooting the Past, Perfect Strangers, and Joe’s Palace all feature characters whose lives have been deeply affected by the regime and events of Nazi Germany and use what might be seen as Poliakoff’s distinctive dramatic method of inviting viewers to reappraise characters encountered in a contemporary present when their backstory is revealed. To some extent, The Sopranos’ use of Dr. Melfi as a device for revealing how Tony’s past has informed his current predicament resonates with Poliakoff’s dramatic method. The plot of Shooting the Past hinges on the ultimate, life-changing revelation to an American businessman, Christopher Anderson (Liam Cunningham), that his ancestry is located in the somewhat seedy, but liberational, underworld of postwar Paris. The situation of the drama

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is that a building housing a fusty photograph library has been bought by Anderson’s company to set up a business school for the twenty-first century. The library collection will be split up unless the chief librarian, Marilyn Truman (Lindsay Duncan), can find a buyer. Time passes amid various complications, but no buyer can be found. Toward the end of the story, Anderson is being seduced by the librarian himself to buy the library, not so much sexually (although there is an attraction), but with a promised dramatic revelation about his grandmother uncovered through painstaking library research. The specific sequence leading up to the revelation echoes those ten- to twelve-minute interview sequences between Jennifer Melfi (Lorraine Bracco) and Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) in The Sopranos in terms of dramatic tension. Such sequences are sustained not by action or fast-paced editing, which might characterize other aspects of The Sopranos, but through interest in characters in complex interrelationship. Both dramas involve attractive characters whom viewers come increasingly to know over the duration of the series (longer than the average one-hundred-minute film). Between the characters there is a frisson of danger in—and a sexual charge to—the encounters as they move between various modes of dialogic negotiation. The point is not so much to equate Chase and Poliakoff or their respective dramas, but to bring out an aspect of television’s long-form serial narrative and what it can achieve dramatically in contrast with cinema.1 A general parallel might be found in the idea of “slow television,” which Poliakoff overtly advocates in the belief that television executives’ assumption of short attention spans is false and patronizing. If the drama is powerful and interesting enough, Poliakoff believes, viewers will be engaged. Chase’s contempt for the demands of network television to catch ratings might be recalled in this context. Moreover, in its treatment of time in the later seasons, as well as in the Melfi-Tony interviews cited, a version of “slow television” is manifest in parts of The Sopranos.

Similarities and Differences The parallels between Poliakoff and Chase are evident. Both men eschew mainstream televisual output and speak of films. Both men see television as a medium to be capable of what they believe to be better, more sophisticated output. Both men are interested in good writing and visual texture with the aim of achieving a poetic construct, a metaphor, perhaps, for contemporary life. In this respect they echo the aim of the

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romantic poets with their advocacy of human capacity to think and feel in the face of burgeoning industrial (now postindustrial) culture. However, there are two significant differences between Chase’s Sopranos and Poliakoff’s oeuvre. First, Poliakoff constructs himself as an auteur by refusing to take commissions unless he is guaranteed artistic control. His ability to achieve this in contemporary British television is rare, if not actually unique. Beside writing the script, he involves himself in casting, directs, sits in with the editor, and always uses the same trusted composer, Adrian Johnston. His aim is to get as much as possible of his personal and poetic vision onto the screen. For Poliakoff, it is a matter, in his much-publicized view, of authorial originality, a distinctive vision of the world—and a critique of political culture—which he alleges contemporary television has abandoned to focus upon generic material. In contrast, where Poliakoff is hands-on at every stage of the production of his work, Chase, in line with U.S. industry practice, is happy to work with a team of writers and producers. This difference is partly a matter of background: Poliakoff, as noted, started life as a theater playwright with all the cultural capital such a role carries in the English literary drama tradition stretching back to Shakespeare, whereas Chase, albeit reluctantly at times, learned his craft in the industrial structures of network television. The second difference is that Chase draws upon established film and television genres in constructing a hybrid. The Sopranos melds the mobster movie and the soap opera—along with other aspects of psychological drama—although Chase may indeed have forged the contributing elements into something completely new. Poliakoff’s work, in contrast, defies any generic foundations and he refuses to submit to the standard slots of the television schedules in respect of duration. The three parts of Shooting the Past run for seventy-five, fifty-five, and sixtyfive minutes, respectively.

The Achievement of Chase and The Sopranos Ultimately, then, although the term auteur, with its romantic heritage, seems appropriate for Poliakoff, it seems less appropriate for Chase. In making this distinction I am not scoring points, but seeking to define more precisely what I take to be Chase’s achievement as the dominant creative force in the production of The Sopranos. To mobilize this part of my argument, I evoke the words of Barthes quoted earlier. What is

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extraordinary about The Sopranos textually is the density of its texture, not only referencing and engaging with the mobster movie genre and the television soap tradition but incorporating a variety of verbal references ranging from Husserl through Nietzsche to Pokémon. There are numerous visual intertextual allusions, both implicit and explicit, to films and television programs; so many, in fact, that it makes David Lynch and Quentin Tarantino seem almost lightweight in this regard. And yet, for all this intertextual play, The Sopranos sustains, over eightysix episodes, a broadly convincing world, fictional, of course, but resonant both with “this thing of ours” and with contemporary American culture more broadly. Although the style and the balance between mobster action and domestic soap change subtly over the protracted duration of the series, a consistency of tone and quality is sustained. This is no mean feat, particularly with different writers, and should be credited notably to the key executive producers, David Chase and Brad Grey (supported by the four other named executive producers, two supervising producers, and two producers). With five writers and seven directors, it is part of the producers’ job to oversee scripts and filming to ensure stylistic consistency. Many promising television series begin to fall apart in the second or third season. That The Sopranos was sustained over eighty-six episodes is an extraordinary feat of contemporary television, and Chase, since The Sopranos is generally acknowledged to be his baby, clearly played a creative and steering part in this. The characters, narrative, and visual style need careful handling in development over such a span, and through all this Chase’s vision, “the kernel of the joke, the essential joke,” is sustained in an oblique critique of American corporate capitalism. So, on the one hand, I am pointing out that it may be a misnomer to label Chase an auteur, but on the other hand, I am seeking to celebrate what might be seen as an even more worthy achievement: namely, to sustain a consistency of tone and an overarching vision in a long-running, postmodern, hybrid television series produced under industrial television circumstances. As Chase knows to his cost, the achievement of The Sopranos would not have been possible in the network era. But although the circumstances of TVIII, in seeking to establish brand identity, may well be disposed to distinctive as opposed to middle-of-the road product, it is by no means easy to achieve it. Even with the creative freedom and scope of control that HBO afforded Chase to come up with a distinctive vision, to sustain it in production is quite another matter. In one

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formulation of authorship in Caughie’s account, “thematic consistency and wholeness [are] a mark of the auteur’s signature” (16). And it is in this sense that Chase might qualify, but it is in a producer’s, rather than a writer’s or director’s, role, that this consistency is primarily sustained. To celebrate Chase as producer extraordinary in a postmodern industrial television context is by no means intended to damn with faint praise Indeed, in conclusion, I would highlight and celebrate two features of The Sopranos that might particularly be said to bear the mark of Chase’s steering hand: the twelve-minute long therapy scenes and the open (and much-debated) ending of the finale, which Chase both wrote and directed. It is in these aspects, of which Chase himself is known to be proud, that, like Poliakoff, he defies norms and expands the range of things we need to embrace under the concept of television. Mainstream contemporary television is noted for its fast pace, generated by intercutting narrative segments of little more than ninety seconds’ duration, the time span of the average television commercial (see Nelson, State of Play). Television executives are suspicious of long scenes, fearing that, with their allegedly short attention spans, viewers will become bored and flick the remote to hop channels. In this light, it is interesting that Chase is particularly proud of developing and sustaining the slow scenes of halting dialogue and awkward silences between Tony and Dr. Melfi. Such scenes, typically thought to be unsustainable in prime time, not only worked in The Sopranos but became a signature feature of the series. Moreover, in the later seasons, the privileging of slow-paced domestic scenes over action scenes is marked. From earlier seasons in which the episodes were framed by the closure of at least one narrative strand, The Sopranos developed a more free-flowing, open-ended serial narrative form with existential overtones. Vestiges of mob violence, when they occur, are swiftly struck and fleetingly shot. The series took full advantage of the long serial narrative form in television, which—not unlike its counterpart in the serialized nineteenth-century novel—works with readers building knowledge of character and situation beyond the inevitable constraints of narrative in a serialized form (the need for elements of closure as well as cliffhanger). But, as The Sopranos progressed to season six, the general feel increasingly emphasizes the weight of time relative to human endeavor. The pall of death hangs heavy—there are a lot of funerals, some of key characters, not to mention Anthony Junior’s attempted suicide. I do not claim to have predicted the open ending, but, when it

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came, it seemed to me to be fitting, both with the narrative drift and with Chase’s eschewal of network practices. The Sopranos had to end with an underplayed, but rude, gesture in the direction of television orthodoxy. In sum, then, I argue that David Chase is not strictly speaking an auteur in the Cahiers du Cinéma lineage, not because he lacks vision or a sense of himself as a radical artist, but because, despite the fact that he was authorized by HBO—and more broadly the circumstances of TVIII—to be creative, he was licensed to make an innovative television series, drawing upon established genres with a twist rather than creating ab initio, as it were, in the romantic tradition. My key point, however is that his achievement is not demeaned by an examination of the difference between an auteur and an executive producer who also writes and directs, since the skillful working of genres, the working of the blend and clash of a variety of writings and the interweaving of a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture, is itself an artistic achievement. Moreover, to achieve this under any kind of industrial circumstances, sustaining tone and an overarching vision, is remarkable. Here, I am pointing to a shift of the basis of artistic and textual evaluation to celebrate television as television, not as cinema. A key notion of auteurism posits that the value of a work of art lies in an integrity sustained by the controlling vision and execution of an individual artist, the writer of literature, the director of film. As the frame of my essay has hinted, we have long since departed from such an understanding of individual, let alone collective, textual production and the workings of language. So it seems anachronistic to laud Chase as an auteur of this old-fashioned romantic-modernist kind. Moreover, it deflects attention from his real achievement in respect of steering the construction of an open, intertextually playful, postmodern text that draws television viewers in through appeal to established genres and narrative followability and then takes them somewhere else. The levels of textuality afford viewers the opportunity to come at the text in different ways, mobilizing a range of meanings and pleasures for different segments of the market. So The Sopranos is also a “producerly” text in Fiske’s established sense of encouraging multiple, dialogic engagements between text and readers where an authored text, traditionally conceived, carries a singular message notionally inscribed in its authorial vision. It is for these “productive” qualities in the medium of television that The Sopranos and Chase should, in my view, ultimately be celebrated. Literary scholars have long since had an eye out for the great modern

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American novel. Maybe it turned out to be a highly distinctive postmodern television series.

Note 1. For a fuller discussion of the dramatic opportunities afforded by television’s long serial narrative forms, see Creeber, Serial Television.

PART 2

Characters

“Half a Wiseguy” Paulie Walnuts, Meet Tom Stoppard Paul Wright

By way of making clearer the thematic connection to Tom Stoppard in this meditation on The Sopranos, I want to share a few lines from Stoppard’s masterpiece of absurdism, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966). In this now iconic play, Stoppard brings together Shakespeare and influences such as Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author. Using Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, two minor role-players from Hamlet, as his central protagonists, Stoppard not only has them take center stage to reimagine the action and significance of Shakespeare’s play, but also depicts them as increasingly aware of the arbitrariness of their own identities, the constructedness of their roles in someone else’s drama, and their inability to author (or authorize) their own lives. These characters become sounding boards for Stoppard’s most existential reflections on truth, motive, and meaning. At one point, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern encounter an actor on the road—a player who will eventually take part in the famous playwithin-a-play that Hamlet stages to provoke his murderous uncle and adulterous mother. Stoppard’s player describes his theatrical repertoire to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: “Tragedy, sir. Deaths and disclosures, universal and particular, denouements both unexpected and inexorable, transvestite melodrama on all levels including the suggestive. We transport you into a world of intrigue and illusion . . . clowns, if you like, murderers—we can do you ghosts and battles, on the skirmish level, heroes, villains, tormented lovers—set pieces in the poetic vein; we can

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do you rapiers or rape or both, by all means, faithless wives and ravished virgins—flagrante delicto at a price, but that comes under realism for which there are special terms” (23). I think this passage captures as well as any the scope and richness of the narratives The Sopranos offered over the course of six landmark seasons. I especially like here the player’s allusion to “transvestite melodrama on all levels including the suggestive.” It calls to mind just how often David Chase consciously shifted gears in the series, thwarting genre expectations and often those of the audience, which might have clamored for a more conventional mob epic or family drama. In the infamous cut-to-black series finale—best remembered for the musical selection of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’”—the jukebox had a B-side that went unplayed but was nevertheless very revealing: Journey’s “Any Way You Want It.” This sums up nicely the show’s complex array of plot and character—provided that the viewer surrenders initially and trustingly to the pleasures of Chase’s narrative “transvestitism.” And to the extent that realism is also a priority in the show, Chase reminds us, as Stoppard’s player does here, that realism can be had only under “special terms”—at the price of acknowledging the messiness and unevenness of life and identity. But even beyond this general connection between Stoppard’s play and Chase’s television epic, I want to suggest that a particular character on the show exemplifies this existential streak in the show’s construction and unfolding. Paulie Gualtieri, a.k.a. the inimitable Paulie Walnuts, self-described “half a wiseguy” (“The Legend of Tennessee Moltisanti,” 1.8), is a distinctive character deployed for any number of narrative purposes over six seasons. While we are sometimes conditioned as viewers to think of him as comic relief or a means of advancing themes and developments relevant to other characters (especially Tony and Christopher), Paulie regularly finds himself in the interstices of David Chase’s Byzantine plotting—a sort of sociopathic everyman for the mob set. One might assume that by comparison to Tony’s tortured and rich psyche, Paulie is, like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Shakespeare’s play, mere window dressing, what with his amazing hair and silver-streaked wings, malapropisms, and otherwise hackneyed role as an enforcer. But Chase and company also found in Paulie Walnuts a continually pliable sounding board for some of the show’s most important (and absurdist) themes. Paulie has been many things on the show: fetishist of Adriana’s underwear; unwitting yet dutiful son to an adoptive mother, who turns out to be his aunt; aspirant and court jester to Tony’s

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throne; mentor and rival to Christopher; suspected Tourette’s sufferer; fashion icon and fashion victim; town gossip; self-styled wordsmith and raconteur; potential traitor to the Jersey crew in his courtship of New York’s Johnny Sack; initial defender of Vito Spatafore and, later, among his most homophobic critics; the first of Tony’s crew to admit to seeing a therapist himself (for “coping skills”)—this is just a partial list of Paulie’s roles, which have always been allusive to so many of the show’s other core issues and questions. I here illustrate just a few cases in some detail. Among the most memorable scenes from the show’s run is a first-season vignette with Big Pussy, in which the two search for car thieves who have stolen a Saturn from A.J.’s teacher (“46 Long,” 1.2). They find themselves in a coffee shop that is clearly meant to be Starbucks. The exchange is priceless, but it also touches on some of the deepest questions about capitalism and Italian identity in the show: Paulie Walnuts: How did we miss out on this? Big Pussy: What? Paulie: Fuckin’ expresso, cappuccino. We invented this shit and all these other cocksuckers are gettin’ rich off it. Big Pussy: Yeah, isn’t it amazing? Paulie: And it’s not just the money. It’s a pride thing. All our food: pizza, calzone, buffalo moozarell, olive oil. These fucks had nothin’. They ate pootsie before we gave them the gift of our cuisine. But this, this is the worst. This espresso shit. Big Pussy: Take it easy. The scene is, all at once, witty, absurd, and oddly poignant. Paulie— without fully realizing it, perhaps, and without the need for academic conferences or doctoral credentials—articulates a critique of the commodification and homogenization of ethnic culture in the American “melting pot,” which Paulie clearly and hostilely sees as an act of corporate-sponsored cultural identity theft. But what caps the scene and makes it ultimately so rich is Paulie’s final gesture of defiance when he steals a totem of barista chic from the coffee-shop shelves. Absconding with an espresso maker in symbolic revenge for the cooptation of Italian culture, Paulie makes a gesture that is simultaneously pathetic in its futility but touchingly real in the desire to rebel against the ethos of the corporate makeover by which everything cultural is neutered and

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repackaged for sale. And, clearly, Paulie alludes here not just to the predatory empire and once-astonishing profit margins of Starbucks, but also to the notion that American cuisine (and perhaps American identity itself) lacked flavor, form, and content without a primal act of cultural usurpation—or, in Paulie’s terms, a failure to properly appreciate a “gift” that has amounted to an insulting, outright “theft.” I next explore another, more nuanced instance of how Paulie Walnuts keys in to some of The Sopranos’ most serious reflections, in this case one of the show’s leitmotifs, the nature of guilt and accountability, themes we usually associate with Tony, even where the show is decidedly agnostic on the level of moral judgment. This comes in “From Where to Eternity” (2.9), an episode mostly remembered for its account of Christopher’s shooting and subsequent recovery, followed by the execution of his would-be assassin Matt Bevilaqua. Yet there is a seriocomic thread throughout the episode that raises central questions about the moral economy of the show, not merely for its murderous characters, but for the audience’s own relationship to that violence. As Paulie tries to process whether Christopher’s near-death experience was a preparatory visit to hell that bodes ill for Paulie’s own fate as a fellow wiseguy, he disturbs a recuperating Chris in the intensive care unit, pressing him for information on the “bouncer” who sent Chris back to the living. This exchange is both riotously funny and, for Paulie, deadly serious. Paulie: That bouncer that sent you back, did he have horns on his head? Christopher: No. He was just some big Irish goon in old-fashioned clothes. Paulie: Did anybody there have horns or buds for horns, those goat bumps? Christopher: Paulie, it was fucking hell, okay? My father said he loses every hand of cards he plays. And every night at midnight they whack him the same way he was whacked in life and it’s painful, night after night. Does that sound like fucking heaven to you? Paulie: Was it hot? Christopher: Yeah . . . I don’t know. What the fuck? Paulie: The heat would’ve been the first thing you noticed. Hell is hot. That’s never been disputed by anybody. You didn’t go to hell. You went to purgatory, my friend.

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Christopher: I forgot all about purgatory. Paulie: Purgatory, a little detour on the way to paradise. . . . You add up all your mortal sins, multiply that number by fifty, then you add up all your venial sins and multiply that by twentyfive. You add them together, and that’s your sentence. I figure I’m gonna have to do about six thousand years before I get accepted into heaven. And six thousand years is nothing in eternity terms. I could do that standing on my head. Yet, later in the episode, Paulie remains unconvinced that matters are so simple, or that he can avoid paying for his victims over the years. Paulie consults a psychic (playfully named Ted Hughes, in an intertextual nod to the tragic specter of Sylvia Plath), who claims to see and commune with the dead. When the psychic appears to be communing with Paulie’s past victims, Paulie becomes violent at the thought that he might actually be stalked by the spirits of those he has killed. Accusing the psychic of “Satanic black magic . . . sick shit” and calling all the participants in the séance “fucking queers,” Paulie makes one last-ditch effort to find peace in the teachings of the Catholic Church. He tries to dialogue with his parish priest, reminding the priest of his good works and contributions, which must count for something Paulie argues: Paulie: Twenty-three years of donations to your parish and this is what this guy sees hanging over me? Priest: You should’ve never gone to a psychic. It’s divination, it’s the devil. They’re completely unsanctioned by the church. Psychics are heretics and thieves who practice witchcraft. There’s no validity to anything he told you. Your problem’s a spiritual matter. Paulie: Maybe. But irregardless, I should’ve had immunity to all of this shit. I should’ve been covered by my donations. When the organ needed a reed job, who was there? When the priest and the altar boys needed new whites, who picked up the tab? Priest: You should’ve come to me first and none of this would’ve happened. But don’t worry, Paul, I’m here. I can help you. Paulie: It’s too late. You’ve been slacking off on me and you left me unprotected. I’m cutting you off for good. You ain’t never gonna see another dime from me.

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As Paulie storms out of the church, seething over what he sees as the institution’s betrayal of his instinct to charity as compensation for sin, he glares malevolently at a statue of a benevolent yet disappointing Christ. The look Paulie gives him is precisely the look of barely restrained murderousness that Paulie displays throughout the series when his anger can find no immediate outlet. These scenes amount to a mock history of the Protestant Reformation. Paulie’s progression from Catholic certainties about purgatory, to the subaltern world of séances and new-age spiritualism, to his final disappointment in and rejection of priestly mediation—traces a meditative arc on responsibility in a world devoid of meaning that is repeated throughout the show’s run, and for other characters like Tony and Carmela. For all the gallows humor and the uncomfortable but irrepressible laughs Paulie’s story line provokes here, this is a rich and nuanced exploration of the politics and theology of compensation for our failings. But with a proper Sopranos sense of world-weary irony, Paulie implicitly accepts the Lutheran formulation of “faith, not works,” but not faith in any easy notions of God’s grace. Rather, it is a faith in the absurdity of the entire effort to explain or bargain with an amoral and uninterested cosmos that drives Paulie. To borrow the words of Guildenstern in Stoppard’s play: “We’ve traveled too far, and our momentum has taken over; we move idly towards eternity, without possibility of reprieve or hope of explanation.” This captures the tone of the final scene just described, in which Jesus looks on lovingly—and Paulie looks livid enough to whack him. A final example of Paulie’s complex role on the show comes in that most provocative episode (again with Christopher playing a key role) “Pine Barrens” (3.11). Putting aside for a moment all the endless speculation about the Russian—whom Chase refused to explain or bring back to the show—there is a strain of absurdist comedy and Into the Wild–type existentialism to this episode that made it unforgettable and in many respects demonstrated how The Sopranos could so thoroughly reinvent and transgress its genre pedigree. When Paulie and Christopher end up in the New Jersey Pine Barrens lost, wounded, and unable to track their Russian quarry, they find themselves at last huddling in an abandoned truck, stripped of any dignity, as they beg Tony to intervene via a dying cell-phone connection. In a scene of escalating desperation, an important contrast is drawn—between, on the one hand, Christopher and Paulie’s isolating alienation in the midst of a hostile natural world in which every aspect of their identities as mob soldiers is exposed as

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irrelevant and, on the other hand, the comforts and illusions of Tony’s relatively sheltered life as boss, family man, and lover to the increasingly combative (and Livia-like) Gloria. Again, the absurdist comedy of The Sopranos finds a welcome avatar in Paulie Walnuts, who goes from begging to demanding his boss’s intervention, all while Tony lounges in a robe as his mistress makes a steak dinner. The fragility and potential meaninglessness of the social conventions by which we all make our way through la cosa nostra, our things—whatever they may be—are illustrated here in the most clever way. And in the unique world of the show itself, we find ourselves in real sympathy with Paulie, no longer a mere caricature, but a desolate being whose plight is another pointed critique of Tony’s narcissism and our invitation to be complicit in it—a critique, too, of all the claims to solidarity made by Tony’s crew or by anyone trusting in the omertà of a human institution or community. I want again to allude to Stoppard here as an unconscious but very apt connection to the vision of director Steve Buscemi and writers Terence Winter and Tim Van Patten. In Stoppard, the player comes to realize that no one is even watching the drama troop’s rehearsal of the play Hamlet has commissioned to “catch the conscience of the king.” The absurdity of performing for no one and no purpose strikes him hard, and he famously bursts out: You don’t understand the humiliation of it—to be tricked out of the single assumption which makes our existence viable—that somebody is watching. . . . There we were—demented children mincing about in clothes that no one ever wore, speaking as no man ever spoke, swearing love in wigs and rhymed couplets, killing each other with wooden swords, hollow protestations of faith hurled after empty promises of vengeance—and every gesture, every pose, vanishing into the thin unpopulated air. We ransomed our dignity to the clouds, and the uncomprehending birds listened. Don’t you see?! We’re actors—we’re the opposite of people! Think, in your head, now, think of the most . . . private . . . secret . . . intimate thing you have ever done secure in the knowledge of its privacy. . . . Are you thinking of it? Well, I saw you do it. This desperate need for somebody to be watching, for an audience to appreciate and applaud our traumas and sufferings, however simu-

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lated—is the essence of what the “Pine Barrens” episode illustrates so artfully. In this case, it is Tony who is called on by Paulie to be an interested and intervening god, but from the Olympian perch of his mistress’s apartment, Tony is exposed as a reluctant, disinterested, and all-toohuman spectator—an absent-minded audience at best, and one ready to walk out for a better show. Christopher and Paulie have “ransomed [their] dignity to the clouds,” and only “the uncomprehending birds” are really listening. Stoppard’s player reminds us that in moments like “Pine Barrens” we are all exposed as mere actors—hardly the genuine, coherent, or transparent selves we would like to be. Instead, we are “the opposite of people.” Finally, Stoppard leaves us with the notion that the one advantage of being so exposed is the ability to see human behavior in all its absurdity and multiplicity—the capacity also to recognize that the “privacy” of an autonomous self is the ultimate illusion and the ultimate terror as well. I would argue that this voyeuristic experience of watching a seemingly private and existential torture is what makes “Pine Barrens,” and many other episodes of The Sopranos, so affecting and so groundbreaking. But it is sometimes too easy and too tempting to focus on Tony’s moral and psychological crises and to overlook how some of the show’s most profound riffs on how we live and die are found in other characters whom we would otherwise deem bit-players—a supporting cast to Tony’s mobbed-up but still moping Hamlet. One of the signal accomplishments of The Sopranos is how we are both seduced and chastised as viewers for generally looking at the world the way Tony wants us to—it was his show after all. Or was it? Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and Paulie Walnuts beg to differ.

Christopher, Osama, and A.J. Contemporary Narcissism and Terrorism in The Sopranos Jason Jacobs

In his now famous “crisis of confidence” (a.k.a. “malaise”) speech, which he delivered on July 15, 1979, President Jimmy Carter expounded: “The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways. It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation.” In preparation for this speech, President Carter consulted a number of leading intellectuals, including Christopher Lasch, cultural historian and author of the recently published Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. The administration considered this book so important that visitors to the White House were given free copies, and it continued to have a significant political and cultural impact at the end of a decade in which America was experiencing dire economic fortunes (stagflation) and a second energy crisis. In the midst of these crises, Lasch’s book seemed to offer an explanatory framework that situated economic distress as a symptom of a societal failure of socialization. The Carter administration was attracted to this analysis because it offered a way of grasping American decline at the level of individuals. According to Imogen Tyler, “Carter’s claim [in his speech], that the dire economic situation facing the nation [was] a symptom of narcissism, [enabled] him to present his political program of government cuts and economic restraint as a moral corrective to ‘American selfishness.’”1 In other words, a systemic and structural problem—the cyclic destructive

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nature of capitalism—was refashioned and re-presented as an aggregate of individual flaws. Television drama can work in the opposite way. Individual traits and patterns of behavior exhibited by fictional characters can signal, resemble, and be emblematic of wider structural and systemic matters. The Culture of Narcissism presents a psychosocial history of America that calibrates the decline of the family and adult solidarity against the intensification of individualization and consumerism. So does The Sopranos. The show has always been interested in exploring the contemporary cultural and psychological imagination of America through its narratives and characters. It is hardly an analytical revelation that The Sopranos is emblematic of cultural trends, since the very first shots of the show are explicit about its interest in the contemporary landscapes of cultural meaning. In the pilot episode, we hear Tony complain to his therapist that he feels, compared to his father, that he’s coming in at “the end of things” and that “the best is over.” Melfi replies by making the point to him, and the show to us, that “many Americans feel that way.” This is the show’s declaration of its interest in the ways in which many Americans feel. What is special about the show is its successful working through of a complex series of ideas about the decline of America by using character and narrative development in a brilliant and compelling manner. The fact that Tony has children allows the show to depict and calibrate cultural change through generational change. Where Lasch’s work described the origins and consequences of narcissism as he saw it in the 1970s, The Sopranos takes this cultural analysis a stage further by exploring the progeny of that “me generation.” But in what ways does the show resemble Lasch’s thinking? The Culture of Narcissism is primarily concerned with the decline of the family and was immensely influential, beyond its impact on the Carter administration in the late 1970s. As Tyler argues: “Lasch’s central argument, that consumerism subjects men, women and children to new forms and unprecedented levels of social control, made a significant and important intervention in contemporary social and cultural analysis and continues to be extremely influential. Indeed The Culture of Narcissism is one of the most cited and most studied books in the history of cultural criticism” (354). One reason for its impact was that it addressed acute psychological experiences as aspects of historical change, thereby permitting, as Carter anticipated, strongly individual responses, even though Lasch himself pointed out that far wider structural solutions

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were needed. He argues that the psychological anchors of family, community, and tradition have been eroded, leaving a society that is little more than an aggregate of psychologically vulnerable individuals; this is reflected in the increasingly chaotic cultural imagination evidenced in books, films, and other forms of cultural expression. Daniel Horowitz offers this cogent account of the main themes: Rather than liberating people, the progress that liberal individualists and corporate capitalists alike proposed had trapped them, stripping people of sources of genuine satisfaction. In the realm of production, routinized work had become alienating and separated from family life. Reformers, the state, and the professions had invaded the family, in the process undermining its authority and the realm of private life. Feminists had fully contributed to the undermining of the family and the fostering of a false sense of liberation. Elites, especially those on the left, had isolated themselves from the people they claimed to be helping. Consumer culture, the compensation offered by capitalists and liberals who believed in liberation offered in place of meaningful work and family life, further eroded psychological integrity. This left individuals with a sense of empty yearning that was impossible to fulfill. The search for self-fulfillment through consumption and therapy had turned America into a hedonist society. All these forces undermined real work, an authentic sense of self, and a morally grounded faith. (213) There is much in this account that I think The Sopranos implicitly and sometimes explicitly evokes in its various characters and narratives across its seasons. Although it is obviously hard to match specific moments from one text to another in order to claim agreement, there are some general ways in which I think the show has a close affinity to the thinking of Lasch in The Culture of Narcissism, not so much in an acceptance or illustration of his overall argument, but in the ways in which it accords with some of Lasch’s descriptions of the psychological landscape of America. For example, Lasch frequently cites the fascination with celebrity and fame as a symptom of the pathological narcissism that he claims is exhibited across patterns of American culture: “The mass media, with their cult of celebrity and their attempt to surround it with glamour and excitement, have made Americans a nation of fans,

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moviegoers. The media give substance to and thus intensify narcissistic dreams of fame and glory, encouraging the common man to identify himself with the stars and to hate the ‘herd’ and make it more and more difficult for him to accept the banality of everyday existence” (21). Combining this fascination with the contempt for the everyday and the herd is clearly redolent of the depiction of the fictional mobsters in The Sopranos as having disdain for the ordinary lives of those around them whom they exploit, injure, and steal from, while they jockey for power, prestige, and prominence in their own criminal groups. Vito Spatafore, for example, would rather face a painful execution than work a regular job in the ordinary world (“Moe n’ Joe,” 6.10).2 For Lasch, therapy becomes a substitute for meaning, a kind of theatrical staging of the process of acquiring and closing the meaning of one’s life: “Contemporary man, tortured . . . by self consciousness, turns to new cults and therapies not to free himself from obsessions but to find meaning and purpose in life, to find something to live for, precisely to embrace an obsession, if only the passion maitresse of therapy itself. He would willingly exchange his self-consciousness for oblivion and his freedom to create new roles for some form of external dictation, the more arbitrary the better” (99). This sense of therapy as a desperate way to avoid the responsibility and consequences of will, for decision making, for taking responsibility for one’s life, is regularly evoked in The Sopranos, especially in the scenes toward the end of the final season in which we see A.J. in therapy. Indeed, by that point, the show seems to be using A.J. as an index of Lasch’s repeated claims that narcissism is a vivid blend of self-regard and self-loathing. Along with its interest in celebrity and therapy, it is in its overall tone and attitude toward materialism that The Sopranos most clearly chimes with The Culture of Narcissism. As Horowitz claims, “By the 1970s Lasch had developed a tragic vision of American life in which his analysis of affluence and consumer culture played a central role.” Like Lasch’s book, the show seems fascinated by the things it disdains. It also eschews any easy political coordinates. Lasch’s work, too, is difficult to locate politically because it combines a libertarian rejection of state control over the individual with a radical rejection of consumerist corporate capitalism. And although both book and television series are deeply concerned about the decline of America, their disdain for materialism and consumer culture locates them more closely not only to anticapitalist Western movements, but also toward contemporary nihilistic

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terrorism whose target is also modernity and the decadence of Western consumerism. To begin with I will locate the ways in which aspects of narcissism and nihilism are developed through A.J.’s character, before connecting this with a wider stylistic pattern in the show that is co-opted, in the later seasons, into a narrative about the terrorist subjectivity. Put crudely, A.J.’s search for meaning is both emblematic of the failure of society to reproduce coherent values that would ensure stability and the audience’s ability to grasp the meaning of the show, and it recruits A.J.’s narrative into a wider pattern that dramatizes the issue of ethical responsibility for the pleasures of the series using the trope of the mute witness as a metaphor for the evaluative and judgmental subject position that the show demands of its viewers. As the show reaches its conclusion, A.J. himself becomes an important character in this aesthetic and ideological pattern.

A.J.’s Struggle for Meaning It is important to note that some of the show’s warmest moments involve Tony’s relationship with A.J. When Tony sprays whipped cream down his throat in “Down Neck” (1.7), we are reminded that children and parents at their best can be good friends; but even in these scenes one wonders whether friendship is an appropriate measure of parental success. This is alluded to in a sequence showing Tony watching his son playing school sports, in which the film style depicts his joy at his son’s success as pathological and animal-like. It reminds us that A.J. is an index of Tony’s ordinary desire to be a good father, and thereby functions as a screen for various kinds of parental fantasies of achievement. To the extent that characters in the show represent things beyond themselves, A.J. primarily functions in the earlier seasons to remind us of Tony’s failure to transmit the values he holds precious to the next generation. There are many scenes that depict Tony’s disappointment with A.J., and in particular his frustration with what he perceives as A.J.’s weaknesses: lack of drive, ambition, sexual energy, and physical and emotional resilience— in other words, the very properties that have allowed Tony to acquire power. In the final season, Tony claims to hate his son, in part because A.J., recently abandoned by Blanca and severely depressed, reminds him of his lack of enviable qualities—that he, Tony, couldn’t even manage to raise a child who wished to emulate him or his career. This lack is

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brought home vividly when, at the Bing, Tony meets Jason Parisi and Jason Gervasi, who are running a sports book at Rutgers and appear to him to be clued-up, ambitious mobsters in the making. Despite Tony’s attempts to push A.J. into various roles, the boy continues to remind Tony of his passivity and failure as a father. What bother Tony most are the bad feelings this causes him to experience, but we also sense that he may grasp A.J.’s failure to thrive as evidence of his parental failure. In Tony’s perception, his legacy to his child insinuates itself beyond his control through his genes, which have transmitted his depression and his anxiety attacks. A.J.’s presence as a depressed kid is a living criticism of Tony’s flawed biology as much as his ethics. In the scenes in which A.J. does not function narratively as a reminder of Tony’s failure as a parent, he is given a role as an emblem of a certain strain of American youth, what we might call a generation Y kind of passive but savvy consumerism. He is frequently depicted pursuing the pleasures of consumption, especially watching television or playing video games. His deviance is of a mild kind in the genre of ordinary teenage misbehavior—the odd spot of school vandalism, cheating, and swimming-pool urination. Even in the final episodes, where his distress is acute and dangerous, it might be tempting to dismiss his depression and existential despair as part of the generic misery of the teenager; but this is difficult to do because A.J. has form as a nihilist. The secondseason episode “D-Girl” (2.7) is particularly rich in its depiction of A.J.’s pursuit of meaning, at first through his reading of Sartre and Nietzsche (“Nitch”), and later in his encounter with Livia, who tells him that there is nothing but a lonely death in one’s own arms. In the third-season episode “Proshai, Livushka” (3.2), we are given a scene in which A.J.’s desire for meaning is foregrounded explicitly. This is his encounter with the Robert Frost poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” In this scene, A.J. is in his room, struggling to figure out some homework that involves comprehending the meaning of Frost’s poem: “Asshole Robert Frost,” he says to Meadow; “How am I supposed to know what this means? Like I even care.” Like the audience for a sophisticated television drama, A.J. knows not to take the poem at face value, that it represents more than it says on the surface. Meadow also knows this, but is smarter and has already studied the poem: “What does snow symbolize?” she asks. “Christmas?” he replies. In this beguiling scene, it is easy to join the characters we watch in missing the significance of what is happening. A.J.’s frustration when faced with the

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opacity of a thing he knows is freighted with meaning—“I don’t know just give me the fucking answer”—is as familiar as Meadow’s certainty that “sleep” means “death, the sleep of death.” Both interpret the poem as a signpost where the words and symbolism point to things beyond themselves; the poem becomes a puzzle to be decoded. The dramatization of A.J.’s impatience, too, stands for something beyond itself; however, it also warns us to beware of pat answers of the kind that Meadow confidently offers. We may see in A.J.’s frustration the wider impatience of a consumer society that wants packages of meaning that clearly define and orientate their subjectivity; but the scene also seems to warn that even relatively sophisticated solutions to the problem of meaning (“I thought black was death,” says A.J.; “White too,” replies Meadow) ultimately provide clarity where there may be none. After all, in this well-known poem, hesitation and pausing are the key events. The poem depicts the narrator who stops near a wood during a dark evening, presumably on a journey elsewhere. The reason that the traveler stops seems to be to watch the snow falling on the woods; he is a witness to his own hesitation in the face of purpose (the poem concludes with “And miles to go before I sleep”). This hesitation and A.J.’s demand for clarity are important to other resonances that the show wishes to activate. As we witness characters struggling to find meaning in a well-known item of cultural expression, we might be alerted to our own struggles to locate and clarify meaning in the work we are experiencing. This scene and others like it in the show therefore develop the sense that The Sopranos uses its narratives and characters to comment on and explore contemporary society by signaling its interest in the process of meaning making itself. It seems to warn us that it is, as a show, aware of our own involvement and struggle to comprehend it. Short of Meadow and A.J. looking at the camera, and us, directly, this scene is as explicit as it can be in this respect. Such a self-conscious address to the audience allows us to consider the possibility that A.J., as well as being emblematic of a generation and an index of Tony’s failure to nurture his young, can also function as a surrogate for our own desire for generic clarity and resolution. This desire for clarity, to establish the meaning of one’s life and one’s actions, is also, of course, what Lasch signals as the desire to “find something to live for.” I want to fold in these issues of clarity of intention, pausing, hesitating to contemplate and witness, with a contemporary reading of terrorist activities that I argue is made relevant by The Sopranos’ evoca-

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tion of destruction and violence as attractive aesthetic effects that raise questions about the responses of those who witness them. By the final episodes of the last season, A.J. is central to these issues and the patterns that have been established around them.

Al Qaeda and the Witness In a brilliant essay on the uses of art, artifacts, and statuary in The Sopranos’ mise-en-scène, Franco Ricci details the many ways in which images and statuary “subtly suggest that there is more to the action than what is occurring on screen” (141). He concludes by arguing that as much as they consolidate certain kinds of tone and mood, they also alert the viewer to “that space between reality and fiction, thought and expression, violent act and aesthetic deed” (159). Building on the insights of that essay, I will concentrate on a more specific use of art and artifacts as part of a system in the show that foregrounds the act of witnessing; in doing so, I will show how this system was eventually co-opted around a stylistic and narrative pattern that evokes some aspects of contemporary terrorism. In his book Landscapes of the Jihad, Faisal Devji points out that martyrdom in the new globalized lens of Al Qaeda’s jihad is one where the martyr loses all sense of his or her cultural and historical particularity “by his or her destruction in an act of martyrdom,” an act that only achieves meaning by being witnessed in the media (94). According to Devji, martyrdom, or shahadat, involves not only the person whose life is voluntarily sacrificed for the cause of God, but everyone annihilated in this cause whether willingly or not. Not only people, but animals, buildings and other inanimate objects as well may participate in the rites of martyrdom, including even those who witness the martyrdom of others without themselves being killed. Because martyrdom in Islam is thus connected to seeing in a much more general as well as much more specific sense than in Christianity, it is capable of cohabiting in productive ways with the global practices of news reportage. Martyrdom also includes within its ambit any number of subjects: perpetrators, victims, bystanders, other animate and inanimate witnesses, near or far, all of whom constitute by their very seeing the landscape of the

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jihad as a site of sociability. Only in mass media does the collective witnessing that defines martyrdom achieve its full effect, as the various attempts by would-be-martyrs to film their deaths or at least to leave behind videotaped testaments, illustrates so clearly. (94–95) In Devji’s reading, terroristic acts of destruction have meaning only when they are witnessed, and as witnessed they are ethical acts that have meaning in themselves, that point to nothing except their own meaning. In other words, we can see them as attempts to establish and clarify meaning, and, rather than seeing them as products of local or even national antagonisms, we might see them as expressions of a Western malaise that Lasch and, following him, Jimmy Carter, identified three decades ago. Elsewhere, Devji has noted the similarities, in their globalized and antimodern characteristics, between anticapitalist or consumerist movements and the content of Osama bin Laden’s infrequent messages to the world (Devji, “The Ventriloquist”). What strikes me about Devji’s description of contemporary jihadist martyrdom is that inanimate objects can participate in what he describes as essentially ethical (rather than political) acts. The Sopranos, too, uses, as Ricci argues, inanimate but sensual objects like artworks and statues to signal to the viewer the possibility of another way of taking what we see and hear, beyond the generically obvious. To what extent is it the witnessing by such objects that deepens the meaning of scenes in which they participate? We can see this by looking at the patterns of repetition across the show’s various seasons of mute forms that are shown in relationship to some of the characters, many of whom do not notice their presence. My argument is that, presumably without an explicit intention to reference jihadist acts of martyrdom, the earlier seasons of The Sopranos nonetheless internalize the idea of the witness as part of a stylistic and aesthetic system that Ricci has painstakingly detailed. By seasons five and six, the combination of A.J.’s entering adulthood with his history of nihilistic interest and the increasing prominence of terrorist “issues” and references in the narrative after 9/11 allowed this pattern to be co-opted into one that resonated with a contemporary sense of martyrdom. Retrospectively, this allows us to think of the witness as a motif in The Sopranos that raises the issue of judgment and evaluation and implies an ethical stance. The issue relates to the problem that the show appears to have with its very appeal to the audience: What ethical responsibility does it

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have in the glamorization of mob violence? To what extent does it resist or resent the appetite for generic rewards (gunfights, killings, etc.)? The first emblematic instance of the mute witness is the first shots of the pilot episode, when we see Tony in Melfi’s waiting room looking at a statue. In these shots, we see Tony’s puzzlement as he regards the female figure, which appears to gaze directly back at him. It appears to my eyes, and, I think, to Tony’s, as an emblem of judgment. Its very uncertainty, its stony lack of subjectivity, is nonetheless expressive of a judgmental subjectivity; it seems to imply some kind of interrogation. There is no way of getting back at it, of finding out what it wants. Tony’s expression of frustrated puzzlement can be seen as nicely capturing one of our common responses to the demands of an artwork: “What does this thing want of me? How am I expected to respond?” Although art may invite, insist upon, or demand a response, in The Sopranos, objects that are not artworks also participate in striking an interrogative attitude. They are mute witnesses, and the suggestion of their scrutiny forces us to reconsider the surface meanings of what we see. There are many further examples. In “Another Toothpick” (3.5), when Tony visits the garden supply store, there are a number of garden statues in female form prominent in the foreground and later in the background that seem to operate as witnesses to Tony’s initially vicious humiliation of the traffic cop who works there and who has been demoted as a result of Tony’s complaint after he gave him a speeding ticket. “Amour Fou” (3.12) begins with Carmela walking through a museum display of Rodin sculptures that allow us to contrast their despairing attitudes with Carmela’s own estimation of her “spiritual” crisis; the title sequence includes the statue of liberty and the Wilson’s Carpet Giant statue, as distant witnesses to Tony’s journey home. Not only do statues seem to inhabit this role of witness, but the weight of judgment and accusation sometimes is more direct, as in a gaze or stare toward characters and viewers from apparently unseeing eyes. At the end of “For All Debts Public and Private” (4.1), Christopher puts the twenty-dollar bill he stole from the cop he executed on his mother’s fridge, and the episode ends with a close shot of the note, an extreme close-up of President Andrew Jackson’s eye; prominent near the note is a colored card that cheerfully states, “Keep It Simple.” How are we to take this juxtaposition? What is the judgment of money? Is it to remind us that mobsters ultimately kill for money—the simple reason—as Jackson’s presidency endorsed the stealing of Native American land? This

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is confounded by the context of the scene, which takes place in Chris’s mother’s kitchen the morning after he has executed the man he believes murdered his father. Chris has taken the money as a token, a souvenir of the act. It should have meaning, and his pinning it to the fridge seems to encompass his desire to make sure it does, even though his mother is dismissive of his attempts to understand his father as a good man. Perhaps it illustrates a deadly economy of exchange and inheritance; however, the emphasis of the ending is that Jackson’s eye stares in judgment not at her or Chris, but at us. Or take the way in which we see the ruined face of Tony Blundetto after his cousin has blasted him with a shotgun. We see two shots of this amazing, gorily beautiful work of make-up, where Blundetto’s lifeless eyes stare back at us, as much as at Tony. This (the gore, the drama of the killing, the generic reward), the eyes seem to say, is what you want, is it? I think such shots convey an attitude of judgment and evaluation that the objects variously project outward; this seems to be an attitude that the show wishes us to adopt more strongly. Are we, they seem to demand, up to making an ethical response, one that matches the depth and sensitivity that is demanded of us? To what extent are we implicated and asked to stand witness to our implication in such shots? What is the appropriate ethical stance where violence does not serve to clarify moral distinctions but instead to open up the morality and ethics of our narrative involvement in it? These matters—the way that Lasch’s apocalyptic account of narcissism orients the show’s moral tone, the depiction of A.J. as an emblem of generational change, and the use of objects as mute witnesses—converge in the final season’s development of A.J. and his increasingly nihilistic obsessions. It is notable, for example, that A.J.’s depression is strongly connected to W. B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming.” Unlike Frost’s “Snowy Evening,” this poem is direct and unambiguous about the apocalyptic future it predicts, and A.J. is strongly affected by its clarity: we see him reading it in bed, and he quotes it during the meal at Bobby Bacala’s funeral (“Made in America,” 6.21). At that meal, his description and loathing of “fat people” in malls “when Iraqi children can’t get medicine” is redolent of a wider contemptuous revulsion at Western consumerism, shared not only by some terrorists, but also by prominent intellectuals and academics. However, despite A.J.’s contempt for the banality of consumer culture, he has been implicated throughout the show as a willing and enthusiastic participant in it, as

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well as one who enjoys nasty spectacles. It is in those scenes where A.J. is a witness to violence that he begins to operate, somewhat inscrutably, like those inanimate objects and statues: note the way he is silent but fascinated by the fight that breaks out at the party he organizes in “All Due Respect” (5.13); his witnessing of the acid torture of a college boy in “Walk Like a Man” (6.17); and the beating up of a black cyclist in “Kennedy and Heidi” (6.18). Like those inanimate objects, he stands on, passively watching, and we are invited to speculate on the nature of his involvement: Is he repulsed as we are or is he fascinated? The film style deliberately avoids defining his response for us. In the final episode of the show, these patterns are drawn together eloquently. As a way of capping its extraordinary artistic achievement over six seasons, it is difficult to imagine a finer resolution, in part because almost every scene remains conscious of its responsibility to that inheritance. The moment in which we find, somewhat unexpectedly, A.J. and his friend Rhiannon (whom he met at the psychiatric hospital) parked in his SUV in the woods seems to me to be resonant in relation to its inheritance. It is, of course, possible for a television show of more than eighty episodes to draw quite deeply on a wide range of narrative and character histories. Possible, but is it plausible? I mean is it plausible that this shot of the yellow Nissan stopped in the woods evokes A.J.’s difficulty with the Frost poem? The scene, like much of the final episode, is wintry, but the woods are not snowy.3 The couple has sought out this private space in the woods in order to listen to music together: Bob Dylan’s “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding).” They discuss how this song seems to speak directly to their experience of their world, despite being written before either of them was born: “It’s about, like, right now,” Rhiannon says. How are we to take this? It is a generically familiar moment in which a young couple alone in a car struggle with the pull of sexual desire: the desire for further intimacy that the shared experience of the song has stimulated in tension with the stability of friendship. It is played very tenderly at first, with A.J. making the first move, but there is also comedy in the awkwardness of removing clothing, and as A.J. remembers he can adjust his seat to accommodate their lovemaking. More darkly, “I’ve got nothing more to live up to” is the lyric heard at the point Rhiannon removes her clothes. Of all things, music cannot be taken lightly in The Sopranos. The Dylan song is emblematic of countercultural alienation and is about the corrupting nature of consumerism, authority, and advertising. It

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anticipates (and is in some ways emblematic of) many of the themes that Lasch, among others, subsequently interrogated. The song is in part about being owned or duped by the corrupt mass culture around us. There is solid irony at work in the juxtaposition of this song with the interior of one of the most vivid and monstrous symbols of consumerism, the SUV, which catches fire because A.J. has parked it where the exhaust combusts the dry leaves beneath it. The SUV literally burns its environment, and in self-destructing, also audibly melts Dylan’s singing. There is a certain kind of clarity at work here: mass consumerism and environmental destruction has “won,” the products of the counterculture are recruited as the soundtrack to casual sex. So while Dylan’s song is emblematic of its time, it also speaks to a “now” that suggests defeat: nothing has changed since it was released. What, then, is the value of popular culture as protest or resistance? However, what seems to me to be important is what happens afterward. A.J. and Rhiannon abandon the car and run from it down into a small valley: the car is now above them, roaring in flames, and eventually explodes. The couple, who had been about to copulate, now look small and childlike in the woods, a version of Hansel and Gretel facing great, sudden, and unexpected danger. A.J.’s body suddenly seems quite slight against the trees, and he trips during his escape down the hill away from the car. As they witness the destruction of the car and the melting of the music system that distorts hideously Dylan’s voice, their faces resemble those witnessing the visceral horror of an impact. Mutual witnessing of the explosion—different from what we might have expected—is a marker in the next phase of their relationship. A.J.’s response to the final explosion is an aesthetic one: he is in awe of the event; it is, to him, sublime. Something sublime should have meaning. When A.J. discusses the event with his therapist, she mistakes his claim to be “cleansed” by the event by referring to the SUV as a polluter (hers is a literal reading—the one I have outlined—that is here shown to be mistaken). In fact, it is the visceral, emotional, and aesthetic impact that excites A.J.: his proximity to the explosion, the fact that he was “just sitting there a few seconds before” becomes for him a transcendent experience. Note that the experience does not have any meaning beyond itself—it does not point to new kinds of behavior or moral orientation. Instead, A.J. goes about seeking more stimulation of the same kind. He craves dramatic action. When I first saw this scene, and A.J.’s excited recall in the therapy session, I immediately assumed that the

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trajectory of this character would be to become a homegrown jihadist. The combination of his narcissism, nihilism, and witnessing of the spectacular forms of destruction seems to be in keeping with popular ideas of terrorists and their nihilistic interest in media-dispersed theaters of destruction. His struggle for order and clarity demands violence in order to reveal and enforce ethical distinctions. But now I wonder whether my response is just another version of “I thought black was death.” What is clear is that the witness is no longer an inanimate object, but a character, A.J., who watches an inanimate object, the SUV, coming alive. But A.J. as a witness has choices we can see him make. One choice might be the one I at first assumed—that the aesthetics of death and violent destruction lead A.J. to terrorism. Another choice is the one he actually makes. Initially, having tasted the appeal of visceral spectacle, he seeks out future jobs that encompass danger—helicopter pilot, soldier in Afghanistan—but he settles eventually for the comforts of a BMW and a job as a film producer’s assistant. Nonetheless, there is, I think, grounds for hope: it is A.J. who remembers his father’s speech about treasuring the “little things,” and Tony who cannot recall this moment, suggesting that A.J.’s generation has at least the capacity for memory. The final scenes of the final episode bring us to the final witness. They stimulate our desire for meaning and clarity since we know this is the final episode. Like A.J., we are caught between two competing desires. First, we want to see the continuation of the Sopranos critique of consumerism and materialism that the final parts of the sixth season articulate so potently—the mobsters’ contempt for ordinary working life, and their indulgence in the material world. One way to end would be to confront us with its continuation, unpunished: the mob family happily consuming onion rings, in a fairly typical critique of the banality of everyday consumer culture. However, there is another pressing desire: the desire for violent, bloody spectacle, which pleasures us through the witnessing of destruction, and clarifies meaning. Death is a certain ending. That is, in the final shots of the final episode we are confronted—much as Tony is in the opening shot of the pilot, and A.J. is when he struggles with Frost’s poem—with our desire for clarity and meaning. But, with the blank screen, we become the witness, and the puzzlement is ours, no longer something internal to the show. We might say that the show knows about our desires, stimulates them only to throw our desire for clarity and the distinction of meaning back at us. In this sense, we are involved

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in the show’s martyrdom, its destruction of itself, and we become the witnesses to an ethical act. Nevertheless, the demand is not to judge the show, but our involvement in it. Perhaps this intention is at the heart of David Chase’s contemptuous response to the ending of the show: “It’s one thing to be deeply involved in a television show. It’s another to be so involved all you do is sit on a couch and watch it. . . . The way I see it is that Tony Soprano had been people’s alter ego. They had gleefully watched him rob, kill, pillage, lie and cheat. They had cheered him on. And then, all of a sudden, they wanted to see him punished for all that. . . . I thought that was disgusting” (“Sopranos Creator Takes On Angry Fans”). The puzzle is therefore not internal to the ending, but projected outward toward us, like the gaze of mute objects. How are we constituted subjectively? As passive witnesses, or as libidinous consumers who crave nourishment that is suddenly withdrawn? Unlike A.J., who chooses the comforts of easy consumerism over discipline, hard work, and the examined life, the blank screen leaves us with ourselves, and our ceaseless pursuit of meaning. We might, at that point, follow Frost’s traveler and revel more in the suspension and hesitation of meaning: “I think I know.” By evoking patterns of narcissism, the generic markers of popular understandings of terrorism and consumerism, the blank screen challenges viewers to account for their own involvement and to take ethical responsibility for it. Unlike A.J., we are not offered a promised spectacle of destruction within which we might locate meaning, as if the enormity and trauma of destruction is not the taking away of that we find most precious, but a way of clarifying to us what it is that we find precious and important. It is part of the insight of the show, and its profound contribution to contemporary art, that it acknowledges this desire and is courageous enough to grant the audience the intelligence and sensitivity to respond as fully as they can.

Notes This essay is indebted to the theoretical insights of Peter Thomas, “Flourishing inside a Bastardism.” 1. Daniel Horowitz points out that the speech, and the ideas that informed it, “remind us of the persistence in American intellectual and political life of calls for chastened, moral consumption” (18). 2. Neil Davenport points out that season six in particular developed the theme of antagonism between the mob and the working class: “It’s worth remembering how the Mafia have long been virulent anti-communists and

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anti-trade unionists, with a history of providing strike-breaking muscle for employers.” 3. Perhaps a snowy wood might complicate the reference further by reminding viewers eager for loose ends to be tied of the missing Russian mobster from “Pine Barrens” (3.11)—another example of The Sopranos’ refusal to define and clarify what it shows. Whatever the reason, it is an astute choice.

“When It Comes to Daughters, All Bets Are Off” The Seductive Father-Daughter Relationship of Tony and Meadow Soprano Marisa Carroll

When The Sopranos begins, Carmela Soprano and her teenage daughter, Meadow, are on the outs. Carmela catches Meadow attempting to sneak back into the house through her bedroom window after violating curfew. She is unmoved by a petulant Meadow’s excuse for breaking the rules: Meadow cries, “Patrick has a swim meet tomorrow and he needed me!” (“The Sopranos,” 1.1). By the series finale, Meadow is engaged to a man named Patrick, the son of one of Tony’s mob associates. Are these Patricks one and the same character? To my knowledge, that is never made clear, but the use of the Patricks as a framing device does prompt the audience to ask the question: After six seasons, has Meadow ended up in the same place that she started? Or worse—as Salon.com critic Heather Havrilesky has argued—has she ended up in the same place as Carmela? That is, in a state of “complete” denial? How could this happen? As Stephen Metcalf has observed, “Meadow is the one family member who ‘gets it,’ i.e., who has cultivated enough of a life within mainstream culture to see her father’s vocation for what it was.” She was the girl who once longed to put “the whole North American land mass” between herself and Tony and Carmela, and who in her parents’ estimation passed them intellectually by the time she was fourteen (“Denial, Anger, Acceptance,” 1.3). She certainly had the tools to escape her mob ties, or at least New Jersey: brains, the benefits of an

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upper-middle-class life, and an Ivy League diploma. To quote Tony’s “goomara” Gloria Trillo, this is a kid who had “the world by the you know what” (“Amour Fou,” 3.12). Meadow was supposed to be the one with options, but the one choice she couldn’t make for herself—the one that colors all the others—is the family she was born to. In this essay, I suggest that Meadow is trapped in a seductive father-daughter relationship with Tony that circumscribes the avenues available to her. With recent psychoanalytic literature as a guide, I outline the hallmarks of a seductive father-daughter dynamic, then examine how Tony and Meadow fit the typical pattern. I also show how Tony’s sociopathic behavior compounds Meadow’s dilemma. By examining the reasons that this dynamic exerts such a powerful unconscious pull on the daughter, I hope to offer a more sympathetic context for Meadow’s choices. In short, I mount a case in Princess Bing’s defense. According to psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin’s reevaluation of the pre-Oedipal stage put forth by Freud, little girls identify with their fathers just as little boys do. During this period of psychosexual development, children of both genders begin to separate and individuate from the mother (as the primary caretaker, in most instances). In the father’s capacity to function beyond the mother’s control, he “represents the link to the exciting outside and assumes the role of standing for freedom, separation, and desire” (Benjamin 121). Families that uphold traditional gender roles, like the Sopranos, may further reinforce the father’s symbolic position. This is not to suggest that Carmela is without agency. As Kim Akass and Janet McCabe have argued, she wields a certain narrative power (146–61). But in Meadow’s experience, Carmela has spent years “eating [Tony’s] shit” (“Whitecaps,” 4.13) and “expect[ing] to have things handed to her” (“Unidentified Black Males,” 5.9), so we can see why Tony would be perceived as the parent who exercises greater freedom. Benjamin explains that what daughters see “in their fathers and wish, through identification, to affirm in themselves [is] recognition of their own desire” (125). When the exciting father confirms, “‘Yes, you can be like me’—[it] helps the child consolidate the identification and so enhances the sense of being a subject of desire” (130). Benjamin observes that the child’s desire for fatherly recognition has an “erotic” component (135), which is perhaps why Christine C. Kieffer and Michael Kahn have both argued that a father must strike a tricky

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balance with his daughter at this period of her development, as well as in the Oedipal phase that follows. He must accept her identification without expecting her to “serve as [his] mirror” (Kieffer 78), and he must affirm his daughter’s appeal without implying that she is more enticing to him than her mother is (Kahn 75). If the father doesn’t have a handle on his narcissism or his own erotic impulses toward his daughter, it can be disastrous for the little girl. In the first case, her autonomy can be frustrated; in the second, she becomes cast as the Oedipal victor over her mother, which can lead to crippling guilt, among other psychological difficulties (Kieffer 73–77). According to Kahn, the father finds himself in a “delicate” situation then: because many fathers see their daughters as “adorable, seductive little [people],” they must exercise continued self-awareness and vigilance regarding their impulses (71, 89). And as we’ve seen throughout six seasons of The Sopranos, impulse control is not Tony’s strong suit. But he does seem aware of the special challenges fathers face when it comes to their daughters. After Johnny Sacramoni breaks down at his daughter Allegra’s wedding, Tony defends him to the New York and New Jersey crews. In a rare flash of empathy, he argues, “Give him a break, will ya? It’s an emotional day. When it comes to daughters, all bets are off” (“Mr. and Mrs. John Sacrimoni Request,” 6.5). Ruth F. Lax, rescuing a proposition that Freud laid out in his essay “A Child Is Being Beaten,” goes even further: she argues that “when a father wants his daughter’s love, he seduces her and obtains it” (308). She is careful to distinguish seductive behavior from outright sexual abuse, and for all his lawbreaking, incest is probably the one rule Tony wouldn’t violate. No, according to Kahn, the process of seduction is a far subtler one (64). Common methods of obtaining the daughter’s affection can include the following behaviors: A father may indicate his attraction to his daughter (Kahn 80) and “encourage [her] erotic feelings toward him” (Kieffer 77). He may “share confidences with the daughter that he withholds from the mother” (Kieffer 74). In fact, he may indicate his preference for her company over her mother’s (Kahn 80). Finally, as the daughter matures, he may try to control her romantic life and force out her lovers (Kieffer 77). Over six seasons, we see Tony behave in these seductive ways toward Meadow. After all, she is his type. In a session with Dr. Melfi, Tony thinks back on his flings and realizes that he is attracted to a specific kind of woman: “dark complexion, smart, smells a little bit of money” (“Kai-

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sha,” 6.12). Gloria Trillo and Julianna Skiff fit the bill, and Tony is aware that Melfi also falls into this category. Melfi presumably understands that his mother, Livia, falls into it too. But the qualities that Tony recognizes in his type pertain to Meadow as well. Indeed, from the first season’s “College” episode (1.5), Tony and Meadow’s relationship is coded as a romance of sorts. While Carmela is stuck at home, sharing baked ziti, Chianti, and confessions with parish priest Father Phil, Tony and college-bound Meadow are on a tour of prospective schools. One night, they have dinner together, and the romantic elements of the scene are impossible to ignore. The two are alone, classical violin music plays in the background, the lighting is soft and ambient. Tony’s erotic attraction to his daughter is evident. He stares and smiles at Meadow to the point where she becomes flustered by the intensity of his attention, he flatters her brains and beauty (“a real student at Casa Soprano and she looks like a model in Italian Vogue”), and his demeanor is jokey and flirtatious. Back in New Jersey, after Carmela complains that Tony doesn’t have time to talk to her “for two lousy minutes,” she and her symbolic father, Father Phil, come dangerously close to violating his vow of celibacy and hers of marriage. By juxtaposing the Carmela–Father Phil scenes with the Meadow-Tony scenes, creator David Chase heightens the transgressive erotic intensity between both couples. This is an episode about father-daughter seduction, both literal and figurative. The erotic connection between Tony and Meadow is depicted more flagrantly four seasons later in “Marco Polo” (5.8). Although Carmela and Tony have separated, Carmela has asked him to the house for her father’s seventy-fifth birthday party. A bikini-clad Meadow is having a poolside discussion with her uncle Tony Blundetto when her father stops by and interrupts the conversation. Tony invites Meadow onto his lap, asking if she remembers the name he used to call when she was a little girl. (The audience never finds out, which deepens our sense of their intimacy.) Then Tony begins to tickle her, and as Meadow laughs and tries to wriggle away, Tony Blundetto’s reaction likely mirrors that of the viewers: he watches, then averts his gaze, then looks back again. We should be able to watch—after all, it’s just a playful moment between father and daughter—and yet the undercurrent of flirtatiousness between Tony and Meadow is unsettling enough to make us look away (Carmela too). In “College,” we see Tony encourage Meadow to keep secrets from her mother, another typical behavior of the seductive father. After their dinner, Tony leaves Meadow at the restaurant to socialize with Colby

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College students, and when he returns for her, he finds her drunk. As he escorts his woozy daughter back to their motel, he tells her, “Don’t throw up on that dress or we’ll have to tell your mother everything.” Meadow’s underage drinking is not the only secret the two keep from Carmela after the trip. It is in this episode that Tony admits to Meadow he’s in the Mafia (she’s relieved they have “that kind of relationship”), but two episodes later, when Carmela asks Tony if Meadow has ever mentioned his mob connections, he flashes back to their road-trip conversation and shakes his head no. Smiling slightly, Tony is pleased to learn Meadow confides in him instead of Carmela and pointedly continues to keep that secret from his wife (“Down Neck,” 1.7). Tony’s narcissistic and erotic feelings toward Meadow come to the fore again in the following season in “Bust-Out” (2.10). One night, Meadow arrives home to find Tony drinking alone in the Soprano kitchen, and even in the darkness of the room, Tony’s shadowy impulses are apparent. Twice Tony asks her, “Do you know that I love you?” and after Meadow says yes, he responds by casting his wife as the villain: “Your mother doesn’t think I love you enough.” Glen O. Gabbard has noted that Tony “turns to Meadow as a confidante” here, enticing her to reject Carmela in favor of the “father-daughter bond” (146). Using another classic move in the repertoire of the seductive father, Tony repeatedly calls Meadow “Baby,” a pet name often reserved for lovers. Furthermore, during this conversation, Tony confides, “I tell people you’re like your mother, but you’re all me: Nothing gets by you, and I know you think I’m a hypocrite . . .” In her analysis of this scene, Josephine Gattuso Hendin argues that in Meadow, Tony sees “his other, better self, as shrewd as he is, but more polished” (64). According to Gattuso Hendin, Tony needs to see the best in Meadow in order to see the best in himself. But he also wants his daughter to idealize him in return: when Meadow submits to his desire to be mirrored (“Sometimes we’re all hypocrites,” she assures him), his pleasure—another satisfied smile to himself—is undeniable. At this point in the series, Meadow doesn’t always capitulate to Tony’s erotic and narcissistic impulses. When Tony admits his Mafia ties, claiming that Italians didn’t always have options, she retorts, “Like Mario Cuomo?” (“College”); and she excuses herself from the kitchen when Tony’s drunken proclamations make her feel too uncomfortable (“Bust Out”). As an adolescent on the brink of independence, her desire to separate from both parents is strong. But in the end, it’s obvious she is not fully outside his reach.

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Serious rifts in their bond don’t occur until Meadow is in college and starts dating men. Like a typical seductive father, Tony doesn’t approve of his daughter’s romantic choices and he interferes with her relationships. It’s a scenario that would be hard for any daughter to navigate, but Meadow also has to grapple with Tony’s sociopathic rage, which comes out in full force regarding her lovers. One by one, he poisons her relationships with Noah, Jackie Jr., and Finn (Meadow’s first fiancé), resorting to threats, violence, and ultimately murder. When Tony meets Noah, he hurls racial slurs at the half-Jewish, half-black boy, then shortcircuits into a panic attack (“Proshai, Livushka,” 3.2). With Finn, he marks Meadow as his territory after the young man pays for dinner without Tony’s permission. He yells, “You eat—I pay. When you have a family of your own, you pay” (“Unidentified Black Males,” 5.9). In the same episode, he also endangers Finn by getting him a job at a mobbed-up construction site, and the ramifications of that decision eventually lead Meadow and Finn to part. But Tony’s treatment of Jackie Jr. is the most extreme. After Tony catches Jackie at a strip club mid–lap dance, he beats him up for betraying Meadow (“To Save Us All from Satan’s Power,” 3.10). Ultimately, he sanctions a hit against Jackie (“Amour Fou,” 3.12). Because Jackie is a reflection of Tony’s worst behaviors as a husband and father, when Tony tussles with Jackie, he is essentially wrestling with his own shadow. As Kieffer explains, “Many [seductive fathers] project their disavowed erotic feelings onto potential suitors, characterizing them all as potential roués from whom their daughters require protection” (77). Or to borrow Meadow’s language, “Sometimes we’re all hypocrites.” Patrick, Meadow’s fiancé at the series’ close, is the only one of Meadow’s lovers to escape Tony’s punishment. But let’s remember that Tony commits one of his most brutal acts of violence immediately after learning of Patrick and Meadow’s relationship. In “The Second Coming” (6.19), Meadow confides two pieces of distressing news to Carmela and Tony over coffee in the Soprano kitchen. First, she reports that she and her date (whom she has yet to identify) were accosted the night before by a Brooklyn associate of Tony’s named Coco. When Tony hears about Coco’s crass remarks to his daughter, he tells her not to worry and that he’ll “talk to someone.” Although his blood is clearly up by that point, Tony remains calm, staying seated at the table. It is not until Meadow reveals the identity of her mystery date that he springs from his chair, prompting a shocked Carmela to demand where he’s going. The

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next time the audience sees Tony, he is ambushing Coco at a New York restaurant—leaving a trail of blood and broken teeth in his wake. Because of the sequence of events before the attack, it is clear that Coco is not taking a beating for his behavior alone; he is also the recipient of Tony’s displaced rage regarding Meadow’s new lover. Tony’s anger here is twofold: on a manifest level, he is enraged that Coco has disrespected both him and Meadow by treating her as a sexual object; below the surface, he is furious that Patrick has engaged Meadow as a sexual subject. Like Carmela—who asks Meadow, “All those times you told me you were staying with your friend Kimmy in the city, I suppose you were staying at [Patrick’s] apartment?”—Tony surmises his daughter’s new relationship is sexual in nature. Notice his choice of words as he savagely beats Coco: “My fucking daughter! My fucking daughter!” Later in the episode, Tony notices a tooth peeking out from the cuff of his pants, which he surreptitiously attempts to hide. The image of the bloody tooth is telling, because it harkens back to Tony’s extended nightmare in “The Test Dream” (5.11). In that dream, Tony and Carmela attend a dinner celebrating Meadow’s engagement to then-fiancé Finn, a dental student. Before the meal, one of Tony’s teeth comes out, and he conceals it in his pocket, but another falls out at the table. As Maurice Yacowar has observed, the bloody teeth symbolize Tony’s anxiety over losing Meadow to another man: “Tony meets would-be dentist Finn’s parents [and] spits out bloody teeth. The fiancé’s imminent power weakens the father” (269). A bloody tooth is used yet again in “The Second Coming” to remind us that Tony is still haunted by Meadow’s inevitable sexual maturation. Tony’s reactions to Noah, Finn, Jackie Jr., and Patrick illustrate the seductive father’s aggression toward his daughter’s lovers. Meadow alternates between acknowledging Tony’s behavior and denying it, and although his aggression disturbs their relationship, it doesn’t sever it. The force of their connection is most evident in the season six episode “Mayham” (6.3). Tony is in a coma after being shot by Uncle Junior, existing in a dreamlike state. When, in the external world, he goes into cardiac arrest, he is about to enter the Inn at the Oaks, seemingly a manifestation of the afterlife. But through the twilight, his daughter’s bedside pleas come through—“Don’t leave us, Daddy! We love you!”—and he returns to the land of the living. It is here that we see the depth of Tony’s investment in the seductive father-daughter dynamic. It is important to note, first of all, how Meadow’s voice reaches Tony in his comatose state. It is the voice of a young Meadow—at about age four, it’s fair to guess. That

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would be the point in her development when Tony loomed the largest, the most powerful, and the most seductive. In his unconscious fantasies, that is how he would like to remain. Second, we should bear in mind the configuration of Meadow and Carmela in the hospital room. Meadow stands closer to Tony, with Carmela behind her, which suggests that the daughter holds the privileged place in the Oedipal triangle. And third, let’s recognize that Tony hears only his daughter’s voice from beyond, even though the hospital room is filled with family, including his wife. It is not Carmela’s voice that retrieves him, but Meadow’s. The Oedipal victor is clear. But that kind of victory comes with a price. In their clinical practices, Lax and Kieffer find these “favored daughters” are burdened by guilt because their erotic longings for their fathers have been reciprocated on some level, however subtle. (Kahn reminds us that on the unconscious level, “the wish is equivalent to the act” [81].) A favored daughter may feel the need to punish herself because she believes she has won her father away and supplanted her mother (Kieffer 74). This may lead the daughter to avoid sexual relationships with men all together, or compel her to get involved in masochistic love relationships (Lax 313; Kieffer 74). She may even sabotage her own career success (Lax 313). Or, because the daughter senses she has been designated as her father’s true partner, she may wholly “dedicate herself to him” (Lax 313). It is not impossible for favored daughters to disentangle themselves from the seductive dynamic with their fathers; but as Lax points out, “it is the father’s seductive role and its intensity that evokes the girl’s incestuous wishes directed toward him” (308). We have seen the strength of Tony’s unconscious investment, so we know Meadow has an uphill battle. In some ways, it seems like Meadow avoids the described outcomes. She is applying to law school (not medical school, as her parents had hoped), and she has plans to marry. She hasn’t sabotaged her career success and she hasn’t avoided a mature romantic partnership. Plus, her fiancé recognizes her talents, and we see him encourage Meadow not to devalue herself after she makes a self-deprecating remark (“Made in America,” 6.21), so it seems she has escaped a masochistic relationship as well. On a conscious level, she may believe she is achieving autonomy because she has picked a man we learn her parents never liked and a career they don’t favor (“The Second Coming,” 6.19). But choosing the son of a mobster like her dad allows her to avoid the conflict she had with her “civilian” boyfriends like Noah and Finn. Since Patrick grew

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up under the same set of circumstances as Meadow, he will presumably never force her to choose between himself and Tony, as someone outside the family might. By marrying a man who is virtually her cousin, she stays within the clan and assuages Tony’s persistent dread over losing his family. Meadow’s decision to become a civil rights lawyer also ties into her relationship to Tony. As she explains in “Made in America,” in the FBI’s treatment of her father, she sees a parallel to the discrimination faced by recent immigrants, the people she plans on defending. Her quest “to keep the state from crushing the individual” can easily be read as a sublimation of her desire to protect Tony from the feds. After all, with Tony’s shooting and subsequent arrest on a gun charge, Meadow has her own dread to contend with. She is faced with the unavoidable reality that she may one day lose her father. Furthermore, after interning at a hospital and the Bronx law center, Meadow is equipped with more knowledge than Carmela and is in a better position to protect Tony from death or prison. Her superior power could only reinforce the inevitability of her Oedipal victory. As with many favored daughters, her sense of responsibility is acute: in the hospital, she advocates for Tony’s care; on the outside, she fearlessly argues on his behalf to the cops. Tony eventually recovers from his injury, but potential legal problems will always loom on the horizon. What better way for Meadow to serve him than by getting a law degree? One could argue that casting Tony as a persecuted victim of the state is a way for Meadow to strip him of his Oedipal power, but this strategy only binds her closer to him, for she has set herself up as his protector. In the pilot episode, we see Meadow trying to sneak back into the Soprano home but stymied by a locked window. By the finale, we learn that the door to her father’s house will always be open to her. Against the audience’s expectations, she has chosen to stay, but I hope I have shown the unique pressures she’s had to contend with as Tony Soprano’s favored daughter. All hope is not lost, however. As David Chase has said of Meadow’s trajectory, “It’s not ideal. It’s not what the parents dreamed of. But it’s better than it was. Tiny, little bits of progress, that’s how it works” (Martin 185). Meadow, like any favored daughter, can work toward liberating herself from the unconscious yokes of guilt and responsibility, step by step: by recognizing her father’s seductive behavior, acknowledging its allure, and willfully resisting and withstanding the fallout. No easy task, but a shrink could help. Since Tony has left therapy, I understand Dr. Melfi has an open slot on her schedule . . .

PART 3

Gendering The Sopranos

“Blabbermouth Cunts”; or, Speaking in Tongues Narrative Crises for Women in The Sopranos and Feminist Dilemmas Kim Akass and Janet McCabe

Talking about the Sopranos women always gets us into some kind of trouble. In trying to make sense of the closed Soprano world defined by family, Mafia, Catholicism, and strict generic rules, we continually question our investment in a TV universe that does women few favors. The more we struggle to find appropriate ways to think and talk about the Soprano women and their compromised, corrupted, complex lives, the more we come up against the limits of discourse. Maybe we should just learn to keep our mouths shut. Capisce? And yet, rarely has there been a character on television that has fascinated us more than Carmela Soprano. We may revel in the ways that the Sex and the City girls spark sedition, delight in the emotional complexities of the Six Feet Under women, but we always come back to Carmela. We cannot let her go. Our struggle to deconstruct our obsession with her has been integral to our feminist journey over the past eight years. She provokes complex emotions, pushing us to think in uncomfortable ways, in directions that both repel and surprise us; and she challenges our feminism, sometimes shaking it to its very core, as she forces us to the limits of how to speak about and understand such matters. In her review of Reading The Sopranos for Feminist Media Studies, Jane Widdess fails to understand why any feminist would bother writing about Carmela Soprano. Study the inequalities between women maybe,

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analyze how Catholicism kowtows to male power perhaps, but to interrogate a character with not “a feminist thought in her head” is an utterly pointless exercise. At the root of Widdess’s discontent is the dismissal of a character like Carmela. It appears futile to her to read the Mafia wife as anything other than “the princess in the tower, bored, isolated, and entirely dependent on her keeper” (155). What this review illustrates is just how difficult it is to get a handle on the women in The Sopranos; or, more precisely, how what gets revealed when exploring such complex representations more often than not becomes entangled in questions of what can and cannot be said, of who has permission to speak, of how to say it, and of censoring and censure. No one would ever claim Carmela for feminism; but at the same time, no one should dismiss her either. Over the past eight years we have, through Carmela, studied a character that exposes the more troubling aspects of being female and feminine in our complex postfeminist age of troubled emancipation. So how do women negotiate this most patriarchal of narrative worlds; and, in turn, how can contemporary feminist criticism speak of such matters, talking about women like Carmela—no feminist, slipping through the cracks, not quite making the theoretical cut, representing a dominance many of us find hard to reconcile ourselves with, but who proves utterly compelling nonetheless. Unlike the Sex and the City women, who generate a lot of chatter, the Sopranos women do not inspire the same level of certainty. Instead, only hesitancy, confusion, hand wringing, and contradiction remain. Feminist criticism is often quite literally lost for words as the Sopranos women push us to the very limits of our language.

Beyond the Bada Bing We started writing about the Sopranos women back in 2001. The aim of that essay (“Beyond the Bada Bing”) was to explore how they carved out narrative power and influence from the most unpromising and uncompromising of situations. It was an idea based on our observations that it was through the characters of his wife and his therapist, Dr. Jennifer Melfi, that we learn just how complicated Tony Soprano really is. The moral ambiguity identified by many critics, including Stephen Holden of the New York Times (“The Sopranos: An Introduction,” xviii), as key to viewers’ empathy with a mobster boss who commits heinous crimes, we believed, was intimately connected to the narrative position of these

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two women. It is from their perspective, we argued, that we get to know (as he tells his most intimate secrets to both women) someone we morally judge (as Carmela confesses his crimes to her priest and psychiatrist) and someone we psychologically study and analyze (as Jennifer dispenses advice while talking about him to her own therapist as well as her ex-husband). The point is that Tony’s character emerges through ambiguous narrative and generic spaces defined by women whose attitudes toward him are profoundly morally confused and paradoxical. So, we set to work in an effort to uncover the ways in which Jennifer and Carmela wield power over Tony’s narrative. First, we identified how the females performed a crucial structuring task, which was to integrate the brutal (and filmic) “man of the city,” with what Robert Warshow has called “the city’s language and knowledge” (101), into suburban, middle-class America, with its generic rules and narrative rhythms. Each week, made visible in the credit sequence, this shift from the self-contained cinematic world of male violence and defined action into a televisual one shaped by ambiguity and contradiction was re-enacted by Tony as he drives away from the outskirts of New York City and into the leafy New Jersey suburbs. In a series in which the mobster finds himself in unfamiliar generic territory characterized by mundane chores and domestic concerns, women play an important role in referencing the new narrative spaces through which the Mafia don must progress. Long denied an authoritative voice within the hostile world of the gangster genre, women subtly shape this serial arc, using strategies associated with soap opera and family drama—listening and confession, gossip and silence, talking heads and interpersonal skills—to do so. Moving outside Tony’s immediate family to his therapy sessions with Jennifer proved another privileged space for commentary and reflection. It allowed the male to speak and the female to listen as a way of unlocking and making sense of his narrative. In early episodes, Jennifer advised Tony on how to negotiate his recalcitrant mother, offering him coping strategies for managing his crew, while at the same time interpreting his dreams and uttering what he could not. This privileged position, occupied by someone outside both of Tony’s families, was always a precarious one; and, as the series progressed, Jennifer became ever more entangled in her enthrallment of his performance of male power and her knowledge of its untenable reality. Jennifer foreshadowed the confusion between the issue of male power, violence, and the representation

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of it. Despite her attempt to demystify his tormented soul and pathological dysfunctionalism, Jennifer was, at the beginning at least, responsible for keeping Tony’s narcissistic self—and our fascination with it—in place. Although her motives for wanting to treat him remained paradoxical, as she became ever more drawn to him, her ambivalent fascination with Tony functioned as a surrogate for ours. Jennifer’s vicarious position, attempting to unlock the “hidden Tony,” gave us the perfect cover to explore our fascination with the appeal of our (anti)hero. The random rape of Jennifer in “Employee of the Month” (3.4), however, proved cathartic. It remains one of the most shocking, excruciating, and viciously brutal scenes of male violence against women (matched only by Ralphie Cifaretto’s frenzied and fatal beating of Tracee three episodes later). In the aftermath of the rape, what had gone unsaid for three seasons violently erupted. Given that Jennifer is a smart, articulate, and independent woman, someone with considerable narrative agency up until this point, her sexual violation is further compounded by a symbolic subjugation as the legal system fails to exact justice when her rapist is released on a technicality. Even her ex, Dr. Richard La Penna, does little to help. Is her word not enough? Michel Foucault tells us that speaking about sex plays directly into power, the knowledge of which is, in turn, used by authorities for the intention of exacting social control (Will to Knowledge, 57–70); but, as Tania Modleski writes, “for women, the paradoxes of speaking what they take to be the Truth about sex, especially when it concerns an act of sexual abuse perpetrated against them, are more excruciating than any encountered in Foucault” (15). Jennifer’s rape exacts more than violence on her body. Her narrative position also takes a hit. It speaks to questions of female credibility, of how women’s stories get legitimated; there is also a lingering and unspoken sense that the narrative has taken its revenge on a woman who doesn’t quite play by established generic (patriarchal) rules. These are desperate times. But is there not something else, something even more unsettling here? It is a revelation that comes at the end of “Employee of the Month.” Sitting before Tony, physically battered and emotionally raw. Poised on the edge of her seat. Ready to sing like a canary. The camera slowly tracks in, almost imperceptibly, as we witness Jennifer maintaining her professional composure while struggling with the fantasy of unleashing Tony and his mob-style retribution on her assailant. It is a wrestling of

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conscience for which we have been primed. A dream has hallucinated her dilemma. Therapy allowed for its analysis. Interpreting the nightmare for Dr. Elliot Kupferberg, Jennifer spits out her fury for her rapist and a legal system that supports him: “No feeling has ever been so sweet as to see that pig beg and plead and scream for his life ’cause this justice system is fucked up.” Never have we heard Jennifer reveal so much of herself—of her state of mind, of her emotional turmoil. We may desire that she spill the beans, confess everything to Tony, but we know that there is always a price to pay when a woman articulates her desires—for she will become enclosed in the Soprano world and subject to its rules. Jennifer, of course, does not cross that line: she keeps her mouth shut. But is this any reason for us to stop writing about Jennifer? Maybe not. Still, we were not the only ones who had trouble with her character as the series increasingly struggled to find her new story lines. Jennifer may not have been taken out to the backwoods to meet an untimely end, but the narrative certainly whacked her character. In fact, after the rape the series never quite knew what to do with her. It is as if it could not deal with what it had done to her: a textual trauma that the narrative worked hard to repress and seemed reluctant to revisit. Her function scaled back, reduced to acting as Tony’s sounding board or the object of his sexual infatuation. Both roles had minimal impact on the action. From this time forth, violence is repeatedly inflicted on Jennifer; from the verbal abuse she suffers, as when Tony, following her rejection of his sexual advances, storms out of the office hollering that she is a “cunt” (“Two Tonys,” 5.1), to a narrative failing to advance her character beyond a simpering, melodramatic heroine. How could The Sopranos get her character so wrong? Maybe one of the lessons to draw from this narrative denouement is a creative one, pure and simple. It seems to us no small coincidence that Jennifer’s limited professional effectiveness in the last season directly relates to the 2006 departure of writers Robin Green and Mitchell Burgess. After six seasons treating Tony, despite being counseled to the contrary by friends and family, Jennifer’s sudden decision to terminate therapy in the penultimate episode makes no sense. It is out of character, a narrative faux pas in a series that takes its nuance and complexity very seriously. But the narrative travesty that befell Jennifer happened long before the Green-Burgess departure. Her permission to speak was predicated

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on her counsel of a guilt-ridden son, prone to panic attacks, dealing with an emotionally manipulative mother. Once Nancy Marchand, who played Livia, succumbed to cancer in real life, and her character was subsequently killed off, the Oedipal story arc more or less ended—and Jennifer’s role to pathologize Tony’s relationship with his mother and “put it into discourse” (Foucault, Will to Knowledge, 11) became superfluous. Given that Tony’s dysfunctional relationship with Livia required a ritual of confession, the therapy session guided and shaped by Jennifer provided a privileged and circumscribed space of resistance and revelation that powered the narrative. It was where her true authority lay. Once the reason for therapy no longer existed, Jennifer, in the absence of her crossover into the Sopranos’ world, really had nowhere to go. But Jennifer also started to say too much, particularly after the rape. By revealing too many uncomfortable truths, she is put in an untenable narrative position. Once she starts to narrate her (erotic) fascination with Tony, she becomes dangerously entangled in patriarchal power and knowledge. Taken to the very limits, theoretically tied up in knots. Jennifer’s confession—either as a dream sequence or uttered within the therapeutic space—is taken charge of by “the authority of a language that has been carefully expurgated so that it is no longer directly named” (Foucault, Will to Knowledge, 20). Her desires become subject to meticulous rules. Nowhere can a better example be found than when Jennifer speaks of her erotic fantasies and hands them over for interpretation to her therapist, Elliot, played by none other than U.S. film auteur Peter Bogdanovich. Calling her fantasy by its name is costly. Something indecent is revealed, and a veil must be drawn over it. Through her confession, Jennifer inevitably becomes enclosed, in the words of Foucault, in a “triple edict of taboo, non-existence and silence” (Will to Knowledge, 5). Carmela. Now she is a different matter. She knows how to keep her blabbermouth shut—doesn’t she?

“I’m Not a Feminist but . . . Jeez”; or, Carmela’s Last Stand Although we had identified ways in which Carmela carved out a formidable narrative authority within The Sopranos’ text, as feminists we have long been troubled and intrigued by her in equal measure. What is it about this contradictory yet compelling character that kept (and keeps) pulling us back? She lives a comfortable life partly paid for by prostitu-

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tion. Tolerates her husband’s infidelities for the payoff of a $25,000 fur coat. Busies herself with charitable deeds and yet is quite prepared to shake down a neighbor’s sister for a college recommendation for daughter Meadow. She supports widowed girlfriends with baked goods and sympathy, but only until her husband tells her to terminate the friendship. So, what is it about this character that betrays every feminist ideal we hold dear that we find so darned appealing? For us, at least, there is no other character than Carmela Soprano that best represents the uncomfortable dilemmas and paradoxes marking the postfeminist age. Using Carmela as an example of what Deborah L. Siegel calls the “multiple and contradictory aspects of both individual and collective identities” (53) marking the troubled face of contemporary feminist politics, we desired to find a third-wave strategy and use our criticism as a form of activism. Accepting that women like Carmela are not feminists but have a lot to teach us about living within patriarchal strictures proved a starting point. Next, it was crucial for us to interrogate the narrative while in progress, while the fates of characters were still unknown, before meaning had been closed down completely. If, as Siegel argues, third-wave feminism is shaped “by the politics of ambiguity” (60), where better to test this theory than with Carmela Soprano, acknowledging that contradiction and paradox are not only the preserve of theoretical inquiry but are embedded right into the very patriarchal forms that represent such a woman? Let us be clear about this. We know how representation works. And despite constantly working to maintain a necessary theoretical distance it is true to say that, at times, we too were seduced, carried along, in the words of Laura Mulvey, by “the scruff of the text” (29). To be sure, Carmela has much to tell us about our continued investment in approved heterosexual scripts. But, in the face of her power played right under the nose of patriarchy, and driven by Edie Falco’s award-winning performance—when she breaks her silence at the end of season four and starts to blab—our investment in her previously unassailable narrative position comes tumbling down. Like Jennifer before her, Carmela’s fall from grace is precipitated by an act of confession, a confession of desire. Except this time, it is not desire for Tony and the phallic power he embodies but a romantic Dionysian fantasy lover, Furio Giunta, Tony’s violent henchman. Giving voice to her unconsummated lust for Furio and articulating what the text must keep hidden, the very cultural, textual, and generic

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rules that assure Carmela’s position as a force to be reckoned with are violated. And we too have to admit how much we had invested in Carmela keeping silent, shoring up the very sexist and patriarchal edifices that give her power within representation, colluding with that very ideology feminists have long railed against. After all, is that not where our pleasure lies? Good grief, have we learned nothing? Season five finds Carmela seeking a divorce from Tony. Our hope was that her bid for a fair divorce settlement would give insight into how to resist an intransigent patriarchal law. But we should have known better. Nothing is ever that simple when it comes to Carmela. The old rules no longer apply. Her punishment for wanting out finds her losing authority over her children, reduced to melodramatic victim. The potential erotic liberation offered by her fantasy of the dark and brooding Furio goes nowhere; what gets exposed instead is her use of erotic barter to work her angles. What could have been a narrative critiquing patriarchal law and its constraints turns into something far more sinister—and problematic. Without the protection of laws defining her power, and without sanction from the Soprano marriage, Carmela is driven out, denied and reduced to silence. Aggressively pursuing equitable distribution of their assets she is told by Tony in no uncertain terms that she is entitled to “shit” (“Unidentified Black Males,” 5.9). What emerges is the “omnipotent armature” (Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 301) of Tony Soprano. With his far-reaching networks, and command of the narrative, he is able to set in motion an entire process that will turn Carmela into an outlaw. Of course, she can never be outside the law; she is, in fact, always inside Mafia power and generic rules, subject to conventions, prohibitions, and controls. It is in and through Tony’s exercise (rather than possession) of authority that docility is inculcated and a dependent wife returned to him. An uncomfortable sight to be sure. But as dedicated viewers we know that women like Carmela own “the world of emotions in The Sopranos”; it is “their turf, their thing” (Barreca, “Why I Like the Women in The Sopranos,” 32). Way past when a film or television text punished women for resisting generic rules, for rejecting the patriarch, and owning their own desire, this episodic drama series presents us with women cognizant of the collateral damage that will be sustained in the narrative turf war with the obstinate gangster and

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an intransient patriarchal law. One only need think of the fate of Adriana La Cerva to see how it can go so terribly wrong (“Long Term Parking,” 5.12). For not playing it smart with the FBI and keeping stumm, Adriana ends up in a secluded wood with two bullets in her. Carmela may be down, but she is not out. Paralleled with Adriana’s tragic demise is Carmela’s taking Tony back. Assuring her that his philandering has ended, Tony promises that his “midlife crisis problems will no longer intrude on [Carmela] anymore.” Concluding negotiations, she wants “something else in her life.” Settling for a property deal for the time being, she asks him for $600,000 for a piece of land on which to build houses. Tony agrees and, shortly after, moves back home. Celebrating, he toasts his family with champagne: “To the people I love. Nothing else matters.” Maybe so. But his words and gesture remind us that the New Jersey capo looms over everything, the symbolic power in which no crime, no offence, no contravention goes unpunished (look what happened to poor Adriana for thinking it could be any different). Which, in turn, makes us realize just how powerful Carmela’s resistance really is. Resistance is everywhere in power relations. But far from refusing to accept authority and becoming doomed to perpetual defeat, Carmela wields hers as a discursive strategy that modifies and codifies power relations in The Sopranos.

Troubling the Text; or, Trouble in the Text Through our heated exchanges, it has become apparent that whenever we write about Carmela—her desire, her will-to-empowerment—she is to a large extent impossible to write. But let us be clear here: what we mean is that we have to struggle for language, for the right tools to open up this representation to meaning. She embodies neither bell hooks’s woman most victimized by sexist oppression nor Betty Friedan’s bored middle-class housewife—despite exhibiting traces of both. She gives representation to the outside—outside the ethnic and social mainstream—talking about identities anew; and she is more than this. But that is not the point. Even while we understand that representations of women like Carmela emerge as ambiguous and ambivalent precisely because they are made visible in and managed through coded types of patriarchal discourse—institutions like family, marriage, and religion, as well as causeand-effect narratives and strict generic rules—we nonetheless remain

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ensnared in those very fantasies that we are working so hard to deconstruct. Carmela may live the ambivalence and contradiction of the postfeminist woman, but, inevitably, so do we. Straddling the pleasure/ danger divide that has long split feminism, and studying a character that puts those very paradoxes into discourse, is no easy matter. Especially when the fantasy of female power wielded under the very nose of patriarchy is so devilishly delicious. And it seems to us that representations like Carmela tell us much about the limitations of feminist thought, defined by generational schisms as well as theoretical struggles that work to explain and talk about the differing stages of womanhood and female experience. Carmela must, at some level, be rigorously repressed by feminism. She is incompatible with a radical, leftist feminist ideology (as illustrated by Widdess’s critique), because the knowledge gained from her representation is seen as having little or nothing to say about the feminist project. On another level, and something far more problematic, is our investment in narratives bearing traces of age-old power structures that reduce women to nonexistence, silence, and prohibition. Some feminists may reject Carmela as surely as she rejects feminism, but there must be a way for us to talk about problematic representations like hers without taking recourse to what Amber Hollibaugh calls “our collective fear of the dangers of television [which has] forced us into a position where we have created a theory from the body of damage done to us” (486). Catherine Lumby names the problem for contemporary feminist scholarship. Writing that “if feminism is to remain engaged with and relevant to the everyday lives of women, feminism desperately needs the tools to understand everyday culture” (174), she urges us to find new, more-appropriate ways of thinking and writing about popular culture. One of those ways is by using criticism as activism. We are constantly troubling the text, dialoguing with different (often contradictory) methodologies, with other feminists, as well as each other, to participate in a feminist dialectic. We choose to write as a dialogue; it is a political choice. It is one made by women over and over again, working as a collective, embracing our contesting opinions and making meaning from that dialectic: we write as we continue to talk. But such a dialogue is predicated upon forms of power and knowledge, and is historically contingent. Historicity inevitably penetrates representation. Revisiting Carmela time and again over the years, describing her representation at particular historical moments and at different cul-

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tural times, she emerges as nothing more than a discursive construct. Ideas about her appear, experiences reflected, rationalities formed, only to dissolve and vanish; replaced in the next season with a new logic and different ideas. So, for example, the cultural ideals and ideas about motherhood that Carmela makes visible in a post-9/11 world, which witnessed an entrenchment of gender roles, are very different from those she represented when The Sopranos first aired in 1999. Our task is to locate a form of peripatetic criticism that can account for such discursiveness and vicissitudes in the text. Only by talking to each other, troubling our dialogue with the text, allowing one piece of criticism to inform another, contradict it even, can we make visible new ways of talking about the complexity of characters with an inbuilt self-reflexivity. But this is no easy matter. To paraphrase Foucault, we find it difficult to speak on the subject without striking a different pose; we are conscious to defy established power, adopt a different tone to show that we know we are being subversive (Will to Knowledge, 6), but we are also keenly aware of risking opprobrium and of being censured ourselves for our sedition in engaging with power structures that legitimize or discredit women when they speak. Which is why the original title for this paper got us into a lot of trouble.

“Cunnilingus and Psychiatry Have Brought Us to This” When we submitted a version of this paper to the Sopranos conference, we chose a title that best described the dilemma of women speaking in the series. Discrediting his paramour, who had confided to her friends that he had “acquired a taste for her,” Corrado Soprano (better known as Uncle Junior) calls her a “blabbermouth cunt” (“Boca,” 1.9). To us, it encapsulated the precariousness women face when breaking silence and articulating experience. It is a question of legitimacy: who is authorized in the Sopranos world to own desire and utter that experience. Our paper accepted and presentation done, we were invited to meet with the university administration at Fordham. Leaving aside the fact that the original transgressor, Dominic Chianese, who played Uncle Junior, had been speaking that very afternoon, we were asked to talk about our choice of title. What was originally described as an informal sit-down about how Fordham handles controversy soon turned into an

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inquisition where we were forced to defend our scholarship. Discretion was advised; and an imperative soon established where we were meant to confess our digression that had contravened the meticulous institutional rules of Fordham. None of those assembled had heard our paper. It didn’t matter. We were still subject to their censure. Let us be clear. This was not about managing controversy at all but about “the forbidding of certain words, the decency of expressions, . . . the censorings of vocabulary” (Foucault, Will to Knowledge, 21). The morality of a man calling a woman a “blabbermouth cunt” as a means of silencing her was never questioned. We were the only delegates brought in for this kind of questioning.

Honoring the Social Compact The Last Temptation of Melfi Nancy McGuire Roche

The overriding plot arc of the thirtieth episode of The Sopranos, “Employee of the Month” (3.4), explicitly portrays Dr. Jennifer Melfi’s temptation to have her most dangerous and sociopathic patient, Tony Soprano, revenge the violent attack and rape she suffers in an empty parking garage. Although such a plotline seems fairly straightforward, the story unfolds in a complex and often unexpected sequence of events. The underlying narrative is driven both by visual reference and by the progression of thematic scenes. Tension is created by segue, as lessurgent aspects of narrative slow and accelerate information given to the viewer. The primary design of this episode regards Melfi’s welfare, as well as the subsequent fate of her attacker. Most notable is the fact that this episode creates an empathy toward Dr. Melfi that is more powerful than in any story line explored thus far. In “Employee of the Month,” the viewer is presented with a larger glimpse of Melfi’s life away from the defining environment of her office, a location the viewer is most familiar with, and thus most comfortably seated in. The charged moment that passes between Tony Soprano and Dr. Melfi at the end of the episode is more potent than any flirtation, or even sexual engagement, could have generated. The underlying stimulus for this effect is a complete reversal of roles between these two major characters. Even though the action is encrypted by physical gesture and meaningless murmur, this scene presents a view of Tony as concerned and comforting, while Melfi is revealed as vulnerable and wounded.

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Tony comforts Melfi with a close physical presence and soft words. Ironically, this is the most profound interaction between Melfi and Tony that Sopranos viewers will experience. In this moment, the relationship between the two characters becomes intimately welded. During their history, Tony has come at Dr. Melfi with violent rage, declarations of love, romantic gestures, verbal sparring, and even open contempt—he has yet to approach her so intimately. It is here the Sopranos fan comes to the realization that Dr. Melfi is in it for the long haul, that analysis with Tony will continue for the arc of the series. It becomes clear that Dr. Melfi somehow needs the doctorpatient relationship with Tony as much as he requires her for psychoanalysis and as a nonsexual, nonjudgmental female constant in his life. In “Employee of the Month,” Dr. Melfi’s relationships with the men in her life also come into scrutiny. She and the viewer experience nonverbal epiphanies simultaneously. In terms of eliciting emotion and empathy from the observer, this technique is sublimely powerful. The spectator suddenly experiences certain knowledge, as Melfi herself makes the realization. The audience reacts and thinks alongside Melfi. She becomes the analysand, the subject of observation and analysis. “Employee of the Month” not only presents a different perspective between Tony and Dr. Melfi, it also presents several views of women within the social milieu. Women’s place in the hierarchy of sexual society is observed, and, as always, the series addresses the different views of women’s roles by Old World or patriarchal society and by contemporary American culture. As usual, The Sopranos operates on a multitiered level of encounters with narrative. An individual character is addressed, a plot unfolds, the relationship between Dr. Melfi and Tony Soprano is further explored, and all the while postmodern culture is probed and exposed. One of the ongoing concerns for characters in The Sopranos is the permeable membrane between modern and traditional mores. In the very first episode, we learn that Tony Soprano is concerned with the dissolving institution of omertà in the society of Cosa Nostra. The preservation of Italian American tradition is an oft-explored theme as well. Thus, Tony’s personal relationship with his family and the devolving structure of the American family is constantly evoked. One of the most visited thematic sources of observation, be it latent or blatant, is the current status of women. It is important to note that “Employee of the Month” was cowrit-

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ten by Robin Green. Any television episode that uses violence against women as a plot device seems, somehow, less gratuitous when fashioned with a woman in the mix. Green is a graduate of Brown University, where she studied American literature, as well as the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, where she earned an MFA in creative writing. A close observation of “Employee of the Month” reveals a cross-cultural and multifaceted view of women’s roles in society, and an evocative message about the perils of independence. Dr. Melfi is Italian American, as is Tony, as is her ex-husband, Richard La Penna. Her attacker, Jesus Rossi, we are led to believe, is of Hispanic and Italian heritage, two very traditional, patriarchal cultures. It seems plausible that Green and Mitchell Burgess, the authors, were creating not only a revelation about Richard La Penna’s Italian American Anti-Defamation League activity, but also a comment on traditional culture in general that divides women into Madonna and whore, prey and property. In “Employee of the Month,” the interaction between Dr. Melfi and Tony escapes the bounds of their established relationship, as well as exploring the possibilities of a positive symbiosis between these two characters. The role of women as sex objects and objects of ridicule is also probed. Dr. Melfi, who is, without a doubt, the most independent and intelligent of the female characters in The Sopranos, also experiences the worst peril for an autonomous female. As a liberated woman, and thus a free agent, Melfi, leaving work, finds herself in an unprotected domain and is violated. One of the subplots to “Employee of the Month” includes the introduction and subsequent ridicule of Ginny Sacramoni’s obesity. A later episode, “The Weight” (4.4), exposes the consequences of such derision. Thus, the female body in its most sublime and grotesque forms is examined. The spectator will also observe more than once in “Employee of the Month” the male interpretation of a singularly female situation: rape. A link between rape and body type, the risk factor of violence against a woman who is independent versus one who is male dependent, of the female who is a “free agent” versus the one who is “property,” is the primary subliminal text of “Employee of the Month.” Not only are the roles of various female characters of The Sopranos explored, but one is also given a glance at the men in Melfi’s life, who are essentially the antithesis of Tony Soprano and his gang of criminals. As the Soprano

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crew may be examined closely to reveal that none are noble savages or outlaw kings, the men in Melfi’s circle seem equally a parody of the domesticated male. They are ineffective, almost effeminate, postfeminist stereotypes. “Employee of the Month” also examines the continued relationship between Melfi and Tony as doctor and patient, after Melfi’s realization that Tony could and would easily vindicate her attack. To complicate the outcome further, the arrest of Melfi’s rapist has been bungled by law enforcement agents, leading Melfi into temptation to violate the “social compact” and see justice done. Although Melfi does not yield to this temptation, she is suddenly devastated and emotional when Tony appears to take her up on her suggestion to switch to a behaviorist. If she does not choose to use him as an agent of vengeance at that moment, having him nearby is an assurance. In an analogous plot structure, Janice Soprano is also the victim of a violent assault in this episode. Yet here, the viewer feels little or no sympathy toward Janice’s situation. The main device of this parallel narrative is to provide the viewer with a concrete vision of undeserved brutality versus an act that is perpetrated in retaliation to crime itself. Although both of these transgressions occur outside the social compact, one has more effect upon the spectator than the other. As viewers, we identify more readily with Melfi, the innocent victim of violence, than with Janice, whom we have already seen commit murder for a lesser infraction upon her body. Thus Melfi, who is more emotionally and intellectually evolved, is less powerful than the rude and physically menacing Janice Soprano, who seems to share her brother’s violent tendencies and temperament. The female presence in “Employee of the Month” is exceptionally varied, and the staging of this particular episode directly tells much. The first time we see Melfi, she is home and casually dressed, verbally sparring with her ex-husband, with whom she has recently reconciled. The first time she appears with Tony, however, she looks sexy and confident. Tony compliments her outfit and she is obviously pleased. This is a moment of flirtation before they get down to work. Melfi’s dress in this scene is an important detail because she is wearing this suit when attacked. It is also the same clothing she wears in a dream sequence later in the episode. After her assault, however, Melfi’s style of dress changes radically, emphasizing the subliminal fear she has that the rape was somehow her

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own fault. She has put herself in harm’s way not only by walking unescorted into a parking garage, but also by dressing in a sexy and attractive manner. At the beginning of “Employee of the Month,” we see Jennifer Melfi in all her glory: smart, savvy, sexy, and empowered. After the rape, she appears dowdy, older, and unsure; her dress reflects this by becoming longer, ill fitting, and drab. Immediately after the rape, we see Melfi in a hospital gown, the epitome of vulnerability and conformity. She next appears in public, in her office with Tony, wearing a long, black, baggy dress that swaddles her in protective anonymity. Melfi goes from a pale, fitted suit with a tiger-print blouse to grandmother wear in the course of one episode. At this point, Melfi becomes identifiable with Old World traditions of dress. She is in mourning; in this dress, Melfi could easily be an Italian widow. Melfi now looks as if she herself has stepped from the Godfather series. In this episode, Melfi appears at both ends of the spectrum, the antipodes of what is possible for women. She appears to age twenty years over the episode and could be said to resemble Livia, or perhaps the mysterious woman on the stairs who appears in Tony’s dreams. Her cane also conveys the idea of age, infirmity, and dependence. It is also interesting to note that directly after the initial interaction with Melfi and Tony in her office, we briefly view Adriana La Cerva walking through Nuovo Vesuvio in a figure-hugging red suit. The viewer watches her cross through the restaurant as heads turn to follow her. Thus, the glimpse of Adriana inculcates symbolically her presence in The Sopranos as a female stereotype of sexiness and youth. The female body is a subliminal topic of narrative in this episode. In the segue directly after Melfi learns her attacker has been set free, there is a brief scene in which the screen is visually dominated by the nearly nude forms of strippers in the Bada Bing, Silvio Dante’s club. Patrons seated at the edge of the stage greedily view the female bodies above them, dollars in hand, in a posture of acquiescence. The message of this segue is perfectly clear. This is the social compact. Women may dance naked with thugs and goons nearby to protect them. Men may watch only if they mind their manners and offer money in homage. Here, the social compact is also capitalism: money buys protection. Yet, there are consequences. The strippers of the Bada Bing are valuable: they make money. Yet they are the property of the Bada Bing while they are in residence. In their assent to being viewed as property of the strip club, they need never fear rape or violence (at least within the club).

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Adriana is protected in the environment of Nuovo Vesuvio because it is the favored restaurant of the Soprano network. She is sheltered outside of work because of her status with Christopher Moltisanti. Her status often sparks debate among the Soprano crew: she is betrothed, yet still outside the social compact of marriage. In this arrangement, it is admissible for Christopher to hit Adriana, but not by any means for another man to threaten her. Carmela and Meadow Soprano make very small appearances in this episode. Meadow, the New World intellectual, liberated girl appears to tempt Jackie Aprile Jr., the Old World, not-so-smart, adrift young man. Carmela answers the phone and takes Melfi’s message as the bored and regal mob boss’s wife. She is dripping with diamonds and sarcasm—her expensive jewelry reminds the viewer that she has in essence “sold her soul” for it. This property makes her Tony’s property. It is emblematic of her status and protection. It is also in “Employee of the Month” that Ginny, Johnny Sacramoni’s wife, is introduced. She opens the door when Tony comes to call on Johnny “Sack” in his new home in New Jersey. Ginny is obese, and the sight of her provides an unexpected visual of an alternative female physique. She serves little purpose in this initial scene, except as a physical reference—she is the physical opposite of Adriana—and she disappears so quickly that her function remains a mystery. One may only conjecture that she typifies an Old World ideal of domesticity. If Adriana La Cerva is one end of the spectrum, Ginny Sacramoni is the other. The rest of the female body types of The Sopranos fall somewhere in between. We hear jokes about Ginny’s weight directly after Richard hints to Melfi that her rape may have been in some way her own fault for entering the parking garage unescorted. Through this juxtaposition, the viewer is meant to realize that Ginny’s weight protects her from male desire in the same way Melfi’s clothing does after her attack. The men in Melfi’s life, when contrasted with Tony Soprano, seem self-serving and ineffective. Richard serves as Tony’s antithesis: a selfinvolved intellectual who crusades for celebrated causes and is helpless to act in the face of a personal crisis. Melfi’s son, Jason, a student at Bard, is at least appropriately angry in the emergency room, but he soon disappears and proves equally unable to provide comfort to his mother. These characters, along with their counterpart, Noah Tannenbaum, whom Meadow is dating, represent a version of the modern male. In “Employee of the Month,” Richard and Melfi give us a glimpse

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of the future that Meadow and Noah might have had together. Richard’s frigid, almost unemotional performance in the emergency room after Melfi’s rape is an Old World, traditional reaction to Melfi’s sexual violation, as Noah’s dumping of Meadow in “University” (3.6) after he sleeps with her is an action worthy of any Soprano’s crew thug. The underlying message from these two incidents contains a grave warning: beware the modern male. He may profess to be a feminist while acting as a traditionalist. These seemingly New World, cerebral men that Melfi and Meadow gravitate toward are not only dishonorable in terms of chivalry—that is, the social compact of omertà—they are egotistical, self-serving, and duplicitous. The realization that Melfi comes to in Dr. Kupferberg’s office, that she could merely ask Tony for help and he would become avenger, protector, and comforter, is the same epiphany Meadow has in “University” (3.6). In the very last scene, we see her stomping around her parents’ house in a rage, yelling that there’s never anything to eat there, à la Tony Soprano. Although the viewer may never comprehend the irony, Meadow and Melfi have come to a similar realization: After seeing how useless the men in her life are to help, Melfi has a much higher appreciation for Tony and his code of honor. After Noah Tannenbaum, Meadow has a much higher appreciation for Daddy and the respect he demands others show her. After Noah, Meadow and Tony enter a golden period of mutual respect and love like no other in the arc of the entire Sopranos series. This subliminal communication reveals the true genius of writing in The Sopranos. The probability of Robin Green’s tendency toward feminism is a safe bet, given her academic background and screenwriting history. A good writer, however, sees both sides of any story, gives her characters surprising, empathetic qualities, and rewards us for our intellectual processes. The audience ultimately wants to forgive Tony for his multitude of faults, because of his humanity; we welcome his strengths and weaknesses, his unpredictable reactions, but also his moments of wisdom and true kindness. Tony is a man who protects what he loves, and he typifies the omertà as he typifies a certain type of chivalry. Whether he is avenging the death of a beautiful animal or protecting the family he loves, Tony represents certain ideals that have disappeared from modern society, and for which the viewer, ultimately, longs. The spectator wants Tony to avenge Melfi’s violent rape, not because he or she hungers for violence, but rather

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because she or he hungers for justice. At the basest level of enjoyment, no Sopranos viewer longs to see Melfi or Meadow truly injured, either physically or emotionally. Tony may epitomize society’s id, yet he also exemplifies its superego, the desire for justice and honor. The final scene of “Employee of the Month” is both riveting and emotional. Earlier, Melfi has told Kupferberg that after she dreams of being protected by a massive dog, she feels safe for the first time since her rape. Melfi’s dream, witnessed by the audience, is interpreted by Melfi herself. The drink machine, she postulates, symbolizes putting herself in harm’s way. The machine is larger than life, menacing, glowing red as in a horror film. Her drink drops, yet she cannot get it. Instead of accepting the drink as lost, Melfi fights for it; she extends her arm way into the bowels of the machine and it becomes lodged. In the parking lot when she is first attacked, Melfi fights against the rapist, which makes him angrier, leading to him beating her, punishing her with sex, and denigrating her by repeatedly calling her a bitch. Fighting against the drink machine in the dream, Melfi is again compromised physically for fighting back: she is trapped with her arm locked into the machine, and without recourse. Melfi loses her glasses; the intellectual aspect of her is gone, and she is reacting blindly, primitively. The machine symbolizes what is beyond one’s control: society, fate, and the random nature of life. The dog symbolizes the antithesis of the machine: a live entity who lives outside the social compact and who may punish and protect without the “chain of custody.” (After Melfi wakes from this dream, she starts to reach to Richard for comfort, then withdraws.) Melfi then realizes the dog symbolizes Tony. Thus, having Tony nearby makes her more confident. When he says he’ll move on to a behaviorist—as she has previously suggested—in order to please her, what is elicited is not approval, but weeping. Tony is shocked; he leaps up and comes to provide comfort. At this point, their relationship fully engages. Critics have denigrated Melfi’s work with Tony as unprofessional, yet any worthwhile therapist emotionally engages with patients. Empathy is necessary for treatment. Contrary to Melfi, every other psychiatrist who appears on The Sopranos seems disconnected or self-serving. The lesson here is that because Tony and Melfi are engaged in a relationship that is important for both of them, their relationship intensifies with the therapy. Carmela is jealous of Melfi not just because she is female and attractive, but also because the work done in her office is intimate and fruitful.

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She fulfills a need that Carmela cannot. This is no “goomara”; this is an intelligent woman. We understand why Tony needs Melfi: he has a physical affliction that worsens without her help. By the end of the episode, the viewer has a better, if painful, understanding of the other side of the story, of Melfi and her history. The tension in the final moment of this episode is created not only by Melfi’s fragility, but also by her temptation. She is truly tempted to have Tony avenge her violation since the legal system, or enforcer of the social compact, has failed her. There is also an intimacy created by being on the receiving end of Tony’s tender side. In the end, however, Melfi resists temptation, not only to break the social compact by informing Tony of the true source of her grief, but also to violate their patientclient relationship by allowing Tony to continue to console her. Having established the social compact of her role as an independent and strong woman, Melfi is able to revert briefly to a more feminine role. She stops short of having Tony ride off to defend her honor. From that moment on, however, the possibility is ever present. In an ideal feminist society, men and women would be equal and an interchange of strong and helpless roles would be the norm. However, perhaps Green and Burgess are telling us this is not the case—and in the interim, the society we live in is an imperfect and menacing one. In the end, neither Melfi nor Meadow chooses to share with Tony the source of her pain. Melfi knows that Tony would avenge her violation with extreme violence, and Meadow knows her father too well to risk telling him that she lost her virginity to Noah, who in turn abandoned her. Both share an unspoken knowledge that their honor could be vindicated and there is someone nearby who would protect them if invoked. In an imperfect and menacing world, that is more than most ever dare hope for. At the conclusion of “Employee of the Month,” the audience may bemoan the fact that Melfi doesn’t ask Tony for vengeance. In the end, however, she doesn’t owe Tony anything: this keeps her more independent and autonomous than any of the other women in his life. Thus, she allows their relationship to continue on in its most valuable state, which transcends both physicality and favor.

A “Finook” in the Crew Vito Spatafore, The Sopranos, and the Queering of the Mafia Genre George De Stefano

Throughout its eight-year run, The Sopranos scrutinized categories such as “the Mafia,” “the gangster,” “Italian American,” and “American” and reconceived them, demythicizing conventional wisdom and forcing us to look at them anew. The Mafia, for example, was not the thriving enterprise of the immediate post–World War II years depicted in the Godfather films (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972, 1974, 1990), but instead a decadent cartel whose best years were behind it. David Chase’s gangsters lived within the phenomenon that the Italian journalist Vittorio Zucconi called il declino del padrino—literally, the decline of the godfather (De Stefano, An Offer We Can’t Refuse, 62). The Sopranos also critically probed the details and nuances of sex and gender. More specifically, it interrogated the meanings of masculinity and femininity as lived within the culture of Italian American organized crime, now relocated from urban Little Italies to suburban New Jersey. Until the sixth season of the series, women were the cynosure of its critical interrogation of gender and sexuality. Sopranos creator David Chase reconfigured the familiar typology of women in gangster dramas—the long-suffering wife, the flashy mistress, and the unquestioningly devoted mamma—and in the process relocated these types from the periphery of an androcentric genre, giving them agency their forebears rarely exercised. The silently suffering mob wife became Carmela Soprano, a tough cookie who uses Tony’s chronic infidelity as a bargaining chip to negotiate his backing for her real-estate business. The sexpot

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mistress became Gloria Trillo, a successful businesswoman with a carnal appetite to match Tony’s own. The fretting, devoted mamma became the scheming emotional terrorist Livia Soprano. But the series’ boldest subversion, in terms of both gender and genre, came in the corpulent form of Vito Spatafore, a Mafia captain who, near the end of the fifth season, is revealed to be a closeted homosexual. Vito’s sexuality is disclosed in a scene that many found more shocking than any of the show’s murders or other acts of ultraviolence. Finn DeTrolio, the boyfriend of Tony’s daughter Meadow, arrives early one morning at his summer job with the Soprano-affiliated Spatafore Construction Company. He pulls up alongside a parked car that appears to have only one passenger, a uniformed security guard. Then Vito suddenly appears, and we, sharing Finn’s perspective, immediately realize that the mobster had been giving the guard a blow job (“Unidentified Black Males,” 5.9). When The Sopranos returned for its sixth season in March 2006, Vito’s hidden homosexuality became public: two Mafia bagmen encounter him in a gay bar, clad in a black leather vest over his bare chest, leather pants, a black motorcycle cap, and a studded wristband. Vito tries to persuade the astonished and disgusted wiseguys that they have not seen what they think they have seen. “It’s a fuckin’ joke,” he insists. “C’mon guys, it’s just a joke” (“Mr. and Mrs. John Sacrimoni Request,” 6.5). But when word of Vito’s sighting begins to circulate among his fellow gangsters, no one is amused. The revelation that there is “a finook in the crew,” as one mobster says, precipitates a crisis within the Sopranos criminal organization that also reverberates through its familial and social networks. Vito is a “made man” in the Mafia, and, as a captain, a leader. But he also is a husband and father, and his “outing” has a disruptive impact on the intertwined realms of family and “family.” Letizia Paoli, in her study Mafia Brotherhoods, notes that “the woman is considered the repository of the family’s honor because she is the most important element of the family patrimony. . . . Her honor thus defines the honor of all the male family members and enhances the group’s cohesion” (74). Phil Leotardo, the hoodlum who calls Vito a “finook” (from finocchio, a derogatory Italian term for homosexual), demands Vito’s death because not only has he violated the mob’s sex/ gender protocols, but, since Vito is married to Phil’s cousin, he has dishonored the entire Leotardo family. In depicting a “finook in the crew” and the repercussions of such

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a transgression, The Sopranos “queered” the Mafia genre, decentering its typical construction of masculinity as incontrovertibly heterosexual. The Vito story line made manifest the possibility of actual homosexuality within the homosocial milieu of organized crime groups. As Joseph Pistone, the FBI agent who, under the alias “Donnie Brasco,” infiltrated the Bonanno crime family, has observed, gangsters much prefer each other’s company to that of their wives or girlfriends (52–53). Marriage and children, and the obligatory “gumads,” or mistresses, confirm their heterosexual public image, but the absence of women from mob society raises questions about homoerotic desire. This possibility, however, must not become actuality. The specter of queerness may haunt the all-male entity, but to admit it as an acceptable way of being would subvert the very ethos of the organized crime group. The culture of the Mafia, patriarchal and authoritarian, strictly polices the unruly realms of gender and sexuality. Its protocols demand that men master, even repress, their emotions. They must subordinate their own individual needs and desires to that of the collective, the Mafia “family.” They must not hesitate to inflict violence, including murder, if the boss deems it necessary. Establishing and supporting a family is another mandatory standard of Mafia manhood; violating another mafioso’s honor through sexual relations with a female member of his family is one of the most egregious offenses a mobster can commit. The values of the so-called Mafia family are based in a code that stresses respect for women and the centrality of their status in defining and preserving a mafioso’s honor. But at the same time, the denigration of femininity is central to Mafia culture. Misogyny is allied with homophobia, a conflation memorably established in a scene from The Godfather. When the has-been pop singer Johnny Fontane weeps about the sorry state of his once-glorious career—“Oh Godfather, what can I do, what can I do?”—Don Vito Corleone slaps him and bellows, “You can act like a man! Is this how you turned out, a Hollywood finocchio that cries like a woman?” Jane Schneider and Peter Schneider, American social scientists who, over four decades, have produced an invaluable body of work on Sicily and the Mafia, documented the centrality of misogyny and homophobia to Cosa Nostra culture in their 2003 book Reversible Destiny. They provide a vivid account of how Sicilian mafiosi symbolically and literally exclude women from their world: “Through rituals, feasts, and hunting trips, the members shore up and continuously reassert a form of mascu-

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line identity that repels affection and dependency as womanly signs of weakness” (94). The Schneiders report how “food play” was central to male bonding among Sicilian mafiosi. Huge feasts were major social occasions for Cosa Nostra members. At their men-only banquets, the gangsters “revealed a striking ability to carry on without women by preparing each of the lavish, multi-course feasts entirely on their own” (96). When they had finished eating, “the revelers settled into an hour or more of hilarious, carnivalesque entertainment that parodied the absent sex” (96). The Schneiders render an astonishing account of one such revel, where three mafiosi improvised priestly vestments out of tablecloths and conducted a profane mass, in which, at the end of each verse, instead of an “amen” they would chant, “minchia!” (This slang term for “penis” also serves as an all-purpose expletive, like “fuck!”) These “masses” often were elaborate parodies in which “some of the bonvivants performed erotic imitations of women doing a strip tease.” One mafioso at such a bacchanal “dressed up in pink silk women’s underwear with lace trim, a pink satin nightgown and a hooded black satin cape. Plump oranges were used to give the illusion of breasts as he cavorted about” (96). Although these Mafia rituals and traditions seem to employ a certain amount of homoerotic horseplay, such parodic behavior actually exorcises the specters of femininity and homosexuality, the latter seen as a feminine weakness or vice. It builds solidarity among mafiosi by defining them by what they are not: women or homosexuals. The Schneiders cite the psychiatric transcript of an imprisoned mafioso who killed two other mobsters and attempted to kill a third. He claimed he committed the murders to “show himself and to others that he was the equal of the other men, ‘one of the boys,’ capable of manhood, and not one of ‘them’—the women. Indeed the killings had helped him deal with his growing concern that he might be inclined toward ‘pederasty,’ by which he meant being sexually attracted to young men” (92). The Sopranos captures with vivid accuracy the mafioso’s conflation of femininity and homosexuality and the fear and loathing of both. Furio Giunta, an enforcer imported from Naples, mutters disgustedly that two young hoodlums must be performing oral sex on each other when he discovers them lounging in their underwear in their shared apartment. For Paulie Walnuts, a captain in Tony Soprano’s crew, being called a “cocksucker” is enough to incite him to homicidal fury. Richie Aprile, a sullen brute who becomes the lover of Tony’s sister, Janice, worries that

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his son might be gay because he takes part in dance contests. And when Janice asks what difference it would make if the boy were gay, Richie punches her in the face. Both Tony and his son A.J. speculate that the high-school counselor Robert Wegler must be a “fag.” Carmela, who later has an affair with Wegler, snaps at her husband, “What’s with you, you think everybody’s gay. Maybe you’re gay!” (“All Happy Families,” 5.4). There’s insight in Carmela’s rebuke of Tony: those who object most vociferously to homosexuality often do so to assuage anxiety about their own unacceptable or unwanted desires. But organized crime groups rely upon mechanisms somewhat cruder than Dr. Freud’s projection to deal with the threat of sexual unorthodoxy in their ranks. Joseph Pistone, discussing the infractions of Mafia rules that may be punished by death, cites such offenses as not sharing proceeds from illegal activities, talking to police, and testifying before grand juries, and concludes, “Being gay will get you killed, too” (29). John D’Amato, the acting boss of the New Jersey–based DeCavalcante crime organization, was murdered when his confederates learned that he went to swingers’ clubs, where he sometimes had sex with men. The mobster who shot D’Amato explained the hit when he became a government informer: “Nobody’s going to respect us if we have a gay homosexual boss sitting down discussing business with other families” (De Stefano, An Offer We Can’t Refuse, 223). Or a leather-clad captain who cavorts with other men in gay discos, which returns us to Vito Spatafore and the crisis that results from his violation of Mafia norms. Social theorist Judith Butler argues that gender is not a “natural” category but is culturally constructed through the repetition of stylized acts. The repetition of these acts constitutes what Butler calls the “performativity” of gender, as well as of sexuality. In our everyday lives, in the ways that we live in the world, we repeat and perform our culture’s gender norms (Gender Trouble, 140). But gender performativity isn’t only a matter of social constraints. It also is a source of agency, and of power. The constraints of gender performativity—that is, the standards of Mafia manhood—have made Vito Spatafore the man he is: a successful, high-earning mobster, indisputably masculine, which is to say, heterosexual, as confirmed by wife, children, and mistress. Violence, including murder, also is the norm in Vito’s world, and here again he conforms to normative expectations. Acting like a man, in Don Vito Corleone’s terms, has had its rewards for his fictive descendant Vito Spatafore. But

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Spatafore’s growing sense of himself as homosexual creates unbearable distress. In the Mafia’s theater of gender, Vito finds that he can no longer convincingly perform the self that heretofore has constituted his identity and established his place in the world. In a scene that precedes the public exposure of his sexuality, he nearly “drops his beads,” to borrow a phrase from the preliberation gay lexicon. When some mobsters discuss the inexplicably erratic behavior of a Sopranos crew member, Vito offers by way of explanation, “Maybe he’s a secret homo who can’t tell anyone about it” (“Members Only,” 6.1). Once Vito’s sexuality is disclosed and it becomes evident that his life is in danger, he flees to New Hampshire. Ensconced in a picturesque bed-and-breakfast and posing as a sports writer working on a book, he tries to locate a relative who lives somewhere in the state. He fails to find his kin, but he instead discovers the possibility of a new life and a new identity. Stopping in a diner one morning, Vito finds himself attracted to Jim, the handsome, virile short-order cook. Jim is whipping up an order of “johnnycakes,” and the smitten Vito affectionately nicknames him after the breakfast item (“Johnny Cakes,” 6.8). Johnny Cakes is both everything Vito is, and is not, which makes him irresistible to the fugitive mobster. Like Vito, Johnny Cakes is conventionally masculine, but unlike him, he “performs” gender with unselfconscious ease. He is openly gay, and suffers no psychic discordance between his masculine gender presentation and his sexuality. Like Vito, he also is a father, with a daughter whom he loves and who adores him. Unlike Vito, whose idea of work is to sit around construction sites kibitzing with other mobsters, Johnny Cakes not only performs honest paid labor as a cook; he also is a volunteer fireman. In “Johnny Cakes,” he rescues a small child from a burning building. Vito, witnessing this act of heroism, has an epiphany. His mob cronies back in New Jersey denigrate homosexuals as weak and unmanly, but here is a gay man who refutes that stereotype. Johnny Cakes, moreover, is integrated into a community of gay men, some of whom also are volunteer firemen. Johnny Cakes’s friends constitute an alternative community to the Sopranos mob crew, a counterculture premised on humanistic values. Whereas the interpersonal dynamics of the gangster fraternity are corrupted by avarice, betrayal, and the omnipresent threat of lethal violence, the gay crew is founded on friendship, mutual support, and a frankly expressed eroticism. Vito is stricken with cognitive dissonance. He is drawn to the appeal-

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ing gay world of the New Hampshire hamlet but emotionally and materially tied to the criminal life that has provided not only his living, but also his masculine identity. When Jim moves to kiss him for the first time, Vito balks—“What are you, some kinda fag?”—and punches the short-order cook (“Johnny Cakes”). But Johnny Cakes, stronger and in better physical condition, beats down the mobster and curses him for leading him on. Vito, bruised and chastened, later apologizes, saying, “Sometimes you tell a lie so long you don’t know when to stop.” After their reconciliation, Johnny Cakes and Vito enjoy a brief idyll as a couple, the mafioso maintaining their household while his lover works. The scenes of their domestic life are remarkable for their credible depiction of a gay male partnership and their sexual candor. In one scene in “Moe n’ Joe” (6.10), Vito prepares a meal of what he calls “real peasant food”—veal with vinegar peppers, pasta patate, and insalata— but Johnny Cakes hungers for Vito. What follows is a moment entirely without precedent in the gangster genre: as Johnny Cakes put the moves on Vito, the positioning of their bodies makes evident who is the top and who is the bottom. A fat gay mobster “bottoming” for a chubby-chasing, macho short-order cook: it’s hard to imagine a more radical subversion of genre and genre expectations. But this blissful interlude soon comes to its inevitable conclusion. Johnny Cakes finds Vito a real construction job, but the gangster is incapable of honest labor. Vito longs for his life in New Jersey, missing the perquisites of being a mob captain, as well as his two children. He flees New Hampshire, leaving behind one irate lover and a dead innocent bystander who had gotten in his way. Once back home, Vito attempts to win Tony Soprano’s favor and protection with the offer of a lucrative business deal. Tony says he will consider the offer, but in the meantime, Phil Leotardo intervenes. He and his thugs track Vito down to a seedy motel room, where they bind and gag him, beat him to death, and for good measure, force a pool cue into his rectum. Two startling bits of visual business imply the contradictory and combustible mix of fear, loathing, and unacknowledged desire that often underlies violent homophobia. Phil’s presence in the motel room is revealed as he literally comes out of the closet in which he has been hiding, and as his thugs murder Vito, an expression suggesting sexual arousal flickers in his cold eyes. Judith Butler’s performativity theory allows for the possibility of resistance to and the overthrowing of oppressive gender norms. The weak-

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ness of norms lies in the very fact that they must be constantly reiterated: no matter how “natural” they may seem, they are culturally conditioned and therefore can be changed. But Vito doesn’t want to revolt; he wants back in. In his meeting with Tony, he denies that he is gay. Blood pressure medication made him do it, he tells the obviously unconvinced boss. Nevertheless, Tony considers reintegrating the gay gangster. “It’s 2006—there’s pillow-biters in the Special Forces,” he remarks, even reminding his crew, “We all know Vito isn’t the first” (“Live Free or Die,” 6.6). Here, The Sopranos slyly alludes not only to John D’Amato, but to the notorious Vito Arena, the “gay hit man,” as the Gambino crime family member came to be known in the media. Although the Gambinos knew that Arena was gay, apparently he was such an accomplished assassin that they were willing to overlook his sexuality (De Stefano, An Offer We Can’t Refuse, 223). But this “thing of ours” is bigger than any individual, and it demands Vito’s elimination to preserve the cohesion of the Sopranos organization and its members’ sense of themselves. Tony Soprano’s authority also is on the line, because his men have declared that they will not work for “that fuckin’ finook.” Although Tony is angry that Phil has defied him by killing Vito without his permission, he is nonetheless relieved that the Vito problem has been “taken care of.” There are a few messy loose ends, however. When a rival mobster jokes one time too many that other Sopranos crew members also must be gay, Tony’s unamused underlings stab him to death, an act both impulsive and inconvenient, as the killing occurs in Tony’s redoubt, the Bada Bing strip club. Innocents suffer as well: Vito’s two young children find out about the death of their father, including the pool cue penetration, in a newspaper article that identifies him as a gangster. Whatever the wreckage left in its wake, the killing of Vito resolves the crisis posed by the “finook in the crew.” It also is the only dramatically credible resolution, as any Butlerian revolt against the Mafia’s sex/ gender norms was doomed to failure. Some institutions are intransigent in their resistance to change, and will employ a range of strategies— cooptation, ostracism, repression, violence—to deflect any challenge to hegemonic beliefs and values. The paramilitary, male supremacist Mafia crew is such an entity. But it is hardly the only one, as Chase and his writers took pains to establish. From its first episode, The Sopranos presented Mafia life as a microcosm of contemporary American society. This enabled the series to com-

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ment on such phenomena as class mobility, ethnicity, racism, political and corporate corruption, sex and gender, and Mafia narrative itself. Religion, and in particular the significance of Catholicism in Italian American life, did not escape the scrutiny of Chase and his writers. The Sopranos zeroed in on the historically ambiguous relationship between the Church and the Mafia through the character of Father Phil, an Italian American priest who seems to spend more time in the Sopranos McMansion, enjoying Tony’s home entertainment center and Carmela’s baked ziti, than attending to his parishioners. With the Vito Spatafore story line, The Sopranos once again made the organized crime genre perform metaphoric heavy lifting, in service of a larger critique. The series broadened the focus to take in a new and disconcerting development in American life: the convergence between the moral agendas of right-wing, evangelical Protestants and conservative Roman Catholics. As everyone wonders what to do about Vito, Phil Leotardo’s wife Patty, a self-righteous harridan who considers herself a devout Catholic, reports that her church group has sought the assistance of a Protestant evangelical whom she claims is an expert in “curing” homosexuality. The Sopranos gleefully satirized the moral outrage of the gangsters who were so affronted over Vito dishonoring them and their upstanding family values. But with Patty Leotardo’s antigay ecumenism, the show targeted more than the hypocrisy of the Mafia value system. A militant Catholic like Patty making common cause with a right-wing evangelical is a familiar scenario nowadays. Abortion, reproductive technologies, stem cell research, the Terry Schiavo controversy, and George Bush’s Supreme Court appointment of Italian American jurist Samuel Alito: these issues made ideological bedfellows of Christian Rightists and conservative Roman Catholics, an alliance that has been institutionalized in the Republican Party. But as the furor over same-sex marriage has demonstrated, few issues unite conservative Catholics and the Christian Right as effectively as homosexuality. Given the Catholic Church’s antigay anathemas and the Republican Party’s cynical exploitation of bigotry as an electoral strategy, the New Jersey Mafia is hardly the only male-dominated institution unwilling to tolerate “a finook in the crew.” (The U.S. military was one such institution, until the repeal, in late 2010, of the institutionalized hypocrisy known as “don’t ask, don’t tell.”) And yet, just as Vito Spatafore wasn’t “the first” in his milieu, gay men serve in all these organizations, gener-

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ally closeted, and often self-hating and self-abasing in their subservience to power. In late 2006, Ted Haggard, a prominent Christian Right minister from Colorado, was exposed as a crystal methamphetamine user who patronized male prostitutes. Then, just a year later, Larry Craig, a conservative and antigay Republican senator from Idaho, became the butt of countless jokes when he was arrested for “lewd conduct” in an airport men’s room. The lives of evangelical Ted Haggard, Senator Larry Craig, and fictional gangster Vito Spatafore attest to a sad but apparently universal truth: the need to belong to a structure that provides meaning and purpose and even identity, as well as power and money, can be more powerful than the urge to live authentically. And yet, there always is a cost for making such an accommodation, whether it is a furtive life of private anguish and public hypocrisy, or a sordid, brutal death in a motel room. With the story of Vito Spatafore, the made man destroyed by the organization that made him a certain type of man, The Sopranos delivered an incisive and iconoclastic critique of gender, sex, and sexual politics, and one that resonates far beyond the parochial world of the New Jersey Mafia in the age of il declino del padrino.

PART 4

Cinematic Concerns

The Producers The Dangers of Filmmaking in The Sopranos Cameron Golden

In the very first episode of The Sopranos (1.1), a conflict erupts between Tony Soprano and Christopher Moltisanti over Christopher’s threat to turn his life story into a screenplay. Tony angrily tells Christopher, “I’ll fucking kill you. What you gonna do, go Henry Hill on me now? You know how many mobsters are selling screenplays and screwing everything up?” This conflict between the world of New Jersey crime life and a Hollywood version of that life returns dramatically in season six, when Christopher finally succeeds in making a movie and Tony is finally able to carry through on his violent promise. Simultaneously during season six, A.J. Soprano is also lured into the film business, becoming a development executive for Carmine Lupertazzi’s production company. Although it may seem a fresh and promising start for the depressed and suicidal A.J., entering into the film business with Little Carmine and continuing down the road blazed by Christopher seems, on closer inspection, to be a highly dangerous path. The production of Cleaver, Christopher’s metacommentary on his life in the mob, is played primarily for laughs and inside jokes; however, both the content and critical reception of the film seal Christopher’s fate, making it impossible to view A.J.’s entry into this world as anything but another chance for Tony’s other son to screw everything up for his father. During seasons one and two, Christopher dreams of being a bigtime Hollywood player (he works on a screenplay titled “You Bark . . . I Bite” in “Big Girls Don’t Cry” [2.5]) and even gets his chance to be marginally involved in making a movie (consulting with Jon Favreau on dia-

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logue in “D-Girl” [2.7]). It is not only a desire for fame and wealth that motivates Christopher’s interest in filmmaking: although he is impressed by the trappings of the Hollywood lifestyle (his desire to have access to free swag in “Luxury Lounge” [6.7] leads to his attack of Lauren Bacall for her gift basket—a full frontal assault by Christopher on classic Hollywood filmmaking), it has never been these material offerings that have tempted him. He wants the opportunity to tell his story, to see himself represented on the big screen. We know Christopher wants to see his name in print (witness his desire to see his name in the paper in “The Legend of Tennessee Moltisanti” [1.8]). What he wants more, however, during the first few seasons of The Sopranos, is Tony’s approval. Forced by Tony in “D-Girl” to choose between Hollywood dreams and life in the crew, Christopher abandons his fantasy for the moment to focus on serving Tony. What allows Christopher to survive for so long as Tony’s trusted number two despite his many problems with drugs, his involvement with Adriana, who is forced into cooperating with the FBI, and his obsession with Hollywood filmmaking is Tony’s feeling that Christopher is more like a son to him than merely another member of the crew or his nephew or cousin. We see in “Stage 5” (6.14) that Tony feels angry and betrayed after watching Christopher’s film Cleaver; if Christopher really is like his son, how could he treat his father this way by publicly creating such an ugly portrait of Tony through Cleaver’s Sally Boy character, Tony’s not-so-thinly veiled doppelgänger? This festering conflict in season six between Tony and Christopher is accompanied by a closer look at Tony’s biological son and the various ways that he has proven himself a disappointment to his father. Broken by depression, A.J. flunks out of college, bungles a revenge killing of Uncle Junior, is dumped by his fiancée, can’t hold down a job at Blockbuster Video or Beansie’s pizza parlor, and eventually fails at an attempt to take his own life. While in therapy after his suicide attempt, A.J. begins blaming his problems on the depression he inherited from the Soprano family. Throughout the series, Tony has felt some degree of responsibility for A.J.’s problems; Tony has continually told Dr. Melfi of his guilt and shame at passing his depression to A.J.; in “Down Neck” (1.7), he tells her, “My son is doomed. . . . You are born to this shit. . . . You are what you are.” Tony’s feelings of responsibility for his son’s misfortunes lead him into a vicious cycle of wanting to help his son, then interfering in A.J.’s life, and finally resenting him for his dependence on Tony.

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Although Tony may blame himself for the majority of A.J.’s problems, clearly he also feels that A.J., as a man, must bear responsibility for himself. The Gary Cooper model of masculinity to which Tony hews so closely, that of the strong, independent American, is a far cry from his own son, who is, in Tony’s estimation, weak, damaged, and still completely dependent on his family. In “Johnny Cakes” (6.8), after A.J. realizes that his notoriety as a member of the Soprano family is a good thing (it allows him to score drugs and meet girls), he decides to avenge his father’s shooting by killing Uncle Junior. After A.J. fails to harm Junior, Tony confronts his son about the escapade at the police station where A.J. is being held. A.J. tearfully calls his father a hypocrite for chastising him for his revenge plot despite having earlier claimed that his favorite movie scene of all time came from The Godfather, when Michael Corleone avenges an attack on his father. Tony tells his son: “You make me want to cry. It’s a movie. You’ve got to grow up.” This father-son exchange, while underscoring the degree to which movies have formed the idea of the characters for themselves as well as the audience, also allows viewers to see Tony’s disappointment in what his son has become. What makes Tony want to cry is not only the incompetence and cowardice of his son, but also the belief that his own weaknesses are a large part of A.J.’s struggle. The struggle faced by the rest of the Soprano family to distinguish reality from its filmic simulation is highlighted in “Stage 5” with the completion and screening of Cleaver. Having earlier used the phrase “It’s only a movie” on A.J., Tony repeats these words to Carmela after she points out the similarities between Tony and the character Sally Boy. As mentioned, Sally Boy, the creation of Christopher (and screenwriter J.T. Dolan), serves as a vehicle for Christopher to publicly ridicule Tony, his final, unforgivable act of betrayal in Tony’s eyes. Long before the debut of Sally Boy and Cleaver, however, Tony and Christopher’s relationship has begun to disintegrate. In the season one episode “46 Long” (1.2), Tony offers this assessment of Christopher: “He’s got a reputation for immaturity.” And throughout the early seasons, Christopher’s immaturity leads to problems within the crew and with Tony. Christopher’s drug use marks him as a risk to Tony, but his devotion to Hollywood proves a more dangerous distraction. In “D-Girl” (2.7), Christopher’s dreams of becoming a Hollywood player are set in motion by his informal consultations on a gangster film steered into development by his cousin Gregory’s girlfriend Amy. After showing up on set,

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Christopher contributes a few lines of dialogue to give the script an air of realism that it was sorely lacking. Although “D-Girl” contains many metamoments about filmmaking (specifically the making of mob movies) and is played mainly for laughs, the structure of this episode gives the Christopher-goes-Hollywood angle thematic weight. Surrounding this story of Christopher’s seduction into the film world is A.J.’s questioning of existence before his communion and Big Pussy Bonpensiero’s betrayal of Tony to the FBI. The comic moments in “D-Girl” help to establish more dramatic conflicts of betrayal, loyalty, and a questioning of authority that continue to play out within the series. Interestingly, what causes a rupture between Christopher and Amy and destroys (for the moment) Christopher’s Hollywood dreams is the blurring of the line between reality and fiction. After impressing Amy and writer-director Jon Favreau with a particularly vivid and violent anecdote involving a local gangster and a transsexual, Christopher learns that they have taken his story and included it in their latest script. Angered that real life has been co-opted in this way, Christopher demands that they remove it from the script. “You don’t understand where I come from,” he tells Amy. Throughout the episode, Tony has felt Christopher beginning to drift away, captivated by Amy and her glamorous world. But this confusion over a filmic simulation of a real event seems to reawaken Christopher to the conflict between the world of the real and that of its copy. Forced by Tony to make a choice, he stays with his real world and rejects, if only temporarily, Amy and Hollywood. Christopher waits to break into the film business again until season six, this time with backup: with his partner, Little Carmine, he wants to produce a venture that he describes as “Saw meets Godfather II” (“Mayham,” 6.3). Aware of Tony’s reservations toward this avenue of selfexpression, Christopher chooses an opportune moment to tell Tony of his plans: when Tony is in the hospital having barely survived being shot by Uncle Junior. Anticipating Tony’s displeasure, Christopher chooses the one time Tony cannot respond violently and then further ensures Tony’s concession to his request by bringing up Adriana’s death. When he tells Tony about the project, he adds that he is owed this chance because of what happened with Adriana. “What happened with Adriana” could mean either Christopher’s choice to tell Tony that Adriana has been talking to the FBI (and the consequences of this decision for Adriana) or Tony and Adriana’s suspicious (at least to Christopher) car accident in “Irregular around the Margins” (5.5). Christopher’s linger-

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ing suspicions about Tony’s version of what happened between him and Adriana, along with his desire for public self-expression via the Cleaver production, prove to be a lethal combination. Having coerced J.T. Dolan, his old friend from rehab, into writing the screenplay for Cleaver, Christopher begins the process of movie making in earnest while simultaneously settling down with his wife Kelli and daughter Caitlin and working his Alcoholics Anonymous program. But the pressure to live this normal life slowly erodes Christopher’s efforts to stay clean and sober and to view the violent mob story Cleaver with any kind of objective distance. His festering resentment toward Tony’s attempts to sabotage his efforts to stop drinking cause a permanent rift between the two. In “The Ride” (6.9), Tony and Christopher take a business trip together that should allow the two of them the chance to reconnect. “We got a bond . . . it’s very special,” Tony tells Christopher. But the bond between them is eventually revealed to be a façade; Christopher’s sobriety and devotion to domestic life reveal to Tony the contempt he has for Christopher’s efforts and, in turn, his own life. His revelation to Dr. Melfi in this episode—“Every day is a gift but does it have to be a pair of socks?”—underlines the dissatisfaction he feels for ordinary life and Christopher’s choices; a displeasure that Christopher then notices and is able to mirror in the Cleaver script. As Ingrid Walker Fields observes of Tony, “Contemporary suburban life breeds both middle-class ennui and a complex tension with his mob world” (615). At the end of “The Ride,” Tony and Christopher, left with nothing to talk about, rerun their latest adventure, their bonhomie ringing hollow, the tension between them steadily mounting. Another factor contributing to the strain in their relationship is the appearance of Julianna Skiff, a real-estate agent whom both Christopher and Tony want to pursue romantically. After Tony ends his flirtation with Julianna, Christopher begins to see her (having met her at an AA meeting). When Christopher shows Julianna the Cleaver script in “Kaisha” (6.12), she asks if Anthony Soprano is really like the boss in the script. He answers, “It’s just a jumping off point for the character. They’ve got some similarities, like he thinks everything is his.” Relishing this chance to take something from Tony, Christopher declares his independence and continues his affair with Julianna (in spite of Tony’s renewed interest in her) as well as his drug use. Despite their best efforts, by the end of “Kaisha” both Christopher and Julianna are using heroin. Angrily rebelling against his father figure, Christopher uses the Cleaver

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project and his relationship with Julianna to push Tony away, to carve out something for himself, blind to the ramifications of falling back into a struggle for control over his drug habit and Tony. At the Cleaver premiere in “Stage 5” (6.14), Tony’s initial response would seem to indicate that he has begun to soften toward Christopher. Little Carmine states when introducing the production team that “a film has many parents,” and Tony for the moment seems flattered to be included as one of the progenitors of this one. Acknowledged by Christopher as “the man without whom this whole thing would be impossible,” Tony appears to be feeling only pride in his protégé. Ignorant of the looks being shared by many in the film’s audience at his resemblance to Sally Boy, Tony enjoys the movie. At the after party, Tony proudly hugs Christopher and commends him on his accomplishment. Despite Carmela telling him, “That’s you,” after watching Sally Boy menace one of his crew, Tony good-naturedly asks, “The fucking boss down in the cellar, the white bathrobe, where did you get that?” Christopher responds, “I don’t know . . . artistic choice.” Seemingly without malice, Tony states, “Seriously though, I’m very proud. Whatever else happens, you made a movie, Christopher. Nobody can take that away. . . . A hundred years from now, we’re dead and gone. People will be watching this fucking thing.” Tony seemingly isn’t watching Cleaver all that closely himself, for the next morning he is shocked at Carmela’s assertions about what she saw in the movie. Carmela points out to Tony that the connections between himself and Sally Boy were unmistakable. More than physical similarities or wardrobe choices, the one point of similitude between Sally Boy and Tony that upsets Carmela is the relationship between Sally Boy and the fiancée of the main character, which too closely resembles the suspected flirtation between Tony and Adriana with its violent consequences for Christopher in “Irregular around the Margins” (5.5). According to Carmela, “Ro pointed it out to me. But if she saw it that means other people did too.” When Tony attempts to diffuse her anger by telling her, “It’s a movie,” she implores him to wake up and realize what he has actually seen: “It’s a revenge fantasy, Tony. Which ends with the boss’s head split open by a meat cleaver.” After Carmela confronts Christopher with her understanding of his participation in this public humiliation of Tony, Christopher scrambles to find a way to abjure responsibility for what he has created. Christopher forces J.T. Dolan to go to Tony and take credit for the creation of Sally

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Boy, a ruse that Tony sees right through. As Tony watches Born Yesterday (George Cukor, 1950), the film J.T. claims provided the inspiration for Sally Boy, Tony finally realizes what he has seen. Accepting the simulation, he cannot ignore his shame and anger. The screen credit reading “Story by Christopher Moltisanti” means that all of Tony’s fears about Christopher’s Hollywood dreams have materialized. Earlier, Adriana told Christopher, “Revealing your innermost feelings is the best kind of writing” (“Big Girls Don’t Cry,” 2.5), and, in revealing his deepest feelings of anger and resentment, Christopher has helped to disclose Tony’s feelings as well. Discussing his response to the film with Dr. Melfi, Tony tells her, “This is the image of me he leaves to the world. . . . All I am to him is some asshole bully.” The hurt and self-pity that Tony expresses to Dr. Melfi by saying that Christopher “hates me, he despises me, he wants to see me dead” quickly transform into rage and vengeance. The cathartic effects on the audience of horror films like Cleaver, the release of powerful emotions, come for Tony in a realization of the threat posed to him by Christopher, who has become just what Tony feared in the first episode of the series, a Henry Hill–like betrayer, producing an on-screen simulation too real to be ignored. In Baudrillardian terms, the division between the real and the simulated has collapsed. To Christopher, Tony is Sally Boy, the slovenly, vindictive, fiancée-stealing boss, not the kind, nurturing, and supportive father figure that Tony has always envisioned himself to be. The representation has become more important than the reality. As Tony embraces Christopher at Caitlin’s christening, his embrace is a sham, reminiscent of his embrace of Big Pussy at A.J.’s confirmation in “D-Girl,” Pussy’s wire revealing his betrayal just as clearly as Christopher’s dreams of filmmaking reveal his own betrayal of Tony. As Tony looks into Christopher’s face after they have crashed their car in “Kennedy and Heidi” (6.18), he realizes that he has a choice: either call 9-1-1 and save the badly injured Christopher or act to rid himself of this problem once and for all. Tony sees the crushed baby seat in the back seat and hears Christopher’s confession that he’ll never pass a drug test. Despite the brutal crash and his severe injuries, as Tony reaches into the car to suffocate Christopher, a Cleaver ball cap is still on Christopher’s head. This final image of him further underlines how Cleaver has violently and permanently ruptured the bond between this ersatz father and son. Given the damage done by Cleaver to these two and Tony’s deep suspicion of filmmaking, it is ironic that A.J. would find his way into this

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very same industry, driven to it by none other than Tony himself. A.J. has never shown any interest in the film industry; his one ambition has been to open a nightclub. Lazy by nature, A.J. has never done anything to advance this goal on his own other than to frequent many clubs where name-dropping his father guarantees both fawning attention from various hangers-on and his being stuck with the bill at the end of the night. A.J. and Christopher demonstrate a remarkable similitude throughout the series; both struggle with drugs, questionable associates, and the ability to cause problems for Tony. Both spend time institutionalized: Christopher for his drug addiction, which he blames on his father, Dickie Moltisanti, and A.J. for his depression, clearly inherited from his father. A.J., unlike Christopher, finds no need to write to express himself (when his therapist asks in “Made in America” [6.21] if he has considered writing about his experiences, he responds, “Why would I do that?”). Nor does he desire a “Luxury Lounge” experience; he complains bitterly about his parents’ conspicuous consumption and is happy to hear they won’t be buying him a new car after accidentally setting his on fire, because, as he tells them, “We have to break our dependence on foreign oil” (“Made in America”). Initially, A.J.’s political rhetoric is not entirely empty: he tells his parents he plans to join the army, an idea that horrifies Tony and Carmela, who cannot abide his attempt to find another father figure. Continually upset at the state of our world, A.J. has spoken to his therapist about joining the army to help fight the war on terror and “get past the hate” (“Made in America”). Instead of allowing him to find his own way by enlisting, his parents intercede and arrange for him to work for Little Carmine’s production company as a development executive on a script given to Tony by Daniel Baldwin. Driven by fear of losing their son, Carmela and Tony together decide to do anything necessary to save him from the violence of war and, even more selfishly, from separating himself from their family unit. By getting A.J. this seemingly safe job, Tony seems to be thinking of the happy ending of one of the other parents of Cleaver. In “Stage 5,” Tony goes to visit Little Carmine Lupertazzi at his country club to persuade him to assert his birthright and assume control over the family following the death of Johnny Sack. After ordering iced tea and seared ahi, Little Carmine refuses Tony’s request. He goes on to tell Tony about a dream he had about his father’s one hundredth birthday. When Little Carmine presents his father with an empty box, Carmine tells his son,

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“Fill it up. . . . Come back when I’m two hundred.” Little Carmine surmises that the dream doesn’t mean he should want to be boss like his father; he should only want to be happy. Happiness to him means involving himself in the family business on his own terms, choosing another path of expression, his film production company, to fulfill his dreams. Although Little Carmine turns Tony down, the image of the tanned, fit, and contented scion forging his own path clearly stays with him as he ponders his own son’s future. The name of Little Carmine’s company, Lone Wolves, must also appeal to the Gary Cooper–worshipping Tony, who longs for the freedom to carve out his own destiny but is too closely bound to his two families to ever leave either of them. Putting A.J. on Little Carmine’s path to personal and professional fulfillment would appear to be Tony’s legacy to his son; that with this job as a development executive A.J. will finally find himself and be happy, while also allowing Tony to live vicariously through this “lone wolf.” A.J., however, seems intent on following in the footsteps of Christopher rather than Little Carmine. Instead of becoming his own man, A.J. is still unable to find an avenue for success far away from his father’s interest and approval. He has simply assumed Christopher’s role in Tony’s life. The symbol of A.J.’s future is the BMW he drives with confidence away from the Lone Wolves Productions office on his way to pick up his girlfriend Rhiannon (whose name and appearance echo Adriana’s). Speeding off in a black sedan, just like the one Christopher drove, working on another genre movie sponsored by his father, A.J. seems poised to step into Christopher’s role and suffer his same tragic fate. Christopher and A.J., linked in so many significant ways throughout the series, are once again connected in “Made in America”: both are made by Tony, and both, ultimately, engineered to be a disappointment to him. As the Sopranos eat their onion rings at Holsten’s in the final scene of “Made in America” (and the series), A.J. further assumes Christopher’s role in Tony’s life. After he complains of his menial tasks at work that day, Carmela reminds him that what he is truly doing is “making contacts.” These contacts ostensibly will pull him into a future in Hollywood where he can re-create Christopher’s dreams and the anxieties that those dreams have caused Tony. The project A.J. will be working on was given to Tony by Daniel Baldwin, the on-screen version of Tony in Cleaver, thereby keeping the infuriating visage of Sally Boy alive for Tony. A.J. tells his father at Holsten’s that he will try to “focus on the good times,” using the vocabulary of the camera to remind his father of

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the script he will be following from now on. Even the music playing over this final conversation of the series indicates what the future will be for A.J. As Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’ ” plays in the background, a line from the song is clearly heard: “This movie never ends / It goes on and on and on.” The diegetic music choice here directly comments on the construction of their future and the continuation (perhaps eternally) of their conflicts and struggles. A.J. quotes back to Tony the lines that he has been asked to perform, “Try to remember the times that were good,” but it seems clear that both he and his father have forgotten the times that were not and are now doomed to repeat their mistakes.

Comfortably Numb? The Sopranos, New Brutalism, and the Last Temptation of Chris Glen Creeber

I have argued elsewhere that The Sopranos implicitly offers a critique of a new breed of crime movie most commonly referred to as “new brutalism” (see “TV Ruined the Movies”). This can be clearly seen through two characters at seemingly different ends of the same generic spectrum, Tony Soprano and Christopher Moltisanti. Although both are dangerous and violent individuals, they implicitly represent a fundamentally different set of moral and ethical values. Whereas Tony’s traditional sensibilities appear to represent Francis Ford Coppola’s “film school” generation and the old-school “moral” associations of Marlon Brando’s Don Vito Corleone, Christopher seems to encapsulate the new priorities of Quentin Tarantino’s “video store” generation and the “amoral” violence associated with the forms and aesthetics of video games, cartoons, and television. In this essay, I explore these ideas further, asking whether this satirical examination was continued throughout the series as a whole. I particularly focus on the last season, concentrating on Christopher’s production of the gangster film Cleaver, which appears to offer an interesting set of issues and debates around which the moral and ethical issues of the new gangster movie are investigated further.

“This Isn’t Real Blood” Typified by faster editing, special effects, the employment of bright primary colors, an extensive use of pop music, and an incestuous relation-

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ship with pop culture as a whole, new brutalism, critics have argued, seems intent on producing a world of ironic hyperrealism. According to Julia Hallam and Margaret Marshment, new brutalism’s reference to “social reality is largely obscured by ‘high concept’ aesthetics that foreground stylistic excess, its entertainment value articulated through accrued layers of generic self-reflexivity and intertextuality” (92). Perhaps the most well-known and celebrated auteur associated with this new breed of cinema is director Quentin Tarantino, whose films such as Reservoir Dogs (1992), Pulp Fiction (1994), and Kill Bill (2003) create a complex narrative world that refers more to other films and genres— such as blaxploitation, Hong Kong martial arts movies, Japanese samurai movies, and Italian spaghetti westerns—than to any recognizable notion of “the real.” The MTV aesthetics often associated with new brutalism has led some critics to argue that the genre is often implicitly amoral, particularly in its use of violence. In defense, critics foreground the apparent use of religious imagery in the work of Tarantino that points toward a subtle spiritual subtext to his films. Kent L. Brintnall, for example, argues that the violence in Reservoir Dogs is representative of the sufferings of Christ and the iconography of the crucifixion. However, critics have more commonly argued that new brutalist cinema was never meant to produce deeply moral works of art. In fact, it has been suggested that the genre’s portrayal of violence should be regarded simply as an intrinsic part of its stylized aesthetic. As film critic Geoff Andrew explains, “Tarantino does not appear to be concerned with the moral implications of the film; rather, it is primarily a stylish variation on traditional genre conventions, designed to thrill, shock, amuse and surprise” (323). No surprise, then, that the director himself tends to justify the violence in his movies by generally playing down their realism and foregrounding their stylistic construction: “Nobody is getting killed; this isn’t real blood; it’s syrup, it’s paint. If you don’t like it you must not like the color red, because you know it’s not real blood” (quoted in Heard). I would argue that The Sopranos implicitly investigates this debate around the aestheticization of violence in contemporary cinema. In particular, it appears to examine and dramatize the moral differences between the old film-school generation and the new video-store generation of filmmaking through the characters of Tony and Christopher. “I love movies,” Christopher explains in the first season; “That smell in Blockbuster? That candy and carpet smell? I get high off it” (“The Leg-

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end of Tennessee Moltisanti,” 1.8). As critics have pointed out, he even famously misquotes from The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972) in the pilot, immediately suggesting a lack of real knowledge about the earlier gangster tradition. As a “soldier of the MTV generation” (The New York Times on The Sopranos, 129), he also seems to reflect new brutalism’s more violent sensibilities, often exploding uncontrollably with rage and quoting from contemporary gangster movies to articulate his anger. “This is Scarface, final scene,” he shouts; “Fucking bazookas under each arm—say hello to my little friend” (“Meadowlands,” 1.4). These implicit nods toward new brutalism become more explicit when he starts writing his own screenplay, loosely based on his experiences in the mob. In “D-Girl” (2.7), he even teams up with a film development girl who has worked with Tarantino (see Creeber, “TV Ruined the Movies,” 130). However, Christopher’s leanings toward new brutalism are consistently contradicted by a drama that implicitly rejects the style of this new genre. For example, the series frequently and self-consciously turns its back on the portrayal of its comic-book violence by implicitly returning to an earlier cinematic tradition. In particular, it borrows Coppola’s famous technique of crosscutting between scenes of extreme violence and domestic warmth. For example, the killing of Brendan and the mock execution of Christopher in the first season are intercut with a choral recital from Meadow’s school concert, thereby juxtaposing the two morally opposed worlds that these characters inhabit (“Denial, Anger, Acceptance,” 1.3). A similar technique is loosely applied to the whole of “College” (1.5), in which Tony visits Maine with his daughter Meadow for a college tour and accidentally comes across a notorious “rat” now living undercover. As a result, the normality of this everyday family trip is suddenly contrasted with a bloody tale of Mafia revenge. This gives an important moral structure to the drama as a whole, a narrative framework implicitly lacking in new brutalism, with its heavily stylized and cartoonesque violence that has seemingly little concern with creating any ethical center. Similarly, although The Sopranos frequently employs pop music, the music chosen generally lacks the catchy intensity of the songs that so often punctuate more-recent examples of the genre. Nick Lowe’s “The Beast in Me,” Elvis Costello’s “Complicated Shadows,” and Frank Sinatra’s “It Was a Very Good Year” are in direct contrast with the frenetic dance beat of “Jungle Boogie” or “Stuck in the Middle with You.” Con-

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sequently, the choice of music tends to avoid constructing the sort of rapidly edited sequences that have become associated with new brutalism’s strong MTV aesthetic. In this way, The Sopranos attempts to bring back the moral realism to a genre that now seems simply to prioritize its frantic intertextual style over any form of social realism. Seen in this light, Christopher becomes a dramatic symbol through which the overindulgent, violent, and amoral tendencies of new brutalism are frequently ridiculed, parodied, and subverted. With this in mind, the question I want to address is: Does the last season of The Sopranos reveal a gangster show that is still intent on attempting to critique the violent amorality of new brutalism, or has its success and longevity meant that it has gradually been seduced by the genre that it once set out to critique?

“One More Sexy Kill” A good place to begin to address this question is Christopher’s own gangster movie, which he finally gets made in the last season. Cleaver is a film that he revealingly describes as “Saw meets Godfather II” (“Mayham,” 6.3), suggesting the two contrasting genres upon which its strange hybrid form is based—the moral realism of The Godfather absurdly mixed with contemporary teen horror. At one point, he describes how the film was originally inspired by Edward Scissorhands (Tim Burton, 1990). “I’m watching that movie,” he explains, “when boom! All of a sudden, it hits me. What if, instead of a pair of scissors, it’s a meat cleaver instead?” (“Mayham”). It’s no accident, of course, that the subtle sensitivity of Tim Burton’s film is completely lost on this young, hotheaded gangster, who takes a rather sad, melancholic, and beautiful piece of fantasy and turns it into an example of violent, sensationalist, and exploitative “shock cinema.” Indeed, Pork Store Killer, Cleaver’s original title, perhaps more vividly describes its generic aspirations. The story of Cleaver is basically a revenge drama based around a betrayed gangster (played by Daniel Baldwin) who is murdered by his own people and comes back to seek revenge. How exactly Baldwin’s character “comes back” is never made clear (Christopher is never entirely sure whether it is by scientific or supernatural means), perhaps suggesting new brutalism’s tendency to play loose with the traditional modes of realism. In the last season, we see the film in its final stages of development, the production crew (complete with its tokenistic Japanese director) watching its finale in the edit suite. Cleaver’s use of catchphrases

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(such as “Welcome to the Chop Shop!”) immediately emphasizes the film’s comic-book aesthetic, while its graphic ultraviolence is vividly portrayed at its conclusion with a character’s guts pornographically displayed on screen. In fact, some of its makers come from the porn industry, clearly talking about violence in aesthetic and sexualized terms. “I’m thinking one more sexy kill,” says a producer; “Audiences today love blood.” Yet, not content with making an exploitative piece of new brutalism, the film’s makers try to dress it up in some pseudo-Christian imagery. “Dad, that was really neat at the end,” the producer’s daughter tells her father at its premiere; “the creepy figurine and the crucifix.” “Glad you got that Alexandra,” he says. “Very observant. The sacred and the profane” (“Stage 5,” 6.14). Yet, despite its trappings of Christian theology, the film is clearly just an example of exploitative cinema in the extreme, with little moral framework or structure. As if to drive this theme home, Christopher later visits its writer, J.T. Dolan, to complain that Tony is unhappy with the portrayal of the Mafia boss in the film. While arguing in his apartment, Christopher picks up one of Dolan’s awards from the shelf. It is the Humanitas Prize for writing “themes of a socially redeeming nature.” But Christopher doesn’t understand (he calls it the “Humantaitis Award,” making it sound like a disease). Instead, of praising his collaborator on his achievement, he picks it up and brutally smashes him over the head with it (“Walk Like a Man,” 6.17). He will later kill Dolan in cold blood; perhaps this is the price that the writer inevitably pays for, in effect, doing a deal with “the devil.” This, then, is a pretty crude critique of the sort of new brutalism that Christopher and his production team are producing. Not concerned with themes of a “socially redeeming nature,” they simply use violence as a form of aesthetic entertainment. In contrast, Tony Soprano represents aspects of the older form of gangster genre that Christopher and his video-store generation have rejected. According to Carmela, Tony watches Godfather II all the time. On his new laser disk, she explains, he “says the camera work looks as good as in the movie theater” (“The Sopranos,” 1.1). As such, Tony’s choice of film and his cinematic appreciation of the genre appear to reflect a particular generic tradition dating back to Coppola and before. As this suggests, Tony’s character appears to epitomize the sensibilities of the traditional gangster genre, one that seemed inherently at home on the big rather than the small screen. “Whatever happened to Gary

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Cooper, the strong silent type?” he famously asks Melfi in the pilot. “He wasn’t in touch with his feelings. He just did what he had to do.” Not surprisingly, then, Tony is not keen on Christopher’s movie ambitions or his new brutalist piece of cinema. “It paints a very unflattering picture of Italian Americans,” he ironically explains to Hesh (“Chasing It,” 6.16). A day or so after Christopher dies, Tony goes to make a coffee and finds a Cleaver mug with the film’s name and logo on the side of it. Disgusted by the object, he impulsively walks out into the garden and throws it into some bushes. Perhaps Tony is also in a good position to appreciate the gulf between the fiction and reality of the film, particularly in its portrayal of violence. When waiting on a stretcher in the hospital after the car crash, he spies Christopher’s clothes (his shirt, jeans, and ubiquitous Cleaver baseball cap) bundled up on one side. However, this time the blood spilling out of the cleaver on the cap has patches of real blood on it—this is not just “red paint” anymore. In this same episode (“Kennedy and Heidi,” 6.18), Tony angrily tells Melfi that Christopher was “a weak, lying drug addict who . . . showed people his filthy thoughts on a movie screen.” This is a revealing comment; not only does Tony show his disgust for Christopher’s movie, but he implicitly connects it with his nephew’s drug addiction. In fact, it is along the issue of drugs that one of the major fault lines between the old-school gangster movies and new brutalism seems to run. Perhaps the arrival of narcotics on the Mafia scene is the definable moment when the traditional sensibilities of the old-school Mafia were replaced with a new ruthlessness, embedded in a younger breed of gangster who is happy to both peddle and consume drugs. After all, the central narrative of The Godfather revolved around Vito Corleone’s refusal to get involved in the narcotics trade, with Sonny (Vito’s hotheaded eldest son) causing terrible damage by going against his father’s wishes. Christopher is the equivalent of Sonny, his own addiction to drugs never fully understood or accepted by the older members of the family—nor his attempt to remain completely sober, which is constantly frowned upon and ridiculed, particularly by Paulie. Yet, even when he is clean, Christopher appears to have a very different attitude to drug taking than Tony and the rest of the crew. When he uses (primarily cocaine and heroin), it makes him unreliable, disloyal, paranoid, and detached. Even when he travels to Naples with Tony and the crew, he spends most of his time in his hotel room stoned, missing a rare chance to see and experience his ancestors’ homeland. It is no acci-

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dent, then, that just before the car crash that leads to his death, he puts on the soundtrack to The Departed (Martin Scorsese, 2006) and listens to Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb”—a perfect description of his state of mind just before swerving off the road (“Kennedy and Heidi,” 6.18). This is in stark contrast to the way Tony uses drugs. For example, in the same episode, he takes peyote, which instead of numbing him seems to increase his awareness. Not only does he start winning at the roulette table for a change, but he appears to have some sort of spiritual epiphany in the desert. Seen in this light, perhaps the use of drugs in the series also reveals a generation gap between the film-school and video-store generations, a belief in the illuminatory power of natural hallucinogenics in contrast to the numbness produced by chemically manufactured opiates.

Personal Responsibility There are many reasons why Tony kills Christopher after his nephew crashes the car. First, his death would alleviate a lot of stress in his life. Second, he has the opportunity to do it discreetly and without causing suspicion (either with the authorities or within the family). But Tony also looks at the destroyed child seat in the back of the car with rage, knowing that Christopher could so easily have killed his own child because of his selfish return to drug taking. For Tony, this lack of care for his own family symbolizes just how far the Mafia has descended. “He never reached the heights like me,” he says of his father in the opening minutes of the pilot, “but in a lot of ways he had it better. He had his people—they had their standards.” So while Tony and Christopher are clearly both dangerous and cold-blooded killers, Tony mourns for the “standards” of a previous and perhaps more noble generation. This moral contrast is further highlighted in the opposing ways that Tony and Christopher understand addiction. Christopher is strongly convinced that his addiction to drugs and alcohol is something that has been genetically handed down to him. However, for Tony, the “disease concept” is just too convenient, taking the personal responsibility away from the individual. “I know human nature,” he tells his nephew in the last season, “and I know a crutch when I see it” (“Walk Like a Man,” 6.17). What we have here, then, is not just a discussion about drugs and addiction, but a dialogue about personal responsibility. Tony is reluctant to accept the concept that he is not responsible for his actions, that

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the choices he makes have somehow been simply handed down to him through his DNA. For Tony, pushing the blame for personal problems away from yourself is part of the problem with the younger generation of gangsters, resulting in their refusal to keep the “code of silence,” their inability to properly care for their families, and their weakness with regard to drugs and alcohol. Although there is a good deal of violence in the last season of The Sopranos, then, it is not the type of comic-book violence that has come to epitomize some examples of new brutalism. When violence is portrayed, it is within a world that constructs narratively adequate motivation for violent acts. In other words, violence in The Sopranos is more than just a stylistic device; it inevitably comes within a context that asks the viewer to think about the moral choices that are at play. It is for this reason that the show portrays violence without simply turning it into a piece of gratuitous entertainment. For example, when Silvio is at dinner and a shooter takes Gerry out, we see nothing of Gerry’s mutilated body. Instead, we simply see Silvio (in slow motion) getting gently speckled with blood. Even when Tony and Bobby brutally fight over a game of Monopoly, it is clearly not meant to be the graceful and choreographed fight sequence that you might see in a Hong Kong martial arts film. Instead, it is the ugly, undignified, and rather pathetic sight of two fat, middle-aged men falling over and gasping for breath. This implicit critique of new brutalism might even help explain the rather puzzling (and, for some, disappointing) ending of the last episode. How different it is from the conclusion of Cleaver or the death toll at the end of Reservoir Dogs. Seen in this light, perhaps the rather surprising finale was an implicit refusal to give the video-store generation the sort of conclusion they might have wanted—to simply pull the plug before the clichés and the ultraviolence (which we have now come to expect) were delivered. Similarly, perhaps, the credit sequence of the last episode ends with no music at all. As in the psychiatry sessions, it is the silence that speaks volumes. No dance track is needed here to boost up the tempo or add to its dramatic intensity. In conclusion, then, I would argue that the critique of new brutalism that appears to be at work in the early seasons of The Sopranos is still very much in evidence in the last season. In particular, the production of Cleaver gives us a parody of the sort of gangster movie that The Sopranos implicitly deconstructs, attempting to create a piece of social realism in which the world of organized crime can still be judged on some sort of

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moral (rather than simply aesthetic) terms. This is why the series will be missed and why it has continually been the conscience to a genre that has seemingly thrown away its moral compass. It is to the eternal credit of the makers of The Sopranos that their own moral framework remained so surprisingly secure until the very last frame.

PART 5

Dreams and Therapy

Fishes and Football Coaches The Narrative Necessity of Dreams in The Sopranos Cynthia Burkhead

More than anything else in The Sopranos, its dream sequences divided the show’s fans between those sometimes referred to as the “hits and tits” crowd and those more appreciative of the characters’ oneiric experiences. Those fans preferring the program’s much more frequent displays of blood and flesh argued that these were the integral elements of the story and not Tony’s “artsy fartsy” dreams. Yet of the many ways The Sopranos has carved out a place in television history, its use of dreams is among the most important and has earned the show a distinctive place in television dream analysis. The HBO series never used dreams as an obvious ratings booster (remember the Bobby-in-the-shower bombshell in season ten of Dallas [CBS, 1978–1991])? Nor did the producers attempt to inject supernatural aspects in the nature of dreams, as was the case in the season four finale, “Restless,” of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (WB, 1997–2001; UPN, 2001–2003). The characters in The Sopranos dream old-fashioned dreams that involve talking fish and butterflies and dead people. And unlike more-frequent and more-typical television dream sequences, dreams in The Sopranos are the rule rather than the exception. As such, the show avoided from the beginning any potential for the series-ending tricks employed by Newhart (CBS, 1982–1990) and St. Elsewhere (NBC, 1982–1988). Although the decision to avoid dream trickery or the reimagining of the nature of dreams is notable in a medium that invites such creativity, what makes dreams in The Sopra-

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nos most unique is that they are necessary to the show’s foundational premise. In Martha Nochimson’s interview with David Chase, Chase responds to fans’ dissatisfaction with the show’s dreams by stating, “From the get-go this is a story about psychology. A man goes to a therapist. So those dreams are earned, because so much of psychotherapy has to do with dreams” (Dying to Belong, 241). Indeed, the get-go or establishing scene in the pilot episode presents Tony Soprano in Dr. Jennifer Melfi’s waiting room preparing for this first psychotherapy session. Even before the two meet, viewers should be anticipating dreams. So if The Sopranos is to remain true to its initial premise, there must be dreams. However, badly conceived and produced television dreams—indeed, dreams that are not “artsy fartsy” enough—could be disastrous. Significantly, viewers of The Sopranos mostly see the characters’ dreams rather than hear them repeated in Melfi’s office or in the Bada Bing’s backroom office. Finally, each time the principal premise looks to be weakening and thus endangering the story’s viability, a dream occurs to bring The Sopranos back to what made it original in the first place—Tony’s necessary place in the psychiatrist’s office. Without dreams, it is possible The Sopranos would have ended after two seasons. The premise sounds a lot like a bar joke—a mobster walks into a shrink’s office. Instead of the setup for a good joke, however, this is the setup for intriguing character development. Apart from the antiquated notion that therapy diminishes his manhood, Tony Soprano is influenced by the Italian cultural idea that a person does not take his or her troubles outside of the families, of which every mobster has two. These seemingly deep-rooted ideas defining Tony are threatened by his anxiety attacks. Although viewers learn much about Tony from what he tells Melfi, he cannot and does not tell her everything. Even when Tony describes his dreams, as in the pilot episode, when he relates the dream of his penis falling off and the search for his old mechanic to reattach it, the telling is much like the description of a dream in literature: effective for establishing character, but limited. Additionally, these “told” dreams, unable to completely capture the dreamer’s fears and phobias, are too easily read as comedy and risk placing too much emphasis on the dream story and not enough emphasis on the dreamer’s psyche. Witnessing Tony’s dreams visually more fully unfolds for viewers the extent of Tony’s psychological conflict, thus enhancing the potential for character development. For instance, thanks to Melfi’s clinical descriptions to Tony, we

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are intellectually aware of his desire for a nurturing mother; however, when lithium induces him to dream up the classical Italian beauty Isabella (1.12), whom he imagines nursing a baby in old Italy, the depth of Tony’s desire is clearer. And the degree of betrayal he feels at knowing someone in his crew is a snitch is only fully understood when, in a dream attributed to food poisoning in the episode “Funhouse” (2.13), Tony has himself doused in a flammable substance so he can be torched. Perhaps the best example of the importance of dreams to character development has to do with Tony’s moral conflicts. Although we see Tony almost kill his “goomara” Gloria when she threatens to talk to Carmela about their affair, it becomes clear when she visits his dreams that he feels responsible for her suicide (“Everybody Hurts,” 4.6). Viewers would likely doubt Tony’s verbal confessions of guilt over the deaths he causes or nearly causes, but we believe his feelings of remorse when, for instance, Big Pussy, Ralphie, and Tony B. show up in his dreams. In a show that proves its quality in part by the depth it creates in a multitude of its characters, it is no surprise that Tony is not the only one whose development is enhanced by dreams. Christopher’s vulnerability is exposed when the Czech he killed early in season one visits his dreams (“The Legend of Tennessee Moltisanti,” 1.8). In “Employee of the Month” (3.4), the extent of Melfi’s rage and her conflict over the desire to have Tony punish her rapist is manifested in a dream through the fierce rottweiler that protects her from her rapist. In “To Save Us All from Satan’s Power” (3.10), even Sil, a character who seems by design to remain underdeveloped, dreams about missing cheese and pussy, clearly meant to show his feelings of loss and perhaps guilt over the death of Big Pussy. Perhaps more important than their contribution to character development, in at least two instances dreams in The Sopranos function to prevent suspension of Tony’s therapy, which would effectively halt the show’s narrative progression. The first occurs in season one’s “Pax Soprana” (1.6) after Tony becomes outraged at Melfi for suggesting he suffers repressed feelings of anger toward his mother Livia. Glen Gabbard sees this as a point of potential therapeutic hopelessness. The situation resolves itself, and Tony becomes receptive to therapy once again after he has an erotic dream abut Melfi, erotic in spite of the therapist transforming into Livia. At this point, according to Gabbard, “the message is clear. Tony has fallen in love with his therapist” (52). His frustration with therapy develops into a fixation on his therapist; he decides to

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continue therapy mostly as an opportunity to see the object of his desire. Whatever Tony’s motive, the show’s narrative foundation is maintained. The second dream that preserves the show’s narrative movement is one of Melfi’s. When Tony forces her to “go on the lam” after Uncle Junior and Livia attempt to have him killed, Melfi refuses to continue treating Tony, effectively blaming him for the suicide of one of her patients. She is ambivalent about this decision and discusses it with her friend and therapist Elliot Kupferberg. In “Toodle-Fucking-Oo” (2.3), Melfi dreams that Tony has a panic attack while driving his SUV. He attempts to prevent the attack with Prozac, but his bottle is empty, so he passes out and crashes the vehicle; in the background of the dream plays music from The Wizard of Oz (1939). Melfi interprets her dream to mean that Tony has a real need to continue therapy, and she agrees to begin treating him again. Once more, a dream saves the narrative arc from collapsing. Dreams in The Sopranos also provide foresight for both the viewers and the program’s main character. The major examples of this are “Funhouse” and “The Test Dream” (5.11), episodes both much loved and much maligned by the show’s fans. In each episode, Tony has a dream that provides him with dual understandings, first by bringing him awareness of repressed knowledge and then by making him see the action he must take as a result of this knowledge. In “Funhouse,” which presents a sequence of six dreams that Toy attributes to food poisoning, he grasps that Big Pussy is the rat in his organization. In typical surreal fashion, Pussy appears not as a rat but as a talking fish, situated between two sleeping fish. Pussy the fish confesses to Tony that he has been talking to the FBI, confirming Tony’s subconscious fears. Tony is able to interpret the dream correctly and come to terms with the necessary action he must take—to make Big Pussy really sleep permanently with the fish. For this dream to function as foreshadowing for both Tony and the viewers, its images must be interpretable. To some degree, Chase relies upon his audience’s understanding of the mob convention of “sleeping with the fish,” acquired from other gangster stories. Tony’s own understanding is even more interesting because it comes from his dual roles as viewer of mob stories and mobster. Tony clearly understands the gangster conventions presented in film and television: in “Proshai, Livushka” (3.2), we see him alone in the dark crying at the closing scene of The Public Enemy (1931), and we frequently see Tony and his crew quoting from the Godfather films while comparing their own experiences

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to those of the Corleone family. Tony’s understanding also comes from being nurtured into the world from which the mobster conventions arise. Whether it is from fiction or life or a combination of both, Tony’s full understanding in “Funhouse” does not occur until the convention appears to him in a dream through Pussy the talking fish. Five dreams lead to this final dream in the sequence, all of which build to this pivotal revelation. Maurice Yacowar charts the evolution of the dreams: The second dream, in which Tony shoots Paulie, “prepares Tony for the execution of a close aide.” In the next dream, Tony is driven by Adriana and Christopher to find Pussy; Yacowar claims here that “Tony’s subconscious is zeroing in on Pussy.” In the next dream, discussion with Melfi about Pussy Malanga and Big Pussy creates uncertainty for Tony about whether the subject of his dream is the mobster Pussy or sex. Within his dream, Tony is still unable to interpret the dream; but, according to Yacowar, “the ambiguity confirms Pussy as the acknowledged source of Tony’s anxiety, his uncertainty about his safety and identity.” Yacowar suggests that when Tony finally has sex with Melfi on her desk at the end of the dream, “his weakness for Pussy edges out his vulnerability to Pussy one last time” (121). The truth about Big Pussy is revealed in the last of Tony’s dreams, and it is delivered by Pussy himself, sort of, so there is no more ambiguity and no more repression. Tony has been purged of at least this specific anxiety, or, as Chase puts it, what was really poisoning Tony was “vomited out” (quoted in Nochimson, Dying to Belong, 241). He knows which of his crew members is disloyal, and he also knows what he must do about it. The season five episode “The Test Dream” functions narratively in much the same way as “Funhouse.” Tony has an unsettling sense that his cousin, Tony B., is up to something, but he is unsure what it is. When he learns Phil and Billy Leotardo have whacked Angelo, Tony suspects Tony B. will try to avenge his old prison buddy, but it takes a dream to confirm this suspicion. Once again, the dream provides Tony a clear understanding of the situation as well as awareness about what his actions must be—he will have to take his cousin out, permanently. Unlike in the Big Pussy situation, however, Tony is carrying tremendous guilt over Tony B.’s long imprisonment. Ironically, an anxiety attack prevented Tony from going with his cousin on the job for which Tony B. was arrested. On top of this, Tony’s guilt prevents the dream from ending with a clear understanding that he must kill his cousin. So in the dream, Tony is confronted by a mob, angry because he hasn’t stopped

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Tony B. from killing Phil Leotardo. Tony is chased by this crowd, which is replaced by another with lederhosen-dressed men with lanterns. Here Tony sees himself as Frankenstein’s monster hunted by angry villagers. Ultimately, his fear for his own safety and the safety of both his families forces Tony to understand he must kill Tony B. Also, by doing so, he can prove to himself that he really deserves to be the family boss. When he finally kills Tony B. in season five’s finale, “All Due Respect” (5.13), Tony Soprano fulfills the narrative promise made to viewers in “The Test Dream.” A second anxiety is forced to the surface and a second action foreshadowed in “The Test Dream.” After a season-long separation initiated by Carmela, Tony is ambivalent about a final end to his marriage. Bachelorhood has proven disastrous, and the audience knows that underneath all of Tony’s complaints about women and money is real loneliness. His goomara is in the hospital, and he misses his horse, Pie-O-My. In his dream, Tony appears in the living room of his home astride Pie-O-My telling Carmela he’d like to come home. She replies that his return is a possibility, but he won’t be able to keep his horse in the house. The interpretive implication is clear: if Tony and Carmela reconcile, he will have to give up the other things he loves to ride—his mistresses. This is communicated in the dream by Carmela, but since Carmela is, of course, not really in the dream, her words are coming from Tony’s subconscious understanding of his wife. His near-dawn phone call to a sleepy Carmela confirms to Tony and the viewers that she is open to the possibility of reconciliation. The overall emphasis of “The Test Dream” is Tony’s general fear of inadequacy, which is also represented in the dream by his visit to his old high-school locker room, where he encounters Coach Molinaro. At least twice in The Sopranos, Uncle Junior has mocked Tony for being too weak to succeed athletically. Tony goes to the locker room in his dream, therefore, to face the possible truth of Junior’s accusation. When Coach Molinaro begins to tell Tony how he failed to live up to his potential, Tony attempts to reject the truth of this judgment by shooting his old coach. He fails when the bullets fall out of his gun and dissolve as he tries to pick them up. The full extent of Tony’s fear of sexual inadequacy, the Freudian root of all human fears, is revealed in this dream moment. The gun’s phallic significance is interpreted in the dream by the coach himself: “What do you got there? A bigger dingus than God gave you?” Tony cannot shoot his gun, and his ammunition is useless. He leaves this

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part of his dream in the same psychological place in which he began it, unsure of his adequacy as a man. This is the only issue left unresolved for Tony in “The Test Dream,” but once again, this lack of resolution is necessary to preserve the narrative premise. There is some discussion among viewers of The Sopranos about whether sleep experiences caused by drugs or physical illness should even be discussed as dreams. In his pre–season six interview with Nochimson, Chase hints there will be “other mental states that people think are dreams, but they’re not” (Dying to Belong, 242). I suggest that how subconscious knowledge manifests itself may be affected by chemicals or some other altered physical condition, but what exists in the subconscious to be manifested cannot. If a dream is, in part, the recognition of repressed knowledge or feelings, visual variety seems the only real issue. This conclusion is important for the discussion of Tony’s longest, most sustained dream experience of the series, the dream that occurs over two episodes while he is in a coma after being shot by Uncle Junior at the beginning of season six. Most viewers agree that Tony is having a near-death experience in “Join the Club” (6.2) and “Mayham” (6.3). He is septic, literally, and at one point in “Mayham” suffers cardiac arrest and must be resuscitated with paddles. In his coma/dream state, Tony sees the proverbial light, but it is not at the end of a tunnel. It is first seen as a beacon flashing outside the window of the hotel in his dream, and again, at the moment of his cardiac arrest, as the searchlight on a helicopter hovering over his head. But Tony also sees what looks like a forest fire at the other end of town. His precarious position between what appear to be heaven and hell led some message-board responses to speculate that Tony is in purgatory. Even for a believer, this would be possible only if Tony were really dead; but the important thing is what Tony believes, and if he believes himself to be dead, then purgatory is a possible and interesting reading. The other elements of the dream may then explain what prevents his progress to either heaven or hell. After Tony, who in the dream is some sort of weapons salesman, loses his identity by accidentally switching briefcases with a solar-heating salesman named Kevin Finnerty, people continue to mistake Tony for Kevin. This indicates that Tony is connected by more than a briefcase and a driver’s license to this strange salesman. Even Tony begins to doubt his distinctiveness from Finnerty. A major clue to the dream puzzle is the difference in the two men’s professions. Tony deals in violence, and Finnerty deals in produc-

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ing useful energy. As such, he is the antithesis of Tony, at least professionally. But there is something the two have in common. In the dream, Finnerty/Tony is stalked by Buddhists who are suing him for his business incompetence. In life, Tony constantly has to prove his professional aptitude, and those challenging his capability resort to violent means to resolve their problems with him. But Tony also faces legal threats in life, those posed by the police and other law enforcement authorities. Thus, Finnerty represents a repressed aspect of Tony’s psyche, a less violent aspect that Tony begins to accept in the dream. It is this, as well as his appreciation for being given another chance at life, that explains Tony’s altered attitude when he awakens from the coma. He is suddenly interested in his philosophical connection to other humans in the universe. He reminds Paulie that he should be less self-centered. He leans on a paramedic for money and then backs down. He also backs down from his original demands in the sale of Barone’s waste management company. When Tony returns home from the hospital and finds his way to the backyard, he is still looking for the return of the ducks that will confirm his family’s security, but this no longer causes him anxiety. To some degree, Tony’s superego is strengthened in the dream and is able to challenge his out-of-control id. Tony’s violent outbursts later in season six usually follow nonviolent attempts to resolve the problems at hand. Most significant, there is a new physical manifestation of Tony’s new psychological state—he seems to have become allergic to his anger, vomiting twice when he experiences rage. Over the series’ run, many viewers of The Sopranos became increasingly impatient with the show’s dream sequences. Responses to “The Test Dream” on the Television Without Pity board (www. televisionwithoutpity.com) ranged from reverential awe to outright resentment. Mike Farren claims the negative responses lead to a larger question: “The furor exposed a long-running TV dilemma regarding dreams, visions, and hallucinations. Just how much surrealism will a TV audience tolerate?” That depends on who the audience is. If real fans of The Sopranos wanted the show to remain true to its premise, they needed to settle in to Tony Soprano’s dreams. These dreams, in Martin Hipsky’s words, “offer us compelling panoramas of inner space that verge on the authentically surrealistic, but that are in each case reined in, their potentially destabilizing vistas of the untrammeled unconscious shuttered by their service to plot and character development.” Translated for the hits and tits crowd: this thing of ours has got to have its dreams.

From Here to InFinnerty Tony Soprano and the American Way Terri Carney

As fellow critics have pointed out in a myriad of published studies on the series, The Sopranos challenges the traditional gangster genre formula and brings the mob closer to all of us: Tony and his gang inhabit a recognizable world of Starbucks, suburbia, and SUVs. They discuss issues of the day, the same ones we discuss when we turn off the TV after the episode.1 In short, they inhabit a quotidian reality that is continuous with our own, and we are prevented from drawing the neat lines that allow us a comfortable remove from the horror of the “criminal world,” as David Simon’s book Tony Soprano’s America convincingly demonstrates. Indeed, the series is an allegory that shows how the workings of the Italian American Mafia are not so different from the latest incarnation of the American way crystallized in the contemporary, corporate, middle-class consumer culture of the baby boomers, or what David Brooks has deemed “bobo culture.” Both groups, the Italian American Mafia and the bobos, espouse individualistic values, thrive in liberal markets, and dabble in partial morality to justify their wealth accumulation and the me-first practices that obtain that wealth. If indeed The Sopranos is a meditation on the possibility of redemption, as Ellen Willis claims in “Our Mobsters, Ourselves” (2), then the question of Tony’s morality and possible redemption is indisputably linked to our own. Cathleen Kaveny echoes this reading when she claims that “the everyday brutality of ‘civilian’ American family life bears an uncomfortable resemblance to life in the ‘family’ of organized crime. So the question of whether the Sopranos and their circle

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can be redeemed, in my view, is inextricably related to the question of whether we ourselves can be redeemed” (11). If the whole series investigates this question of redemption for Tony and pushes viewers to see Tony’s universe as an extension of our own, it is the Kevin Finnerty sequence (“Join the Club,” 6.2, and “Mayham,” 6.3) that intensifies this central concern and ratchets up the pressure on both Tony and the viewers to own up to their participation in immoral systems. After Junior shoots Tony as a kick-off to the final season (“Members Only,” 6.1), Tony lies in a coma with a gaping hole in his stomach while his friends and family maintain vigil at his hospital bedside. At this critical moment, when Tony’s fate hangs in the balance, his mind wanders to a realistic dreamscape that many have convincingly interpreted as a sort of purgatory, where we meet the watered-down, middlemanagement, businessman version of the Tony we know, or, as I will call him for purposes of clarity, “Tony Business.” His name is Tony Soprano, he looks like Tony Soprano, and he is from New Jersey, but something is not right. We recognize James Gandolfini’s physique, yet his gait and accent have been normalized, and we gather that he is a salesman in the field of precision optics who is attending a professional conference in Costa Mesa, California, a town sandwiched between the heat of raging forest fires and the beacon light of a neighboring town, again symbolizing a limbo for Tony’s alter ego.2 In the comascape of Tony’s mind, he projects himself as a moral, normal everyman, but his vision is plagued by persistent interruptions of the reality he would leave behind. In the alternate universe of comatose Tony Mafia, Tony Business is an honest man with a wife, two kids, and a successful professional life. While on the business trip, at the hotel bar, Tony Business finds he has picked up the wrong briefcase and wallet and that his own are gone. He is now in possession of Kevin Finnerty’s identity: his license, credit cards, briefcase, and business papers. We soon learn that Kevin Finnerty, like Tony Business, is a businessman, one who has angered a group of Buddhist monks by selling them a faulty solar heating system and then ignoring their numerous attempts to contact him with complaints. The rest of the sequence, which continues over two episodes, centers on Tony Business’s struggle to resist assuming the identity of Kevin Finnerty, even as the evidence accrues that they are one and the same. I read this sequence as being about the possibility for Tony Mafia’s redemption, which is predicated on Tony Business recognizing Kevin Finnerty as a facet of himself. By doing so, Tony Business would accept the dishonesty

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and fraud that Kevin Finnerty symbolizes and dissolve the superficial differences between the two men, thereby denying the coma dream of being an honest businessman. In order to be saved you must own your sins.3 The fact that Tony Business is being held accountable for another man’s immoral practices dramatizes degrees of guilt and complicity within a business culture that defines success by monetary gain and reduces humanity to a stack of identification cards and boarding passes. When the Buddhist monk responds to Tony Business’s argument that he is not Kevin Finnerty with an ironic “To a certain extent, all Caucasians look alike,” he gives voice to an overarching theme: all businessmen, from Tony Business to Kevin Finnerty to Tony Mafia, will have to account for their part in the corrupt practices of accumulating wealth in disregard of fellow human beings, whether those fellow humans be murdered or more indirectly victimized. Of course, this circle of complicity implicates us, the viewers, as well: the Kevin Finnerty sequence is an allegory for how our collective business practices and materialist culture taints all of us. We, like Tony, are unavailable to redemption as long as we blindly support and enable an economic system that is selfjustifying even when perpetrating “victimless” crimes such as polluting the environment or cheating employees out of benefits and retirement packages.4 As another monk urges: “Someone must take responsibility.” Tony Business and Kevin Finnerty are incremental steps on the line that connects us to Tony Mafia, and we are called on to own them both. Such a direct summons for audience awareness is, of course, safely tucked into the dream cycle, thereby subduing any violent or unseemly reactions to heavy doses of cognitive dissonance. It is funny to think about the largely negative reaction to the sequence, with many bloggers and online commentators expressing impatience and disgust with the story line. It is as if resistant viewers were in therapy and faced with a new truth about themselves that they are unwilling or unable to accommodate, similar to when Tony faces the evidence of his mother’s murderous plot against him and throws a table in Melfi’s office (“Isabella,” 1.12). Tony Business does not recognize Kevin Finnerty as his responsibility despite unrelenting pressure to do so, although he reluctantly adopts his identity coordinates at key moments when convenient. For example, without his own identification and credit cards, Tony Business is “forced” to book a hotel room under Kevin Finnerty’s name and credit

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card. As he confesses to his wife on the phone, he is worried about committing fraud, but he does it all the same.5 (Significantly, one of Tony Mafia’s “victimless” crimes is credit-card fraud, a scheme that preys on seniors.) In the hotel lobby, Tony Business checks in as Kevin Finnerty and attracts the attention of the angry Buddhist monks, who now identify him as Kevin Finnerty, the solar-heating salesman who sold them a faulty system and never returned their calls. Still sure that he is not Finnerty, though he admits jokingly that there is a strong resemblance, Tony Business tries to explain his situation, but to no avail. The next day an envelope slides under his hotel room door with a summons for him, Kevin Finnerty, to appear in court over the matter. Through this sequence, we see how easy it is to be corrupted, how seamlessly he flows from Tony Business to Kevin Finnerty, and how difficult it is to turn back once you have taken the first small step downward. The involvement of the viewers in the checkered moral universe of American business practices is intensified by the use of crosscutting, which can underline contradictions, hypocrisies, and unresolved conflicts that require awareness if they are to be resolved. As Glen Creeber points out in “TV Ruined the Movies,” the technique of crosscutting “between scenes of extreme violence and domestic warmth . . . gives an important moral and ethical context to the story, graphically revealing the hypocrisy that lies beneath the Mafia’s respectable veneer” (131). An example of this technique in The Sopranos occurs in “College” (1.5), in which Tony’s brutal murder of an old enemy is juxtaposed with a bucolic New England college tour with his daughter Meadow. In the symbolically dense Kevin Finnerty episode, that central strategy is used almost frenetically, rendering the Tony Mafia–Kevin Finnerty–Tony Business spectrum a fluid, borderless terrain of identity. The editing in the Kevin Finnerty episodes continually juxtaposes the worlds of Tony Mafia in the hospital and Tony Business/Kevin Finnerty in Costa Mesa, yet unmistakable overlaps and echoes from one to the next create a thick connective tissue that suggests strong parallels between the two. The viewer is therefore put in the same situation as Tony Business: unable to definitively say where one businessman begins and another ends. The most pervasive of these connecting themes is what I will call the Asian theme.6 There is an undeniably negative, almost threatening tone to this thematic fiber of the connective tissue, and a persistent emphasis on the material trumping the spiritual, or at least a failure to integrate

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the two in any meaningful balance. In the Costa Mesa universe, Tony Business has several tense encounters with the Buddhist monks and even drives out to their Crystal Monastery, a visually rich setting replete with Buddhist statuary and gardens, to discuss the Kevin Finnerty misunderstanding. In the Tony Mafia universe, there are many Asian references in the hospital: Tony Mafia’s doctor is Asian, and similar in appearance to one of the Buddhist monks in the Kevin Finnerty sequence; Janice mentions having had Chinese food when arriving to relieve Carmela at Tony’s bedside; Christopher references the new Asian horror-film craze when talking about his film (“Asians flip for those films”); Meadow makes two seemingly unimportant mentions of the Asian hospital workers, once to A.J. (“The Chinese guy is going to change his meds”) and then, later, when she escorts Paulie into Tony’s hospital room and warns him about the Asian nurse (“She’s a real ballbuster”). The peacefulness we stereotypically attribute to Buddhism and Eastern spirituality is haunted by an aggressive, even menacing tone or is reduced to a commodity. As if to drive this point home, we notice that A.J. is wearing a T-shirt with Asian lettering and Sil’s bathroom decor incorporates Chinese lettering in an ornamental pattern. Another pervasive theme echoing between the two realms is responsibility and memory, two essential ingredients in the formula for redemption. Tony Business is told by his telephone wife that he is “too distracted with work” and that this whole Kevin Finnerty mix-up is “partly [his] fault.” The Buddhist monk at the monastery responds to Tony Business’s explanation of not being Kevin Finnerty with a pragmatic version of Buddhist theory: “Yeah, I know, no me, no you, only trees, but we need heat. Someone needs to take responsibility.” This responsibility/memory theme suffuses the Tony Mafia world as well. In Junior’s prison interview for mental competency, the central question to be determined is whether he will bear responsibility for his crime against Tony Mafia. In the very next scene, in a strategic montage sequence, we switch realms to witness Tony Business, who has just been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, say to the doctor, “My uncle has memory loss,” a comment that connects the Alzheimer’s theme to a failure to own one’s crimes, or at least an excuse not to see them as your own. The topic of responsibility and memory gets a sardonic, humorous treatment at Phil’s dinner table, back in the Tony Mafia universe again, where Phil and Vito discuss the death of Phil’s brother. A newly enraged Phil declares, “I don’t forget,” pounding his fist for punctuation. But then one of the wives interrupts

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with an offer of tea or coffee, and a few seconds later, after a brief contemplative pause with Vito, Phil resumes their conversation with, “I forget what we were talking about.” “Me too,” responds Vito, creating an ironic perspective for the viewer, who sees the frailty of human memory and the consequences for personal responsibility. Finally, Dr. Melfi and Carmela discuss the heavy responsibility on Tony and Carmela for having raised their children in a world of duplicity and deception, and Melfi unequivocally places responsibility on Carmela, who seems to accept it in a moment of extreme, painful clarity. A third and final theme strengthens the connective tissue—a collection of health-related elements, namely stomach ailments, MRIs, and Band-Aids. Tony Mafia’s gaping stomach wound seems to reverberate semantically between the two worlds: Charmaine Bucco in Carmela’s story has stomach cramps, and Tony must save her from drowning; A.J. has stomach issues after eating a burrito; and Tony Business’s daughter reports that his son can’t get on the phone because he is vomiting. Tony’s head is also in two places at once. In Carmela’s unforgettable monologue over Tony Mafia’s hospital bed, she recants telling Tony Mafia during an MRI (in the pilot) that he is going to hell: “You are not going to hell, I didn’t mean it.” From this scene we switch to Tony Business in Costa Mesa, where his doctor discusses Tony’s MRI after his fall down the hotel stairs. His diagnosis is early Alzheimer’s. In one of the final scenes of the Costa Mesa setting we recall the image of lonely and confused Tony Business in his hotel room with a Band-Aid on his head, contemplating his Alzheimer’s diagnosis, a sad scene that quickly segues to Paulie at his kitchen table cutting coupons for Band-Aids, all the while complaining about having to give Carmela a cut from the last heist. The three themes highlight the lack of balance in Tony Mafia’s life and the consequences he must face: he has not managed to integrate the compartments of his life; he has not taken responsibility or repented for his numerous sins/crimes; and his physical and mental ailments symbolize the price for his disconnectedness and his partial morality.7 He will not be redeemed, and the consistent implication for the viewer into the world of Tony Mafia means a similarly bleak reading of our own chances at redemption. The series has repeatedly used strategic casting, or what we might call “actor residues,” to conflate or confuse viewers’ reality with that of the fictional characters, again pushing to incriminate the viewer in the moral universe we are loath to accept as our own.8 In some cases, it is a previous acting role that lends a savvy intertextuality

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to the series, as is the case with Michael Imperioli (Christopher) and Lorraine Bracco (Melfi), who were both in Goodfellas (1990). In others, as in the case of Tony Sirico (Paulie), real-life behaviors can flavor the Sopranos character, creating a three-dimensional quality that leaps into our own sphere of reality and inscribes an eerie textual self-awareness. In the concentrated Kevin Finnerty sequence, the effect of ontological seepage deepens through the characters of Kevin Finnerty, the man on the driver’s license in Tony Business’s limbo, and Lee, the woman at the business dinner who kisses Tony Business in the hotel parking lot, resulting in a blurring of the world of the Italian American Mafia and that of bobo America. The casting of Sheila Kelley as Tony Business’s fling Lee imports an actress residue that solidifies our reading of Tony Business as a tamer version of Tony Mafia. The actress founded a successful exercise craze based on the movements of striptease and pole dancing, which she calls the “S factor.” The website detailing the philosophy and mission of her business (www.sfactor.com) sells suburban soccer moms who have likely never been in a strip club the chance to release their inner goddess. If Tony Business is Tony Mafia’s watered-down self, it makes sense that Tony Mafia’s omnipresent stripper girls are replaced with the mainstreamed version of stripping, which is sold to the average American woman wanting to lose a few pounds and look good for her husband while grabbing a bit of feminist self-possession, even as she spins around a stripper’s pole in high heels and little clothing. Like Tony Business, she represents the world of bobos: selling things without selling out. Corporate gain is justified by the purported spiritual underpinnings of the business product or mission; as Brooks pithily puts it, the “comfortable contortion of caring capitalism.” Along with the aggressive Buddhist monks, Sheila Kelley’s character taints the white-bread Tony Business with the residue of violent and sexy mob life under the bland veneer of middle-class, middle-management mid-America. Tony Business is the honest businessman who figures as a cog in the military-industrial complex; Kevin Finnerty is the dishonest businessman who sells solar heat to Buddhist monks; and we are somewhere on that same spectrum, along with Tony Mafia. The clever casting of Lee plots us closer to the world of Tony Mafia, and the Kevin Finnerty character contributes to the same effect. Kevin Finnerty’s address in Kingman, Arizona, which we see on his driver’s license in the sequence, can be found on Google maps. Kingman is equidistant (around one hundred miles) to two American tourist attrac-

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tions: Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon, capitals of materialism and spirituality, respectively, polar pillars of the fundamental tension embodied by bobo culture. When Tony Mafia awakens from his coma, he seems changed by his experience, but soon he is back to business as usual. When he suffocates a bleeding and barely breathing Christopher after a gruesome car accident (“Kennedy and Heidi,” 6.18), Tony attempts to revisit the revelatory experience from his coma, perhaps trying again to effect real change in his life. He heads out to Arizona (Kevin Finnerty’s state), hooks up with a college student who strips for money (an upgraded stripper like Lee), and enjoys an altered state of consciousness by taking peyote (like his altered state of coma). High and happy, Tony Mafia and the educated stripper win big at the Las Vegas casino and wind up at a scenic park that conjures the spiritual, natural beauty of the Grand Canyon. Here, Tony appears to have a revelation: while staring at the sunrise over the desert, he screams, “I get it!” A sort of identity labyrinth is created, and the worlds of Tony Mafia, Tony Business, and Kevin Finnerty echo and repeat the personal coordinates of each. The peyote episode confirms that Tony Mafia’s redemption is connected to the Kevin Finnerty sequence, and that his redemption/ revelation is, indeed, illusory: he “gets it”? The “get it” would mean to assume responsibility, yet clearly he still thinks he can reconcile greed and virtue—that he can have them both by somehow blending wealth accumulation and violence with spiritual purpose and fulfillment. Our bobo culture tries to reconcile materialism and spirituality but fails. We are still, like Tony Business, reluctant or unable to accept responsibility for the evils of individualistic, corporate capitalism, which fuels greed and personal gain at the expense of spirituality, communitarianism, and shared humanity.9 Many viewers hated the Kevin Finnerty sequence. The salient themes in these two episodes show that violence and greed prevail over spiritual and other methods of “coping,” like therapy and Buddhism. Indeed, narratives of integration such as Buddhism, psychoanalysis, and bobo capitalism merely enable us to remain disconnected, like Tony. They are a Band-Aid to a deeper, structural problem: our collective and willful Alzheimer’s.10

Notes 1. Various studies confirm that the world of The Sopranos is one we all share, whether we call it postmodern, post-countercultural, bourgeois, me generation, or suburbia. Albert Auster states: “Theirs is a world of suburban

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split levels, shopping malls, soccer moms and dads, SATs, and videogames. . . . Indeed the old urban restlessness of the gangster has been replaced in The Sopranos by suburban smugness” (11). 2. See two chapters from Richard Greene and Peter Vernezze’s 2004 book The Sopranos and Philosophy: Wilson, “Staying within the Family,” which treats Tony’s morality as a mirror of our own contemporary business ethics, and Gini, “Bada Bing and Nothingness,” in which Al Gini notes, “In his mind he’s just a businessman trying to get by and do well for his family” (11). 3. Kaveny writes: “As a self-described devout Catholic, Carmela surely knows that redemption from sin requires repentance and a firm resolve to amend one’s ways” (13). 4. See Green, “I Dunno about Morals.” 5. According to Vernezze, fraud is lower in Dante’s circles (along with deception) than murder or greed. It is a uniquely human sin and our greatest evil (186). 6. See Combs for a look at how Tony tries and fails to incorporate Eastern thought into his world. 7. Combs concludes that “Tony compartmentalizes his life as a coping mechanism. He distances his emotional and spiritual self from his consciousness in order to cope with his racism, sexism, and inhumanity. Unless he recognizes the connectedness of all things, the imbalances in his life, and his role in promoting unhappiness in others, Tony’s entire life, let alone his therapy, will fail to promote harmony” (24). Santo connects Tony’s fat body with the corruption of the American Dream, greed, and moral bankruptcy. 8. Several other Sopranos critics discuss what I call actor residues: Creeber (“TV Ruined the Movies,” 126), Yacowar (11), Akass and Macabe (148), and Bondanella (309). 9. Richard Stivers writes: “For meaning to be effective it must be shared meaning that binds people together in common responsibilities and reciprocal moral relationships. Consumerism is a shared belief but it leaves one psychologically isolated, for it is based upon freedom without responsibility. The attempt to create meaning in consumerism, to spiritualize consumerism, fails because its utopian promise of perfect happiness and health cannot be achieved in this world, and therefore happiness and health remain transitory, as anxiety, suffering, and death constantly remind us” (69). Martha Nochimson describes “a culture awash in pious pronouncements about the value of both individualism and family which allows no way to integrate the blood ties of family with the isolating drive necessary to individuals bound for success” (“Waddaya Lookin’ At?” 5). Steven Hayward and Andrew Biro assert that “Tony is trying to sustain community solidarity and at the same time must relentlessly focus on the bottom line. Forced to inhabit a world in which the forces of commodification are such as to continually emphasize individualism and personal gratification at the expense of solidarity and communal pleasures, it is perhaps not surprising that Tony is insecure” (209). 10. Willis examines how Tony “uses what he’s learned in therapy—that you can’t compartmentalize your life—to more fully accept his worst impulses” (7).

“Whatever Happened to Stop and Smell the Roses?” The Sopranos as Anti-therapeutic Narrative David Pattie

In 2004, Mike Lippman speculated about the eventual outcome of The Sopranos as a series and Tony Soprano as a character: “Tony will most likely end up dead or in jail, but he will certainly become more and more isolated from the people he loves along the way. He will change from a man surrounded by family to a man who will ultimately suffer alone. Therapy may allow us to pretend that Tony is redeemable, but even from season one we learn that Tony’s personality and lifestyle will make it impossible for him to escape his destiny. In the end, Tony will fall” (156). Well, now we know. Tony does not fall; he does not end the series alone. He ends the series as a whole as he ends season one, in a restaurant, surrounded by his family. The FBI might be preparing warrants, and the men who walk into the diner might, conceivably, be out to kill him, but when we last see him, he is alive and he is free. The series has stopped; it hasn’t ended—at least, not in the sense that we imagine a long-term “flexi-narrative” (to use Robin Nelson’s phrase [TV Drama in Transition]) ending. Sunnydale disappears into the Hellmouth; Jed Bartlett heads off into the sunset; Carrie finally accepts Mr. Big as her destiny; Ross and Rachel, at long last, fall into each other’s arms; Mulder and Scully are reunited and dedicate themselves to combating the oncoming alien invasion, whatever form it finally takes; in Six Feet Under, Nate dies, Claire leaves home, and, in an artful montage, everybody meets their end. Even Lost, we are promised, will resolve

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itself—with the narrative strands, the disparate time lines, the reality and the fantasy, all coming together in a (presumably cosmic) moment of closure. Tony, on the other hand, just goes. One moment he is there, and the next he is gone: the screen goes blank, the music cuts out, and darkness descends, broken only by the sound of irate fans, blogging. Creator David Chase, interviewed for The Sopranos: The Complete Book, offered the following interesting gloss on the (frequently furious) reaction to the series’ final moments: “I remember I would tell my kid and her cousin bedtime stories. Sometimes I would want to get back to the grownups and have a drink, so I would say something like ‘and they were driving down the road and that’s it. Story over.’ They would always scream, ‘Wait a minute!’ Apparently the need for finality exists in human beings. But we’re not children any more” (Martin 184). Chase is undoubtedly right: we are so used to the idea of narrative finality that we will intuit its presence, even if the clues pointing toward closure are tenuous at best. However, there may be more to the dismay that the last scene provoked than the childish desire, on the part of the series audience, for an ending. In the case of The Sopranos, it could be argued, the quest for narrative resolution was strongly implied in the series’ opening scenes. Tony, sitting silently in Dr. Melfi’s waiting room, is at the very beginning of a narrative arc that will be predicated on the active search for a satisfactory explanation, which will itself be radically transformative. After all, according to Australian therapist Michael White, someone will only seek therapy if the narrative that governs their lives runs counter to their wishes or their best interests, or if “the person is actively participating in the performance of stories that she finds unhelpful, unsatisfying, and dead-ended, and that these stories do not sufficiently encapsulate the person’s lived experience or are very significantly contradicted by important aspects of the person’s lived experience” (14). White is one of the originators of narrative therapy—a therapeutic movement that, as the name suggests, works to transform the stories that those undergoing therapy tell themselves in order to make sense of their experience of the world. Deriving much of its inspiration from a peculiarly postmodern notion (the centrality of narratives in the structuring of human experience; and, in the work of Michel Foucault in particular, the operations of power in the dominant discourses that govern people’s social behavior), narrative therapy seeks to intervene in the analysand’s life, not by leading him or her toward an objective truth, but by transforming

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the story—by assembling another narrative from the raw material of the patient’s experiences. The narrative thus created also, and necessarily, is shaped by an active, participating analyst, rather than one who stands back from the process, guiding that process toward an underlying truth: “[The] conversations that therapists and clients have can be seen as stories, as narratives. Like any story, each case or each session of each case has a beginning, a middle and an ending, or at least a sense of an ending. Like any story, the conversation is held together by the patterns involved, by the plot” (de Shazer 92). Therapy, therefore, can function as a structured, unfolding, transformative conversation, which (at least by implication) involves both parties in the creation of a new, healing story. Therapist and client, bound together in an unfolding narrative that will transform them both: whatever the status of narrative therapy in the practice of contemporary psychoanalysis, it could be said that the approach has already found a home in contemporary culture. This model of the relationship between analyst and analysand recurs frequently in narratives that use therapy as part of their central dynamic. It recurs so frequently that we might call it the industry standard for therapeutic narratives; indeed, two of those narratives are referenced during the course of The Sopranos: the unholy partnership of Billy Crystal and Robert De Niro in Analyze This (Harold Ramis, 1999) (“Guy Walks into a Psychiatrist’s Office,” 2.1) and the rather more romantic coupling of Barbra Streisand and Nick Nolte in The Prince of Tides (Barbra Streisand, 1991) (“Two Tonys,” 5.1). However, this is not how the therapy sessions in The Sopranos operate. Dr. Melfi and Tony never engage in a narrative that coheres. For David Chase, the therapeutic narrative apparently set up in the series’ opening minutes is flawed from the start: “What people forget is that Melfi was compromised from the get-go. . . . The very first time she and Tony met, she told him, ‘If I was to hear that someone was going to be hurt, I’d have to go to the police . . . technically.’ What she was really saying is that his therapy and her fascination with him was more important than the damage he was doing. So right then and there, she made her deal with the Devil” (Martin 110). Glen Gabbard, discussing the same moment, is equally clear about the damage it does to the therapeutic process—and to the narratives that could grow from it: “Is Dr. Melfi right to tell Tony about the limits of confidentiality? Probably so. At the same time, she is also squelching his capacity to reveal who he is to her” (49). As the series progresses,

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and as Tony begins at times actively to resist the therapeutic process, the conversation between them stalls. For example, in “Unidentified Black Males” (5.9), Tony tells Melfi that he and Carmela, estranged for much of the series, have slept together; however, rather than carrying the conversation through to a moment of insight, Tony breaks off to answer a call on his mobile, to his therapist’s obvious annoyance. For Jason Jacobs, the therapeutic narrative worked through between Melfi and Tony over the course of the series is a profoundly unequal one. Tony, for all his faults, is a far more vital, engaged person than his therapist can ever hope to be: Tony is a fascinating mixture of popular culture, ambition, and submission to impulses and appetites that society does not sanction. . . . Tony intuitively—but not intellectually—understands that the world is a deeper and richer place than can be encompassed by the sterile categories of society and the therapy that it sanctions as a panacea. Tony may not understand himself but he understands the world better than Melfi. Who would envy her insight? In this way the show challenges us to consider a mob leader as a better human being than his therapist. Tony is the most interesting thing in her life. (155) To which one might commonsensically reply that Tony kills people and Melfi does not. However, Jacobs’s argument is not so easily dismissed. It is true that the rich, complex details of Tony’s life are permanently hidden from his therapist; for example, in the pilot she doesn’t know who or what RICO (the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) might be, and the various violent deaths in Tony’s life are glossed over in the therapy sessions as, among other things, regrettable lapses in employer-employee relations. And it is also true that this is because the two narratives they are involved in are fundamentally incommensurate: the narrative that Melfi attempts to construct is oriented toward final disclosure, and Tony’s aims toward the maintenance of the criminal status quo ante. However, this is not because the fullness of Tony’s life must always trump the relative vacuity of Melfi’s; rather, it is because the strategies adopted in the series work against the kind of resolution we might expect to meet in a therapeutic narrative. In the rest of this essay I describe and discuss three such strategies: the blocking of the forward progression of dialogue exchanges; the crabwise movement of narrative

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strands; and the gradual decay of most of the series’ major relationships. Each one of these three strategies impedes, disrupts, or frustrates the linear progression of the dialogue, the characters, the scenes, the episodes, and the series as a whole; each one of them can be thought of as antitherapeutic—that is, working to avoid the kind of narrative resolution that, in fiction, psychiatrists are supposed to bring to their clients.

Blocking In “Mr. and Mrs. John Sacrimoni Request” (6.5), the Sacramoni family are gathered together to discuss an upcoming wedding; this being The Sopranos, however, the meeting takes place in a jail, with the usual arguments about the placement of guests conducted during family visiting time. The discussions follow a familiar pattern; however, the location and situation add their own tension, and a full-scale family row threatens. It is neutralized and resolved by John Sacramoni, who assures his family that, no matter what, they will face the day with dignity and fortitude. At this point, one might expect the scene to end; but, characteristically, the conversation continues. The scene actually finishes with the beginning of another argument, as his daughter Catherine returns to what is clearly a long-standing family topic—“Jesus, can we ever talk about anything in this family besides food?” This is characteristic of the series: scenes never seem to finish at a conventional moment of closure—there are few obvious tag-lines, a relative paucity of capping phrases and images, and an unusually large number of times when, as just described, another conversation begins immediately before the next scene starts. Equally characteristically, the conversation described carries echoes of previous, equally unresolved scenes and conversations on the same general topic. Talking about weight in the Sacramoni family has, in previous episodes, provided raw material for a joke competition conducted between Tony and his crew (broken off abruptly when John enters the back room at Satriale’s); a way for Paulie Walnuts, in season four, to prove his potential loyalty to the New York families; and very nearly the cause of Ralphie Cifaretto’s death. We might expect that by this time the conversation would have moved on; that at least someone in the family might have realized where talking about weight gets you. But no: the conversation simply continues, not advancing, not building toward a lesson that the characters can absorb. They’re still talking about weight, because it’s what they have

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always talked about. The final line—or at least the final line that we hear—closes off any sense of resolution that the conversation might have contained. A potential move toward a healthier attitude to the world and to their lives has effectively been blocked. In acting improvisation classes, actors are taught to eschew blocking lines; that is, to avoid lines that impede the forward progression of the scene. Usually, these are simple monosyllables, simple agreements, or lines that take the conversation back to a previous point that has already been resolved. In writing, as in acting, such lines are generally to be avoided. Not so in The Sopranos. Sometimes, whole scenes consist of little more than blocking lines. For example, at the end of “Guy Walks into a Psychiatrist’s Office,” Tony comes home, but in place of a dialogue exchange that might draw the episode to a close, or set up next week’s action, we have: Tony: Hey. Carmela: What’re you doing home at this hour? Tony: Nothing. (Pause) Carmela: Thought it was A.J. home from school. Tony: Yeah (Pause; Tony follows Carmela into kitchen) Carmela: You all right? Tony: Yeah. (Pause) Carmela: Want a little cold past’? I can microwave it. (Gets food from fridge, puts it in microwave; Tony goes to table; Carmela brings food) Tony: Looks good. Carmela: You want cheese, something to drink? Tony: (Very minimal shake of head; pause; Tony starts to eat) Sit down. (Carmela sits; begins to go through post; music starts— “Time Is On My Side”) According to Maurice Yacowar, this scene “expresses marital comfort” (79). However, Tony and Carmela’s apparent ease in each other’s company is made possible only because they have what is, in effect, a nonconversation. Each one of Carmela’s questions and conversational gambits are blocked by Tony’s monosyllabic replies. The quiet intimacy of the mise-en-scène is challenged and negated by the unspoken tension in the dialogue. Over the course of the episode, we have seen Tony out of control and flailing. He has a panic attack and crashes the car;

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he makes a desperate attempt to restart his therapy with Melfi; he is furious with his newly returned sister. Nothing of this is expressed in the dialogue. The episode does finish calmly, but only because Tony is determinedly uncommunicative; because he blocks the conversation at every opportunity. That blocking should feature so heavily in the series is unsurprising: as we are reminded consistently, Mafia dialogue is predicated on suppression, misdirection, and euphemism. It is, at base, a language built on blocking (even at its most rhetorical, as in Paulie’s splendidly rotund, yet characteristically unspecific, “And onward goes this thing of ours” [“Fortunate Son,” 3.3]). The series, though, demonstrates that this language is not simply a matter of professional practice for the Mafia; it seeps out into the characters’ private lives and infects the language of those who come into contact with them (Meadow, for example, upbraids Jackie Jr.’s sister for daring to speak the truth about her family in the presence of outsiders [“Army of One,” 3.13]). In Tony’s therapy, even the most insightful moments are almost immediately blocked. In “The Second Coming” (6.19), after a moment of seemingly transcendental insight at the end of “Kennedy and Heidi” (6.18), Tony tells Melfi that he has realized that mothers “are the bus. They’re the vehicle that gets you here. They drop you off, then they go their own way, continue on their own journey. The problem is, we keep tryin’ to get back on the bus when we should just be lettin’ it go.” But straight away, he dismisses the thought: “Y’know, you have these thoughts and you almost grab it, and then— (dismissive gesture; hand scraping away from chin).” This dismissal, almost at the end of Tony and Melfi’s narrative, is all-embracing and final; it is perhaps the most decisive block he ever employs—a closing off not only of the implications of this truthful insight, but of the possibilities inherent in all such insights.

Meandering As Steven Combs notes, the success of Tony’s therapy is predicated on his recognizing the connectedness of all of the elements in his life: he is also right to notice that Tony simply cannot allow this to happen: “Instead of recognizing the connections between his criminality and psychological problems, his adultery and marital failure, and his objectification of women and emotional distance from his mother, wife, and daughter, Tony compartmentalizes his life as a coping mechanism. . . .

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Unless he recognizes the connectedness of all things, the imbalances of his life, and his role in promoting unhappiness in others, Tony’s entire life, let alone his therapy, will fail to promote harmony” (24). The problems with this are, first, that the issues Tony attempts to compartmentalize cannot be kept apart without great and taxing effort; and second, that keeping the elements of his life imbalanced means that, for Tony, nothing can ever be truly resolved and completed. He is not alone in this. Carmela ends the series still married to Tony and locked in an uneasy compromise with the realities of his life despite the strongest possible warning (in “Second Opinion” [3.7], Dr. Krakower tells her that she is little better than an accomplice to Tony’s crimes, and ends the consultation: “One thing you can never say: that you haven’t been told”). Meadow oscillates between distaste for her father and the urge to defend him and those like him. A.J., growing into an understanding of his father’s life, alternates between shallow cynicism, assumed toughness, and innocent incomprehension. Janice is the same mixture of selfdelusion, self-pity, and self-interest at the series’ end as she is when she first comes back into Tony’s life. Artie Bucco also ends as he begins: an envious, dissatisfied man, having trouble with his business, his marriage, and his best friend. Indeed, it could be said that the only characters in the series who change decisively are those who decay (like Uncle Junior) or die (like Christopher, Adriana, Livia, and all the rest). The series’ plotlines are similarly inconclusive; in fact, they seem to be predicated on nonresolution. The dynamic of the first season never resolves; although Livia and Junior both survive season one, the threat they pose does not recur. They dwindle over subsequent episodes; Livia becomes a painful burden, and Junior declines, gradually and agonizingly, into senility. Pussy Bonpensiero’s status seems to be resolved at the end of the first season (he is not an informer), and again at the end of the second season (he is an informer and he is killed); but he recurs and recurs—right up to the end of the sixth season (he appears finally in Paulie Walnuts’s dreams, at the end of “Remember When” [6.15]). Ralphie Cifaretto emerges as a potential threat halfway through season three; he is abruptly murdered halfway through season four; and then he takes up residence in Tony’s dreams for the next season and a half. The death of Jackie Jr. seems to create a profound rift between Tony and Meadow; however, at the series’ end she reveals that she is going to become a lawyer, to help persecuted men like her father. The death of Tony’s cousin temporarily resolves the feud between New York and New Jersey—until

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it flares up again in the next season. Paulie is a trusted friend, then a resentful underling, then a bore, then the last man standing. Chris is a surrogate son, then a substance abuser, then a potential successor, then a loyal mob member, then a resentful underling, then a threat, then dead. Season six starts with a moment of apparent climax (Junior shoots Tony) and with a period of realization (during which Tony tries to be, as far as is possible, a new man—faithful to his wife, forgiving to his children, more tolerant of others). However, the rest of the extended season charts Tony’s gradual return to an even more violent, alienated version of business as usual. The irony of this progression—or regression—is at its sharpest in the events surrounding Christopher’s death: before the crash, and before he is suffocated by his cousin, he asks Tony, “Whatever happened to stop and smell the roses?” (“Kennedy and Heidi,” 6.18)—a phrase first used, ironically, by Junior in “Army of One” (3.13). As with the dialogue, the structure of The Sopranos’ narrative lines disrupts any sense that the series is moving toward therapeutic resolution. Glen Gabbard has noted that “the family problems are far too messy and complex to be resolved by the end of the end of the episode, as they are in The Brady Bunch or Ozzie and Harriet. They are far too messy and complex for easy resolution. Critics have complained that plot elements are left hanging, but the writers recognize that life is like that and have no intention of tying up all the loose ends of the story lines” (153). We could, perhaps, go further: to recognize the nature of the messiness and complexity of their lives would, for most of the characters, be tantamount to accepting themselves as, at best, morally compromised. Here, the differing analogies for the therapeutic process offered by Melfi and Tony (in “Unidentified Black Males,” 5.9) are particularly relevant: Tony: Sometimes I think what happens here is like taking a shit. Melfi: I prefer to think of it as a moment of birth. Tony: Trust me. (Pause) It’s like taking a shit. It is true that, in the context of the episode, the analogy Tony draws graphically demonstrates a desire to expel blackness and any taint of weakness or effeminacy (see Gibson). But it is also a fair description of the series’ narrative processes. Birth is unsurprisingly the analogy of choice for someone who believes in the therapeutic narrative; it suggests change, the death of the old, harmful stories and the emergence of new, more healthy ones. On the other hand, taking a shit happens regularly

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and randomly; it does not lead to growth or change; it is not a narrative, but simply a process. Furthermore, birth brings with it responsibility; taking a shit is simply a matter of disposing of that which is unnecessary. Melfi might wish to see her task as bringing Tony, through a series of structured insights, to a new sense of himself; the circling, meandering story lines of the series, however, would seem to bear Tony out. After one crisis, unpredictably, at the wrong time and the wrong place, there will be another one; and then, when that is purged, along will come the next thing.

Hollowing During Livia’s abortive wake, Tony looks at his daughter, who is greeting their guests and accepting their condolences. In a moment of uncharacteristically clear-eyed insight, he says to Carmela: “Look at her. She’s already becoming a robot, like the rest of us” (“Proshai Livushka,” 3.2). In passing, Tony has managed to identify a trend that governs the development of both characters and relationships over the series. We might say that both fall prey to a process that can be described as “hollowing”; the same type of relationships obtain at the end as at the beginning, but by the final episodes much of their emotional content has gone, leaving behind social networks maintained as much out of habit as anything else. This process predates the series’ opening: as we soon find out, the relationship between Tony and his mother keeps going mostly because Tony has a clear idea of how a son should treat his mother—even though he knows very well that Livia cannot reciprocate. However, even after the events of the first season, and after Tony’s repeated insistence that “she’s dead to me” (for example, “Guy Walks into a Psychiatrist’s Office,” 2.1), he cannot bring himself to cast her off entirely; right up to the moment when she dies, he still visits, still pays for a housekeeper— and still berates himself for being a bad son. Even when the emotions that animate the relationship have gone, the form of the relationship is to be maintained. During the course of the series, we see the same process at work in many of Tony’s relationships. His friendships with his work colleagues at the beginning of the series are strong and warm: he mourns the passing of Jackie Aprile, is hurt by Christopher’s behavior, and treats Pussy, Silvio, Hesh, and Paulie as trusted friends. By the end of the series, though,

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he treats Hesh with suspicion, thinks of Paulie as a garrulous fool, and can barely bring himself to visit the comatose Silvio. The relationship between Christopher and Tony displays this dynamic most clearly. At the beginning, as noted, Christopher is Tony’s surrogate son; however, the long, wearing decay of their friendship—Tony’s growing dismay over Christopher’s incompetence, drug abuse, and failure to assume responsibility in the organization, and Christopher’s growing suspicion and resentment of his cousin—eats away at their initial connection, leaving only the habit of being together. When the end comes, it is not because Christopher poses an overt threat; it is because there is no longer any reason left for Tony to keep Christopher alive. Just before the black farce of Christopher’s intervention, Tony seeks advice from his uncle: Junior, with characteristic dispassion, tells him, “A dog you love catches rabies, you put it out of its misery” (“The Strong, Silent Type,” 4.10). Tony rejects this advice and gives his cousin another chance. Two seasons later, though, after the relationship between the two has decayed beyond repair, this is precisely what Tony does. Sadly, the last time we see Chris alive, he is acting as Tony’s driver; exactly what he was doing the first time we saw him. We also see this process at work in Tony’s familial relationships. Even after events that might signal a decisive narrative shift (the tumultuous row in “Whitecaps” [4.13], which ends with the marriage apparently in tatters; the shooting, and its immediate aftermath, at the beginning of season six), Tony and Carmela return to their relationship’s default state—Carmela resentfully accommodating herself to Tony’s failings and infidelities, and Tony trying to hide as much as he can from his wife. Each time the marriage resets, though, it does so at a marginally less intense pitch: the distance between them increases—Carmela takes refuge in her emerging real-estate business, and Tony heads off to Vegas to deal with Christopher’s murder alone. During the series, Tony and Meadow move away from each other—their relationship in the final episodes is still warm, but far more distant than it was at the series’ beginning. Similarly, Tony spends the series gradually accommodating himself to the fact that A.J. is a continuing disappointment. He defends his son in the first season, rounding on a therapist who diagnoses A.J. with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (“Down Neck,” 1.7); at the series’ end, he usurps his son’s therapy session so that he can talk about himself (“Made in America,” 6.21). The relationship between Tony and his uncle undergoes a particu-

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larly harrowing process of hollowing. The residual flashes of affection— masked by Junior’s insecurity, paranoia, and selfishness—that the two feel for each other in the first season have disappeared entirely by the series’ end. For Tony, his uncle becomes nothing more than a dangerous burden. However, this is caused not only by the inexorable coarsening of Tony’s emotional life, and Junior’s own manifest inadequacies; it is also caused by Junior’s slowly encroaching senility. Junior’s illness arguably functions as a symbolic reminder of the processes that eat away surreptitiously at his nephew: senility hollows him, leaving nothing more than the emptied shell of his previous life. As his consciousness decays, the habits of the Mafia boss remain, at least for a while: He tours the old neighborhood (“Where’s Johnny?” 5.3), and responds to the cops who come to take him home with a touch of his old aggressive insouciance (“Go shit in your hat,” he tells them). He tries to become the don of his nursing home—after he is beaten up by the disturbed younger man he has nominated as a surrogate mob soldier, we see him sitting with a cat in his lap, the very image of the archetypal mob boss; however, the animal is part of a therapy session, and Junior’s mind has finally collapsed (“Remember When,” 6.15). Finally, the process is at work in the relationship between Dr. Melfi and Tony. As noted earlier, the relationship starts with insights aplenty, and Melfi is even able to offer a guarded defense of the Sopranos’ lifestyle to their neighbors (“I like Murano glass,” she tells the snobbish Cusamanos [“A Hit Is a Hit,” 1.10]). However, even in the first season, she is aware that there are barriers which impede the forward progress of a therapeutic narrative: in “Isabella” (1.12), she tells him, “Your life is boxing us in.” This phrase is echoed five seasons later, in “Cold Stones” (6.11)—“Anthony, we’ve been dancing around this for years. How you live.” The mingled repulsion and attraction, the complex, interweaving dialogue comprising insights, insults, confession, and aggression, have come to nothing. At the end, they still dance around the same topic— and there are clear signs that both are tiring of the dance. When Melfi’s therapist Elliot Kupferberg brings new research to her attention, research suggesting that sociopaths manipulate therapy, Melfi seizes upon it with apparently indecent haste. She does so because she knows that the therapeutic process has come to nothing, and that the meetings between her and Tony have become entirely routinized. Given this, it is unsurprising that Tony and Melfi’s narrative—the narrative line on which the whole series is based—doesn’t reach a concluding moment of transcendental

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realization; it simply ends, as abruptly as the series. When it comes to their final encounter, she can dismiss him over something apparently trivial (all he does is tear a recipe from a magazine in her waiting room); by this stage, the relationship between them is so hollow, and so fragile, that it can collapse at the slightest pressure.

“All This Fucking Self-Knowledge” Toward the end of season four, Tony makes what seems like a final break with his therapist. The moment, appropriately enough, is marked by what seems like a moment of acute, if rather depressing, insight: “I’m a miserable prick. I said this since day one. . . . All this fucking selfknowledge, and where the fuck has it gotten me. . . . Come on, I’m a fat fucking crook from New Jersey” (“Calling All Cars,” 4.11). This might very well be so, but given Tony’s habit of masking his true meaning, it is doubtful that he would ever reveal who he is as fully as Melfi would wish. As I have argued here, even such moments as this do not constitute the kind of narrative resolution that the therapeutic narrative promises; even here, Tony hides himself. He is only fully frank with Melfi when he encounters her in dreams (most notably in “Kennedy and Heidi”); when they meet in the flesh, he stalls, he blusters, he blocks or redirects the conversation, and, if all else fails, he attacks her. The story of Tony’s life might be “unhelpful, unsatisfying, and dead-ended,” but he will never be able to tell it in its entirety—not to his children, not to his wife, and certainly not to his therapist. The structure of the series mimics this fundamental dilemma. From its beginning, the narrative is impeded and cannot flow smoothly to resolution. It is in some ways frustratingly incomplete; the narrative is not predicated on moments of insight that transform the characters, but on blocked conversations, on story lines that meander rather than progress, with plots reaching unexpected or abrupt conclusions, or narrative lines paying off unexpectedly (for example, it is possible to trace a direct line from Meadow’s need for a bedside lamp to Adriana’s murder). Given this, it is unsurprising that relationships tend to erode, rather than to progress (Pussy takes his problems out on his wife and family; Christopher loves Adriana, but not enough to give up the status that his position in the mob gives him). The whole thrust of the series, then, is anti-therapeutic: it cannot move toward a transfiguring revelation because the narrative structure of the series forbids it.

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Fittingly, The Sopranos ends with two scenes that, in different ways, play this theme out. First, Tony visits Junior in hospital. Junior, who ordered a hit on his nephew in the first season, has finally declined into the all-encompassing haze of dementia, and simply cannot remember his past. When Tony tells him he used to be in charge of North Jersey, all he can say is, “That’s nice” (“Made in America,” 6.21). In the series’ final scene, A.J. reminds his father of an apparent moment of epiphany, which memorably closed out the first season; a stop-and-smell-the-roses moment, when Tony told his family always to remember the times when they were together, “the times that [were] good” (“I Dream of Jeannie Cusamano,” 1.13). Now, it is Tony who can’t remember. The series ends in conversational and narrative indeterminacy, with the transformations promised by the opening therapeutic encounter as far away as ever; this is unsurprising, given that the narrative strategy of the series has worked against the kind of self-realization that would reshape the story of Tony’s life.

PART 6

Ethnic and Social Concerns

Mangia Mafia! Food, Punishment, and Cultural Identity in The Sopranos Michael M. Grynbaum

“Leave the gun. Take the cannoli.” This pithy evocation of violence and dessert, first uttered in Francis Ford Coppola’s classic The Godfather (1972), conjures up commonly shared images that, for better or worse, define Italian American culture in the popular American mind. From Mario Puzo’s Corleone saga to Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990), the most popular portrayals of second- and third-generation Italian Americans in the twentieth century are found in films devoted to the mob. It is no coincidence that food figures prominently in the construction of these textual and filmic worlds—in the American myth of the Mafia, cold-blooded murder and hot Italian meals stand side by side. The latest, and arguably most complex, literary incarnation of this culture has come in the form of the tragicomic HBO series The Sopranos, which debuted in the first days of 1999. Tony Soprano, the show’s protagonist, is far removed from the caricatured wiseguys and noble paterfamilias of previous mob fictions. A Mafia boss living a bourgeois lifestyle in the upscale suburbs of northern New Jersey, Tony is juggling a dangerously full plate. Straddling his two lives—his birthright as a mobster and his assimilated life as an American dad—Tony’s problems range from arranging retaliatory killings to getting his daughter into an Ivy League school. Unlike the untouchable mobster of old, Tony is in therapy, seeing a psychologist once a week, suffering panic attacks, and popping Xanax. He is devoted to the ancient honor codes and malebonding rites of the Mafia—rituals from another century, set in stone in

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the “Old World” of the Italian peninsula—but also forced to cope with the exigencies of modern exurban life. The Sopranos functions as an ethnographic text, seeking to portray a distinct subculture—specifically, the hybrid world of fin-de-siècle mobsters in an upper-middle-class American setting. The characters’ lives are defined by this push and pull of old and new, memory and reality, their Italian heritage and their adopted homeland. And, in many ways, they are defined by what they eat. “‘The Sopranos’ is a visual feast for the food-obsessed,” the New York Times declared in 2002 (Carr C7). They weren’t kidding: every episode of the series is saturated in sumptuous Italian fare. The central locale of the Soprano household is its kitchen; Tony’s mob hangout is Satriale’s Pork Store and Meat Market, a butcher’s shop; and many of Tony’s family dinners, with blood relatives or blood brothers, occur in the upscale setting of Nuovo Vesuvio, the mob’s local restaurant of choice. Names of Italian dishes fly as often as bullets: pasta “fazool,” veal parm’, tiramisu, clam oregenato. The characters fetishize certain dishes and the camera follows suit, hovering on steaming heaps of fresh semolina spaghetti. An episode guide titled Bright Lights, Baked Ziti includes descriptions of the foods devoured in every individual scene (Bishop). An official cookbook was released in 2002 (Rucker, The Sopranos Family Cookbook), along with a real-life gourmet food brand (Carr C7). And the on-screen chef, Artie Bucco, became an important character in the show, with entire subplots built around his personal and professional life. This focus on food is not incidental. Food and dining play an important role in underscoring the show’s themes, fleshing out characters, foreshadowing events, and developing narrative. This “language of food” manifests itself in myriad ways (Dunne 215), many directly connected to the rituals and taboos associated with the consumption of food in Italian American culture. As with any culturally mediated construct, an arbitrary set of rules is attached to the consumption of food within the Sopranos milieu. When it comes to chowing down, the Italian Americans portrayed in the show have their own specific sets of guidelines, similar to the kosher and halal systems of Judaism and Islam, respectively. “You use too much sauce on your spaghetti,” complains Furio, a native Italian, when eating the “Americanized” Italian cuisine of his mob compatriots. “Never serve pasta and meat on the same plate. . . . First the pasta, then the meat. That’s the right way” (Rucker, Sopranos Family Cookbook, 9). The use of the phrase “right way” emphasizes the arbitrary eating rules that serve to create a cultural identity. Furio’s com-

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plaint refers not only to the preparation of his dinner, but also to a larger issue of cultural authenticity. For The Sopranos’ Italian Americans, food is identity, and it can represent norms of masculinity, memory, family, and cultural heritage. In an introduction to The Sopranos Family Cookbook, “Artie Bucco” writes: “I’m inviting you into many kitchens, many Italian-American kitchens, and, along the way, into many Italian-American lives. If you are one of us, either by birth or in spirit, you know that food is not just fuel for the Italian body. . . . Food is family, tradition, birth, confirmation, marriage, sickness, death—life itself” (1). Thus, characters in the show who stray from culturally accepted food norms also betray their cultural identity. Sometimes, a “food foul” serves to foreshadow this betrayal; other times, the breaking of a food rule underscores a break in identity that has already occurred. Either way, when a Sopranos character violates a food norm, watch out: it’s a signal that trouble is brewing, and in many cases an upset stomach can lead to a bullet in the gut. In this essay I examine three shootings in the series—two from the second season, one from the sixth—each an act of violence that functions as punishment for a character who has violated cultural norms of eating and identity. To put it another way: when it comes to dining in The Sopranos, do it with tact—or risk getting whacked.

“Put My Fucking Dinner on the Table”: Food as a Signifier of Identity and Masculinity “I have heard that Eskimos have fifty words for snow,” says Tony’s righthand man Paulie Walnuts. “We have five hundred words for food” (Rucker back flap). Food is a crucial component in the construction of ethnic self-identity in The Sopranos, and the show’s Italian American denizens are proud of its importance to their cultural heritage. For some, food is an apt metaphor for maternal duty: “I gave my life to my children on a silver platter,” complains Livia Soprano, Tony’s mother (“The Knight in White Satin Armor,” 2.12).1 For others, it is part of the Italian body; one Mafia member calls a woman “so fat her blood type is Ragu,” referencing a brand of tomato sauce that is a foundation of many Italian meals (Dunne 218). Tony tells a character who is reading Chicken Soup for the Soul, “You should read ‘Tomato sauce for your ass.’ It’s the Italian version” (“The Knight in White Satin Armor”). For almost every character, Italian meals represent a connection to family

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and childhood; Tony’s senior-citizen uncle Junior recalls, “Mama always cooked. No one died of too much cholesterol or some crap” (Rucker, Sopranos Family Cookbook, 27). Food functions as a unit of nostalgia and memory, a vessel to the past; it also serves as a proxy for authentic cultural experience. Junior complains about modern conceptions of food “healthiness,” viewing these new norms as an encroachment upon “true” Italian fare. Contemporary fears about cholesterol conflict with the authenticity of the food of his childhood. And those who do not eat the proper foods are labeled as outside the cultural boundaries of the community. One character uses the term “Wonder Bread wops” to describe Italian Americans who have assimilated to the “American” lifestyle of country clubs and professional careers (Rotundo 55). Eating a commercialized, American brand of bread separates these third-generation Italian Americans from those who stay more “true” to their ethnicity by eating Italian-made bread; again, eating acts as a symbol for obeying or betraying cultural norms. Richie Aprile is one Sopranos character who, like the “Wonder Bread wops,” finds himself on the outside of the norms of his ethnic subculture. An erratic mobster recently released from prison, Richie becomes engaged to Tony’s sister, Janice. But while he is trying to marry into the Sopranos’ good graces, Richie’s masculinity—and, accordingly, his Italian American identity—is under assault. “The Knight in White Satin Armor” opens with an extended shot of Richie’s son twirling through a ballroom-dancing routine, dressed in tights. “He wouldn’t miss an opportunity to fucking foxtrot and tango in front of everybody,” Richie growls, lamenting his son’s feminine form and choice of an “unmanly” profession. Meanwhile, Janice enters the scene, carrying a couch and telling Tony that she worked as a mover several years ago. The physical strength required for such a job establishes Janice as a masculinized woman; indeed, she is heftier than her future husband and has a tattoo on her left breast (the superimposition of a tough-guy signifier onto a symbol of maternity underscores her gender ambivalence). Richie’s masculinity is therefore threatened by both his fiancée and his child. The cultural norms of the mob require that the husband be a dominant figure, keeping control over his wife and raising a manly son. With powerful Janice as his future spouse, the couple’s gender roles become confused; with a homosexual son, Richie feels unable to pass on his manhood to the next generation. These tensions reach a head in a scene set in the couple’s kitchen.

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It begins in a typically domestic fashion, with Janice cooking dinner and Richie waiting for his meal. At the onset, American gender norms for food preparation are kept intact; the “wife” is feeding and the “husband” eating. However, Richie is seen holding a bottle of wine at his crotch; the bottle becomes a phallic symbol, further implying the conflation of food with gender identity. Janice chats idly about the weather. Richie then starts complaining about his son: Richie: My kid hit me up . . . today to go to England for these dance contests. Janice: Little Ricky is still coming to the wedding right? Richie: Rick. Rick. Richard. How many times I gotta tell you? He was “Little Ricky” when he was twelve years old. Janice: Ballroom dancing is a legitimate art form. Richie: (Angrily) He bears my name. The issue of Richie’s masculinity has been raised. By insisting that Janice call his son “Rick,” versus the childlike, more feminine “Ricky,” Richie Sr. is attempting to remasculinize his son—a symbolic extension of himself—and therefore bring himself back into what he views as the cultural norm. But his anger sparks Janice’s ire. “I’ve been in this house cooking your fucking dinner . . . all day,” she says. Janice is complaining about her role as a preparer of food, but in these characters’ cultural norms, a wife would never whine about such a responsibility. Richie is further reminded of his inability to control his spouse when Janice tells him she put her mother (who lives with the couple) to bed early, “because I thought maybe we wanna have sex?” In initiating sex, Janice plays the aggressor, a traditionally masculine role. Richie becomes irate as the gender roles in his household are further subverted, and his loud retort uses a food rule to regain some sense of domestic normativity: “Put my fucking dinner on the table and keep your mouth shut!” But instead of reverting to the role expected of her, Janice becomes more disrespectful, directly challenging Richie’s concept of masculinity: “Just because he’s a ballroom dancer you believe your son is gay, and what if he was gay, what difference does it make?” This is the final straw, and Richie brutally punches Janice in the face. Even though she staggers back stunned, the damage to Richie’s masculinity has been done and cannot be reversed. To emphasize this change, the show uses its most potent signifier of identity: food. Richie

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walks back to the kitchen and plates his own dinner; he serves himself spaghetti, ladles on the tomato sauce, pours a glass of wine, and takes his meal to the table. His newly feminized role—despite his violent efforts, he has taken on the wife’s role as preparer and server of food, and ultimately puts his own “fucking dinner on the table”—is further confirmed when he begins reading a copy of New Jersey Bride magazine. Richie is now outside his designated cultural role—and he has violated a food rule by serving himself. Time for punishment: Janice returns to the dining room with a gun and shoots her fiancé twice in the chest. Blood splatters everywhere; Richie is dead. Interestingly, after the deed is done, both Richie and Janice revert to traditional gender roles. Absolution appears to come with the reassertion of cultural norms. Janice calls her brother for help, crying, “Tony, I need you, I need you to come over now.” Tony finds her sobbing over Richie’s corpse: “I didn’t mean it, Tone; I didn’t mean it.” Janice is insisting on her own passivity and playing the expected role of a grieving widow; her behavior returns her to the feminine sphere as a way of avoiding guilt. Richie’s body, meanwhile, is carried off to Satriale’s meat shop, introduced by an establishing shot featuring a prominent “Pork” sign and a small pig statue sitting atop the awning. Mobsters dressed in yellow butchers’ outfits use the shop’s meat-slicing machines to cut up Richie’s corpse for ease of disposal. The scene is shot to forefront the parallel between the corpse and processed meat products; blood spurts against plastic flaps as in a slaughterhouse, and the characters emphasize that they are using the same tools the butchers use to prepare pork and sausage. “It’s gonna be a while before I eat anything from Satriale’s,” remarks one character. The ritualistic act of slaughtering animals is replaced by the slaughter of a human. Richie literally becomes animal meat, a food traditionally signifying masculinity (Dunne 220). In this sense, his death morphs him back to an expected masculine role. His cruel punishment “fixes” the cultural violations he committed in life.

“He Ate Something That Didn’t Agree with Him”: Food and Betrayal The episode “Funhouse” (2.13) opens in the kitchen of Tony’s mother. “Have some eggplant!” she says eagerly. Tony demurs: “I told you, I’m not hungry.” The reply: “Now you won’t even accept food from your own mother.” Livia accuses her son of violating a social ritual—dining

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with one’s mother—and of ignoring the cultural significance of familial food offerings. (A mother’s cooking represents heritage, memory, and childhood [Rucker, Sopranos Family Cookbook].) The scene then cuts to what is obviously an Indian restaurant. Sitar music plays in the background and an enormous Vishnu statue appears on-screen, underscoring the exotic ethnicity of the establishment and its differences from Nuovo Vesuvio, Tony’s typical Italian place of dining. An extended shot of a waiter carrying an enormous cooked fish follows. (Seafood, as we will see, is an important signifier of this episode.) Tony orders the chicken vindaloo and appears to be enjoying himself; after rejecting the Italian food of his mother, he further eschews his ethnic heritage by indulging in the cuisine of another culture. In straying from his cultural food norms, Tony unintentionally foreshadows the dual betrayal that will occur later in the episode, when he is forced to kill his childhood friend “Big Pussy” Bonpensiero after discovering that the mobster has been acting as an informant for the FBI. Before this revelation, however, Tony continues eating at Vesuvio, where he informs his compatriots that they “missed a great meal. Indian food. That vindaloo’s magnifique.” Tony orders a plate of zucchini flowers and soup with mussels. With Pussy sitting at his side, Tony announces that “all my enemies are smoked.” Later, he returns to his home and presents his wife Carmela with a fur coat. Overjoyed, she rewards Tony with sex, mounting him in their bedroom wearing only the coat. In these scenes, food and gender norms are again conflated. Tony, the übermale of the series, is usually associated with red meat; he mans the grill at his house on the weekends, cooking slabs of meat on an open flame that gestures toward a “primitive tribal instinct in men” (Rucker, Sopranos Family Cookbook, 161). But his meal at Vesuvio is decidedly feminine. Flower imagery is strongly associated with femininity, and Sara Lewis Dunne notes that seafood is considered to be the “most ‘female’ of meats” (223). Dunne also notes a connection between seafood and female genitalia: “As many of us know from numerous smutty jokes, female genitals are often compared to seafood in terms of ‘taste’ and odor” (223). In consuming seafood, Tony gestures toward the act of cunnilingus, which in a previous episode of the series has been established as an unmanly act (Dunne 223). According to Anthony Rotundo, “The mobsters take cunnilingus as a sign of weakness because it is a man giving pleasure to a woman, a reversal of the ‘proper’ gender order” (63). (Gender confusion occurs constantly in this episode, with its focus on

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the death of a decidedly masculine mobster with the feminine moniker “Pussy.”) Furthermore, Carmela’s fur coat morphs her into a kind of animal, and she takes the dominant position in sex with her husband. Throughout this sequence, Tony’s culinary choices match his straying from his culture’s norms of masculine identity. Tony’s punishment occurs almost immediately. Haunted by a disturbing nightmare in which he douses himself with gasoline, Tony awakes in the clutches of an excruciating stomach pain. He barely makes it to the bathroom before vomiting profusely. “It’s the chicken vindaloo!” he cries. “I was wondering about that chicken. Probably fucking cocker spaniel!” Having eaten an unfamiliar cuisine (Indian food), Tony now accuses his feeders of violating a food rule, the Western taboo against eating dog. He blames his illness on the breaking of an eating norm, but also recognizes that a cultural boundary has been broken. “Fucking goddess with the six arms, no wonder,” he says, referring to the Vishnu statues in the restaurant. Tony, usually a hypermasculinized and powerful character, has become weak and vulnerable after moving outside his familiar Italian American food culture. “I don’t want you to see me like this,” he moans as his wife places a blanket over his sweating shoulders. Carmela hands him a Coca-Cola to soothe his stomach, a quintessentially American consumer food product that represents a return to the familiar. Tony starts to feel better after a few sips. When Vesuvio’s chef Artie Bucco comes to the Soprano house the next day, he immediately takes a defensive tack. Carmela asks him whether Tony ate at his restaurant the night before; Artie replies, “Yeah, but I got an A rating.” Nevertheless, Tony begins berating Artie about the quality of his shellfish—tellingly, Tony now suspects the seafood of causing his woes: Tony: Why don’t you dump those mussels you gave me before you cause a fucking outbreak. Artie: Whoa nelly! I handpick every piece of shellfish myself! Tony: Oh yeah? You smell them as you’re picking them or are you staring off into space? Again, a character’s masculinity is at risk. Tony’s allegations of food poisoning threaten Artie’s manhood: Bucco’s livelihood and honor are dependent on the quality of his food. In Artie’s own words, “It’s a serious allegation.” But it’s no surprise that shellfish is suspect; Tony recognizes

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that it’s not his usual meat, and many cultures ban the consumption of shellfish in their dietary laws. (Even The Sopranos Family Cookbook reminds readers to scrub clams “with a stiff brush” and be careful to discard those that look unclean [19].) Whether Artie or the Indian restaurant is to blame, Tony recognizes that he has violated his cultural eating norms and is now paying the price. But Tony also recognizes that someone else has violated norms: Pussy Bonpensiero. In another dream sequence, Tony has a conversation with a talking fish on an ice rack at a seafood market, who speaks in Pussy’s voice. “You know I’ve been working with the government, right Tone?” the fish asks. Tony’s culinary betrayal mirrors that of his friend, who has broken the Mafia code of trust and loyalty. The sequence also illuminates Tony’s previous comment that all his enemies are “smoked.” Smoked is an adjective commonly used to describe a way of cooking fish; Tony inadvertently intuited his friend’s betrayal through a metaphor for food preparation. “These guys, on either side of me, they’re asleep,” the fish continues, suggesting that Pussy will soon “sleep with the fishes.” Seafood, already a signifier of femininity and weakness, is now associated with death. Tony and his pals pick up Pussy the next morning, ostensibly to testdrive a boat. Instead, they confront him about his disloyalty. Trying to talk his way out of certain death, Pussy pleads, “I fed them bullshit.” His use of the verb fed invokes the feeder-eater power dynamic; Pussy is trying to convince Tony that he was the one with agency in his relationship with the FBI. Tony isn’t swayed, but before his friends shoot him, Pussy asks, “We gonna make a tequila?” He invokes a social eating ritual, hoping that the familiar action of taking shots together will bring back previous feelings of camaraderie and cast aside his straying from the Mafia norms. Instead, after downing the drinks, Tony shoots Pussy several times in the chest, killing him. His body is then dumped over into the water. Again, in death, a character is turned into meat. Pussy’s body will be consumed by the fish; he becomes literal seafood, in this case an appropriate end for a man with a feminine nickname. And Tony, though he has cleared his ranks of disloyalty, has been forced to execute his former best friend, a cruel punishment for his culinary dalliance.

“Another Sake, Hon?”: More Seafood, Less Masculinity The conflation of seafood with the crisis of masculinity, established in “Funhouse,” re-emerged in the sixth-season premiere, broadcast in

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March 2006. “Members Only” (6.1) opens with an FBI agent throwing up. Again, food poisoning serves to signify impending disaster; this episode, like “Funhouse,” will end with an unexpected shooting. Issues of culturally mediated gender norms are also established early on. Tony’s sister Janice remains a masculinized presence; now married to the overweight Bobby Bacala, she again serves to upend her culture’s traditional domestic gender roles. (At one point, she complains about her maternal duties as a feeder: “This child, constantly wanting to breast!”) When we first see the couple, Bobby is pushing their baby carriage and tries to explain to Tony why he arrived late: “The car seat, the other stuff. Packing in there takes forever. You probably remember that?” Tony remains unsympathetic. “No, I don’t. I didn’t do that crap,” he grunts, establishing his masculine superiority over Bobby. In my marriage, Tony seems to say, I did the man’s work. Indeed, issues of masculinity come to the fore in this episode. Whereas in previous seasons the mobsters usually fit a generalized idea of the tough man, “Members Only” opens with several instances of newly feminized men. One particularly overweight character, Vito, has dropped nearly a hundred pounds on the Atkins diet. Standing outside Satriale’s meat shop, the guys’ usual hangout (and a potent signifier for meat and, in turn, masculinity), Vito shows off his shiny new suit and rushes to get a number for “the guy with the custom cufflinks.” His concern with body image and appearance is construed by the other mobsters as outside the gender norms of Italian American men, and Vito finds himself the butt of much mockery. Later in the episode, Tony privately weighs himself in his bathroom; unhappy with the result, he removes his shoes, and then his pants, to tip the scale downward. Tony does not talk publicly about watching his weight, to avoid the harassment of his friends and to stay within the bounds of culturally accepted gender norms.2 Still, the scene suggests Tony is straying from the masculine norm of his culture—and this violation is underscored by a sudden change in food preference. Carmela and Tony are shown enjoying a sushi meal together at a chic Japanese restaurant. A Japanese waitress appears with various rolls: “spicy shrimp hand rolls . . . yellowtail roll, scallions, oysters. You tell me when you want to stop.” Tony replies happily, “Keep it comin’.” Carmela says, “I don’t know about you, but ever since we found this place I find myself fantasizing about this.” Tony quips, “Me too. Sometimes during sex.” His joke serves to underscore the deviancy of

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their actions; dining on a foreign cuisine is an illicit thrill for the couple, as they violate the eating norms of their shared heritage. Raw fish is far removed from the accepted Italian food lexicon. Furthermore, in ingesting the “feminized” meat, Tony further chips away at his masculinity. (In “Boca” [1.9], Tony derisively refers to cunnilingus as “eating sushi.”) And when the mobsters dine at their usual Italian haunt, Vesuvio, they complain to Artie about the staidness of the selection. “Where do you get this bread? The bread museum?” asks one; “I could recite this menu in my sleep,” complains another, turning his back on the food of his culture. These dual violations—of cultural dining and gender norms— place Tony in a very vulnerable position, both as a “weaker” man and an outsider to his culture. Tony continues to commit “food fouls” throughout the episode. When one mobster, seeking a favor from Tony, provides him a gift of take-out, his only reward is a noncommittal grunt and a dangerous assignment to kill an enemy of the mob. Food gifts come with an expectation for reciprocity; if it goes unheeded, an implicit contract is broken. The episode immediately cuts to Tony taking a shot of sake alone in the sushi restaurant, tying the two food-rule violations together. In the next scene, Tony tells his wife that he ate alone at the sushi place. “You went there without me?” she asks, somewhat hurt. Tony: Yeah, I was hungry. Carmela: I thought that was our special place. Tony: I went there alone, Carm. Carmela: I know, you said—it was just nice to have someplace for us. The demasculinizing effect of eating seafood was somewhat tempered by the fact that Tony had been dining with his wife. Here, it is established that Tony himself has developed a taste for the “feminine” meat, and is willing to spurn his wife in order to chow down on raw fish. The foreignness of the Japanese cuisine is emphasized in a later scene, back in the familiar space of Artie’s restaurant. Carmela and Pussy’s widow are eating a traditional Italian meal and catching up after several years. Artie comes by: “Dessert was on me. It’s nice to see you two patch things up.” Artie adds that he and his estranged wife are also getting back together. The scene directly connects the act of dining together on culturally familiar food with the reparation of emotional ties. Whereas the sushi place has caused a rift between husband and

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wife, Artie’s Italian dinner brings people together. Seafood, conversely, tears loved ones apart. Punishment lies just around the corner. Throughout the episode, there is heavy foreshadowing of an impending tragedy, with repeated references to Pussy, now long dead, and ominous signs such as a “new insurance card” that arrives for Tony. The chicken comes home to roost, as it were, in the final minutes of the show. Tony arrives at his Uncle Junior’s house to take care of the old man, who suffers from senility. Pussy’s name is invoked again, along with that of J. Edgar Hoover, the notorious crossdresser, two conspicuous references to feminized men. The episode’s gender-bending themes are back to the forefront; we’re reminded of Tony’s violation of masculine gender norms, Vito’s obsession with weight and clothes, and, above all, the choice to replace traditional masculine Italian meats with the feminized sushi. To top it off, Tony is seen whistling in the kitchen, pouring macaroni into a boiling cup of water. In portraying Tony cooking a meal, a traditional task of a housewife, the show completes his symbolic gender transformation. Tony has strayed far beyond the cultural norms of masculine identity, and his “food fouls” are the most conspicuous evidence. He is vulnerable, and as always in The Sopranos, punishment comes quickly and violently. An apparently confused Junior staggers into the kitchen brandishing a firearm; a shot rings out, and Tony falls to the floor, clutching a bloodied stomach. The site of his injury is no coincidence. Tony’s culinary tastes are at the root of his vulnerability and its subsequent punishment. Like those of Richie and Pussy before him, his eating choices betrayed his culture’s accepted norms of masculinity and identity. In The Sopranos Family Cookbook, “Artie Bucco” writes, “Food is hope, a reminder of what might still come in life if you stay close to your roots” (116). But in the darkly ambiguous culture of The Sopranos, food also functions as a warning, reminding the eater of the consequences that come when one strays from those roots. Like the mob itself, food in The Sopranos has its own code of honor and loyalty. Those who break this code risk the ultimate penalty. For the Italian Americans portrayed in the show, perhaps an updated slogan is needed: “Take the cannoli. Leave the sushi.”

Notes 1. I examined three episodes of the series for this essay: “The Knight in White Satin Armor” (2.12) and “Funhouse” (2.13), both from 2000, and “Members

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Only” (6.1), from 2006. Each section of the essay focuses on one episode, so I do not parenthetically cite dialogue and scene descriptions in the text. 2. For an extended discussion of the interplay between weight and masculinity on the show, see Santo.

The Guinea as Tragic Hero The Complex Representation of Italian Americans in The Sopranos Frank P. Tomasulo

This chapter begins with a personal anecdote. The first time I Googled my name, the first listing to appear was in the American Film Institute Catalog of Feature Films. Under the listing for Gentleman’s Fate (Mervyn LeRoy, 1931), the catalog read, “Wealthy gentleman Jack Thomas [John Gilbert] is told that his real name is Giacomo Tomasulo. . . . When Jack meets Frank Tomasulo [Louis Wolheim], [it turns out] his hard-boiled brother is a racketeer” (745–46, my emphasis). Another reference to the same film indicates that it is about “Jack Thomas, who finds out . . . that he’s from a family of racketeers. Family loyalty drags him into the Mob—but without enthusiasm” (LaSalle 23). As an Italian American, I sometimes feel that way when viewing gangster movies and television shows. I am dragged into the mob—but “without enthusiasm.” This essay explores the intersection of the gangster genre and Italian ethnicity in one such television series: The Sopranos. Fredric Jameson has argued that the gangster genre “is not about the Mafia, but rather about American business itself” (32). No less an authority than actor James Gandolfini, who played Tony Soprano, agrees: “This is a show about America, and anyone who watches with any degree of intelligence understands that right away” (quoted in Doyle R2). This argument has also been made by literary critic Sandra M. Gilbert (née Mortola), who views The Sopranos’ “Nouveau Jersey” family as part of a tele-universe that is somehow representative of contemporary America (11–25). I agree with them, to some extent. Certainly, The

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Sopranos is an all-American fable to its core; more specifically, it is a caustic indictment of the material and social conditions of postmodern capitalism in the United States. Echoing Gandolfini and Gilbert, Martha Nochimson has said that “we are all Sopranos” (personal conversation, January 24, 2008), meaning that not only Italians and other ethnic minorities but most Americans can identify with the plight of Tony Soprano, his crime-ridden mob family, and his personal family, which is as dysfunctional as it gets. Again, there is some truth to this. If, as the best sellers tell us, the United States is a “Prozac Nation,” then Tony Soprano could well be the capo dei capi of our doped-up dynasty. Statistics tell us that divorce and separation are endemic to modern marriage, and Tony’s marriage to Carmela represents a classic case study of how infidelity, financial disputes, job stress, and conflicts with children can lead to marital strife. Whether they are work-related or personal, our pervasive problems are played out in The Sopranos for all to see. Sociology tracts and the popular press have told us for decades that it is hard to reconcile the competing demands of multitasking at work and maintaining a happy home life. Tony Soprano’s Organization Man predicament is a textbook example of that common cross-ethnic condition. If our quotidian lives are filled with a steady diet of stomach-wrenching pathos and the occasional dish of humor, then The Sopranos is a universal psychological recipe book for our times. For many Italian Americans, however, the kind of universalist argument presented thus far is akin to saying that The Birth of a Nation (D. W. Griffith, 1915) is about the American South, Jud Süss (Veit Harlan, 1940) is about Germany, and Know Your Enemy: Japan (Frank Capra and Joris Ivens, 1945) is about Asia. Yes, to some extent, The Sopranos is about America in general. But it is also true that the casa Soprano and the Mafia famiglia are distinctly Italian, and are identified as such. Further, the world of organized crime is the setting for the show. My focus here, though, is not specifically the Mafia aspects of the series, which have been addressed by many other scholars and authors. This chapter does not try to make the case that The Sopranos is as racist, defamatory, or prejudicial as The Birth of a Nation, innumerable American westerns, or other films that demean minorities. Nor do I agree completely with organizations such as the National Italian American Foundation that have labeled The Sopranos an “ethnic minstrel show” (Camille Paglia, quoted in Lavery, “Coming Heavy: The Significance

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of The Sopranos,” xiii) that debases Italians by focusing on “wiseguys” rather than on Italians in more edifying professions. Indeed, my point of attack is not specifically about the Mafia aspects of the series at all; those critiques have been addressed and debated in the academic and journalistic literature on The Sopranos. What I do hope to demonstrate is that, despite all the recent progress made in ethnology and ethnogenesis, and changes in general attitudes about minorities, The Sopranos does not show Italian ethnicity as a socially invented (if not imposed) construct, but, rather, as a fixed essence, an immutable “national character pattern” (Kracauer 8) that contains the seeds of criminality and venality. In that regard, the series more closely resembles a much earlier masterpiece, Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (1596–1598), also set in an Italian milieu. As does Shakespeare’s play, The Sopranos capitalizes on a vindictive stereotype even as it demonstrates what living that stereotype is like. Admittedly, The Sopranos contains a complex system of ethnic representation, “a multifaceted vision of ethnicity” (Cavallero and Plasketes 51). There are a few accomplished and positive Italian American characters on the series, and even some of the mobsters have their good points (concern with family and occasional good deeds, for example). However, as I hope to demonstrate, even outside its Mafia milieu, The Sopranos is an example of “racism lite.” That is, it projects a subtle and sophisticated reification of ethnic prejudice and profiling perpetrated by endowing its Italian American characters with four perniciously stereotypical characteristics: (1) ingrained prejudice, (2) macho attitudes combined with violent behavior, (3) congenital dimwittedness, and (4) clichéd attire. The animus displayed by Mafia everyman Tony Soprano (and others in his crew) toward African Americans, women, homosexuals, and many other groups exemplifies the typecasting of Italian Americans as incorrigible bigots. Indeed, it appears that Tony Soprano is prejudiced precisely because he is Italian.

African Americans Throughout the run of the series, African Americans are repeatedly referred to as mulinjan or “muli,” a derogative Sicilian-dialect term derived from melanzane, the Italian word for eggplant. Many episodes show black people in crack houses, using narcotics, fighting, acting as

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mob assassins, or aiding and abetting in underworld scams. In season five, for instance, a doctor’s Mercedes is stolen at a wedding party and the victim blames “fuckin’ niggers! Who else?” (“All Happy Families,” 5.4). In this case, the car thieves were Italians, since it was members of Tony’s crew who actually committed the grand theft auto. In “Army of One” (3.13), a mob hit on young Jackie Aprile is attributed to African American drug dealers. And in “Unidentified Black Males” (5.9), Tony’s cousin Tony Blundetto claims that he developed a limp after “two black guys jumped me,” when in fact a car ran over Blundetto’s foot after he committed a mob hit on Joey “Peeps” Peparelli. Tony Soprano had used the same cover story many years before, although he called the imaginary black muggers “fuckin’ jigaboo cocksuckin’ motherfuckers.” Even if they are not assumed to be guilty of a crime, black characters are repeatedly referred to in racist terms and stereotyped as criminals. For example, after receiving a speeding ticket from Officer Leon Wilmore, a black cop, Tony complains to a politician friend who has the “affirmative action cocksucker” demoted (“Another Toothpick,” 3.5). Later, Tony feels some remorse and tries to give “Shaft” (as Soprano calls him) some money. Although the black officer seems to be guilty of nothing except doing his job, Tony is later told that Officer Wilmore had several professional “issues.” Similarly, Tony’s treatment of Meadow’s mixed-race college boyfriend, Noah Tannenbaum, epitomizes his racism: he calls him “Buckwheat,” “mulignan,” “Butterhead,” “Sambo,” “charcoal briquette,” “ditsoon,” and “Jamal Ginsberg, the Hasidic Homeboy,” adding anti-Semitism to the mix (“Proshai, Livushka,” 3.2). When Tony is forced to spend a morning in jail on a weapons charge, we see a black inmate on the commode in the background pulling down his pants, while the gangster is in the foreground wearing a suit jacket (“Soprano Home Movies,” 6.13). In this case, it is not Tony but the show that visually denigrates the black characters. (The more grotesque aspects of that scene were cut from the reruns featured on A&E.) There are other times, however, when Tony treats certain black characters more favorably. For instance, when Tony is in the hospital recuperating from a gunshot wound, he befriends a rap music artist who is mending from seven bullet wounds (“The Fleshy Part of the Thigh,” 6.4). Apparently, outlaws of a feather flock together. More often, though, African Americans are the target of Italian animus. For instance, when a black construction worker tries to break up a fight between Mafia factions at a building site, one of the Italian mob-

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sters says, “Who are you? Ralph Bunche?” and then strikes the man with a lead pipe, knocking him unconscious (“No Show,” 4.2). And when a young black man on a bicycle gets into an altercation with three Italian American Rutgers University classmates of A.J. Soprano, they say, “Fuck you, nigger!” (“Kennedy and Heidi,” 6.18). Although the man musters his dignity and replies, “I am not a nigger. I am from Somalia,” that does not dissuade the boys. Yelling, “You’re in the wrong neighborhood,” they beat and kick him to a pulp—six against one—and throw his bicycle into the path of a moving car, where it is crushed. In a therapy session after the incident, A.J. ironically quotes Rodney King: “Why can’t we all just get along?” (“The Second Coming,” 6.19). Like his racist father, the youngster seems unaware of his own role in fostering bigotry. The net result is to suggest that Italian Americans are inherently racist. The point is that Italian Americans are portrayed as prejudiced simply because they are Italian.

Women In addition to being racists, the Italian men on The Sopranos are also frequently exposed as overt or closet sexists. When an attractive female “utilization review specialist” visits Tony Soprano in the hospital, he initially flirts with her, but when he realizes that she wants to send him home before he is fully recuperated, he says, “Get out of my room, you sick cunt!” (“The Fleshy Part of the Thigh”). Later, he calls her “the bird of prey.” And when Soprano captain Paulie “Walnuts” Gualtieri finds out that his putative mother is not really his mom at all but his aunt, he refers to his real mother, a lifelong nun, as “a whore” (“The Strong, Silent Type,” 4.10). Tony’s mother, Livia, the matriarch of the Soprano brood, plays a prominent role not only in early episodes of the show but in Tony’s therapy sessions. Throughout these sessions, in flashbacks, and during these early episodes, we learn that Livia is the worst kind of mother; she even orders the whacking of her own son because he moves her into a nursing home (“I Dream of Jeannie Cusamano,” 1.13). As Jonathan Cavallero and George Plasketes note, the portrayal of an Italian mother who is “unable to . . . properly raise her children demonstrates a critique of Italian American culture” that is anathema to most Italian Americans (58). In season six, at the lake house of Bobby “Bacala” Baccalieri, Tony’s

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sister, Janice, who is now Bobby’s wife, recounts how Tony’s father fired a gun into their mother’s beehive hairdo (“Soprano Home Movies”). Janice’s explanation for her father’s chauvinistic behavior is that “he was Napolitano to the core,” thereby attributing sexist, violent tendencies to an ingrained predisposition among Italians. Later, in that same episode, when everyone is drunk, Tony and Bobby have a knockdown, drag-out fight over a slight to Janice’s honor. Although this seems to be a case of a man (Bobby) upholding his wife’s (undeserved) good reputation, it is really just a violent macho power play between the two men. In another episode, during a therapy session, Tony’s psychiatrist, Dr. Jennifer Melfi, asks him what all the women in his life have in common. Tony sums up his feelings about females in his reply: “They all break my balls” (“Pax Soprana,” 1.6).

Gays Italian “values” are also on display in the episodes involving the closeted gay capo Vito Spatafore, a character based on the real-life Gambino crime family member Vito Arena, who was a homosexual (Mustain and Capeci 375). One night, when Vito leaves home to go to a gay bar, we see his wife watching Imitation of Life (Douglas Sirk, 1959) on television. Such self-referential allusions are great fun for film buffs, but the premise of that melodrama is the advantage of a black person “passing” for white, clearly a nod to the plot point of The Sopranos in that Vito is trying to pass for straight in mob society. Does this sort of intertextuality absolve the show of its negative treatment of intrasexuality, particularly with respect to the inherent intolerance by the show’s Italian Americans of the “finooks” (from the Italian finocchio, fennel, which is used as a derogatory term for homosexuals) in their midst? Vito is called an “ass-muncher,” a “hornhusker,” and a rechhione (literally, big ears), an allusion to the Italian myth that men with big ears are more likely to be gay. Christopher Moltisanti guesses that Vito “has been going up the Hershey Highway,” and even Tony, who is usually sympathetic to Vito (because he is a capo and a “big earner”), labels homosexuals “meatpackers” and “bologna smokers.” The portrayal of gays in The Sopranos, like that of other “out groups,” is complicated. For example, Vito initially arouses sympathy when he seems bent on suicide as he first flees New Jersey over his outing in a gay bar and later when he falls in love with short-order cook and volunteer

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firefighter Jim “Johnny Cakes” Witowski in New Hampshire (“Johnny Cakes,” 6.8). That temporary empathy vanishes, however, when Vito shoots and kills an innocent civilian after an auto accident he caused. Even Vito expresses antigay sentiments. At a funeral for a man who committed suicide, Vito suggests that “maybe he was a homo” (“Join the Club,” 6.2). Later, Vito even pushes away and punches Johnny Cakes after their initial kiss, screaming, “What are you, some kinda fag?!” Here, his Italian intolerance for “finooks” seems to trump Vito’s own sexuality, a clear instance of hypocrisy. Based on these examples, one might conclude that The Sopranos is an “equal opportunity” show that portrays all groups as prejudiced. This is not the case, however. Herman “Hesh” Rabkin, the Jewish racketeer, has a black mistress, Renata, and Jewish doctors are represented as proficient and unbiased; State Assemblyman Zellman, who is white and Jewish, is good friends with a black community worker; and Asians are generally represented as professional and respectful. In fact, only the Italians in The Sopranos are consistently depicted as bigoted.

Costume One could take up many pages documenting every appearance of the stereotypical sleeveless undershirt, the so-called guinea T, on The Sopranos. And this isn’t to say that many real-life Italian men (and even medigon, non-Italians) never wear them. However, in Satriale’s Pork Store and the Bada Bing club, everyone does. Does this preference in attire perforce suggest an authorial inscription of lumpen-proletarian “Italianness”? Or is the fictional diegetic world of The Sopranos such that Italian Americans become the norm by which all ethnic groups, including WASPs, are judged? Peter Bondanella, after conducting quantitative research on the characters in “Sopranoland,” found that “the minority has become the majority” (299). Suffice it to say that all the male Italian American characters on The Sopranos wear sleeveless undershirts, and they are constantly shown in that attire (as opposed to, say, occasionally wearing a different kind of T-shirt, no undershirt at all, or being more fully dressed). In many ways, the choice to emphasize this garment, vernacularly called a “wifebeater,” is the equivalent for Italian Americans of showing black characters eating watermelon or fried chicken. Even if Tony wears a stylish silk Canali shirt over his T-shirt, the implication is that underneath he

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remains a low-class “guinea.” In other words, Tony Soprano is clad like a lower-class gavone precisely because he is Italian.

Violence After returning from ten years in prison, Richie Aprile comes home and beats up Beansie Gaeta, and eventually runs him over with a car, permanently crippling him (“Toodle-Fucking-Oo,” 2.3). Later, when Richie punches his fiancée, Janice Soprano, she shoots him dead, showing that uncontrolled violence is not limited to Italian males (“The Knight in White Satin Armor,” 2.12). (The verbal argument that precipitates the punch is about whether Richie’s son, a ballroom dancer, is a homosexual. Thus, here the supposed ingrained homophobia of Italians is combined with their alleged genetic predisposition toward mental and physical cruelty.) Ferocious incidents of this kind are endemic to The Sopranos, suggesting that bloodshed is the default mechanism for dispute resolution in the Italian American community. Indeed, it appears that Tony Soprano and most of his friends and family are violent precisely because they are Italian. An episode in season six (“Mr. and Mrs. John Sacrimoni Request,” 6.5) reinforces this point. Just out of the hospital, Tony suspects that his crew sees him as weakened, especially after he has a fainting spell at the Sacramoni wedding reception. Even the usually loyal Christopher Moltisanti criticizes one of Tony’s executive decisions as “a pussy-ass move.” To prove his stugots (balls), Tony deliberately picks an unnecessary fight with his new, well-toned and muscular bodyguard and driver, Perry Annunziata. Soprano pounds his employee repeatedly, defeating him handily, especially since Perry is loath to fight back against the boss, a “made man.” Confirmed as “top dog” once again, Tony enters the men’s room, looks in the mirror, and promptly throws up twice—his soft side’s response to his own unprovoked aggression. Here the mob boss’s internal guilt is externalized, making his portrayal more complex and sympathetic. This sensitive side of Tony Soprano has helped alleviate some of the criticism by Italian American groups, but one still has to ask whether audiences appreciate this complexity or simply chalk up Tony’s brutality to his italianità. This sort of macho violence is once again evident in The Sopranos in the previously mentioned titanic drunken brawl between Tony and Bobby Bacala at the latter’s lake house in season six. Defending his wife’s

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“honor,” Bobby throws the first punch. This then devolves into a sumo wrestling match, with choking, head butts, and bare knuckles substituting for the Marquis of Queensberry rules of professional prizefighting. Here, Italian Americans are depicted as quick tempered, inebriated, and dirty fighters. And, of course, both men are wearing—what else?— sleeveless undershirts.

Language and Lawlessness It was the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan who posited the link between language and law through le loi du père, the law of the father (41). But what of the link between language and lawlessness and, by extension, the misuse of the English language by the Italian American gangsters in The Sopranos? Their dialogue is so full of malapropisms that they could challenge Yogi Berra, who at least kept his jumbled syntax and mangled vocabulary wholesome. Take, for instance, Christopher Moltisanti’s lament that “I’ve been totally fuckin’ ostrafied” (“Walk Like a Man,” 6.17). Or his plan to “create some dysentery among the ranks” (“The Weight,” 4.4). Finally, Chris claims that “Isaac Newton discovered gravity ’cause some asshole hit him with an apple” (“Stage 5,” 6.14). When Paulie Walnuts hears that he is supposed to whack a Russian who killed sixteen Chechnyan rebels and was in the Ministry of the Interior, he recaps this as, “He killed sixteen Czechoslovakians. The guy was an interior decorator!” (“Pine Barrens,” 3.11). Tony’s dad, Johnny Boy Soprano, refers to his wife as a “fuckin’ albacore around my neck!” (“Down Neck,” 1.7). And when Bobby Bacala mentions that a French soothsayer foretold the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, it comes out as “Quasimodo predicted all this” (“For All Debts Public and Private,” 4.1). Younger Italians on The Sopranos are no less ignorant. Tony’s son A.J. develops a nihilistic worldview after learning of the “God is dead” philosophy of “Nitch” (“D-Girl,” 2.7), and later quotes the Irish poet “Yeets” (“Made in America,” 6.21). Even the Ivy League–educated Meadow Soprano refers to “Mario Lasagna” when she means tenor Mario Lanza. Among the older mobsters, New York boss Carmine Lupertazzi tells Tony that “there’s no stigmata these days” about being in psychotherapy (“Fortunate Son,” 3.3). Finally, Phil Leotardo claims that he was descended from Leonardo da Vinci, who, his grandson adds, “wrote The Da Vinci Code” (“Stage 5”). And Phil is especially offended

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that officials at Ellis Island changed the family name from Leonardo to Leotardo because the latter is associated with ballet attire, an affront to his masculinity. Tony’s malapropisms are so pernicious that he is a veritable Italian Archie Bunker. Just a few examples: Tony refers to “Prince Matchabelli,” a bastardization of the political thinker Niccolò Machiavelli combined with the title of his classic work, The Prince, to produce the brand name of a low-end men’s cologne (“Fortunate Son”). Likewise, Tony mishears the title of the Italian opera Aida (albeit the Elton John version) as “I eat her” (“The Telltale Moozadell,” 3.9) and compares his girlfriend Gloria Trillo to “one of those Spanish princesses in a painting by Goyim” (“Amour Fou,” 3.12). And when Dr. Melfi cites Carlos Castaneda, Tony replies, “Who the fuck listens to prizefighters?” (“The Happy Wanderer,” 2.6). He also insists that the paintings in the psychiatrist’s outer office are some kind of “Gorschach test”; distances himself from the movie mass-murderer “Hannibal Lecture” (“The Sopranos,” 1.1); and describes the sexual proclivities of mob captain Ralphie Cifaretto as not making “penisary contact with her Volvo” (“Mergers and Acquisitions,” 4.8). Tony’s misuse of the language is just as ludicrous when he is trying to be sympathetic or to take his parental role seriously. Thus, when young Vito Jr. acts out after his gay father is slain, Tony replies, “It’s to be expected with Vito’s passing and all that entrails,” turning his expression of empathy and concern into a ludicrous laugh line (“Chasing It,” 6.16). When he launches into some antigay invective, Tony states: “I agree with that Senator Sanatorium” (actually, former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum) (“Live Free or Die,” 6.6). And after Christopher’s death (at Tony’s own hands), he mentions that “I was prostate with grief,” again converting a (hypocritical) expression of sorrow into a farcical faux pas (“Kennedy and Heidi,” 6.18). He criticizes Meadow for using vulgarity in the house: “When did you start to use that kind of language in this house with immunity,” and, in a non sequitur variation on the famous aphorism from Les liaisons dangereuses, notes that “revenge is like serving cold cuts,” instead of is best served cold (“Cold Cuts,” 5.10). If African Americans talked like this on a television series, the show would be taken off the air—as was Amos ’n’ Andy in 1966. (The aural crudity of the characters in The Sopranos is not confined to their misuse of the language. A quantitative longitudinal study of the audible belches and farts in the series would no doubt be suitable for inclusion in The Guinness Book of World Records.) In line with their other stereotypical characteris-

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tics, it appears that Tony Soprano and his comrades are inarticulate and crude precisely because they are Italian.

Questions and Issues Despite its use of postclassical generic, narrative, and aesthetic devices, and its creation by an Italian American, The Sopranos relies heavily on demeaning tropes of ethnicity, class, sexuality, and gender. The result is the construction of negative iconic stereotypes about working-class Italians that perpetuate old Hollywood clichés. Although creator David Chase (born DeCesare) has clearly tried to transcend these passé stereotypes through universalization, complexity of characterization, irony, and creative experimentation, most viewers probably take The Sopranos “straight”—that is, as a raw, unvarnished anthropology of Americans of Italian descent, not as a “discursive construction in a free play of signifiers” or as “an ensemble of multiple effects” (Penley 20). Although the “complex” characters in The Sopranos all have their “good” sides, they appear to be bigoted, misogynistic, homophobic, violent, and ignorant louts simply because they are Italian. The etiology of their antisocial personas seems to stem directly from their ethnicity. Likewise, their being Italian seems to constitute an explanation for their behavior. The location shooting, casting, and rough language certainly contribute to the series’ Barthesian “reality effect,” but the ethnic images and prejudiced portrayals appear to be “realistic” only if they square with one’s preconceived notion of Italian identity. If one’s impression of Italian Americans is that they are “screaming, cursing, battering, gun-toting, and sexually-indulgent” (Cortes 117), then The Sopranos easily confirms that stereotypical vision. David Chase offers a general rebuttal: “The Italian American experience is an advertisement for America. . . . It’s hard to think of a group who’s come from so little who’s done so well. If you have so little self-esteem at this point that these movies bother you, I have to wonder why. . . . This Italian mob thing has become . . . a national myth” (Bogdanovich interview). So, perhaps, has the “national myth” of the vanquishing of the Native Americans. We may be in “the twilight of ethnicity” (Alba 16), but The Sopranos displays a “highly anomalous deformation of . . . Italian-American life” (Casillo, Gangster Priest, xiv). Thus, although the backdrop of the underworld makes for a highly dramatic setting, the culture of Italians is vastly misrepresented because of the exaggeration of their negative traits.

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As it happens, Italian Americans are among the most law-abiding citizens of the United States, and gangsters constitute less than 0.03 percent of their population (Lawton 72). Is The Sopranos an example of “ethnic self-loathing masquerading as a timeless tale of existential woe?” (Iaconis AL4). Does the arthouse “brand,” extensive use of irony, and aesthetic production values of the series shield it from criticism of its ethnic stereotyping? In Chase’s defense, one could say that the milieu of the post-Gotti Mafia gave the series creator the perfect metaphor in which to explore the deterioration of America in “the twilight of the godfathers” (Gabbard 42), the decline di padrone. After all, we live in an epoch in which Italian Americans, the “problematic whites,” are almost fully accepted as Caucasians in U.S. society (Jacobson 6; Guglielmo and Salerno 1). The Sopranos may be assimilated ethnics, but just as black radicals once scorned Sidney Poitier’s Oscar-winning performance in Lilies of the Field (1963) as “a convincing portrayal of a Negro,” so the roles played by James Gandolfini and Edie Falco (which won them both Emmy and Screen Actors Guild awards) can be viewed as convincing portrayals of Italians.

Conclusion The Sopranos may well represent an expression of America’s sublimated desires, and it may be true that the violence and moral complexity of the series fulfill a mythopoetic need for U.S. viewers to see their country’s existential and national problems acted out (and sometimes solved) in a dramatic fictional context. Back in 1948, Robert Warshow averred that “the gangster speaks for us, expressing that part of the American psyche which rejects the qualities and demands of modern life, which rejects ‘Americanism’ itself” (100). As such, Tony Soprano can be viewed as a farcical contemporary avatar of the tragic hero, although, as Karl Marx said of Louis-Napoleon, he is “a mediocre and grotesque individual [playing] the hero’s role” (144). Unfortunately, the tragic (anti)hero in The Sopranos is not an Anglo-American but the guinea—indeed, the guinea pig.

“All Caucasians Look Alike” Dreams of Whiteness at the End of The Sopranos Christopher Kocela

Dreams play a significant role in the narrative development of The Sopranos. From the nightmare opening scene of “Meadowlands” (1.4) to the extended oneiric sequence that makes up almost half of “The Test Dream” (5.11), each season of the series devotes progressively more and more screen time to the depiction of Tony’s dreams. Yet it is not until season six that a continuous dream narrative extends beyond a single episode. Tony’s coma-induced fantasy that he has accidentally picked up the briefcase and wallet of Kevin Finnerty, a middle-aged salesman in the field of precision optics, develops over the second and third episodes of the series’ final season.1 Key to understanding this extended sequence, I suggest, is an encounter that occurs at the outset of “Mayham” (6.3). Upon waking up in a hotel room charged fraudulently to Kevin Finnerty’s credit card, Tony discovers a summons to Crystal Monastery slipped under the room door. As Tony has already learned by this point in the dream, Finnerty is being pursued by Buddhist monks for failing to address their complaints about a heating system his firm installed at their monastery. Hoping to establish his own innocence and to learn more about where Finnerty can be reached, Tony drives out to Crystal Monastery only to be mistaken, again, for the man in question. When Tony asks, “Do I really look that much like this guy?” one of the older monks responds, “To a certain extent, all Caucasians look alike.” On one level, this monk’s response turns the tables on the way in which Tony and his crew, throughout the series, generalize about the ethnic and racial “others” they encounter in their personal lives and business

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dealings. But the problem of telling one Caucasian from another develops into an important theme beyond the immediate context of Tony’s dream, informing several crucial plot developments in the final season of The Sopranos. Tony is in a coma because his Uncle Junior, mistaking him for long-dead Pussy Malanga, shoots him in the belly in a fit of dementia at the end of “Members Only” (6.1). The final scene of this episode shows Tony losing consciousness on the floor of his uncle’s kitchen, unable to answer a telephone operator’s request, voiced through a dislodged receiver, for his identity and location. Twenty episodes later, in “The Blue Comet” (6.20), Tony plans a pre-emptive strike on Phil Leotardo in an effort to prevent all-out war between the New York and New Jersey crime families. The plan fails, however, when the assassins hired to kill Leotardo mistakenly shoot another white-haired elderly man who looks just like Phil. Finally, in the season’s last episode, “Made in America” (6.21), Tony confronts Junior in the hospital only to discover that his uncle’s dementia has progressed so far that he is unable to remember his own past. Among the last things Tony says to Junior before the series’ infamous final scene is his question: “You don’t know who I am, do you?” For viewers attentive to the complex treatment of Italian American identity and white racial consciousness throughout the first five seasons of The Sopranos, the notion that cases of mistaken identity should serve as bookends to the final season is perhaps not surprising. Season six of The Sopranos, and particularly Tony’s dream notion that “all Caucasians look alike,” extends the theme of white racial misrecognition that constitutes one of the series’ most unique contributions to the history of the gangster genre. In two previous articles on The Sopranos (“From Columbus to Gary Cooper” and “Unmade Men”) I have argued that what sets the series apart from its filmic precursors, particularly the work of Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese, is the way it interrogates the complexity and history of Italian American identity. Where previous installments of the gangster genre tended to depict characters marked by their obvious ethnicity, The Sopranos foregrounds the complexities of white racial identification by drawing attention to the Soprano family’s almost complete assimilation into mainstream American culture.2 Of particular interest throughout the series is the way that Tony is able to affirm or deny his whiteness, depending on the situation, to further his own personal and business interests. When, in “A Hit Is a Hit” (1.10), Jennifer Melfi asks Tony point-blank whether he considers himself an “aver-

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age white man,” Tony responds: “I don’t mean white like Caucasian. I mean a white man, like our friend Cusamano. Now he’s Italian but he’s a medigon. He’s what my old man would’ve called a Wonder Bread wop.” Tony’s self-serving ability to manipulate the terms Caucasian and white man as signifiers of racial and ethnic difference manifests itself at various points throughout the series. In the housing development scam in “Watching Too Much Television” (4.7), Tony is able to gain the trust of his African American compatriot, Maurice, by appealing to a shared history of ethnic persecution. At the same time, he is also able to exempt himself and his crew from the dirty business of clearing out crack houses by invoking his visibility as a white man: “Oh nice! Bunch of white guys settin’ off caps in the ghetto. That won’t attract any attention at all!”3 In these and other instances, Tony’s success as a businessman depends on a strategy of white racial misrecognition; indeed, a central thesis of The Sopranos seems to be that success as a postmodern mob boss demands proficiency in manipulating one’s racial and ethnic profile. Yet, except for one or two revealing moments in Jennifer’s office, Tony is rarely called to account for these business tactics, and even when he is, he betrays little self-consciousness about the way he uses his whiteness to his own advantage. Instead, Tony’s contradictory relationship to whiteness is symptomatically registered, throughout the first five seasons of the series, in his recurring panic attacks—attacks that, I argue, are brought on by repressed awareness of his conflicted racial identity. In season six, however, Tony not only appears cured of his panic attacks, he also begins to see whiteness as both essential to his children’s future success and, at times, as detrimental to his long-term ability to maintain credibility as a Mafia boss. Crucial to understanding these narrative developments is Tony’s extended coma dream. In her essay “‘You’re Annette Bening?’: Dreams and Hollywood as Subtext in The Sopranos,” Cameron Golden argues that The Sopranos tends to encourage a Freudian interpretation of dreams as repressed wish fulfillments. Beyond the fact that Jennifer tells Tony explicitly at one point, “Dreams are wishes” (“Calling All Cars,” 4.11), extended sequences in episodes like “The Test Dream” and “Funhouse” (2.13) clearly present Tony’s dreams as fantasy resolutions of unpleasant business dilemmas. In “Funhouse,” Tony’s dream represents his unconscious knowledge that one of his closest capos, Pussy Bonpensiero, has become an FBI informer, while “The Test Dream” attempts to mitigate the pain of Tony’s decision to kill his cousin, Tony Blundetto.4 At first glance,

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Tony’s coma-induced dream in season six also appears as an example of repressed wish fulfillment. The fact that Kevin Finnerty is a former patio salesman recalls Tony’s ironic answer to Meadow’s question, in season one, about why Tony didn’t try to make a life for himself outside the Mafia: “Being a rebel in my family would have been selling patio furniture on Route 22” (“College,” 1.5). On one level, Kevin Finnerty embodies Tony’s lifelong wish for an escape from inheriting his father’s business—a wish Tony has kept alive, in his waking life, by preserving hopes that his children will find success in a world beyond the Mafia. In keeping with this hope, what Tony learns from the monks at Crystal Monastery—“all Caucasians look alike”—signifies a future in which Tony’s ability to claim ethnic difference, or to strategically deny his whiteness, will no longer be possible or necessary. Yet it is also this revelation that problematizes the conventional Freudian reading of Tony’s dream. Between his father’s generation, a lost “golden age” of the Mafia, and the future Tony envisions for his children is his repressed wish for the end of the Mafia itself—a wish whose fulfillment Tony cannot experience simply as pleasurable since his own identity is inextricably bound up with the mob.5 As much as Tony longs for a future in which his children will be freed from their father’s means of livelihood, that longing amounts, on a symbolic level, to a yearning for self-destruction and is thus in keeping with Freud’s later theory of dreams not as wish fulfillments, but as figures for the death drive. In contrast to the theory advanced in The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud argues in Beyond the Pleasure Principle that the compulsion to repeat certain traumatic experiences cannot be explained as a wish fulfillment. Instead, some dreams, like those of shell-shocked war veterans, betray the existence of something “beyond” the pleasure principle, motivated as they are by a “compulsion to repeat” that Freud defines as a drive to return to an earlier state of inanimacy.6 This theory of the trauma dream as representative of the death drive must be factored into any explanation of Tony’s extended coma dream. In addition to fulfilling Tony’s wish for an escape from Mafia life, Tony’s transformation into Kevin Finnerty also represents his compulsion to repeat the trauma of having been mistaken for another man and shot by his uncle. It is no accident that Finnerty, though once a patio-furniture salesman, has since moved into the field of precision optics, as we learn in a restaurant discussion between Finnerty and several colleagues in “Join the Club” (6.2). “Precision optics” is what Uncle Junior lacks, metaphorically,

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when he mistakes Tony for Pussy Malanga; consequently, when asked how he came to choose his new field, Tony/Finnerty suddenly becomes morose: “I’m forty-six years old. I mean, who am I? Where am I going?” As the dream progresses, the traumatic aspect of Tony’s identification with Finnerty gradually comes to eclipse its liberating or wish-fulfilling dimension. After Tony slips and falls in a hotel stairwell, he is taken to the hospital, where he is diagnosed with an early stage of Alzheimer’s disease. When the doctor asks for Tony’s name, he replies angrily, “What does it matter? I’m not gonna know myself soon” (6.2). On returning to the hotel, he confides in the bartender about the diagnosis and then asks him, “Is it possible that I am Kevin Finnerty?” (6.3). Tony’s growing fear, aroused by the Alzheimer’s diagnosis, that he will soon be unable to distinguish himself from Finnerty, even in his own mind, clearly reflects his unconscious knowledge that having been shot by his uncle bodes ill for his future as a mob boss. In this context it is especially significant that the central revelation of the dream, the monk’s claim that “all Caucasians look alike,” is followed almost immediately by a meditation on universal oneness as death: “One day we will all die, and then we will be the same as that tree. No me, no you” (6.3). Taken as a whole, the coma dream, with its central conceit of misidentification, represents an instance of traumatic repetition compulsion for Tony. That the entire dream is a journey toward death is made clear when, driving out to the Inn at the Oaks, Tony is met by his deceased (murdered by Tony S.) cousin, Tony Blundetto (Tony B.), who invites him “inside” on condition that he leave his briefcase and his business behind. The coma dream, in which whiteness is revealed as a figure for both wish fulfillment and the death drive, provides a valuable framework for understanding the presentation of whiteness throughout the final season of The Sopranos. It also sheds new light on the complex relationship between whiteness, Italian American identity, and Tony’s business practices established in earlier seasons. In “Proshai, Livushka” (3.2), for example, Tony militates against Meadow’s relationship with Noah Tannenbaum, her half-black, half-Jewish boyfriend, by telling Noah, “I’ve got business associates who are black, and they don’t want my son with their daughters and I don’t want their sons with mine.” Tony’s attempt to police racial boundaries inside his home by appealing to standards set among his business partners is unsuccessful, at least at first. After Noah storms out in a rage, fully intent on pursuing his relationship with Meadow, Tony is overcome by a panic attack and passes

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out on his kitchen floor. Yet, in light of the opening episodes of season six, what becomes evident about the image of Tony’s prone and unconscious body—whether on his own kitchen floor after the confrontation with Noah or on the floor of his uncle’s kitchen, bloody phone receiver dangling above his head—is that it signifies the eventual “dead end” of his racially inflected strategies for securing the future of his family.7 Whereas Tony’s conflicted relationship to whiteness is manifested, throughout the first five seasons of The Sopranos, in his recurring panic attacks, the visual and symbolic culmination of those attacks in season six is the image of Tony’s hospitalized and comatose body surrounded by friends, family, and crew members after being shot by Uncle Junior. Unable to communicate with those around him and unable, even in his own mind, to establish the truth of his identity, Tony is reduced to a state that mirrors his uncle’s dementia, suggesting an important lesson about inheritance for the would-be mob boss of the postmodern era. As borne out by the remaining episodes of the series, Tony’s inheritance of Junior’s place at the head of the Family necessitates a violent and self-destructive severing of his ties to Soprano and Mafia history. The result is that, by the end of the series, Tony is able to guarantee a secure future for A.J. and Meadow only by deploying strategies of white racial misrecognition that undermine the conventional rules of Mafia business, radically compromising his own ability to identify with previous generations of Soprano men or the “golden age” that they represent to Tony and his crew. The split nature of whiteness as both wish fulfillment and death drive for Tony becomes evident when comparing two important subplots in season six. One of these concerns A.J.’s break-up with his fiancée, Blanca, and Tony’s various attempts to help his son through the depression that follows. In a crucial scene in “Walk Like a Man” (6.17), Tony tries to cheer up A.J. by suggesting that numerous girls are just waiting to meet a guy with his son’s attributes. When A.J. dismisses the idea that he’s as special as his father claims, Tony replies: “You’re damn right you are. You’re handsome, and smart, and a hard worker, and . . . let’s be honest, white. That’s a huge plus nowadays.” This is the first and only time in the series in which Tony addresses one of his children not as Italian or Italian American, but simply as white. In contrast to his repeated reliance on the presumed difference between what it means to be “Caucasian” and “white,” Tony is able to acknowledge here that white racial identification is crucial to his plans for his son’s happiness.

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As he tells Jennifer Melfi shortly after: “He’s got the world by the balls. Every fuckin’ advantage” (6.17). Interestingly, A.J. internalizes Tony’s words and his father’s anxieties about whiteness—something that becomes especially evident when, in “Kennedy and Heidi” (6.18), he witnesses his friends’ beating of a young Somali man in the street. Although A.J. is apparently unfazed by watching these same friends pour acid on the foot of a white college student for failing to pay back a betting loan (6.17), the beating of the African man reactivates his depression over the break-up with Blanca. In therapy, when his doctor asks whether writing about his experiences with the Somali man might clarify his feelings, A.J. detours through a series of denials about Blanca (“Blanca isn’t black! Well . . . she’s pretty tan”) before establishing a wider context for the injustices he has witnessed: “I was watching CNN—this story about these kids in some Iraqi hospital. How the burn unit doesn’t have the right medicine or something. Then they show this story about some mall in Minnesota—all these gigantic fat people buying stuff and eating all this shit. It’s like my parents. You should see our house—the stupid coffee maker they got, media room. And then there’s Blanca, and her kid hardly talks. She can’t afford to send him to a decent school” (“The Second Coming,” 6.19). A.J.’s observations indicate his growing awareness of global and racial inequalities—an awareness that threatens his father’s plans for his future when, as he tells Tony and Carmela, he contemplates joining the armed forces. But Tony is eventually able to stem the tide of A.J.’s growing depression and discontentment. In the series’ final episode, A.J. is persuaded to give up his environmental and humanitarian concerns when Tony secures a cushy office job for him in the film industry—a job to which A.J. now commutes in a new BMW sport coupe, also a gift from his father. As a result, this important subplot concludes with the suggestion that Tony’s wealth and connections, both the result of his illegal business practices, might nonetheless succeed in establishing a life for A.J. outside the Mafia’s influence. Meanwhile, as the final episode also suggests, Meadow appears destined to make a similar exchange of humanitarian ideals for comfort and privilege. As she reveals over wine with her parents and her soon-to-be-in-laws, the Parisis, her work at the “poverty law center” has attracted the attention of the legal firm at which her fiancé, Patrick Jr., works. Although Tony and Carmela have both had misgivings about the idea of Meadow marrying into another mob family, Tony is all smiles when he learns that Patrick’s firm has already

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proposed a $170,000 starting salary for Meadow when she finishes law school. If Tony’s hopes for his children’s future appear to be coming true (at least provisionally) by the end of the series, his relationship to Soprano history is much less rosy. Tony’s open promotion of A.J.’s whiteness as a crucial advantage in contemporary American culture is matched, in season six, by attention to the way that Tony’s business practices contribute to the “whitening” of Newark’s North Ward. In “Johnny Cakes” (6.8), Tony is approached by Julianna Skiff, real-estate agent for Jamba Juice, with an offer to purchase a property he is presently leasing to Caputo’s Live Poultry. At first, Tony refuses the Jamba Juice offer, claiming a desire to protect his father’s old neighborhood from gentrification. In Tony’s view, all American cities, like all Caucasians, according to the monk in his dream, have begun to look alike: “You know it’s not just the money. You drive around America today and everything looks the fucking same. The Old Navy and the Bed, Bath, and Whatever. But the North Ward is the North Ward.” Of course, as we know by this point, Tony has a romanticized view of his old neighborhood: the episode opens with a scene in which Patsy Parisi is frustrated in his efforts to shake down the manager of a nearby coffee shop for protection money because, as the manager explains, “all expenses have to go through corporate in Seattle.” Tony’s eventual decision to sell to Jamba Juice when the price is right is interesting, however, not only for the way it betrays his supposed interest in preserving the historical integrity of the North Ward, but also for the way it reverses the outcome of Tony’s earlier real-estate ventures. As mentioned earlier, Tony’s strategic deployment of his whiteness in his dealings with Maurice in “Watching Too Much Television” results in a housing development scam whose victims, the episode makes clear, are primarily African American families.8 In “Johnny Cakes,” however, the immediate victims of Tony’s transaction with Jamba Juice are not only Italian Americans like Caputo and his family, but members of Tony’s own crew. The episode ends with Patsy’s discovery that, as a result of the sale of Caputo’s store, he will be losing more protection racket money. His response—“I got a kid in college! . . . What the fuck is happening to this neighborhood?”—drives home the extent to which traditional strategies for Mafia earning, at times complemented by Tony’s ability to affirm or deny his whiteness, are now threatened by Tony’s larger-scale enterprises.9 The implications for Tony’s future, and the future of his old neigh-

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borhood, are clear. Although earlier in the episode Tony defends his ability to work in his father’s old community while living in the comfort of suburban North Caldwell, Tony’s strategic ability to shuttle between “old” and “new” families—here figured as a split between an ethnic Italian American past and a future of assimilated whiteness—is itself a shortterm strategy. Neither A.J. nor Meadow shares Tony’s concern for the old neighborhood; moreover, what the Jamba Juice deal demonstrates is that, to protect the future of his children, Tony, too, must dissociate himself from his family’s past. As Chris Messenger argues, Tony’s drive in the opening credits of every Sopranos episode reminds viewers of the migration of Italian American immigrants from “now grim, older factory towns . . . to a suburban frontier” (283). The overall trajectory of the series’ narrative, however, establishes that drive as a death drive for Tony, emphasizing his forgetting, rather than remembrance, of the historical process of assimilation and white racial identification. The starkest expression of Tony’s separation from his ethnic past occurs in the penultimate scene of the series, “The Blue Comet,” in Tony’s long-delayed reunion with Uncle Junior. On a literal level, of course, it is Junior rather than Tony who is cut off from the past, unable to identify his nephew or even to remember his former status as a mob boss. When Tony reminds him, “You and my dad, you two ran North Jersey,” Junior responds impassively, “That’s nice,” before turning to watch birds out the hospital window. But the dialogue between Tony and Junior in this scene echoes beyond the broken relationship between the two men, providing, I suggest, a strong sense of symbolic closure to the series despite David Chase’s refusal to satisfy expectations for narrative closure in the diner scene that follows. Junior’s preoccupation with the birds outside his window establishes continuity between this scene and the pilot episode of the series, in which Tony’s exaggerated concern for the ducks in his backyard swimming pool earns him mockery from his children and the title “birdman” from his wife. In a therapy session later in that episode, Jennifer comes to the conclusion that Tony’s depression over the migration of the ducks is the result of his fear of losing his family, establishing a symbolic association between birds and family that is reinforced at numerous points throughout the series.10 In the disjointed discussion between Tony and his uncle in the final episode, however, Junior’s birds, rather than symbolizing family cohesion, represent his inability even to remember his family. At one point, Tony finds himself competing with the birds for his uncle’s attention: “You don’t remember

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that you shot me? Enough with the fucking birds! I’m Anthony! Johnny’s son!” That Junior’s mental incapacity is expressed here in terms that reflect Tony’s own conflicted sense of identity suggests that, figuratively, if not literally, Junior’s fate is also Tony’s own. Junior’s inability to make the connection between “this thing of ours” and his own past life foreshadows Tony’s eventual disconnection from what he calls the “ground floor” of his business—a disconnection already foreshadowed in Tony’s coma dream from earlier in the season. Although The Sopranos infamously ends without providing an end to Tony’s story (Will he or will he not be punished for the slaying of Phil Leotardo?), the nature of Tony’s punishment is revealed in the fact, established conclusively here, that Mafia membership provides no shortcut to personal or cultural identity. Instead, Tony’s conflicted efforts to carry on tradition and to protect his family, like his uncle’s dementia, seem destined to produce a mob boss cut off once and for all from his past.

Notes 1. Although it is possible to read the Finnerty narrative as a kind of purgatorial or supernatural experience, in this essay I regard it as a dream. 2. Pellegrina D’Acierno offers a compelling account of the way in which Italian American ethnicity is established in the films of Coppola and Scorsese. 3. I discuss both of these scenes in greater detail in “Unmade Men.” 4. Martin Hipsky also discusses the Freudianism of dreams in The Sopranos. 5. For more on the way in which The Sopranos reflects cultural nostalgia for an earlier “golden age” of the Mafia, especially earlier incarnations of the gangster genre, see Auster; Nochimson, “Waddaya Lookin’ At?”; Creeber, “TV Ruined the Movies”; and Pattie. 6. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud explains the need to qualify and expand his earlier theory of dreams (609). Freud’s expanded theory of dreams presages his first speculative account of the relationship between repetition compulsion and the death drive. 7. The connection between whiteness and death is also driven home in the same episode in which Tony argues with Noah (“Proshai, Livushka,” 3.2). A later scene shows Meadow attempting to help A.J. with his homework, an essay on Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” According to Meadow, the snow in the poem “symbolizes cold, endless white, endless nothing, death.” Even after A.J. objects with, “I thought black was death,” Meadow insists: “White too.” In light of Meadow’s interpretation, it’s difficult not to see the transition from season five to season six of The Sopranos as something of a journey through Frost’s snowy woods, especially since Tony eludes the FBI in the final moments of season five only by escaping into the snow-covered forest behind Johnny Sack’s house. These snowy woods continue to haunt Tony

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later when, in “Soprano Home Movies” (6.13), the gun he dropped during his escape is found and later used by a juvenile offender who agrees to testify in court about its owner. 8. At the end of the episode, Assemblyman Zellman, a key co-conspirator with Tony in the housing development scam, is approached by a young African American girl hoping, as she says, for a “nice house.” 9. That Patsy should be the one to voice discontentment about this turn of events is especially appropriate given Meadow’s engagement to Patsy’s son, Patrick Jr. If, as discussed, this marriage promises to secure Meadow’s professional future outside the Mafia, Patsy’s reaction also suggests that a Soprano-Parisi marriage, far from bringing these long-established families closer together, may ultimately signal a rift detrimental to the business interests of both. 10. Jennifer reinforces her Oedipal interpretation of the ducks on numerous occasions. In “Down Neck” (1.7), she reminds Tony: “When you first started therapy, you said that you had this dream—about those ducks. They flew away with your penis; it was a bad omen that something was going to happen in your family. Is this the terrible thing?” In “I Dream of Jeannie Cusamano” (1.13), she reiterates: “In your worst dreams, a duck flies off with your penis. Castration.” And as late as “The Strong, Silent Type” (4.10), she again reminds Tony: “When it was the ducks it embodied feelings of dread about your family—that something terrible was going to happen.”

PART 7

Images of Justice and The Sopranos

Representations of Law and Justice in The Sopranos An Introduction Barbara Villez

Where is there any law in The Sopranos? At first sight, this is not a show representing any aspect of the law or the legal system. The series is about outlaws, so where is the law? In fact, at the very least, there is representation of the law through its agents: the police and the FBI, and sometimes lawyers. Tony Soprano and his collaborators constantly fear indictments, and people are jailed. However, outside of the constant menace of punishment for illegal activities, is there any representation of law and justice? The answer to that question is yes, lots. A closer look at this series reveals the strong presence of the law, stronger than one might expect from a narrative centering on the Mafia. Using the loop of the law to read the series gives a different perspective on an already rich narrative, questioning modern American society in which the law has a major role. For Anthony Chase, a film represents the law when it gives visibility to legal questions starting from the very concept of right and wrong. The law is a central organizer of social relations and as such is present even in series that outwardly seem to have no legal theme or concern. In Carnivàle (HBO, 2003–2005), the marginal society of a traveling freak show makes it clear from the first episodes that its survival is dependent on the existence of a vertical authority structure and a consensual set of rules. Such rules get the members of this wandering group through

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major crises and simple disputes. But without a code to guide them or procedures to channel their anger and grief, there could be only chaos (Villez 73). In a similar manner, other series, seemingly devoid of any notion of law, have built-in dilemmas that make legal questions “visible.” Courtroom dramas aside, some series clearly reserve a place for representations of the law (see Angel [WB, 1999–2004], for example)1 or use a legal issue as a backdrop (for example, Weeds [Showtime, 2005–] and Big Love [HBO, 2006–]). In The Sopranos, signs of the legal system can be most obviously visible in the usual, and inevitable, presence of the police and the catand-mouse games that they play with some of Tony’s associates. Viewers also discover rumors of looming indictments, expectations as well as strategies against FBI investigations, and betrayals by Family members who turn stool pigeons or “wires.” Across the seasons, viewers heard of divorce, witness protection programs, prison sentences, and such varied punishable acts as smuggling, insider trading, arson, robbery, and rape, not to mention murder. A television work like The Sopranos, with its weekly exposure to the illegal activities Tony engages in, has the time to make visible the consequences of these acts, in terms of society and the legal system, but also the physical and moral consequences; we see Tony suffering from stress at the very beginning of the series. The awareness that every act carries consequences is a legal concept that is central to the show. But the consequences looming over Tony from the judicial system appear decidedly less terrible than those threatening anyone who defies or disobeys the covenants or ethical code of the Family, those in “the business.” The double family is a vehicle for the representation of authority and law. The Family/family serves as a body politic, operating on family loyalty, a code of honor, and a sense of civic pride (Rapping 99). Trust and respect are absolute values; betrayal is severely punished. Despite attitudes that often seem disrespectful of the law, a parallel system operates with the Family’s code of ethics, rigorous rules on obligations and duties, and a series of corrective measures ranging from “a talking to” to “a taking out” (read: execution). However, the conflict that runs throughout the seasons between the Family’s illegal activities and the moral values that weigh so heavily on family/Family behavior brings to anyone using the loop of the law to read the series a reminder of the confrontation between natural law and positive law.

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A Parallel System of Rules Traditional attitudes to the law are expressed in moments of light banter about lawyers. When Tony kids Jimmy, “You missed your call, you shoudda been a lawyer,” the latter answers, “Please, enough people hate me” (“Nobody Knows Anything,” 1.11). More surprisingly, though, when Carmela resignedly announces to an acquaintance at the end of the final season that Meadow has opted for law school instead of medicine, we see that the social ladder includes some inner family preferences and that lawyers are not in high esteem despite their social and financial success. Tony and Carmela want their children to succeed in the WASP suburban community they evolved in—the importance to them of college shows this as well as their son’s private Catholic school or their aspiration to join the country club. It is therefore both interesting and innovative that Meadow’s career choice is met with lukewarm approval, because it is clear that she will necessarily delve into unclean activities or, though less probable, potentially work for the “wrong” side. Meadow and A.J. talk about their father’s business; Meadow even asks Tony outright whether he is in the Mafia. The truth does not seem to bother them, even though Tony is concerned about their knowing. In contrast to the cool attitude with which Meadow takes in her father’s illegal activities, she is appalled and furious at her soccer coach when she learns that he has slept with one of her friends (“Boca,” 1.9). When Tony learns about this, he is also outraged. This is an inadmissible act, one for which there must be a sanction. Here, the existence of a profound morality is clear. Tony has no confidence in the law to deal with this problem. The law would put the grievance into general terms and not satisfy the individual need for vengeance, which would bring with it justice within Tony’s system of order. He therefore wants to deal with the soccer coach in his own way, but Meadow and Carmela plead with him to let the official authorities handle it. After the police come to take the coach away, Tony gets drunk to evacuate some of his anger and frustration at having been prevented from assuming “his” responsibilities, responding to the offense and closing the wound. This is the role of the criminal justice system, but because Tony denies its legitimacy, he sees such management as the responsibility of the family/community fathers. Tony is a man of action, not of words, and the law is slow because it transforms passions into words (vengeance through the trial, emotions expressed through reason). The passage of time to transform

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disorder into order makes Tony uncomfortable because he does not trust the absence of action. The coach’s act was a breach of faith. The community entrusted their children to his care, and his betrayal touched Tony personally because a breach of faith is one of the worst offenses. There is no pardon for such acts in the system of Tony and the Family. Junior demonstrates this in the same episode by breaking off a long-standing affair after finding out that his girlfriend has betrayed him, breaking her promise of silence. The cases in which Tony is in control become fewer and fewer, but when he manages to maintain his authority, he feels able to preserve the moral values on which his world is built. These values change more slowly than those of the outside world, which he thinks is going to the dogs. In his sessions with his therapist, Dr. Melfi, Tony blames this on the crumbling of modern society’s moral values, which threaten both his family and the community. He and his friends often talk of disappearing values and the dilapidated state of things. What is the world coming to? Tony and Artie wonder as they contemplate a young couple in a restaurant, the boy wearing his cap through the dinner, “and in a nice place like this!” (“Boca”). When this spectacle becomes too much for Tony to just sit there and ignore, he gets up and demands that the young man take off his hat. Tony stands over him, silently but forcefully, until the boy obeys the command. When Tony returns to his table, the waiter thanks him. Tony has enforced a code of propriety and, in this instance, has served as a figure of authority in the community. Tony Soprano thus demonstrates that like the nomad society of Carnivàle, no one can live without rules or a structure of authority. The parallel system that exists in The Sopranos is an example of how rules are inevitable and are created in the absence of, or instead of, the will of a legislative or governmental structure imposed on the collectivity. Tony is outside the law, but his system operates in a strangely similar manner. His system of values with the Family’s ethical code exists parallel to the law. His solutions to conflicts are usually simple, bypassing complicated and lengthy legal procedures. The Family respects justice, but their conception of it rarely matches that of the law, which they do not consider a legitimate source of authority, or a source of justice. The law is not Tony’s concern, other than how to stay clear of it. The obligations and duties of Tony’s Family are those of an older, more traditional society. The protection of traditional moral values is a sign of family culture.2 The business Family is governed by a simple set of absolutes, and loyalty

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and trust are the basis of all dealings. “I don’t make the rules,” says Junior (in “Boca”), but everyone knows the risk of disobeying them.

Natural Law versus Positive Law The Mafia is based on a family culture. The family model is that of a vertical structure of authority, from which rules are passed down and judgment carried out in a nonadversarial, traditional manner. The rules governing this structure are there to preserve its existence and protect it from change or challenges to paternal authority. The matters of rule making, rule following, and rule breaking are pervasive in The Sopranos. Christopher Moltisanti, for example, complains to Tony that he makes everyone play by the rules, but he is the only one who doesn’t (“Amour Fou,” 3.12). Rules of conduct that serve to protect a traditional social order from the outside and that are discovered through human reason rather than coming from any governmental authority fall under the heading of natural law or natural rights.3 Decisions are taken according to a form of reasoning that seeks mainly to justify their results (Stoljar 157). Natural law is also akin to strict moral values that may be thought to help citizens evaluate positive law, because the principal standard is human justice. The conflict between law and justice is a constant battle in The Sopranos and parallels the conflict between natural law and positive law, in debate for centuries. Natural law is not imposed on the group from an outside source, like the legislature, for example. However, it does come from a sense of morality and justice. This is very much like the way Tony’s Family operates. What the soccer coach did was unpardonable; killing, on the other hand, is sometimes necessary. Although natural law and positive law have a common vocabulary of rights, obligations, and duties (Hart, Law, Liberty and Morality, 2), positive, or enacted, law is made up of arbitrary rules imposed on men by other men. Since natural law has its source in reason, it is seen above all to preserve universal values (Hart, Law, Liberty and Morality, 70). In this respect, Tony’s system of rules can be compared to natural law as it seeks to preserve the Family’s own existence as a social body. Of course, as Hart warns, the justification of acts within a natural law system depends on the kind of group in question and the type of acts its members take to protect it (Hart, Law, Liberty and Morality, 19). However, The Sopranos invites viewers to compare the acts committed by Tony to those of oth-

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ers, like the soccer coach, for example. The victims of Tony’s acts are rarely unrelated to crime, whereas the soccer coach preyed on the innocent, against any concept of moral justice (see Hart, Law, Liberty and Morality, 7). Here again, viewers are witness to the conflict between the waste-no-time sanctions Tony feels are justified and more efficient and the slow procedural inefficacy of positive law, carried out by the police. The decisions taken on moral grounds, according to the code of the Family, seek to fill in the gaps of the law. Positive law is nonspecific because it is a product of society, which, although recognizing the values that are dear to Tony and the Family, seems less concerned with how to protect them. Positive law does not exist to preserve natural law; it does not protect moral values, although some laws have been enacted to clean up vice in society, mostly with little success. Instead, positive law seeks to establish norms, which is another recurrent theme in this series. Tony is at conflict with norms because here again they are arbitrary impositions from outside authority. However, they are also a means to assert himself in the community and acquire respect outside the Family. A.J. is a good vehicle to remind viewers of the question of arbitrary, even unfairly imposed law. As a typical teenager, he often complains of his parents’ unjust decisions. For example, when he is grounded for having drunk sacramental wine at school, he protests that the punishment is “not fair,” to which his father responds, “Got that right” (“Down Neck,” 1.7). When it comes to his family, Tony seems to have integrated these norms. In such cases, society benefits from Tony’s eagerness to participate and from his civilian values, helping his neighbors, cheering on the teams, supporting the church. Nevertheless, the obvious problem of the Family business keeps the conflict alive between moral values and legal behavior. Tony is a mixture of American ideals and European realism. His reaction to cheating on exams shows acceptance of some of the codes of American society, where college is considered a key to the entrance of a good and successful life. But Tony is also imbued with more-realistic, more-European attitudes when it comes, for example, to lying, which he does without batting an eyelash. Cheating and lying in a European context are seen as so human that there is little anyone can do about them, much less expect people not to lie or cheat. This is one of the reasons that, in a French court, for example, if the accused is called to testify, he will not be asked to take an oath: no one expects him to tell the whole truth.

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Tony’s world reflects a hybrid system of American idealism and European realism that, when confronted with legal questions, gives rather interesting results. This world is also a battleground for modernity and tradition, for natural law and positive law, for ethics and legality. Such conflicts can cause panic attacks, which is where the series starts.

An Introduction to This Section I hope it is now clear that law and justice are quite present in this series, which is as rich a field for the investigation of images of justice as most courtroom dramas. Other, more practical aspects of the law are discussed in the following articles of this section.4 James M. Keneally, a New York criminal lawyer, contributes with a chapter on how true to life The Sopranos is in depicting what lawyers and their clients face during criminal prosecutions, with plea negotiations, criminal forfeiture of assets, guilty pleas, and sentencing. Sharon Sutherland, University of British Columbia assistant professor, and Sarah Swan, an LLM candidate at Columbia University, discuss the negotiation skills Tony displays throughout the series in his dealings with business rivals. They go through the steps and strategies of good negotiation techniques as taught in law schools. Yet another aspect of the representation of law in The Sopranos is the image of its relation to the Mafia and organized crime. Reaction to the show from European audiences has been mixed. This is partly due to the different criteria audiences have in terms of social behavior, organized crime, and the institution of justice, because in Europe, “Justice” is an institution. There is less trust in institutions in Europe than in the United States and a more eager tendency to avoid thinking about the law. Furthermore, Italians have had a long and painful relationship with the various Mafia families, and a new reading of their history is coming to the fore today with more attention given to the voices of victims’ families.5 Consequently, Tony’s anxieties and peregrinations have met with less sympathy than one might have expected from European audiences, especially in Italy, where the Mafia cannot be taken lightly.6 The paradox of the popularity of Italian films dealing with the Mafia, which Palermo prosecutor Antonio Ingroia describes in his chapter here, comes from a fascination with violence with which Italians, especially Sicilians, have lived. They seem to have integrated the presence of danger through the cinematic stereotypes of Mafia characters. The Sopranos

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constitutes a sort of culture shock because the Mafia members, and especially Tony, are depicted as troubled, disoriented, and weak. Some young Mafia leaders, however, are themselves amused by the image projected by Tony and his buddies. Palermo judge Fabio Licata discusses here their attraction to the contemporary images of the Mafia as cool businessmen of crime visible in the series. Both Antonio Ingroia and Fabio Licata are well known in Palermo as specialists in the fight against the Mafia. Their chapters shed light on the reception of the series by Italian television viewers and on how representations of the Mafia influence the chances of success of antiMafia programs. The Sopranos is not a series about the law, but, as will be seen in this section, the law is present in many different ways in the show. What becomes perhaps more clear here than in the more traditional legal series is that the law is a fundamental element in the lives of anyone who lives among others. It is part of a country’s culture and influences a nation’s mentality. The criminal justice system can also be seen via the opposition of Tony’s Family. This Family and his other family both serve as metaphors for society today, in which authority and order are simultaneously questioned and recognized as essential.

Notes 1. See Sutherland and Swan for more on Angel. 2. In “Nobody Knows Anything” (1.11), Tony reminds his children that “sex talk at the breakfast table is a punishable offense.” 3. See, for example, Aquinas, Summa Theologica; Locke, Two Treatises of Government; Holmes, “Natural Law”; and Hart, The Concept of Law. 4. The essays in this section were initially presented together in a workshop on law in The Sopranos that I organized for the Sopranos Wake conference (New York, May 22–25, 2008). 5. See Io Ricordo (Ruggero Gabbai, 2008), a film dedicated to the memory of Paolo Borsellino and the victims of the Mafia, or the works of photographer Letizia Battaglia, such as Dovere Di Chonaca [The duty to report]. 6. In some European countries, such as France, the off-peak programming hours had much to do with this.

Lawyer-Client Relations as Seen in The Sopranos James M. Keneally

Just a few scenes from Johnny Sack’s arrest and prosecution in seasons five and six of The Sopranos accomplish two things: first, they show some of the nuts and bolts of criminal cases without using too much dramatic license and without boring the audience to tears. Second, and more significant, they accurately depict what occurs in the relationship between the attorney and the client in a case where the client’s guilt is all but guaranteed. First, and briefly, the nuts and bolts: in succinct fashion, we are told that Johnny faces a raft of RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) charges and the forfeiture of virtually all of his property. Then we are shown the plea negotiations, and finally the guilty plea. Beyond that, we are told that the case against Johnny was made with the help of a cooperator. This point really rings true. In the criminal justice system, cooperators make cases. They are a necessary component of the system. And watching from a defense attorney’s perspective, it is clear that the Johnny Sack story is accurate and plausible. There are technical quibbles that could be raised, but one example will suffice: in the plea negotiation meeting between the government and Johnny Sack’s lawyer, there is no mention made of the federal sentencing guidelines, which is really the way such discussions take place. However, the reason for that is easy to understand. Any dramatic TV show that attempted to discuss sentencing guidelines provisions would be canceled in roughly five minutes. What is really striking about this story, though, is the way in which it depicts the relationship between Johnny Sack and his attorney and how Johnny Sack eventually comes to accept the notion of pleading guilty.

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Defense attorneys typically prefer to talk about their victories rather than their defeats. Often, however, they are faced with situations in which a client has been charged and it becomes painfully apparent that he or she does not have a triable case. In those situations, the defense attorney has to be frank with his or her client about the client’s prospects and shepherd the client to the point at which he or she can make a rational, informed decision about the case. At the same time, the attorney cannot be perceived by the client as not being on his or her side. This can sometimes be a difficult, painful process. For the client, it can be a grieving process, consisting of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. The attorney has to allow that process to run its course and at the same time continue to gain the client’s trust and litigate the case. Watching the five scenes of Johnny Sack’s prosecution, the audience actually witnesses his grieving process and, within that, his trust in and reliance on his attorney. The first scene—his arrest in “All Due Respect” (5.13)—is classic denial. He tries to run away when it is obvious he cannot possibly escape. In Johnny Sack’s mind, this simply is not happening to him. Then, in Tony’s conversation with his counsel, we hear just how dire the circumstances are—a “major kreplach” consisting of eighteen years of RICO predicate acts. In the next scene (in “Moe n’ Joe,” 6.10), Johnny Sack lashes out when his attorney informs him of what the government will be seeking to have forfeited and mentions that it might be time to consider cooperating. Here, Johnny clearly does not see his attorney as being on his side. He asks his lawyer if he is trying to get him to commit suicide, and later, when his lawyer expresses relief that Johnny does not want to flip and says, “I don’t represent turncoats,” Johnny replies, “’Cause it would kill your practice.” In the next scene, also a jailhouse visit, one can sense that time has passed and Johnny has come to realize the gravity of the situation. He makes one last feeble attempt at bargaining when he asks about allocuting (admitting to his crimes). His depression is visibly on the horizon, and he reminisces about meeting Ginny at the tie counter at Wanamaker’s. Finally, of course, in the trial scene, there is acceptance, as Johnny admits his guilt. Watching these scenes would strike a chord in any lawyer who can fill in the blanks and imagine what counsel for Johnny Sack is doing on his behalf—the motions he might be making and the trial preparation

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he would be conducting, while simultaneously trying to get Johnny to understand what he is facing. This is frequent fare in dealing with clients, who may at first stomp out of meetings or kick their lawyers out of attorney conference rooms in jails. Then, as time goes by, as they come to understand that their lawyer really is on their side, they come to accept their situation. Anyone who has been a defendant in a case and has pleaded guilty would probably see a bit of his or her own case in that of Johnny Sack.

“This Isn’t a Negotiation” “Getting to Yes” with Tony Soprano Sharon Sutherland and Sarah Swan

As reigning boss of the New Jersey Mafia, Anthony Soprano knows how to negotiate. Over the course of the six-season Sopranos series, he maintains his precarious leadership position within a combustible criminal organization through his ability to read the behaviors of colleagues, competitors, and clients and tailor his negotiation approaches accordingly. Although he obviously relies on brute force and physical and psychological violence to persuade others when he believes those methods will be effective, he also skillfully utilizes traditional negotiation skills. Tony appeals to the desires, interests, and emotions of those he negotiates with, and carefully exchanges offers and refusals until a matter has been resolved. He often effectively quells rising tensions between others, gets good value in his “business” deals, and ensures his own place within the “family.” Despite his many successes in his professional sphere, however, Tony is unable to translate these skills into successful negotiations with those who occupy his personal sphere. In fact, Tony is startlingly ineffective in his negotiations with family members, often repeating the same mistakes over and over. In particular, when dealing with the female members of his clan, Tony seems incapable of drawing on any of his personal skills or sources of power. As set out in this chapter, a comparison between Tony’s professional negotiations and his personal ones reveals that the power dynamics present in the negotiations offer an explanation for Tony’s disparate skill set. Negotiation, as defined in Robert Fisher and William Ury’s bestselling text Getting to Yes, is “back and forth communication designed

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to reach an agreement when you and the other side have some interests that are shared and others that are opposed” (xvii).1 Much negotiation scholarship explores the dynamic nature of power in this communication, and the ways that a party may use different forms of power to “have one’s way, either by influencing others to do one’s bidding or by gaining their acquiescence to one’s action” (Mayer). Every negotiation involves power imbalances between the parties, and use or misuse of power can often be an extremely influential component. Negotiation scholars suggest a number of typologies for the kinds of power that people may be able to access in a negotiation. For the purposes of this essay, we draw on the four classifications offered by Robert Adler and Elliot Silverstein: personal power, organizational power, information power, and moral power. All of these power sources may be available to an individual at the same time. In addition to these sources of power, there are five key elements regarding the use of power that are important for this essay. First, the amount of power any individual has in a negotiation is not fixed; power is dynamic: “During the course of a negotiation the existence of different types of power will mean that there will be shifts in the balance of power” (Baylis and Carroll 289). Second, power is relational: power is not manifested purely as a characteristic of one party, but depends on the context of the parties’ relationship to each other. In fact, power in negotiations typically arises from the dependence that each party has on the other. Third, power depends on a party’s perception of his or her own and others’ relative power. Fourth, power can come from multiple sources and can be difficult to discern. And finally, a person may have power but choose not to use it or be unable to use it (Boyle and Sutherland).

“Why Don’t You Just Take It Easy, Will Ya? We Just Wanna Talk to Ya, That’s All” When the context permits Tony to employ personal power in all of its manifestations, Tony is a highly successful business negotiator. He draws on an array of personal power that encompasses not just the usual sources of business power, such as intelligence, persistence, knowledge, confidence, memory, and so forth, but extends to physical strength and a demonstrated willingness to draw on the extremes of physical violence. We see numerous examples of Tony’s use of physical intimidation and violence as a negotiation tool throughout the series, although, as his

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own organizational power grows—as he becomes more and more firmly placed as the boss—Tony more frequently orders his colleagues to carry out violent acts rather than engage in them himself. Nonetheless, our exposure to Tony’s personal violence is frequent enough that we recognize that he continues to draw personal power from the awareness of his own physical power even as he gains organizational power from his ability to demand that others carry out his violent orders. An early example of Tony’s reliance on threats of violence in negotiation occurs in “Denial, Anger, Acceptance” (1.3). In this episode, Tony enters into a business deal with a Hasidic Jew who agrees to turn over 25 percent of his business to Tony in exchange for persuading the man’s son-in-law to give his daughter a divorce. Initially, Tony relies on his soldiers, Paulie Walnuts and Silvio Dante, to convince the son-in-law to walk away from the marriage with nothing. When Paulie and Silvio are stumped by the son-in-law’s religious conviction that his death at their hands would be a form of spiritual victory over his father-in-law, Tony is called in. Here, Tony shows his superior ability to access alternative forms of power. Unsuccessful in influencing the man through fear of death, Tony seeks greater informational power in order to be able to better understand the man’s potential weaknesses. Tony calls his Jewish associate, Hesh Rabkin for advice: Tony: He’s leaving me no options. This guy’s willing to go down with the ship like no man I’ve ever seen. Hesh: Here’s a thought . . . Maybe he’s willing to go to the world to come, but if he’s stuck here on this earth, I know one thing that no man wants to go through life without. Tony: What? Oh. That’s a fuckin’ brilliant idea. Hesh: Make like a mohel, huh? Finish his bris. As a consequence of his willingness to seek additional information, Tony succeeds where Paulie and Silvio fail. Employing “plan B” and a pair of bolt cutters, Tony convinces the son-in-law to grant the divorce on his father-in-law’s terms.

“You Always Know What to Say to Me, Don’t Ya?” Tony’s combination of intelligence, willingness to seek advice, persistence, and resort to threats and actual physical violence in this scene are

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typical of the personal negotiation skills he brings to bear in the majority of his business negotiations, notably with those outside the mob. Although the potential for violence and his imposing physical presence are always elements of his personal power in these discussions, Tony draws far less frequently on this source of power when negotiating with his business “family.” It is in his interactions with business associates that we see Tony at his most flexible as a negotiator and, consequently, at his most successful. Tony employs a variety of effective techniques to ensure his negotiation successes. He considers how the other person’s character and negotiation style will impact the negotiation, thinks about the other person’s interests, and is sensitive to how the other’s emotions and ego will affect the negotiation. He remains focused on his goal, eschewing all distractions to ensure he walks away successful. Perhaps one of the best illustrations of Tony’s business negotiation savvy occurs in “Commendatori” (2.4). Tony travels to Italy to reach a deal between his New Jersey family and the Italian branch of the family for the sale of luxury stolen vehicles. Tony is surprised to discover that the acting boss of the Italian family, Annalisa, is a stunningly beautiful woman. They begin their negotiation indirectly, by getting to know each other through sharing a meal and wine, as they reveal small personal details and build rapport. Tony attends her home for a family dinner, and even sleeps there. Throughout the episode, Tony and Annalisa engage in a careful negotiation dance. Early on, Tony tells Annalisa that he wants one of her soldiers, Furio, to work for him in America. She, with either real or feigned outrage, spits and yells that he is one of her best men and she will never let him go. (Nothing in the episode indicates whether she actually feels as vehemently as she suggests, though given her obvious comfort with negotiating, it seems likely she is merely posturing.) Later, after wooing Tony with food, wine, and her family, Annalisa takes Tony to a cave in the hillside. The cave creates a dark, seductive atmosphere, and it is obvious that Annalisa intends to seduce Tony—to bring her personal sexual power into the dynamic of the business negotiation. Tony, however, sees through this ploy and remains entirely focused on his negotiation goals. When Annalisa essentially offers herself to him sexually, he rejects the offer and terminates the sexual negotiation by telling her: “I don’t shit where I eat.” Explaining the English phrase, which she does not understand, Tony tells her: “It’s business. We’re in business.” Immediately, Annalisa switches into business mode, retorting, “Not at those

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prices.” The two then bargain, and Tony leaves with both Furio and a significant profit margin on the cars. Annalisa is presumably pleased as well, though we never know exactly how good the deal is for her. The fact that both Tony and Annalisa achieve a high level of satisfaction is, of course, a good sign of a successful negotiation in a context in which ongoing negotiations will be part of a long-term business relationship. Tony’s considerable facility in negotiating in business generally extends to negotiation with his closest business associates as well as with new business partners like Annalisa. Tony’s negotiation with Paulie over the management of the Cifaretto crew in the series finale (“Made in America,” 6.21) concludes as most such negotiations have throughout the series: Tony gets his way through the application of persistent and varied pressure. Paulie eventually accepts Tony’s offer to lead the crew despite his strong misgivings. In this case, as in all his negotiations with Paulie, Tony speaks from a place of organizational power. He also makes a point of adapting his approach to what he knows of Paulie. In this case, Tony ridicules Paulie’s concerns that people in this position never seem to last very long. Finally, he tells Paulie that, if Paulie doesn’t take the job, he’ll give it to Patsy. Rather than focusing on making the offer more appealing, Tony plays on Paulie’s pride and competitive nature. Tony understands his colleagues and their interests and makes use of that knowledge in pitching his arguments. As Paulie accepts the job, he says, with some insight into Tony’s nature, “Prick. You always know what to say to me, don’t ya?”

“In Fact, the Expiration Date Was Last Week on All Your Bullshit with That” Where Tony’s business negotiation is most erratic is, not surprisingly, when he is negotiating with close family members who are also in his business family. In these encounters, we see signs of the same forms of negotiation weakness that we discuss in more detail in looking at Tony’s relationships with his wife, Carmela, and his daughter, Meadow. In the mixed family and business world, Tony deals almost exclusively with his male relatives, especially his uncle, Junior Soprano, and his nephew, Christopher Moltisanti. In these relationships, Tony generally avoids physical confrontations. His physical presence continues to be threatening, but his ability to use the threat of violence is undercut by the clearly understood fact that he chooses not to use this power over Junior and

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Christopher. Instead, Tony must rely on his other sources of power or engage in alternative tactics that avoid direct conflict. Tony’s “negotiations” with Uncle Junior in season one are particularly informative about his methods in dealing with relatives in business. Tony cannot confront his uncle openly about which one of them will be boss of the New Jersey mob. Rather, Tony works hard to preserve his uncle’s pride by allowing him to be boss-in-name while Tony works behind the scenes as boss-in-fact. As he did in negotiating with the Hasidic son-in-law, Tony draws on outside knowledge to develop his strategy for dealing with Uncle Junior, increasing his personal power by increasing his repertoire of negotiation strategies and his knowledge of psychology. In this case, he draws from a conversation with his psychologist, Dr. Melfi, the idea that old people need to feel in control even when they are not. As a result, Tony deals with the fall-out of many of Junior’s poor leadership decisions behind his uncle’s back to permit Junior to believe he is successfully managing business. Not surprisingly, the fact that Tony allows himself to be guided by his feeling for his uncle and his nonbusiness interests in ensuring his uncle retains his pride leads him to make worse business decisions than when he acts purely from business interest. When negotiating in a purely business environment, Tony is highly skilled at drawing personal power from his strict control of his emotions. He does not allow his feelings to intrude in his negotiations with strangers and is highly successful. Even when he engages in physical violence, Tony generally does so without losing control of his anger: rather, he directs his anger in a calculated way. When family is involved, however, Tony seeks solutions that are driven by emotion. It is entirely predictable that his efforts to preserve Junior’s pride and to avoid family conflict eventually result in near-catastrophic conflict. Tony’s strategy leads directly to Junior plotting with the other “old person” in Tony’s life, his mother, Livia, to kill Tony. When Tony asserts true organizational authority over Junior in later seasons, he is much more successful in managing his negotiations. Effectively, in those successful negotiations, Tony situates the negotiation in the business world. When he allows the negotiation to move into a family realm, he is significantly less successful.

“I Won’t Pay. I Know Too Much about Extortion” As a business negotiator, one of Tony’s great sources of personal power is his ability to treat problems as rational and to avoid engaging in emo-

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tional reactions to the negotiation. Where his emotions are already engaged in the relationship, however, Tony seems unable to access his best rational thinking and is instead influenced by emotional reactions. As a consequence, Tony repeatedly cedes power to his family members and frequently even fails to recognize that he has power at all. Tony’s negotiations with Carmela and Meadow are perhaps the most striking for the manner in which Tony cedes power. Tony’s relationship with Carmela is clearly one of mutual dependence. In a business negotiation, Tony would immediately see that there is power in the degree of dependence each party has on the other. In this relationship, Tony has enormous potential power over Carmela in the form of economic power. In theory, Carmela’s power as Tony’s wife should draw from the positive leverage of being uniquely placed to meet Tony’s emotional and sexual needs and desires. We know that Tony does not, in fact, depend on Carmela exclusively to satisfy his sexual appetites, but he certainly grants her positive leverage as the mother of his children. Carmela’s real negotiation strength, though, comes from her overt exploitation of moral power. Carmela uses Tony’s failures, his philandering, and the potential dangers his job always poses to his family to manipulate him. Tony seems helpless to assert his own potential sources of moral power despite the fact that Carmela is hardly morally pure after years of knowingly receiving the economic benefits of Tony’s criminal enterprise. Similarly, Tony is unable to maintain his coolly rational approach to a negotiation in the face of Carmela’s emotional blackmail. Instead, Tony negotiates from a position of weakness. We see Carmela’s persistent and manipulative style of negotiation at work on Tony in the episode “Second Opinion” (3.7). In this episode, a fund-raiser at Columbia University—where Meadow is going to school— uses his own extremely well-honed negotiation skills to convince Carmela that the Sopranos should donate $50,000 to the school. In particular, he plays on Carmela’s need to be seen to do the “right” thing for a wealthy, professional family. Carmela needs to make the donation to satisfy her own sense of worth. Tony does clearly see that the fund-raiser is applying pressure to Carmela to force the Sopranos into an uncomfortably large donation: Carmela: What, your daughter’s future isn’t worth ten thousand dollars? Tony: That’s not it. That motherfucker’s full of shit. He’s shaking me down.

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Carmela: No, he’s not. Tony: Oh, yeah? Who knows more about extortion, me or you? When Carmela first requests the money, citing her concern that Meadow have the best university experience possible as her motivation for wanting the donation, Tony hands her $5,000 cash and tells her that is enough. Although that appears to be the end of the negotiation, we soon learn that it is not: later the next day, Carmela tries again to get Tony to make the donation with the reasoning that, since Tony provides for the widows of mafiosos who either died or can no longer provide, he should provide for his own daughter. Understandably, Tony rejects the analogy and once again tells her he is not paying. Carmela then, in a rather despicable display of manipulation, feigns severe depression, lying on the couch wrapped in a blanket in the dark in the middle of the day. Tony, on coming home and discovering her in that state, is immediately disconcerted and disturbed. He asks her what is wrong, and whether she is depressed. She tells him that she told the fund-raiser she will make the donation, and that he has to do something nice for her today. He agrees. In this scene, Carmela uses Tony’s interest in preserving the marriage, and his struggle with mental health issues, to negotiate the donation she wants. Tony is no match for this kind of manipulation, and is $50,000 lighter for it. In this episode, Carmela calculatedly exploits every form of power she can access to convince Tony to do as she wishes. Tony finds his efforts to respond on a purely rational business level to be entirely inadequate to meeting her ploys. Despite a long history with manipulative female relations (starting very notably with his mother), Tony seems to have developed no skill set to permit him to engage power of his own in the negotiation, and so he eventually gives in.

“I’m Glad We Have That Kind of Relationship” Whereas Carmela succeeds through the exploitation of Tony’s weaknesses, Meadow is even more capable of influencing Tony in a negotiation through the combined use of many of his own tools for negotiation and those tools her mother has demonstrated to her over the years. With Meadow, Tony consistently underestimates his own relative power, and falls into the trap of perceiving Meadow to have much more power than she does. At the same time, Meadow accurately identifies Tony’s primary weakness: although he does have substantial power over her—power as

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her father to ground her in the early seasons, economic power, and the ability to withhold many things Meadow desires—Meadow realizes that Tony will not use this power. Just as she has learned over time that Tony would never use physical force against her and thus could never use the threat of physical punishment effectively, she has also learned that Tony will not risk losing her love by imposing other penalties. Meadow recognizes that Tony’s dependence on her for this love and respect is a driving interest in all his negotiations with her. Although she arguably has more dependence on Tony, he fails to perceive this. In an early example of Tony’s negotiation relationship with Meadow (in “Toodle-Fucking-Oo,” 2.3), we see Meadow easily negotiate her way out of any significant punishment for trashing her grandmother’s house, instead settling for the confiscation of her Discover card for two weeks, during which time she will receive an allowance to which she otherwise would not have been entitled. As she leaves the scene of the negotiation, the smirk she carries off camera indicates her knowledge of victory. Tony, however, has made himself virtually impotent in his attempt to negotiate with her. Prior to the discussion with Meadow, he and Carmela discuss what punishment to implement. Tony starts from the view that he and Carmela have no real power over Meadow because they can’t hit her or throw her out. He suggests they not overplay their hand because, if she finds out they are powerless, they are “fucked.” Tony’s interpretation of the situation is completely erroneous. As Meadow’s ultimate “punishment” shows, there is an obvious power that her parents have over her: economic. Meadow is entirely economically dependent on her parents and, given her lifestyle, has gotten used to a certain level of luxury. Any of these amenities and luxuries could be confiscated as punishment. Tony, though, is blind to this possibility, and his misinterpretation of his negotiation position is at tremendous variance with his ability to read and judge motivations in a business negotiation. Similarly, Tony’s execution of the negotiation—his skill in managing the discussion—is extremely poor. In this case, Carmela takes the lead in opening the discipline negotiation. After Carmela announces to Meadow that she is going to be punished, Tony chimes in with an uncharacteristically impotent “Yeah, that’s right.” As soon as Meadow starts exhibiting signs of intense negative emotion, shouting that she deserved a night off from studying, Tony immediately backs down from his already sadly weak position, with an “All right, all right, settle down.” Meadow’s ability to make her father uncomfortable with emotion is just

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one tool that she uses to acquire the more powerful stance in the negotiation. She also carefully suggests what punishment is appropriate for her; when her parents accept that after adding a mere week onto the period for which she will be without her Discover card, she agrees, then presents a “problem” with that punishment that requires her to receive a further sum. Meadow is adept at presenting “compromises” to Tony that actually meet her interests much more than they meet Tony’s. He accepts these lopsided compromises because Meadow ensures that they meet at least one important interest of her father’s. For example, in her negotiation over punishment, she is careful to offer a suggestion of a penalty that Tony can cling to as an indicator that she has, in fact, been punished. Negotiation texts identify this preemptive offer as a frequently successful means to control the potential frame for the discussion. In suggesting a punishment and ensuring that she makes it clear that her suggestion is aimed at accomplishing her parents’ goals of punishment, Meadow forces her parents to discuss punishment within the framework she creates—one that does not include grounding or other significant limitations on her lifestyle. Because Meadow’s solution speaks directly to her parents’ stated interest in punishing her, and because her parents are able to assert their parental authority by increasing the proposed sentence, they are allowed to save face: in reexamining the punishment, Tony and Carmela can remind themselves that they doubled Meadow’s punishment and, in so doing, have demonstrated their parental power and ensured a strict punishment. Similarly, in “College” (1.5), Meadow preemptively tells Tony about engaging in drug use in order to ensure that she is able to frame the context: Meadow: A couple of weeks ago, me and some friends, we were doing speed. We did kind of a lot of it for a while. Tony: You what?! Meadow: It was just between homework and SATs and just the general pressure of life, we needed something to keep going. Tony: That crap will kill you. Meadow: I know. Tony: I oughta slap the shit outta you. Where did you get it? Meadow: If I thought this was gonna be a lecture, I never woulda told you.

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Tony: Take a reality check, what do you think I’m gonna say? Where did you get it? Meadow: No way I’m telling you, especially after this reaction. Tony: Why did you tell me? Meadow: You were honest to me today. I won’t be doing it again, it got too scary. Tony: Jesus, right under my nose. Think you’d know. Meadow: No dad, you won’t. Tony: I’m glad you told me, despite of everything. Meadow: I’m glad I did too, I’m glad we have that kind of relationship. In this masterful exchange, Meadow confesses to drug use and yet convinces her father that she is a good child by playing on his desire to have the kind of relationship she claims they have: one in which she will speak openly to him about what is happening in her life. She succeeds in preventing Tony from lecturing her on drug use, diverts him from the question of who supplied the drugs, and successfully ends the confession in a way that strengthens her future ability to negotiate with her father. Tony simply has no defenses against Meadow’s combination of Tony’s best rational and strategic negotiating with Carmela’s exploitative use of moral power and emotion. From extreme physical violence to gentle verbal cajoling, Tony Soprano uses all forms of persuasion and negotiation in order to achieve his ends. Putting his personal, organizational, informational, and moral power into play as required, Tony masterfully negotiates with those in his professional world. Unfortunately for Tony, he has little ability to recognize and draw upon these sources of power in his personal negotiations. Tony’s dependence on the love of his family members, and his fear of losing it, weakens his resolve and blinds him to the power dynamics at play in those negotiations. He is ultimately unable to negotiate in any effective way with the Soprano women. This paradox between his professional and personal negotiation abilities adds to the complexity of Tony’s character: he is ultimately a man who is capable of running the New Jersey Mafia but incapable of negotiating successfully with his own daughter.

Note 1. Getting to Yes is a seminal and well-known text in the study of interestbased negotiation, and, hence, it is the source of our title.

The Price of Stereotype The Representation of the Mafia in Italy and the United States in The Sopranos Antonio Ingroia

It must be understood that the Mafia phenomenon is not merely criminal but has cultural and social roots. In our society, so deeply influenced by mass media and stereotypes that are carried by a televisual culture, any autoreferential attitude of conceit would be disastrous. This is why, to an anti-Mafia prosecutor, studying Mafia representation is of great importance. This study is essential and deserved also because it concerns the complex relationship of the public and users of the justice system. An example of this is the well-known paradox that in Italy the most popular and successful Mafia movies are the roughest trivializations, certain gruesome stories, the fakest costume farces. This is especially true in Sicily, where people might be expected to grasp the difference between fiction and reality. This paradox can be explained by the fact that the average spectator perceives and appreciates the movies as fiction: myths and fantastic stories that, even if inspired by the crudest facts, emanate fascination. So, it happened, happens, and will happen that, despite the best intentions of their authors, certain representations propagate a negative fascination with the evil hero. Mafia characters are highly appreciated by spectators who recognize on the screen people and situations they know so well from reality. This is how the Sicilian sees the mafiosi celebrated on the screen. It is in this manner that one can see the paradox of a somewhat topsy-turvy regionalist pride that can lead the average

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Sicilian spectator to applaud certain celebrations of violence, injustice, and evil dominant in real life. The Neapolitan writer Roberto Saviano in his best seller Gomorra (2006) relates the lives of some mafiosi who imitate movie and television characters. In short, the homogenization of cultures and languages has also reached the Mafia universe. This is a sign of new behaviors for the mafiosi, who are becoming less and less different from others, increasingly better camouflaged in society. This is why, as television has also penetrated into mafiosi households and they watch, with their children, the same fictions as the rest of society, it has become more and more important to verify the impact of these fictions. In the tradition of the Italian movie, filmmakers have rarely succeeded in representing the Mafia without celebrating it. However, in the unforgettable film Salvatore Giuliano (1962), director Francesco Rosi constructed a fascinating story, but with the dryness of a journalistic chronicle. He used no celebratory indulgences to tell of the Mafia’s dark power, and the character of gangster Giuliano is seen in the film as a body, more dead than alive. This is evidence that it is possible to tell of the Cosa Nostra without celebrating it. In contrast, current Italian television fictions, for the most part, are one-dimensional, without weight. Their characters are icons of the antiMafia, losers bound to fail, or mafiosi represented as fascinating negative heroes, capable of nourishing a certain mythology of the Mafia. The video biographies of the Cosa Nostra bosses are also dangerous because they transmit an idea of the immutability and eternity of the Mafia, hard to defeat in a place prone to fatalism, like Sicily. Although in Sicily this kind of fiction draws a wide audience, The Sopranos was much less popular in Italy than it was in the United States. It is easy to find the reason for this in the cultural operation of the screenwriters, who represented the members of the Mafia in a different and subtler way. They debunked and destructured the charm, the glamour of the Mafiosi. They even poked fun at them without laughing at them. The result is disorienting, with an effect of estrangement for Italian spectators, because the myth of the Mafia is overturned and rewritten; the characters are reintegrated into society—like any one of us, average men. The authors have understood the new relationship between the Mafia and society, staging the process of integration. Tony Soprano is very far from a character like Marlon Brando’s Godfather in the Francis Ford Coppola film. However, Italians are disposed

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to admire only strong and archaic godfathers. The Mafia boss can be seen only in his sacredness as a powerful bad man. In Italy, it is impossible, unacceptable, to show him as such an ordinary person, busy with normal, small or big, family or psychological problems. This is the force of the American program, but it is the main problem for Italian television viewers because whereas in the United States, the members of the Mafia are integrated into American society, in Italy, the Cosa Nostra is still a separate world. Americans have become immune to the fascination of the Mafia; this is not yet so for Italians.

The Image of Justice in The Sopranos Fabio Licata

The complexity of modern society as seen in The Sopranos through the metaphor of Tony’s double family (the mob and his blood relatives) represents a crisis of the traditional role of justice in films and TV series. The series created by David Chase is not just a different representation of organized crime, overcoming the stereotype of the boss as a negative and tragic hero such as the Godfather Don Vito Corleone or Tony Montana, a.k.a. Scarface. Tony Soprano and the other characters of the drama are also symbols of the global crisis of the family and society. Like society, families are now more fragmented; individualistic and traditional values are increasingly blurring. In this world, which is characterized by fewer and fewer absolute references, the criminal justice system is seen as a part of this general crisis. Writers have described the mob as a real part, albeit negative, of our society, and in doing so they have portrayed the corrosion and decomposition of the main aspects of the society in which Tony, his family, and its acolytes live and act. The clue to this representation is the icon of the family, given that the image of the Mafia family overlaps that of the blood family as well as that of the larger family, society. All aspects of the social order can be found in The Sopranos: family, school, religion, the economy, the police, and justice. Yet they appear deconstructed in comparison with the stereotypical representation of movie clichés. The narrative is constructed to prevent the viewer from perceiving Tony as the iconic antihero. On the contrary, Tony is a member of the real society that surrounds him. He is someone whom the viewer can meet in a bar or restaurant; someone who, despite being a mobster, has

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problems and neuroses and experiences the same troubles as anyone else. The other main characters are similarly humanized. When not represented as negative symbols, the ordinarily positive traditional television and cinematic key figures also have their problems here. Tony’s mother plots to kill him; his daughter Meadow seems anything but the traditional daughter of a Mafia boss (she has the typical problems of any ordinary young girl, including conflict with her father); Dr. Melfi, violating professional ethics, gets involved in the stories her patient tells her and becomes attracted to him, although aware that he is a gangster. Tony resembles any nouveau riche businessman, with the additional problems related to the specificity of his work. In this framework, the representation of the criminal justice system also sheds its traditional image. The judiciary remains in the background, without any particular positive or negative connotations. When courts, prosecutors, and judges are featured in the show, they are represented in a blur and do not seem to be protectors of the citizen or defenders of the weak. At most, they encounter events that appear to be accidents in the life or business of the mob. Legal troubles are just nuisances, problems to solve, a business inconvenience. Rather than heroes fighting for the common good, prosecutors are represented as using without hesitation the same means as mob members to reach their goals. To convince them to join the witness protection program, they play the various members of Tony’s family against each other. Otherwise, they are depicted as politicians who lie to the people, as when U.S. Attorney Braun speaks on television about the government’s successful actions against the mob. While watching him make this announcement, Tony and his boys are counting large amounts of money that have clearly come from their illegal activities (“46 Long,” 1.2). Thus, the perspective is turned upside down compared to classic law movies. Justice is not the place where all the characters—fearful or corrupt policemen and witnesses, incorrect or unfair lawyers, judges, or prosecutors—take their problems and where, at the end, Good triumphs, despite the errors and deviations of the system. The police are not represented as the traditional guardians of society who combat systemic flaws or inefficiencies to ensure peace and security. The feds are not presented as protectors of Good who, in the end, one way or another, must prevail over the activities of the mob. These protagonists are very different from those in a film like The Untouchables (Brian De Palma, 1987). Here, policemen are represented as members of an adversary group, almost

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as business competitors, who do not hesitate to use unfair practices in order to penetrate the secrets of Tony’s family. Even the feds are full of neuroses and personal problems, and their actions appear clumsy, imperfect, often doomed to failure. An attentive and critical observer of the series has pointed out that the feds in The Sopranos are depicted as “cartoon characters, voyeuristic outsiders trying to catch a brief glimpse of the immorality and intrigue they purport to restrain” (Howard, “Tasting Brylcreem,” 170). In short, Tony and his crew, when compared to the judicial system, appear neither as antiheroes nor clearly as negative characters. They are represented merely as ordinary people. Their peculiarity is that they deal with illicit business, so they must necessarily clash with the criminal justice system. And in this conflict, the viewer does not necessarily perceive the representatives of justice clearly as the representatives of Good; rather, prosecutors and feds are represented as contenders in a fight for power and the control of territory. Consequently, the viewer is more involved in the private lives and business of the characters than in the final result of the fight against the mob. Like the mob, the judiciary and the police are pieces of the complicated and imperfect puzzle of our contemporary society, and as a result, the viewer can get the impression that the mob will never truly be defeated. One of the keys to the success of The Sopranos is in the parallel between the problems of these ordinary or extraordinary characters and those of society and the general public. The individual and collective tragedies, the human weaknesses, the lack of values, the crisis of public institutions—these and other crucial aspects of life are all represented without “discounts” for anyone. The unsacredness of roles affects all the traditional authority figures of society (for example, the family, the image of the mob, the police, and the judicial system), and viewers, albeit through an ironic representation, perceive that, in the end, the world of The Sopranos is not so different from their own. The lack of a clear distinction between good and evil does not necessarily lead to a trivialization of criminal activities, because the problems of a sick society is one of the themes of the series. David Chase, accused of having given a positive image to the Mafia bosses, has argued: “It is not true that I glorify the Mafia, my characters are all neurotic and unhappy” (Farkas 32). If Tony has family problems, needs a psychoanalyst, cannot trust his own friends, and has to fight for family peace, he is just like the television viewer. That is why he appears

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to us as a realistic character. The representation of the legal system, almost caricatured and grotesque, is not so distant from real life either, given that common citizens often consider the judicial system to be a distant entity, as well as a place where complicated and remote fights for power sometimes take place. However, in a society in which the media, and especially television fictions, have an increasingly crucial role in the development of awareness, the risk is that this deconstruction of typical television formats (for example, hero versus antihero and the vision of justice as a place where Good triumphs) might be received critically by the general public, who identify themselves with Tony, the ordinary family man. The writers’ efforts to humanize the characters, without hiding any of the protagonists’ illegal and violent activities, could be said to encourage the development of a collective mental image in which criminal activities, while remaining morally censurable, could be accepted as an “ineliminable” element of an increasingly violent and individualistic society. At the same time, the humanization of the characters could decrease confidence in the criminal justice system and in its ability to defend society and its weak members. Certainly, The Sopranos has profoundly affected the representation of Italian American organized crime and, indirectly, has had some influence on the image of the police and the legal system. Traces of the series can be found even in real judicial files and FBI official press releases, as well as in scholars’ analyses and comments. Take, for example, the statement by FBI director John S. Pistole during operation Old Bridge in 2008: “For those of us who grew up in ‘The Godfather’ generation and now live in the era of ‘The Sopranos,’ today’s case demonstrates once again that organized crime is not fiction. It is alive and real, and there is nothing romantic or glamorous about it” (“Mafia Takedown”). However, the average American viewer, the direct and real protagonist of an advanced and complex society, seems to have the critical tools to understand the general purpose of the series. Thus, even though viewers appreciate the contents of their favorite program, and feel instinctive sympathy for Tony Soprano, they generally have sufficient cultural tools to understand that this is a paradoxical metaphor of the crisis of values in modern society. In other words, the American public are able to appreciate the artistic work of Chase and his writing team while remaining aware of the ironic aspects of their efforts to represent the figure of a modern boss at the same time as they use the instrument of caricature to show the critical aspects of both the judicial system and the police.

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The American public are aware that Tony is a criminal, and an example of their distance from him can be found in their reaction to the finale. The enigma of the last episode caused dismay in many fans who expected a dramatic conclusion to Tony Soprano’s career: killed by his rivals, losing the war against the feds, or possibly forced to join the witness protection program. In short, the public would have preferred a classic finale, where justice somehow triumphs. As Chase saw it, the New Jersey Mob boss “had been people’s alter ego. . . . They had cheered him on. And then, all of a sudden, they wanted to see him punished for all that. They wanted ‘justice.’ . . . The pathetic thing—to me—was how much they wanted his blood, after cheering him on for eight years” (“Sopranos Creator Takes On Angry Fans”). It can therefore be affirmed that, while appreciating the peculiar and problematic representation of American society (or at least part of it), the public, including the aficionados, had the critical ability to understand the negativity of the protagonists and to expect that ultimately, somehow, Tony would pay for his faults. It is interesting to note within this analysis of the representation of the judicial machine that the public did not necessarily expect the traditional “happy ending” arrest and conviction of the mobster. If any type of punishment was expected, it was that other criminals would kill Tony or that the feds would arrest him. Thus, once again, the judicial system is not seen as an institution with which the public can identify or that they can ultimately trust. Rather the police, the courts, and related staff are parts of the complex mechanism that governs the dynamics of power in modern society. Their officers are seen as winners or losers in the contest for power. This analysis could help us understand why The Sopranos did not register the same success in Italy as in the United States, even though the series depicts the saga of an Italian American family and belongs to the popular genre of police and Mafia stories. The series was not given the best treatment by television channels, which broadcast it only by satellite and at very late hours, cutting off many potential viewers. However, there are many other reasons for its failure in Italy. One reason certainly goes back to the deep differences between Italian and American social structures. The different role played by organized crime in Italy must also be kept in mind. The social roots of organized crime and its culture, which persist in significant parts of Sicily and southern regions of Italy, as well as the serious moral and physical violence connected

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with them, are factors that make the world portrayed in The Sopranos seem unrealistic. Italian bosses surely dislike the image of Tony, whereas they identify themselves with the tragic antiheroes of classic Mafia movies. The philosophy of the series is not appreciated by that part of society which considers the representation of the mob unrealistic, if not dangerous, because of the negative trivialization of organized crime.1 The same goes for the image of the police and justice. Italian productions dealing with the subject of justice and organized crime, either in the cinema or on television, have mostly fallen into the classic “militant” genre, with declared educational purposes, in which the hero/antihero opposition is clear and, at the end, the positive character triumphs. Recent fiction series have tried to represent real criminal stories through the day-to-day life of the protagonists and have transformed the Mafia story into a real “telenovela.” In these shows, real and serious criminal events are undeniably trivialized. In essence, Italian productions are still unable to find new ways of representing modern organized crime. One recent attempt—the drama Il Capo dei Capi (The Boss of Bosses), based on the life of Salvatore Riina—drew a good audience but failed to relate the evil of the Mafia in a fresh and understandable way without emphasizing the role of the central character. Instead, by extolling Riina’s private life (love affairs and family life included), this series emphasized the personal side of real criminal events. Consequently, the show ran the real risk of becoming a celebration of the boss. Film and television have a decisive role today in the formation of popular culture. The Mafia bosses, who, at least in Italy, tend to appear as popular leaders, are extremely concerned with their public image and the way in which their stories are told by the media. There are numerous cases in which Mafia bosses are arrested and a copy of Mario Puzo’s The Godfather or a newspaper opened to an article relating their latest criminal actions is found in their homes. One particularly good example of this trend is Giovanni Brusca: when he was arrested, the police found a videotape of a documentary on the massacre of Judge Falcone in his house in Capaci. Salvatore Riina appreciated the aforementioned fiction about his life so much that he was eager to spread it around through his lawyer. And another example is the camorrista Schiavone (called Sandokan), whose luxurious villa was a replica of the one in the film Scarface (Brian De Palma, 1983). Italian bosses, therefore, find it hard to appreciate the image of crime and American society offered by Tony Soprano. On the contrary,

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they prefer to identify themselves with the classic antihero, tragic and evil, but with an aura of greatness, even if negative. The vast majority of Italian viewers perceive Tony’s character to be unrealistic because to them a Mafia boss who kills and operates with fierce criminal power cannot see a psychoanalyst, quarrel with his wife and children, or succumb to everyday worries. On the one hand, the traditional image of the boss, rather than the problematic vision of Tony Soprano, is more like that of Bernardo Provenzano, who wielded his power from a shabby stable, living like a hermit, eating only vegetables and ricotta. On the other hand, the good and honest part of society has difficulty accepting David Chase’s revolutionary narrative. They are aware of the pedagogical power of the media and reject the image of a humanized criminal whom they deem unrealistic and dangerous. Yet, it would be an error to neglect the fact that Italian society is changing, becoming increasingly complex. It must also be said that even the Mafia is undergoing transformations, adapting its structure and its habits to the models imposed by consumer society and a global economy. Although the images of bosses such as Riina or Provenzano remain myths for young bosses, recent events have revealed that the new generations of criminals resemble the old models less and less. The boss Salvatore Lo Piccolo, considered Bernardo Provenzano’s successor, was captured because of misguided steps taken to see a woman. He hid out in a comfortable villa, where the police found luxurious clothes and watches. His son, Sandro, also a fugitive from justice, loved to look like a normal guy who, between a murder and an extortion, enjoyed beautiful motorcycles, beautiful women, and all the typical luxuries of a rich young man. It is also interesting to note that the recent Old Bridge operation (conducted by the FBI, the District Attorney of New York, the public prosecutor of Palermo, and the Italian police) revealed the continuity of the links between the Sicilian Cosa Nostra and the American mob (ninety arrests were carried out, and the investigators discovered joint illicit business projects, as well as the planned return to Sicily of some escaped bosses). The results of this investigation uncovered, in particular, the strong cultural influence the Italian American boss model incarnated by Tony Soprano has had over young Sicilian mobsters. This can be seen, for example, in photos seized in a Sicilian boss’s home of young Italian mobsters dressed in jeans, sneakers, and large Hawaiian shirts, posing with their girlfriends on a boat.

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Although it is true that a fiction like The Sopranos could overshadow the negative aspects of organized crime and offer a distorted vision of the work of police, prosecutors, and judges, this is also a sophisticated attempt to represent, in a realistic way, the daily life of mobsters today. At the same time, it must be remembered that this peculiar representation demystifies the figure of the boss. Italians need to overcome the current archaic and simplistic representation of the Mafia, as The Sopranos helped American audiences to do. Just as this new way of portraying the criminal life of Mafia mobsters aims especially at demystifying the Mafia without trivializing the evil that it relates, it should be possible to narrate the day-to-day work of justice, unveiling its flaws and showing its successes, without losing sight of the fact that this is the place where everybody’s rights must be protected and guaranteed.

Note 1. Among the number of articles on this subject, see Saviano.

PART 8

Narrative and Intertextuality

“Funny about God, and Fate, and Shit Like That” The Imminent Unexpected in The Sopranos Robert Piluso

Some claim that a divine design—call it “God’s will”—dictates the course of human events. Others claim that chaos reigns—no God, no overarching “plan” to anything. In traditional Western storytelling, plan imbues unified meaning to a text: an author purposely arranges incidents to constitute a plot in accordance with authorial will. However, with The Sopranos, it is the authorial will of creator, writer, and executive producer David Chase to present a universe and narrative decidedly not in accordance with divine or authorial will. Instead, the aesthetic principle unifying Chase’s The Sopranos is a concept I call “the imminent unexpected”: characters may make plans, but these plans are not always necessarily carried out; characters may do things, but these things do not necessarily carry consequences; characters may not “deserve” atrocities to happen to them, but that won’t stop the atrocities from happening. Sometimes, terrible things—sickness, death, disease—just happen. And what can we do? As identified by Aristotle, a “plot” should be a series of causes and effects that necessarily follow one after another and build to a fitting climax—most usually a moral, prosocial outcome. Increasingly, from The Sopranos’ first season to the last, Chase chooses to swerve from Aristotle’s classic storytelling paradigm. As a result of this “swerve,” for audiences, watching an episode of The Sopranos is much closer psychologically, emotionally, and experientially to actually living than to watching a

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story. Chase himself explains, “If you’re raised on a steady diet of Hollywood movies and network television, you start to think, Obviously there’s going to be some moral accounting here. . . . That’s not the way the world works.” Rather, Chase offers, “In life, you don’t get an ending to every story. You can’t tie a little ribbon on everything and say it’s over. And yeah, I know . . . ‘The Sopranos isn’t life.’ But it’s based on it!” (quoted in Martin 181). As in life, when watching The Sopranos, we often do not know why things happen, or when they will, or if God’s plan is at work, or if chaos reigns in a godless void. Rather than expect Chase to eventually serve his mafiosi their just desserts, we wait for death. For misfortune. For disaster. Nothing is sacred. No one is safe. Chase presides over his narrative’s universe as an antigod: Chase’s authorial/divine design for his universe is the lack of the feeling for an audience of an authorial/divine design. It is the will of this “god” that there is no God. Anything goes. All you can do is worry. Worry all the time . . . Before examining the imminent unexpected in The Sopranos, we must look to its aesthetic precursors: a small corner of the feast called by Chase “a steady diet of Hollywood movies.” With The Godfather (1972) and Goodfellas (1990), respectively, Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese chose to follow Aristotelian conventions of narrative in which “reality” takes a backseat to Judeo-Christian moral accounting and commensurate Aristotelian poetic truth. Intrinsic to Aristotelian tradition is the notion of cause and effect in narrative: what I’ll call the imminent expected. In The Godfather (so highly revered by Tony and company), things are done by characters that bear direct ramifications on other characters. When Don Vito Corleone rejects a business proposition by Sollozzo, Sollozzo orders the Don gunned down. In response, Michael Corleone avenges his attacked father by murdering Sollozzo (in Tony’s favorite scene). Dramatic and cosmic unity prevail. How romantic. How ideal. Scorsese’s Goodfellas operates according to the same Judeo-Christian/Aristotelian aesthetic of cause and effect. Henry Hill is warned by his boss, Paulie, not to deal drugs, yet Henry deals anyway. For the crime of drug trafficking, Henry is arrested. When Paulie finds out Henry disobeyed him, he “turns his back” on Henry. Rather than go to jail, and because Paulie abandoned him, Henry cooperates with the government. Paulie is sent to jail for his crimes, while Henry has to hide in the witness protection program for the rest of his life, “a shnook.” In a subplot to Goodfellas, Tommy De Vito murders a made guy, Billy Batts, because

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Billy publicly insulted him. Years later, the mob murders Tommy, Henry explains to the audience, “as payback for Billy Batts.” In these Sopranos precursors, when blood is spilled, or when a scheme goes into action, definite results are “imminently expected” by audiences who witnessed the causes. These films, these “schemes” of Coppola and Scorsese, do not go “agley” (to borrow Robert Burns’s phrase); although the plots are marvelous and amaze us with their reversals and recognitions, the tragic trajectories of the characters can hardly be called “unexpected.” Rather, as can be expected by a Western audience, characters pay the price for their crimes. The writer-god inscribes events that lead to other events. There is sin, and punishment follows. We know: “They had it coming.” We sigh: “The writing was on the wall.” In “The Sacraments of Genre,” Leo Braudy observes of Coppola and Scorsese, “These directors are drawn to the implications of directorial imposition and tyranny: the director as aesthetic master of his material, shaping it to his will” (18). Basically, Coppola and Scorsese reign as gods of their consciously—and Judeo-Christian conscientiously—constructed filmic universes. Fortunately or unfortunately for Tony Soprano and associates, Chase’s universe, “shaped” according to Chase’s “will,” does not operate according to the same cosmic laws of Aristotelian drama and correspondent Judeo-Christian divine cosmic comeuppance. Except, we might say, in the first season . . . Perhaps the reason that many fans regard the first season as “the best” is because the first season fits, aesthetically and dramatically, in line with The Godfather and Goodfellas; Chase plays to the audience’s Aristotelian imminent expectations. Whatever secret “sins” of characters exist, these sins are revealed, and consequences result. Most famous is the story line of Tony and Dr. Melfi. In the first episode, as the result of a panic attack, Tony starts going to see a psychiatrist, knowing that doing so goes against the code of omertà and that if his therapy were to be discovered, it would mean his life (“The Sopranos,” 1.1). Moreover, early in the first season, Tony places his mother, Livia, in a “retirement community.” As a consequence of this tremendous insult, Livia reveals to Uncle Junior that Tony sees a therapist—knowing that this information should warrant Tony’s execution. Sure enough, Uncle Junior arranges an attempt on Tony’s life (“Isabella,” 1.12). While the attempt on Tony’s life fails, the cat is out of the bag—or rather, the feds release the feline by playing for Tony a surveillance tape wherein Livia and Junior conspire to murder him (“I Dream of Jeannie Cusamano,” 1.13). In retaliation,

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Tony “fluffs his mother’s pillow” on his way to “visit.” Cause and effect, right? However, Tony could not have expected that the “healthy girl” Livia would experience a stroke, and, wheeled away by orderlies, narrowly evade his vengeance. Well. Didn’t see that coming. Tony didn’t. We didn’t. Livia’s attempt on Tony’s life produces no “effect” on her. It’s unfair. It’s the first major occurrence of the imminent unexpected in The Sopranos, but that’s just the beginning of the cruel, frequent injustice of Chase’s universe. We’ve still got another five seasons to go. In “Full Leather Jacket” (2.8), Shawn and Matt decide that they have to do something to get noticed. So, they shoot their friend, associate, and gangster-superior, Christopher; they do it, as they explain, “on spec.” Sitting by Christopher’s hospital bed, dazed, Tony wonders aloud, “How could this happen?” For audiences, it is a serious moment of whoa in the show. Tony, like the audience, could not have seen this coming. There was zero dramatic cause for Matt and Shawn to take this measure; Christopher didn’t murder a made guy like Billy Batts (nor gravely insult Goodfellas’ Tommy De Vito); in The Sopranos, effects can and do happen without causes. Moreover, these “causeless effects” can happen at any time, in any episode, to any principal character (it doesn’t need to be the season finale or November Sweeps, as HBO is exempt from such narrative catering to advertisers). Such vile, unexpected instances of disaster are felt by the audience to be imminent, and the audience watching The Sopranos, psychologically parallel to the characters living The Sopranos, never knows when something horrific is going to happen to one of the characters. This free-floating anxious dread that audiences experience is identical to the way we never know when something bad is going to happen to us in our real lives. As with Christopher’s shooting, the main way that the imminent unexpected manifests in The Sopranos is through disaster: sickness, death, or violence. First, with regard to sickness, audiences never would have had a TV show about Tony Soprano in the first place if Tony did not suddenly, unexpectedly, pass out from a panic attack one afternoon while grilling sausages. Tony goes to see Dr. Melfi because he is worried that these panic attacks will recur—when he least expects them— and cause inadvertent physical harm to himself or his loved ones. Tony comes to realize, with the help of Dr. Melfi, that the panic attacks are psychosomatic manifestations of Tony’s dread of the imminent unexpected: “I’m afraid I’m going to lose my family, like I lost the ducks” (“The Sopranos,” 1.1). Tony doesn’t know when, or if, this loss could or

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would occur; he’s only afraid that it might. Many years later, in a dream, Carmela echoes her husband’s fear to the ghost of Adriana: “I’m worried all the time” (“Members Only,” 6.1). In Carmela’s subconscious, Adriana personifies the imminent unexpected because Adriana’s disappearance was so painfully, so singularly unexpected for Carmela in her dramatically ironic blissful ignorance. For the Sopranos audience, however, Adriana’s murder (in “Long Term Parking,” 5.12) provided a longdelayed Aristotelian catharsis and fitting climax: her “sin” of being a snitch to the FBI was finally uncovered—and reckoned unto Tony. Second, with regard to death, audiences find the imminent unexpected providing The Sopranos with all-too-grisly realism. In “Mobbed Up: The Sopranos and the Modern Gangster Film,” David Pattie observes, “The world that Scorsese’s gangsters inhabit is unpredictably violent, as is the New Jersey of The Sopranos; and in both worlds there is no clear separation between the business of crime and the characters’ personal lives” (142). Although I contend that Scorsese’s Goodfellas is predictably violent because the film follows Aristotelian rules, I agree that in The Sopranos, “no clear separation” restricts the universe’s violence to the province of the mob. Moreover, the universe’s violence is not reserved for “sinners.” In “Christopher” (4.3), Karen Baccalieri, a kind, charming, and caring woman, is on her way home from a church function when she is killed in a car crash, leaving her two young children without a mother and her loving husband, Bobby “Bacala,” without a wife and best friend. Like Bobby, other characters cannot begin to fathom the “senselessness” of such a tragedy; they, like the audience, couldn’t have seen it coming. Through Karen’s sudden death, Chase shows his audience that no one, personal villainy or virtue regardless, is ever safe—not even driving home from church. Third, with regard to violence, the imminent unexpected perversely pervades the entire episode “Employee of the Month” (3.4). At the end of a typical day at the office, on the way to her car, Dr. Melfi is grabbed by a young man, pulled into a stairwell, and brutally raped. There was no precursor, no dramatic cause for this effect: part of what makes it so unsettling. In Chase’s Sopranos universe, there is no dramatic reason for horrors to happen; sometimes evil just lashes out indiscriminately, and good, strong, moral people suddenly become victims. Later, the police apprehend Dr. Melfi’s assailant. What an amazing blessing, we think. Then, the police mishandle the chain of custody, and the assailant is released back into Chase’s world—not made to pay for his crime

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by the police, or by David Chase. The imminent unexpected similarly occurs in “The Test Dream” (5.11), when Tony’s mistress, Valentina, is preparing for Tony a postcoital snack. Her sleeve gets caught in the stove burner, setting her robe and whole body ablaze. The audience has watched dozens of Sopranos characters cooking hundreds of times across scores of episodes and they never combusted. When mobsters get murdered as the result of one or some of their misdeeds, it’s business as usual in the genre; it’s the imminent expected (go ask Big Pussy, or the Bevilaqua kid). However, when gangsters die not by virtue of being gangsters, but by virtue of being human beings, it’s the imminent unexpected. In “He Is Risen” (3.8), a captain in Tony’s crew dies from a heart attack while on the toilet. Cancer claims both Jackie Aprile Sr. (“Meadowlands,” 1.4) and Bobby Bacala Sr. (“Another Toothpick,” 3.5). Uncle Junior battles cancer, a malady of the body, and “beats” it by the end of the third season, only to succumb in later seasons to dementia, a malady of the mind. In “Two Tonys” (5.1), Carmine Lupertazzi dies of a massive stroke while having lunch on a golf course with Tony and Johnny Sack (the two of whom had plotted the year before, in “Whitecaps” [4.13], to assassinate Carmine, but did not end up going through with the hit). Which brings us to another uncanny phenomenon on The Sopranos where the imminent unexpected manifests itself: the planning of hits. Gangsters scheme to whack one another for this reason or that reason. As the genre has trained audiences to expect, when a hit is commissioned on a character, the order is carried out. The hit doesn’t always succeed (as with Don Vito in The Godfather), but triggers do get tugged. In “The Weight” (4.4), Johnny Sack gets into a beef with Ralphie and orders a hit on him, while Carmine orders a hit on Johnny. Neither of the hits goes through. Audiences expected (Chase might argue wanted) one or both of these characters to die by the otherwise highly Aristotelian episode’s end—the whole plot had been building to blood! But for Chase, the imminent unexpected can also be the sudden subtraction of expected violence. In “Whoever Did This” (4.9), Chase employs the imminent unexpected in a variety of ways. Ralphie’s adolescent son, Justin, while playing with a friend, is mortally injured by an arrow. Father Phil counsels, “It’s a great mystery to us: why things happen the way they do. But God has a plan for all of us.” Does he now? Or is Chase the one with the plan— promulgating, through the show’s seeming randomness of incidents, the

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lack of a divine plan? Soon after, an electrical fire at the stables mutilates and destroys Tony’s precious racing horse, Pie-O-My. The investigators declare the fire an accident, but Tony is unconvinced, believing that Ralphie orchestrated the event. In Tony’s view, as a consequence of Justin’s new medical bills, Ralphie arranged the death of Pie-O-My to collect the insurance money. Ralphie, however, protests that he had no hand in the fire: “That accidental fire was a bolt from beyond.” Incredulous, Tony sneers to Ralphie, “You know, it’s funny about God, and fate, and shit like that.” Arising from this conflict of perspectives—Ralphie claiming “divine design” and the imminent unexpected, and Tony claiming Aristotelian authorial design—Tony and Ralphie find themselves brawling to the death in Ralphie’s kitchen. The outcome: at long last, Ralphie meets his much-deserved, long-anticipated bloody end. Over the course of two seasons tolerating Ralphie’s abominable behavior, audiences had come to accept that Ralphie was just one of those cockroaches who always scuttled off just the right way to avoid getting crushed. When the guillotine finally fell, the effect on audiences was one of gobsmacked amazement. Recall the look on Tony’s face when he hears that his seemingly immortal mother has passed on (“Proshai, Livushka,” 3.2). Another realm in which the imminent unexpected pops up is the FBI’s attempts to capture and hold Tony “morally accountable” for his crimes. The third season opens with an entire episode devoted to the FBI infiltrating Tony’s home and installing a wire-tapped lamp (“Mr. Ruggerio’s Neighborhood,” 3.1). A few episodes later, Meadow takes the lamp to use in her dorm room at Columbia (“Another Toothpick,” 3.5). So much for that idea. So much for that plot. The lamp incident typifies the FBI’s rotten luck and Tony’s good fortune throughout the whole series. Another tactic the FBI employs is to use “cooperators.” Ray Curto, one of Tony’s elderly lieutenants and one of the show’s more minor characters, is an informant planned to eventually testify against Tony. Unlike other cooperators, who Tony discovers and kills (Big Pussy, Adriana), Ray slithers along unsuspected, undetected for years—from the show’s very first episode, in fact. Then one night, as Curto is handing over a tape to the FBI inside an agent’s car, he sighs and slumps forward dead (“Members Only,” 6.1). The unexpected: the universe has twisted again, and Tony ends up on top. How long can he stay there? we wonder. We fear. He wonders. He fears. In that same episode, Tony is shot in the gut by Uncle Junior. Audiences, like Tony, could not have foreseen the dementia-addled Uncle

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Junior making any sort of violent gesture—let alone a spontaneous, unwarranted one. Episodes later, reflecting on the incident to Dr. Melfi, Tony says, “I got caught up in domestic violence. You think it can’t happen to you, but it does” (“Mr. and Mrs. John Sacrimoni Request,” 6.5). Nobody expects the imminent unexpected—and yet, Chase suggests, we all probably should. In many of the sixth season’s nine final episodes, Chase utilizes but also subverts the imminent unexpected. These episodes depict Tony costarring with another main character, and that costar finds himself in a position to possibly be killed by Tony. In “Soprano Home Movies” (6.13), Bobby Bacala embarrasses Tony by defeating him in a fight. For the remainder of the episode, we hold our breath, wondering, “Is Tony going to kill Bobby?” Simultaneously, Tony deliberates, “Should I kill Bobby?” Chase’s empathic synthesis between audience and Tony’s psyche reaches a new high (or a new low) in “Remember When” (6.15), costarring Paulie Walnuts, when Paulie’s blathering mouth earns him the honor of being viewed by Tony as a liability. On a trip to Florida together, Paulie pushes Tony’s every last button. Again, the audience wonders, “Is Tony going to kill Paulie?” Again, Tony deliberates—particularly on their boat ride together—“Should I kill Paulie?” Bobby and Paulie, although still subjected to Tony’s verbal and emotional sadism, are both spared Tony’s corporeal wrath. Yes, as we’ve seen him do before, Chase subtracts expected violence. Compounding the audience’s anxious dread when watching these final nine episodes is the fact that the audience knows—as Chase knows the audience knows—that these are the series’ last episodes. There is no avoiding it now, no prolonging it: all characters shall meet their final fates. Vocalizing the audience’s dread of the imminent unexpected, Carmela sobs, “I worry, Tony, I do. . . . You eat and you play and you pretend like there’s not a giant piano hanging by a rope just over the top of your head every minute of every day!” (“Chasing It,” 6.16). Years earlier, Tony had confessed to Dr. Melfi, “I’m walkin’ down the street and I’m lookin’ up cuz I feel like a safe’s gonna land on my head” (“Nobody Knows Anything,” 1.11). David Chase, we know, is the one holding on to the rope levying that piano, that safe, whatever you want to call it: that final fate. And wait, isn’t this a show about gangsters? With “Kennedy and Heidi” (6.18), Chase personifies the imminent unexpected as the drivers of an SUV blasting around a bend in the road in the middle of the night. Christopher swerves to miss the oncoming

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vehicle and crashes his car, while the offenders, Kennedy and Heidi, ride away scot-free. In effect, Christopher’s murder is instigated not by Tony or by any other mighty gangster, but by two hapless, spoiled teenage girls. Mysterious cars speeding away in the night seem to be Chase’s favorite face of the imminent unexpected: a zooming taxi strikes down Hesh’s nephew, Eli, after he staggers into the street (“Members Only,” 6.1), and a fleeing car ejects a satchel of money for Tony B. to find, revitalizing his gangster sense of self (“Sentimental Education,” 5.6). Of course, audiences most unforgettably know the imminent unexpected as the abrupt black screen. With “Made in America” (6.21), Chase takes full advantage of the audience’s imminent expectations of Tony’s ultimate fate: either “dead, or in the can” (as Tony predicts in 4.1). Moreover, audiences expect to actually witness Tony being one or the other, on-screen. With a hit out on him from Phil Leotardo, Tony and family hide and await fire and brimstone to come raining down on them from anywhere at any moment. Will Tony lose his family? Will his family lose him? We’re worried. We’re “worried all the time . . .” Then, when a truce is brokered with New York, we think the storm has passed. The episode’s final scene finds Tony and family gathered at Holsten’s sharing a bowl of onion rings, while a threatening man in a Members Only jacket takes an interest in looking at Tony. And then . . . well, as Uncle Junior once put it, “God fuck it all!” (“Members Only,” 6.1). Chase, as antigod, casts a lightning “bolt from beyond,” and The Sopranos, contemporaneous and coterminous with Tony’s psyche, is no more. Nobody expected Tony’s death to look like that. His mother was right: “In the end, it’s all a big nothing” (“D-Girl,” 2.7). Very anti-Aristotelian indeed. Whereas Scorsese and Coppola chart traditional dramatic paths of cause and effect to culminate in “moral accountings”—and through so doing, afford the audience cathartic release of pity and terror—Chase’s imminent unexpected in The Sopranos leads only to the cold, silent void. On the precipice of release, at the last second Chase cuts to black, and pity and terror collapse inward in the audience psyche. We are granted no purgation of our dread of our own deaths by witnessing a safely objective depiction of Tony, as Chase phrased it, “facedown in a bowl of onion rings with a bullet in his head” (quoted in Martin 183); only, instead, a subjective representation of death, of fate—entirely unexpected. And not funny at all.

The Sopranos and History Albert Auster

Already notable for critical accolades that acclaimed it one of the greatest television series and dramas of all time and, in the case of critic Ellen Willis, even compared it to nineteenth-century literary masterpieces such as George Eliot’s Middlemarch (2), The Sopranos is famous for its violence and strings of murders; indeed the question of who was going to get whacked each season was sometimes foremost in viewers’ minds. Equally significant, and adding complexity to the series, is the verisimilitude of the psychiatric sessions that Dr. Jennifer Melfi (Lorraine Bracco) has with Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini). Similarly, the unique number of strong and interesting women is a rarity in a genre most notable for using women as props rather than portraying them as authentic human beings. What has not been explored with any degree of depth is The Sopranos’ use of history, which gives the series a context within which to work and gives its characters a rich complexity, so much so that critic Tom Shales referred to the series as being “rife with reverberation” (quoted in Teachout). Indeed, The Sopranos, paraphrasing anthropologist Clifford Geertz, has a kind of “thick historical background” that is unusual for a television series. This essay looks at a number of strands of that thick historical background that gives added complexity and sometimes even ambiguity to the characters in the series. First, and perhaps even foremost, in this background is the place of The Sopranos within the rich tradition of the gangster film genre from which it takes so much, and from which it frequently departs. Second, I discuss the varieties of the immigrant experience and history that The Sopranos touches upon and the dilemmas that it reflects. And finally, this essay examines how The Sopranos uses actual

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historical events, both past and contemporary, to illuminate character, influence events, and provide some context for the series. Probably never in the history of the gangster genre has a film or television series made so much use of the previous history of the genre as well as adding to it and perhaps departing from it. Indeed, in the very first episode the ground is set. Watching over one of the first murders in the series is a photo of Edward G. Robinson as the title character in Little Caesar (1930). Similarly, in the series’ second season, after the death of his mother Livia, Tony Soprano watches The Public Enemy (1931), and is especially moved by the scenes in which Tommy’s mother, in obvious contrast to Tony’s more problematic maternity, lovingly prepares Tommy’s bed as she awaits his return from the hospital. These brief snippets from the classical period of the genre pale, however, in comparison to the use The Sopranos makes of more modern landmarks of the genre, principally The Godfather (1972) and Goodfellas (1990). That The Godfather was a favorite of real gangsters there is no question. Take, for example, Gambino family underboss and John Gotti associate Sammy “the Bull” Gravano. On seeing The Godfather, he says, he left the movie “stunned”: “I mean, I floated out of the theater. Maybe it was fiction, but for me, then, that was our life” (quoted in Maas 72). It isn’t surprising, then, that The Sopranos uses The Godfather incessantly. For the mobsters, it is their Niebelungen, Ramayana, and Norse legends. In the very first episode, as Christopher Moltisanti (Michael Imperioli) and “Big Pussy” Bonpensiero are burying a victim, Christopher refers to “Louis Brasi, resting with the fishes,” and is corrected most emphatically by Big Pussy for this egregious faux pas: “Luca Brasi! Luca Brasi!” Silvio Dante is noted in the Soprano crew for his imitation of Al Pacino’s Godfather III (1990) line, “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.” Similarly, Carmela Soprano refers to Tony’s favorite scene in the Godfather saga as the one in which Vito Corleone (Robert De Niro) returns to Sicily to kill the don who ordered the murder of his family. And in preparation for their trip to Italy, members of the Soprano crew watch The Godfather. Even Tony’s son, the hapless A.J., is dogged by references to The Godfather when a girlfriend is disappointed because the Soprano home doesn’t resemble the Corleone family compound. Equally prominent in the series, but in no way resembling the legendary status of The Godfather saga, is Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas. However, Goodfellas is perhaps more relevant to the genesis of The Sopranos because the gangsters in that film bear a greater resemblance

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to the characters in Goodfellas than they do to the more mythic and romanticized figures depicted in The Godfather. The connection with Goodfellas is made more direct and fundamental by the presence in the series of Lorraine Bracco, who played Karen Hill, the wife of Henry Hill (Ray Liotta), in the film, and by Michael Imperioli, who played the hapless mob gofer Spider, who is first shot in the foot and then murdered by Joe Pesci’s character in the film. Sopranos regulars Tony Sirico, Frank Vincent, and Vincent Pastore also made appearances in the Scorsese film. And though not as numerous as the references to The Godfather in the series, there are scenes—such as a dinner party at the house of Tony’s neighbors the Cusamanos—in which the film is discussed, as well as an appearance by Scorsese (played by an actor) in one scene, when the film-obsessed Christopher shouts after him, “Kundun! I liked it,” as Scorsese enters a club (“46 Long,” 1.2). The point at which The Sopranos departs from the usual gangster genre is its therapy sessions, which became a hallmark of the series. However, many critics have overlooked the fact that there was already a string of neurotic hit men and even mobsters who had sought the aid of psychiatrists and psychoanalysts before The Sopranos. Indeed, in the very same year as its debut, The Sopranos had company on the couch with the comedy Analyze This (1999), a film that is even mentioned in The Sopranos (after Dr. Melfi rejects him for treatment following the first season’s final murderous depredations, which force her to conduct her sessions from a motel room, Tony seeks help from another therapist, who also rejects him and gives Analyze This as his reason). But even before Analyze This there was the 1996 film Faithful, in which a hit man played by Chaz Palmentieri consults a psychiatrist in order to carry out a hit. Similarly, in 1997 there was the film Grosse Pointe Blank, in which another hit man, played by John Cusack, turns to psychiatrist Alan Arkin for guidance. Consequently, one might argue that The Sopranos is merely the culmination of a trend. The question that is most interesting is what will follow for the genre after The Sopranos. Thus, while films and television have not abandoned any mention of the Mafia or organized crime, the major criminals de jour are serial killers; witness the TV series Dexter (Showtime, 2006–) and Criminal Minds (CBS, 2005–). However, gangsters have not deserted the big screen; take, for example, 2007’s American Gangster, which might contain clues to the fate of the gangster genre. First, there is that film’s emphasis on African American criminals,

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not Italians. This fits in with the recent trends in organized crime in which gangster cartels from Colombia, Russia, and other countries have supplanted the Mafia as a focal point in the annals of law enforcement. Then there is the weakening of traditional organized crime due to the efforts of the U.S. Department of Justice and other institutions of government. This doesn’t mean the Mafia has lost its prominence in the criminal pantheon, but that it is probably now primus inter pares. There is no doubt that the gangster will persist; he, and maybe someday she, is too much a part of our national mythic heritage. To advance an argument first made by Richard Slotkin in Gunfighter Nation, the gangster film first appeared in the 1930s after the relative decline of the western because audiences faced by the Great Depression no longer appreciated narratives that emphasized American grandeur and the saga of the frontier. They could, however, empathize with the gangster, whose rise and fall more clearly mimicked their own fate in the desperate times they faced. By this same logic, our own era, which has seen American hegemony challenged economically, politically, and militarily, and the western diminished by its association with a racist and patriarchal past, finds the gangster, a figure preeminently identified with tragedy, rich in contemporary associations. Another element in the thick historical background of The Sopranos is its emphatic use of the Italian American immigrant experience complete with all its dilemmas and ambiguities. The central irony is that the most notable contribution, certainly in our popular culture, of Italian Americans is a criminal enterprise. This doesn’t negate the contributions of millions of Italian Americans to other aspects of our culture. Indeed, where would the American twentieth century be without the achievements of the Capras, Sinatras, and DiMaggios, as well as politicians, statesmen, and jurists such as Fiorello LaGuardia, Rudolph Giuliani, Mario Cuomo, and Antonin Scalia? Nonetheless, despite efforts such as a 1997 City University of New York conference on the “lost world” of Italian American radicalism, which examined the importance of Sacco-Vanzetti, Carlo Tresca, Vito Marcantonio, and Mario Savio in the American left, the Mafia still remains the institution most identified with Italian Americans. Thus, in one of his earliest sessions with Dr. Melfi, when the issue of the Mafia comes up Tony justifies Italian American criminal activities by comparing them to what J. P. Morgan did to attain his fortune. Tony is exceedingly proud of his Italian heritage. For example, on a trip into

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the city of Newark, Tony takes his daughter Meadow into a church that his grandfather, the first Corrado Soprano, and Tony’s Uncle Frank, who were skilled stonemasons, helped to build. In this scene, Tony marvels at the beauty of their handiwork. On another occasion, Tony is quick to contradict Dr. Melfi’s assertion that Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone with his own claim that the real inventor was an Italian, Antonio Meuci. And in another moment when Dr. Melfi asks Tony why he was attracted to her patient Gloria Trillo, he replies, “She’s smart, she’s sexy, she’s Italian, stick to your own kind.” To which Dr. Melfi replies scornfully, “What’s this, West Side Story?” (“Pine Barrens,” 3.11). Nor is Tony alone in his homage to Italians and Italian American culture. In the series’ first season, Paulie Walnuts and Big Pussy are on the trail of car thieves who stole the car of one of A.J.’s teachers. They trace him to his workplace, a contemporary upscale coffee bar. There, Paulie is incensed by the fact that these coffee bars are making money off what he refers to as “the gift of our cuisine.” And to get something back, he symbolically shoplifts an expresso maker (“46 Long,” 1.2). An irony of all this Italian chauvinism is that when Tony, Paulie, and Christopher venture to Italy in the series’ second season (“Commendatori,” 2.4), they are truly fish out of water. For Christopher, who has vowed to climb Mount Vesuvius, the trip is instead one long bacchanalia of heroin abuse. For Paulie, there is the total inability to communicate at any level, even with a prostitute he hires, and, irony of ironies, a disdain for the local cuisine. In Tony’s case, it is an exercise in frustration: he lusts after Annalisa, the daughter of Don Zi Vittorio and the de facto head of her criminal family now that her father is senile and her husband is in jail; but, though he dreams of consummating their relationship, he must demur when she offers to have sex with him because, as he puts it, “You don’t shit where you eat.” The trip also brings into focus the cultural gulf between the Italians and the Italian Americans. For instance, Tony, who has just put his mother into a nursing home, is confronted by Annalisa, who says that, despite her father’s disability, she would never do such a thing. Also, Annalisa, besides being extremely alluring, is obviously an excellent businesswoman who is in total command of her Mafia family, which is in total contrast to the tradition of the American crime families, where the only roles women play are wife and mistress. Interestingly enough, Annalisa’s explanation for this is that Italian men have no problem taking orders from women because they are so in love with their mothers.

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Whatever the explanations, the pilgrimage of Tony and his crew to the “other side,” as they refer to it, is filled with a sense of spiritual and cultural emptiness. Rather than experiencing a feeling of renewal, Tony, Christopher, and Paulie are confronted by the fact that, to quote Thomas Wolfe, “You can’t go home again.” And what they must live with is the void of their own existence, metaphorically evoked by the barren northern New Jersey landscape that they pass silently through on their way home from the airport. Another side of the Italian American experience is evoked by the mutual incomprehension and disdain that frequently exist been Italians like Tony and more assimilated Italians. This raises its head in one of the earliest sessions with Dr. Melfi when Tony mentions RICO (the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act), to which Melfi responds, “Is Rico your brother?” (“The Sopranos,” 1.1). More than anything, however, these “Wonder Bread wops” are concerned with the image of Italians. Thus, Dr. Melfi’s ex-husband, Dr. Richard La Penna, who is a member of the Italian American Anti-Defamation League, can proudly proclaim the fact that only about five thousand Italian Americans have ever belonged to the Mafia out of more than twenty million. Similarly, on a golfing date with his Italian American physician Dr. Bruce Cusamano and some of Cusamano’s friends, Tony is seen as a curiosity, and to his discomfort is plied with questions about John Gotti and other notorious mobsters. Most insightful of all the episodes that deal with the Italian American experience and their heritage is “Christopher” (4.3). Confronted by a Native American protest against Columbus Day, Tony’s crew, led principally by Silvio, decides to counterprotest. One thing leads to another, including a near riot and an attempt to intimidate the leader of the Native Americans with the threat to go public about a discredited Internet rumor that Chief Iron Eyes Cody, of the famed Advertising Council spot condemning pollution, was half Sicilian. Tony, of course, is appalled by all this dereliction of business, and quite vehement in his command that Silvio and the others cease and desist from violent protest and instead try a campaign of “hearts and minds.” To accomplish this, they enlist a part-Indian casino owner, who they believe will be able to exercise some influence on the Native American leadership. When he fails, all he can offer Tony and the gang are comps at his casino, which is also his ploy to get Tony to use his influence to get Frankie Valli to appear there.

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This episode is David Chase’s clever counterattack on the tunnel vision of those Italian Americans who saw any mention of the Mafia as a slur. It is Chase’s reply (although the episode was written by Michael Imperioli) to the Italian American defamation groups who criticized The Sopranos for its depiction of Italian Americans. Chase and Imperioli present this point of view quite clearly in a lecture Carmela and her friends attend at Father Phil Intintola’s church, where a Professor LongoMurphy of Montclair State University downgrades the Mafia, talks about Italian American women and their contributions, and tells them that, when others identify Italian Americans with “meatballs and spaghetti,” they should counter that with “orchieta and broccoli rabe.” Her comments about the Mafia especially offend Carmela and her friends, and, after the talk, Gabriella Dante, Silvio’s wife, confronts Father Intintola and chastises him for allowing them to be humiliated by the speaker when they have done so much for the parish. Nonetheless, the episode is particularly complex, and Italian attitudes toward Columbus are not seen as monolithic. For example, as the Soprano crew members discuss and give vent to their outrage against the Native Americans, who were planning the protest against Columbus, Furio Giunta voices his own outrage against Columbus for being Genoese, and one of the northerners who have traditionally oppressed southern Italians. In contrast, when A.J., who has been assigned by his teacher to read Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States, tells Tony that, according to his teacher, if Columbus were alive today he would be tried for “crimes against humanity,” Tony angrily responds that “in this house Columbus is a hero.” However, hero or not, Tony is especially outraged when Silvio complains about the suffering that Italians, and in particular his parents, who came from Calabria, had to endure after they emigrated. This annoys Tony, who reminds Silvio that, despite this, he has a beautiful wife, a son in college, and a prospering strip club. Tony berates him with the comment, “Where is your self-esteem? It’s not Columbus, the godfather, or Chef Boyardee.” And then, invoking his favorite film icon Gary Cooper, Tony reminds Silvio of how Cooper faced down the “Miller Brothers” all by himself. In all of this, Tony sounds practically Emersonian in his condemnation of the ideology of victimization and his homage to self-esteem and self-reliance. This episode also satirizes all forms of ethnic and racial political correctness. For example, at a horse barn owned by Hesh Rabkin, an older confidant and advisor of Tony’s, when Rueben “the Cuban” hears

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about the protest against the Columbus Day parade, he applauds it and says that Columbus was no better than Adolph Hitler, a comment that offends Hesh, who accuses him of trivializing the Holocaust. Similarly, the episode depicts a televised debate between an Indian activist and a member of the Italian American Anti-Defamation League about the Columbus Day protest, and when the Italian American dares to use the phrase “the middle passage” to describe Italian American immigration, the host, Montel Williams, protests that the term is reserved for African Americans because of three hundred years of slavery. The satire in this episode and the narrative of other episodes in The Sopranos illuminate the ambiguities inherent in the Italian American immigrant experience. For instance, how Italian are Italian Americans? Or, to put it differently, what is the real current connection between Italy and Italian Americans? Similarly, what is the real contemporary connection of Italian Americans, who may be one, two, or even three generations removed from immigration, with their Italian heritage and identity? And finally, and most crucially in terms of the critics of The Sopranos: Is a depiction of the Mafia or Cosa Nostra necessarily a slur against the Italian American community? Of course, no television series can answer these questions definitively. It is to The Sopranos’ credit that it raises them and takes them seriously. It is also clear, at least from the “Christopher” episode, that David Chase and Michael Imperioli abhor any kind of identity politics. At one moment in “Christopher,” Tony angrily denounces the obsession with Columbus by saying, “Columbus is so old he might as well be a film.” If this is so, what then for Tony constitutes important historical events? This unequivocally is World War II. Tony is a fan of the History Channel and is frequently depicted viewing snippets of World War II documentaries featuring General George S. Patton, Winston Churchill, and the German general Erwin “the Desert Fox” Rommel. Clearly, Tony looks to them for examples of their leadership; but they are also often used as counterpoints to the struggles faced by Tony. Consequently, confronted by dissatisfaction among his crew, Tony is shown watching a film about Rommel, who was unhappy with Hitler’s leadership, and plotted with other German officers to assassinate him. More significantly, this obsession with World War II is part of Tony’s fin de siècle nostalgia. In the very first episode, we hear Tony comment, “I came in at the end,” “I missed the best bits,” and “Nowadays there are no values. Guys today have no room for the penal experience.” Part

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and parcel to this nostalgia is his awe of what Tom Brokaw has referred to as “the Greatest Generation.” As a result, despite his conflicts with his mother and his Uncle Junior, he can still express admiration for them as he watches them seated, all dressed in black, at the funeral of Jackie Aprile Sr., saying, “Remember that was the generation that lived through World War II.” World War II is not the only history mentioned in The Sopranos. The series episodes refer to far-flung historical tidbits such as Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, which Tony learns to prefer over “Prince Matchabelli.” And in the justly acclaimed “Pine Barrens” (3.11), when the ex-Russian commando Valery escapes, he is referred to by Paulie as Rasputin. Indeed, in the same episode, Paulie refers to the Cuban missile crisis and the historically ignorant Christopher replies in amazement, “That was real? I saw the movie. I thought it was bullshit.” Often, these historical references come from surprising sources. For example, the frequently quite literate Uncle Junior refers to the quarrelsome Ralph Cifaretto as a “Ghibelline”: a reference to the political party in medieval Italy that supported the emperor. It is the self-same Ralph Cifaretto who shows what kind of hold the past has on The Sopranos, even if in Ralph’s case it was purely fictional. In “University” (3.6), a drunken Ralph joins the Soprano crew at the Bada Bing, announcing that he has “come to save Rome.” Then he duels with one of the crew and proclaims the merits of the sword-andsandals epic Gladiator (2000). Ultimately, this causes havoc and tragedy; when Ralph’s faux-Roman machismo is challenged by his pregnant mistress, he brutally beats her to death, and in turn is beaten by Tony, who had formed a sentimental attachment to the young woman. These historical references, both fictional and true, are also joined in the series by frequent allusions to contemporary events. For example, in “Second Opinion” (3.7), after Carmela has been warned by the Manichean psychiatrist Dr. Krakower (a reference to the famed film theorist, perhaps?) that she is living on “blood money,” and by a more ameliorative priest to accept the good in Tony and reject the evil in his life, she becomes exceedingly depressed. But in a hilarious luncheon with her married-to-the-mob friends, the subject of Hillary Clinton comes up. Initially, Carmela criticizes Hillary, commenting, “To be humiliated in public and then walk around smiling all the time . . . I would dig a hole.” However, after being reminded that Senator Clinton took her adultery and “spun it into gold,” Carmela has a change of heart and realizes, “She could be a role model for us all.”

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In another evocation of contemporary events, the depressed A.J., on the verge of suicide, attempts to talk to his psychiatrist about the Middle East crisis. He wonders at two people “arguing about a plot of sand” that they think God reserved for them, and, perhaps echoing Seymour Hersh, declares emphatically to Meadow, “Bush is going to bomb Iran” (“The Second Coming,” 6.19). Afterward, so convinced is he of the need to solve the crisis, he resolves (until seduced by Tony and Carmela with a job as a story consultant for a film producer) to volunteer for the army with the expectation of going to Iraq. For all its historical references and use of documentaries to deepen the context of its action, perhaps The Sopranos’ most illuminating moments come when it uses history to provide an almost existential element in the lives of the characters. This is perhaps best illustrated in the sixth-season episode “Cold Stones” (6.11). Carmela wins a trip to Paris, but Tony begs off going with her because he finds his hands full with conflicts with Phil Leotardo and the fallout from Vito Spatafore’s homosexuality. So he sends Carmela off to Paris with a wad of cash and her best friend, Rosalie Aprile. Both Carmela and Rosalie are awestruck by the city’s food, its language, and its culture. They find themselves looking everywhere, and Carmela is constantly saying, “Who built that?” But most of all they are overwhelmed by the city’s history. In one moment, they come across a plaque commemorating a resistance fighter who died during the liberation of the city in 1944. Bewildered, they wonder what it means and who the dead soldier was. In another, Carmela looks at a beautiful necklace that was presented to a queen, or perhaps the mistress of a king, and muses longingly about the love that must have motivated the gift. Carmela’s marvel at what she sees in Paris, however, is transformed into a deep melancholy, and she says to Rosalie, “When you die, life goes on without you, like it does in Paris, when we’re not here.” As always with Carmela, the past is personal. And the Parisian sense of history can mingle with her quest to understand her past and the pasts of those around her. So, one evening, she begins to question Rosalie, who has lost both her husband and her son, about what she feels about their deaths. Rosalie, however, refuses to discuss it, demanding, “Why can’t we have a good time?” and then rides off on the motorcycle of a young Frenchman she’s just met. Carmela is left to her own devices and that night has a dream about Adriana La Cerva, Christopher’s old girlfriend, who unbeknownst to

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Carmela was murdered because she was discovered to be an FBI informant. Thus, in this episode, the ubiquity of history in Paris is seen as stirring up questions about not only the larger historic past, but also the immediate pasts of those who become caught up by its spell. As a result, in The Sopranos, history is presented not just as facts, events, and personalities, but as a deeply personal element of existence, which reminds us not only of past great deeds or loves, but of our own mortality and relationships. In The Sopranos, therefore, the past is not merely prologue, but deeply embedded in our present and our consciousness. It also reminds us constantly of the finiteness of our being. One encounters history as not merely the source of comedy, malapropisms, and sometimes even astute commentary on the actions and feelings of characters; it serves as philosophical counterpoint to the drama and sometimes even lifts it into the realm of tragedy. In this essay I have attempted to examine how The Sopranos makes use of history. This examination reveals that, for The Sopranos, the use of the history of the genre allows the gangsters in the series to identify with a mythic mob, one grounded in the popular culture, which gives their lives a larger resonance. Similarly, the series’ exploration of the Italian American immigrant experience allows it to investigate the manifold aspects of that experience in America, so that Meadow Soprano, in refuting her father’s advocacy of the notion that economic discrimination lay at the heart of the rise of the Mafia (“There was a time Mead, when Italian people didn’t have a lot of options”), responds, “You mean like Mario Cuomo?” (“College,” 1.5). Finally, contemporary history, as well as the past, allows the characters to explain their actions, connect to precedent, and give their lives some larger meaning. With this “thick historical background” as part of its characters’ lives, their dialogue, and the series’ narrative, The Sopranos seems to echo William Faulkner’s famous comment from Requiem for a Nun, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

Silence in The Sopranos Steven Peacock

Silence can be uncomfortable. It can be used to unsettle, shaped to make things awkward or prove a point. Equally, silence can be empty, abstract, reaching and airy. It is often seen as unwanted or dangerous, something to be quickly stopped up, even if only by so much white noise. The Sopranos is particularly sensitive to the qualities of silence, its registers, scales, and tones. Often in the contemporary world, silence takes on negative connotations, existing as a void to be avoided. Yet David Chase’s series embraces its characteristics, refashioning a lacuna as an untapped wellspring of expressive possibility. Considerable work has been done on speech in The Sopranos (as is skillfully demonstrated in this book by many of my fellow contributors). This valuable strand of Sopranos scholarship explores the series’ use of language, scripts, and the threatening or therapeutic treatment of words. Yet the program’s masterful and crucial handling of silences remains, on the whole, overlooked. Cases and codes of silence abound in this world: permeating the pregnant pauses in Dr. Melfi’s office; at the Sopranos’ breakfast bar after an argument; in a beat before a beating; and, of course, as omertà, the vow of silence taken by the Mafia, punishable by the ultimate gagging of death. Tony’s days are occupied by keeping people’s mouths shut, stuffing his with food, hushing things up. Many matters are left, have to be left, unspoken. In different ways, the characters often also seek comfort in quietness, negotiating a precarious position in the eye of an ongoing storm. The Sopranos is cocooned in silence; more so than in any other television drama, an aesthetic essence of smothering stillness is palpable, filling rooms and cars, pocketing conversations. Like a glass cloak, silence envelops the series and its families, protecting Tony from the hand of the

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law, but not from pain; it invites reflection, yet also contains the inevitability of being broken. The Sopranos’ approach to passages of quiet sets it apart from other acclaimed examples of both the gangster genre and contemporary U.S. serials. Consider, for example, the distinct handling of voices and sound in benchmark mobster films against which The Sopranos is often placed and measured. Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese, 1990) presents a garrulous, hyperkinetic world of words and movement, fired up on cocaine and adrenalin. The film’s mosaic of voice-overs is as fluent and unremitting as its many celebrated tracking shots. In a similar way, the Godfather trilogy (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972, 1974, 1990) makes use of sweeping operatic arias, emphasizing the primacy of the human voice as much as it measures the consequences of constant murmurs, rumors, and mumbling determinations. Although it often quotes from these two great works of cinema, The Sopranos negotiates its distinct status as a television program. As Glen Creeber notes: “The small screen (particularly through its use of closeup and medium shots) achieves a more personal and intimate view of the world” (“TV Ruined the Movies,” 127). Creeber continues: Tony’s tragic predicament can be viewed as an essentially cinematic creation, desperately trying to conform to the apparently intimate dynamics of the small screen. Looking like extras from The Godfather, his crew are deposited uncomfortably into a world of soap operas, docu-soaps, and confessional talk shows— forced to take their personalities beyond their traditional generic boundaries. “Nowadays,” Tony complains, “everybody’s gotta go to shrinks, and counselors and go on Sally Jessy Raphael and talk about their problems.” As such, Tony’s long-running battle with therapy implicitly parallels the narrative’s own struggle with the personal requirements of television. (127) Here, Creeber implicitly points to a long-held theoretical belief in the fundamental importance of the spoken word on television. As John Corner asserts in his influential work Critical Studies in Television, above all, “it is through speech that television addresses its viewers and holds them in particular relations to specific programs and to channel and station identities” (37). In turn, many contemporary television dramas take the medium’s reliance on talk as the basis of their art (I am thinking here of the extraordinarily deft linguistic and narrative designs of The

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West Wing [NBC, 1999–2006], Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip [NBC, 2006–2007], and Deadwood [HBO, 2004–2006]). Yet, while weaving its own intricate, delicate, and complex web of words, The Sopranos resists becoming ensnared in language. Eschewing the jittery, relentless surge of sound and vision found in most modern works of television, The Sopranos does not fear the long pause, or tracts of quiet. It moves beyond the received wisdom of television’s form. Rather than presenting an ongoing struggle between the capacities of film and television, as Creeber claims, The Sopranos quietly plays against expectations of the latter, finding meaning in muteness. A notable exception to the widespread lack of critical voices on silence in The Sopranos is Douglas L. Howard’s inspiring work on “Soprano-speak.” Pointing up the linguistic achievements of the show, Howard also invites an inquiry into “the subtle nuances of innuendo, implication, and silence [through which we may] understand the conflicts that the characters themselves face” (202, my emphasis). According to Howard, The Sopranos reminds us that “silence can indeed be golden” (202). To begin to attend to the “subtle nuances” of silence marbling the series, my ensuing interpretations are also guided by Jason Jacobs’s sensitive appreciation of “the art of The Sopranos.” Jacobs alerts us to “the deep richness in the choices that are made here, in the points of comparison and contrast, and in the ranges of feeling that are evoked” (“Violence and Therapy in The Sopranos,” 139). As Jacobs analyzes the layering of music in the series, I hold on the moods and modulations overlapping in moments of silence. As an associated concern, this chapter seeks to demonstrate how particular works of television merit a sustained scrutiny of style and meaning. A consideration of The Sopranos’ stylistic decisions, mise en scène, and handling of silence allows the series to open up in new ways. The critical approach of close textual analysis and an expressive appreciation of style are more normally associated with film and film studies. Here, as elsewhere, I aim to promote the applicability and profitability of applying a similar methodology to television.1 I hope that the following readings may inspire readers to return to The Sopranos anew, to test their understanding of the moments described and viewed, and to open a critical conversation. A detailed critical consideration of television style has been, so far, dramatically underrepresented. It should also be noted that the following interpretations and evaluations are not presented as the “definitive” reading of silence in The Sopranos, or indeed of the

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handling of silence in a particular episode of the series. Many other strands and facets of silence are used to expressive effect in The Sopranos and merit further inquiry. The thoughts here constitute an invitation to begin to think and talk about this overlooked aspect of style together, as a critical community. Time codes from the episode, showing minutes and seconds within the episode’s duration, are given to allow the reader to easily locate the moments under scrutiny. To illustrate the series’ significant patterning of silences, I have chosen to focus on one particularly rich episode, “Whoever Did This” (4.9). Aspects of silence riddle the episode, informing both ongoing narrative arcs and more-singular happenings. The first sequence opens with a verbal reminder from a courtroom judge that the gathered jurors must remain silent about Uncle Junior’s legal hearing. There is Ralph Cifaretto’s stunned silence at his son’s backyard archery accident, with the boy ending up in a coma. And then, with Tony’s ill-timed confession to sleeping with Ralph’s ex-girl Valentina, there are two horrific acts of irreversible silencing: first, Ralph’s alleged bitter burning of racehorse Pie-O-My; then, Tony’s shock retaliation, dragging Ralph away from scrambling breakfast eggs to dash his brains out on the kitchen floor. In this last act, the episode offers an assertively dramatic instance of how silence informs the series. It presents a rare example of the “silencing” of a major character, and, as Christopher Moltisanti reminds Tony toward the end of the episode, the exceptionally deleterious murder of a “made” mob captain. Rather than melodramatically emphasizing the impact of this event, the series achieves a complexity of tone, handling a declamatory moment of high drama in a strangely mute manner. Furthermore, The Sopranos achieves a greater density in developing echoes of more-everyday silences around this climactic core. As an example, let us look first at a more characteristic instance of silence in “Whoever Did This”: [17:43–19:15] A scene set in the Soprano household begins with an establishing shot of the suburban home’s grandiose exterior. Moving inside to the kitchen, we see Tony and Carmela chit-chatting across the breakfast bar, Tony swaddled in his ubiquitous dressing gown, hunched over newspaper and food; Carmela dishing out coffee, eggs, and family gossip. Anthony Jr. joins his father at the bar, grouchily rousing from sleepiness, griping over the fatty bacon that his mother dutifully sets in front of him. An attempt by Tony to tease his son, snatching a moment of rare intimacy, ends in mute (and mutual) disaffection. Here, then, is the distinctive sound of “Soprano-silence” noted ear-

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lier. First, the series subtly recasts an often used, often unremarkable mainstay of television storytelling—the establishing exterior shot of the family house—into a charged marker of silence. To borrow and bend a term from film studies, such views of the Sopranos’ home front form repeated “pillow-shots” (Burch 158–85)—stonewall buffers that cushion the dealings of previous sequences, emphasize a set quality of silent stillness, and bolster the well-guarded privacy of the family inside this luxurious pad.2 (The shots also hint at the idea of a normal suburban life being an elaborate and secure front for Tony’s crooked dealings). A swathe of sheltering quiet carries into the heart of the house, into the kitchen. The scene opens on an oft-repeated bit of Sopranos business around the breakfast bar. A morning conversation, teetering on disagreement, is both secured and tested by natural pauses. When Carmela conjures the image of Ralph’s son Justin “hooked up to those machines,” the sequence leads into its first complex contemplation. As Tony sits mute, the quiet keeps tensions in play. If we place the moment in the context of the episode as a whole, a series of resonances forms in the silence. The image of a mutilated child invites musings on futility, mortality, and less-innocent injuries. Tony may turn his mind to his own son’s precarious safety as a mobster’s progeny; the idea leads into A.J.’s subsequent appearance and his parents’ fond reaction. At the same time, thoughts of Ralph and suffering wryly hint at things to come. An unspoken risk of violence bleeds into even brief passages of quiet thought. Mute moments carry conflicting associations. Husband and wife share a content and tacit appraisal of their grumpy son carping over his breakfast (perhaps content because tacit). Yet, characteristically, Tony cannot help but strain the moment, breaking the silence to cajole A.J., conducting a jokey interrogation. Father and son shamble into a clunky bout of playtime wrestling, ending in an enforced bear hug by Tony. A once-happy silence, when pushed and pressed, recoils into awkwardness and embarrassment. Throughout the sequence, from a passing deliberation on a boy strapped to hospital machines, to the awkwardly sought intimacy of a grabbed bear hug, The Sopranos opens up aspects of uncomfortably imposed restraint. As a natural companion to restraint, silence follows. The series pitches together brittle instances of cracked composure and broken calm. It quietly rhymes occasions in Tony’s domestic and mob life, forming family resemblances in silence. The uneasiness soundlessly noted at the close of the sequence chimes with Tony’s embarrassed

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reaction in the next scene, as he stares in silent discomfiture at Ralph’s tearful outburst about his boy. A clumsy move to questioning A.J. that ends in a suffocating struggle keys into Tony’s more serious call for confession from Ralph over Pie-O-My. Pressing Ralph to break his silence launches the men into a messy fatal fight, again scrabbling around a muted breakfast setting. From one scene to the next, The Sopranos explores the range of feelings evoked in quiet spells, and bridges the breaking point of silences. To recall Jacobs’s leading claim for “the deep richness in the choices that are made here, in the points of comparison and contrast,” we can also consider The Sopranos’ skillful counterpointing of sound and silence. Here we return to thoughts on the more dramatic event of Ralph’s murder and its aftermath. Having whacked Ralph in a scrappy wrangle, Tony phones Christopher to assist in “cleaning up the mess.” The episode presents some of the series’ most gruesome and striking images in the men’s clinical efforts to erase all evidence of the killing, not least the shock reveal of Ralph’s toupee, a glimpse of his severed head being tucked into a bowling bag, and various limbs and gory leftovers. Ultimately, bits of Ralph are buried underground. At time code 41:26–42:30, Tony joins Christopher in the bathroom, with Ralph’s body dumped in the tub. As Tony and Chris work to dispose of Ralph’s body, to cover up the silencing of a captain, the program creates a staccato pattern of sounds, at once everyday and extraordinary. The scene is reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), of Norman Bates’s meticulous yet workaday cleaning of Marion’s bloody bathroom. Both are conducted, for the most part, without dialogue. There is an emphasis on the trivial noises of household chores, of swishing brushes and streaming water. The muted homespun tone of both moments, of “quietly getting on with the task,” unsettlingly suggests the characters’ familiarity with such circumstances. The richness of the moment amplifies in a spare arrangement of isolated sounds, interspersed in the surrounding silence. The Sopranos uses such punctuations to carefully measure the weight of the moment, avoiding tipping into bombast. The burden of such a loaded killing carries in the sound of a bowling ball thudding downstairs. The noise meets with that of Tony dragging clanking metal chains up the stairs, to weigh down the dismembered body. Although perhaps Shakespearian or Dickensian in allusion, the action and sound integrate without force into the passing moment, without appearing histrionic (Tony might indeed need and use chains for this dreadful purpose). Finally, the two spare sounds

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form a little pun—a ball and chains—lightly noting the heaviness of the scenario. For fear of repercussion, just these two characters must bear the weight of Ralph’s death, keeping deadly quiet. In a final counterpoint of quiet and clamor, The Sopranos delicately brings to a close the remarkable nature of the night’s proceedings. The sequence’s achievements emerge most strongly when placed in the wider context of the show as a whole. A later scene plays off the series’ more usual handling of silence and sound in the Bada Bing strip club: [48:55–49:28] Having buried Ralph’s body in a virtuoso display of mechanical-digger derring-do, Tony and Christopher return to an otherwise empty Bada Bing in the dead of night. The mood and tone are mute and understated, though rife with veiled threats and expectations: Christopher is the only one who knows of (or at least suspects) Tony’s involvement in Ralph’s messy demise. To close the evening and seal an agreement of keeping quiet about the death (or else), both men take a swig of whisky: a little nightcap (or, perhaps, “Night, Cap,” as a silent toast to the dead man). Throughout the series, the Mafia family uses the Bada Bing as a cover operation. In this space, the noise of the strip joint’s banging bass reverberates through a backroom office, muffling the mob’s clandestine discussions in a wall of sound. Yet, in this moment, the customary rumble of music is notable by its absence. The club’s quarters become a dead space, funereal in hush: there are to be no echoes of this incident. The singular whack of the whisky glass breaks the silence and accentuates Tony’s ensuing threat: Chris had better not blab. Let’s consider a little more, from the closing moments of this scene and the episode: [52:25–53:42] After the onerous events of the evening, Tony beds down in his strip-club office. The camera discovers Tony on waking: caught vulnerable and childlike in fetal position, his thumb tucked up to his lips. Rising to shake the sleep away, Tony crosses the office toward the mirror on a far wall. His eyes are still sore from Ralph’s spraying Raid into them during their desperate scuffle. Moving into the strip club’s main room, the drowsy mobster calls repeatedly for Christopher, but receives no reply. He is alone in this dark, deserted, and pin-drop silent space, a lonely player on an empty stage. Breaking the seal of silence, Tony opens the door to the street, allowing a rush of noise and light to spill in. The episode ends. The final moments exemplify an accomplished synthesis of silence and decor. Tony wakes up at first light; this is a new beginning, but as

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gray rays emerge to brush the edges of the room, there is also the promise of a dawning recollection. Although Tony stays silent, the program provides us with a glimpse of his gathering senses in the visual composition. As camera and character move to the mirror, the blank surfaces of walls suddenly fill with colorful clusters of photographed faces. Again, without overstatement and in an unspoken manner, The Sopranos hints at rushing thoughts and a flurry of overlapping impressions. On waking, Tony has to face up to things. In an instant, a jumble of figures appear to silently claim his attention, just as pressing reflections swirl in the mind’s eye on rousing from sleep.3 Looking into the mirror, Tony opens his eyes wide. In a further opening, of the door to the street, any remaining respite in quiet retrospection washes away in a sudden flood of light and city noise. The only word spoken in this scene—the repeated call for Christopher—is both perfectly appropriate in the circumstances and, in its singularity, with dramatic restraint, a declaration of precarious trust. In any consideration of silence in The Sopranos, it would seem remiss to conclude without a reference to the series’ finale. Here, in the final episode (“Made in America,” 6.21), “Soprano-silence” reaches its apogee: in HBO’s entreaty to journalists to keep quiet about the ending; and in the inevitable and yet entirely surprising silencing of the program, in an act that rendered both viewers and characters speechless. In these climactic closing moments, the series presents a last, searing insight into the mindset of Tony Soprano. Even the most everyday of situations infuses with anxiety, with the quietly niggling threat that the chatter of the world might be quelled in an instant, of a journey (indeed, Journey) suddenly stopped in its track. The music ascends to drown the family’s voices in the cozy diner booth, only to find itself suddenly snapped off (“Don’t stop . . .” forevermore stopped). The screen turns to black, and a long silence ensues (going “on and on and on”). At the same time, the silence elevates and critiques the series’ status. On the one hand, the stretched silent black gap hints at the coming gulf in prime-time viewing: from now on, television will be nakedly empty, with nothing on. On the other hand, the marriage of a pop song and series suddenly snuffed out speaks in ironic terms of pop culture’s putative disposable presence: we tune in (to the radio, to the TV) with a fickle, fidgeting sensibility; we are able to turn it all off just like that. Even if “it’s not TV, it’s HBO,” it’s still lowbrow stuff, right? Ultimately, The Sopranos presents a lasting silence as a space to be filled with the viewers’ myriad reactions: quietly confused, perhaps, or loudly enraged, or silently respectful. It is an act

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of generosity and a final entreaty for the viewers to interpret the work on the screen in front of them; a silent attesting to the value of close criticism of television, and of television’s potential as a richly significant artistic medium.

Notes 1. For discussions of televisual style, see, in addition to the essays by Creeber and Jacobs just cited, Deborah Thomas’s “Reading Buffy,” my “Introduction” and my essay “Status and Style” in Reading 24, and my essays “Going Dark in Heroes” and “In Between Marion and Geoff.” 2. In his reading of the films of Yasujiro Ozu, Noel Burch uses the term pillow-shot to define visual compositions in which Ozu’s camera “focuses for a moment, often a long one, on some inanimate aspect of Man’s environment.” Burch notes that in the pillow-shots, “people are perhaps known to be near, but for the moment they are not visible, and a rooftop, a street-light, laundry drying on a line, a lampshade or a tea-kettle is offered as centre of attention. It is the tension between the suspension of human presence (of the diegesis) and its potential return which animates some of Ozu’s most thoughtful work” (161, italics original). 3. At the Sopranos Wake at Fordham University, New York, Jason Jacobs noted that the collected photographs include a prominently framed snapshot of Tracee, the stripper murdered in cold blood by Ralph outside the Bada Bing. Taking the previous silence as reflecting a melancholic mourning for the sudden absence of Ralph’s scattershot comedic figure from the world of the show, Jacobs interprets the moment of viewing Tracee’s photograph as a rude reawakening to the fact of Ralph’s nastier side, and an unspoken justification for his death.

PART 9

Cut to Black: The Finale and the Sopranos Legacy

“What’s Different between You and Me” Carmela, the Audience, and the End Joseph S. Walker

Few moments in television history have so energized, enlivened, and enraged an audience as the ending of “Made in America” (6.21), the final episode of The Sopranos. In an interview conducted shortly after the episode aired (and included in the invaluable book by Brett Martin, The Sopranos: The Complete Book), as millions of viewers were still fiercely debating what the shockingly sudden cut to black actually meant, series creator David Chase acknowledged realizing ahead of time that the episode’s evasion of an unambiguous, conventional moment of closure would be controversial. What was surprising and disturbing, he said, was the sizable portion of the audience that apparently not only expected, but actually wished, to see that closure take the form of Tony being gunned down: “Tony Soprano had been people’s alter ego. They had gleefully watched him rob, kill, pillage, lie, and cheat. They had cheered him on. And then, all of a sudden, they wanted to see him punished for all that. They wanted ‘justice.’ . . . The pathetic thing—to me—was how much they wanted his blood, after cheering him on for eight years” (quoted in Martin 184). However disingenuous it might appear to be shocked at an audience’s bloodthirstiness all of half an hour after showing them the bullet that pierces Phil Leotardo’s skull, Chase’s surprise at this reaction must be tempered by his own creation of a character who has, since the beginning of the series, been Tony’s most obsessive and deeply invested observer, while embodying exactly these

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seemingly contradictory impulses of identifying with, cheering for, and condemning him: Carmela Soprano. Indeed, everything that dismays Chase about the audience at the end of the series is already embodied in Carmela at its very beginning. In one of the pilot episode’s key scenes, Tony, following his panic attack, prepares to undergo an MRI exam.1 Carmela’s version of offering comfort, as Tony lies passive and anxious in the mouth of the device, is notably lacking in warmth, and their conversation quickly descends into bickering, with Tony countering Carmela’s accusations of infidelity with his own complaints about Father Phil’s continual presence in his home. “We all got different needs,” Tony says, to which Carmela replies, with one of the key lines that define their relationship and her character: “What’s different between you and me is, you’re going to hell when you die.” At the next moment, however, as he is pulled into the scanner, she clutches almost desperately at his hand and then waves at him as he recedes from her. What do we have here but the very image of the Sopranos audience, fondly reaching out for the mobster in the machine as we anticipate his downfall, loving him even as we rest confident in our superiority to him? If the audience is, to Chase, “pathetic” in its desire to see Tony punished, what is Carmela? By the time she utters this line, we have already learned that, whatever else she may be, she is indeed an observer of Tony. It is worth remembering that The Sopranos begins with the first meeting between Tony and Dr. Melfi, and that as he begins relating his story to her, the first indication we have that the series will not be confined to his point of view is a shift from one of his flashbacks—feeding the ducks in the pool—to Carmela and the kids watching him through the window. We’ll see her watching him in this way many times over the course of the series, often through the frame of a window; a particularly memorable instance occurs in the fifth season, when Meadow calls with the news of her engagement and Carmela, unable to restrain her tears, looks down out the bedroom window at her own estranged husband floating in the pool (“Unidentified Black Males,” 5.9). For all the flashiness, the outrageousness, of her hair and makeup and clothes, we see Carmela looking at Tony far more often than we see the reverse. The final seconds of the show’s second season are instructive: at the graduation party for Meadow in “I Dream of Jeannie Cusamano” (1.13), we see Carmela turn to look at Tony; the camera moves in over her shoulder to a tight view of him, dressed to the nines, cigar smoke wreathed around his head, eyes grim,

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exuding menace and power. Carmela may not know, as the audience does, that this is a man who has just killed his former best friend, Big Pussy, and she may not have been privy to the montage of ruined lives and piles of cash that led up to the shot, but it is essentially through her eyes that this nearly iconic image of him is framed. Tony’s awareness of Carmela’s critical, consuming gaze is perhaps signaled in part by his continual construction of narratives for that consumption—narratives of affairs ended, of murdered friends and relatives disappearing into witness protection, of money and needs safely provided for. Carmela’s reception of these narratives is highly conditional and ambivalent: to paraphrase Big Pussy, again from the pilot, she knows, but she doesn’t know. She hopes. In the long dream sequence that dominates “The Test Dream” (5.11), Tony is unable to tear himself away from a movie playing on the television in the kitchen in order to prepare for a dinner with Finn’s parents. When Carmela berates him he tells her that the TV is “so much more interesting than life,” but she counters that “it is your life.” She asks him again to get ready to go, but he silently points at the TV, and she turns to see that it is now showing the two of them preparing to leave for the dinner. They watch passively as their television selves take over the action of the dream narrative. The moment works in several ways—it is an acknowledgment of Tony’s obsession with television and film and a metafictional nod to the fact that Tony’s life really is a TV show, and it functions also as Tony’s recognition of the fact that much of his life is lived as a performance, with Carmela as both a costar and a central member of his audience. Like her fellow audience members, those Chase discusses, Carmela spends much of her time cheering Tony on and vicariously sharing in the excitement of his life and crimes. She may occasionally lament that “I think my husband has done terrible things”—and we note with silent wonder the staggeringly self-delusional “think”—but she is also capable of asking him, with great excitement, if he made a score; she is capable of warning him to keep an eye on Vito and Paulie when they deliver short envelopes; she is capable of aiding in his schemes actively, as when she takes Livia away from the retirement home Green Grove so that Tony can hide money and guns there. Carmela’s response to a noise outside her home is to grab an assault rifle, and her response to news of impending indictments is to surrender her stolen jewelry to be hidden. For all his lies, Tony is sometimes surprisingly honest with Carmela about his activities; when he realizes at the end of the first season that Junior and

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Livia have plotted against him, for example, he tells her fairly explicitly how he will seek revenge. Tony’s warning to Carmela after he helps to dispose of Richie Aprile’s body—“After all these years, don’t make me make you an accessory after the fact” (“The Knight in White Satin Armor,” 2.12)—clearly comes years too late. The considerable personal charisma that makes Tony Soprano acceptable as a television protagonist is also not lost on his wife. Like the audience, but in an even more literal way, Carmela is repeatedly beguiled by Tony, charmed, seduced, to the extent that she is even capable of saying, multiple times over the course of the series, that he is a good man. Even during their lengthy separation she refers to him repeatedly as a good father. It is surely no coincidence that Carmela’s “He’s a good man, a good father” so neatly echoes Tony’s habitual defense of himself to Melfi: “I’m a good guy, basically. I take care of my family.” At the same time that she identifies with and cheers for him, however, Carmela also seeks distance from Tony, difference, distinction; she longs to be something more than his echo. The windows she watches him through may be transparent, but they also place him within a frame and offer a physical boundary indicative of this impulse. Tony’s claim to Carmela that “You’re not just in my life, you are my life” (“Pax Soprana,” 1.6) can be heard as a statement of romantic fulfillment or, more ominously, as an expression of control and limitation, and when he has the sentiment engraved on a watch (“The Second Coming,” 6.19), it might almost be taken as a symbol of her bondage to him (little wonder that she will, before the end of the episode, throw the watch back in his face). Her resistance to being completely subsumed within his identity is most frequently verbal; although she often tells others that he is a good man, she just as often tells him that she is tired of his bullshit. She seeks her own identity and her own empowerment in many ways over the course of the series, but they are almost always limited by the scope of Tony’s world. The spec house she builds as an expression of independence is financed with his money, licensed by his corrupt influence with the inspector; it is clearly an illusion, made all the sadder by the fact that it is the face-saving price she demands for reconciling with him. The friends she lunches with and talks to are the wives and girlfriends of his fellow mobsters, who can give her no real perspective or ideas outside her own. Among them, only Angie Bonpensiero offers a model of a different kind of identity and a form of empowerment, and then only after her own husband has disappeared. Even this is no real escape, how-

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ever; Angie becomes something more than Big Pussy’s wife by essentially becoming Big Pussy, taking over his body shop and his loan-shark operation and running them only through Tony’s indulgence. Carmela practices a form of this masquerade herself, aping Tony’s gangster identity to get Meadow a letter of recommendation through quiet intimidation and unspoken threats (“Full Leather Jacket,” 2.8). It’s worth noting, too, that the few times she does succeed in imposing her will on Tony, it is often by employing his characteristics and tactics. Having promised a $50,000 gift to Columbia University, she gets it from Tony by exhibiting depression and torpor to a degree that frightens; deciding that he must leave the house, she dispatches him with screams and violence; deciding to take him back, she negotiates her price in what amounts to a sit-down at Vesuvio. Does Carmela ever have a chance to escape Tony? Does she ever really have a choice in the drawing of the tight boundaries that enclose her? To a great extent, the obstacles that confront her are practical. Her attempts to bar Tony from the house during their separation are so ineffectual that she soon gives them up entirely, and the other members of her family—notably, in this heavily patriarchal culture, her father—frequently insist on his presence. She discovers that there is apparently no lawyer in New Jersey willing and able to represent her in a divorce. Still, the most important barriers to Carmela achieving any kind of independence or selfhood outside of Tony Soprano are those she has internalized. Witness her response to the psychiatrist Dr. Krakower, who tells her, in no uncertain terms, that she must immediately leave Tony, taking only the children, and have nothing to do with his “blood money”: “You think I need to define my boundaries more clearly, keep a certain distance” (“Second Opinion,” 3.7). A “certain distance” is perhaps all that Carmela can really hope for; penned in by tradition and fear, she is almost incapable of holding the thought of actually leaving Tony in her head. Small wonder that she is more comfortable with the advice of the priest, a few episodes later (“Amour Fou,” 3.12), who tells her to stay but to live on only “the good part” of what Tony earns—as though any such distinction can be clearly drawn. It would be all too easy in these moments to see Carmela as shallowly materialistic, and indeed she is, if anything, more obsessed with money than Tony; but it might be more accurate to see this concern as one mechanism for coping with her almost total lack of any actual agency. Over the course of the entire series, probably Carmela’s only sig-

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nificant expression of real resistance and independence comes with her brief affair with Robert Wegler, A.J.’s school counselor, during her separation from Tony. There is, perhaps, the potential for an even more meaningful break in her mutual infatuation with Furio, but when he flees and abandons her, those feelings become nothing more than part of the separation struggle with Tony, something to be thrown in his face as evidence of her desperate desire to escape him. With Wegler, however, Carmela not only acts but, for once, escapes Tony’s power and knowledge, making a lie of Tony’s smug assertion to Melfi that “I’m the only man she’s ever been with” (“Unidentified Black Males,” 5.9). What looks like escape, however, becomes just another version of the same trap, as the educated, sensitive Wegler abruptly becomes a crude whiner, accusing her of using “the only weapon you have, your pussy” to help A.J. through him (“Sentimental Education,” 5.6). Shocked and hurt, Carmela falls back on rhetoric drawn straight from Tony’s world: “You better watch your step,” she tells him as she leaves. Far from offering any alternative to the life she has known, Wegler only reinforces her identification with Tony. When she next encounters him at the school (in “Cold Cuts,” 5.10), she interrupts his halting apologies to tell him “I’m going back with my husband,” an idea she has not previously articulated but does enact only a few episodes later. It is a remarkable moment for Carmela and for the series. In interviews the show’s producers point out the relative lack of “self-conscious camera work or gimmicks” (Martin 161), stating a preference for straightforward, realistic representation. Here, however, as Carmela turns and walks away from Wegler, her face stricken, the image shifts into slow motion and then briefly freezes completely before cutting to the next sequence. Such deliberately cinematic techniques are indeed rare in the show, reserved usually for moments of extreme violence or dream sequences; used here, the device makes it impossible to ignore how Carmela’s forward progress has been arrested. Realizing the futility of her attempts to break free from Tony in this world sheds a new light on Carmela’s line from the first episode: “What’s different between you and me is, you’re going to hell when you die.” That the line is significant is indicated by the fact that the characters themselves never forget it: Tony throws it back in Carmela’s face years later, during the fight that leads to their separation (“Nice thing to say to a person getting an MRI!”), tellingly immediately after she asserts, “I know you better than anybody, which is why you hate me” (“Whitecaps,” 4.13). Still later, when Tony is in a coma and on the verge of

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death, Carmela apologizes for having said it, significantly negating the sentiment by taking it upon herself: “It’s a sin and I will be judged for it” (“Join the Club,” 6.2). Despite the emphasis Carmela places here on the religious content of her remark, however, in the context of the series as a whole this aspect of the line scarcely seems to matter. Indeed, watching The Sopranos as a whole, it’s striking how marginalized religion becomes, given that many episodes in the first season—particularly “College” (1.5), with Carmela’s intense night with Father Phil—feature it as a major theme. As the series goes on, organized religion becomes almost a joke; the characters, even Carmela, may pay it lip service, but it plays no real role in their lives or thoughts. Tony’s early assertion to Melfi that he will go to heaven because he is a soldier gives way to his vague sense that there is “something” more to life than what can be seen, though the something is never articulated. By the end of the first season, it has become clear that Father Phil is not merely a “schnorer,” but a coward who fears confronting Tony over his sins even as he urges Carmela to do so, and no significant religious figure ever steps forward in the series to take his place. Instead we get Buddhist monks primarily concerned with their heating system, a priest who shakes Paulie down for a bigger cut of festival proceeds, and an inane “prayer leader” who tells Tony that dinosaurs lived alongside man. Religion may offer a set of symbols and images for the characters’ subconscious minds to play with, as in Christopher’s vision of hell as an Irish bar (“From Where to Eternity,” 2.9) or Paulie glimpsing the Virgin Mary on the stage of the Bing (“The Ride,” 6.9), but there is no indication that they give it any real consideration—not even Carmela, who offers prayers of thanks for Tony’s survival but otherwise visits church only for weddings and funerals. If anything, religion is to Carmela only what Melfi eventually realizes therapy is to Tony: a rationalization, a discourse that allows her a space to live with the evil that she does, or at least the evil she allows. Just as therapy allows Tony to believe that there are reasonable justifications for his actions, so religion allows Carmela to believe that by staying she can help him to truly become a good man, an idea that is delusional at best. What really matters about Carmela’s line in the MRI room, then, is not “you’re going to hell when you die” but rather “what’s different between you and me.” Here is Carmela’s real desire: for there to be a difference, a distinction, between her and Tony. As we have seen, she will seek this difference throughout the series, without ever really achieving

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it. If we see The Sopranos as Carmela’s story rather than Tony’s, it is a story of futility and frustration, of paths that circle back around on themselves, of continually returning to where we began. Such a reading of Carmela suggests, too, a fresh approach to the conclusion of the series; whatever else the ending of the final episode accomplishes, it certainly undercuts Carmela’s claim of difference, leaving her and Tony in the same place, awaiting the same fate, having made essentially the same choices—to the degree that they can make choices at all. Perhaps more important, reading the finale through Carmela in this way suggests a rationale for the audience’s “pathetic” desire to see Tony dead, a desire that parallels Carmela’s to see him in hell and which has its origins in the same impulse: an expression of difference, a need to believe that we are better than this man who is, in so many ways, a monster, despite our love for him. What would Tony’s death accomplish here? A moment of definitive closure, it would allow the audience to step away from our own identification with Tony, the alter ego we have cheered on for eight years; it would grant us the difference, the distinction, the privilege that Carmela seeks and is denied. If she cannot dispatch him to hell and walk away unscathed, however, no more can the audience be purged of identification with his blood; for both viewer and wife, the identification with Tony is one that cannot be so simply and cleanly contained or denied, one that, it seems, will never truly end.

Note 1. That the de facto boss of North Jersey must report for his MRI at six thirty in the morning is the first instance of the series’ quiet but insistent recognition of the bleakness and anxiety engendered by health care in contemporary America. Real horror in The Sopranos takes the form not of a bullet or a baseball bat or even a cleaver, but rather Johnny Sack’s cancer, Uncle Junior’s dementia, Tony’s grotesquely gaping stomach wound, Agent Harris’s intractable parasite. The body is endlessly corrupt and vulnerable, and there is neither comfort nor relief to be found in a mercenary medical system run by insurance companies and utterly unsympathetic to the individual.

Unpredictable but Inevitable That Last Scene Maurice Yacowar

I know, I know: David Chase has avowed that Tony does not get whacked at the end of The Sopranos. And even if we set aside the aesthetic imperative of a profitable Sopranos movie or twelve, Chase might be expected to know because he conceived the whole drama and supervised every instant, every component, across the six seasons, and in fact both wrote and directed that intriguing last episode. But, as D. H. Lawrence has exhorted us—trust the art, not the artist (14). So, returning to the art and looking closely at the last scene, and the last episode, and the last season, and, indeed, at the whole motherjumpin’ series: Does Tony Soprano get whacked? My conclusion is unequivocal: yes and no. The no is obvious because, as Chase acknowledges, we don’t see Tony get killed. We get that notorious blank screen. But neither have we seen the conception and delivery of Meadow and A.J., yet we infer those occurred because the context of the drama suggests as much. And as the later action suggests the earlier happened, the earlier action may strongly suggest what happens behind that blank screen. Context counts. A plethora of evidence in the drama and around it sets up our expectation that Tony will be killed. This architecture compels the inference that Tony dies in the diner—and probably not from indigestion. For one thing, high art and popular culture have always been obligated to assure us that crime does not pay. The hours and the per diem may make up for the lack of tenure—but crime does not pay. In life and in politics, perhaps; but in art, nope. So our killers have always been brought to Boot Hill, even when they are good guys like Shane, let alone the gangsters in

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David Chase’s primary models—The Public Enemy (1931), the Godfather trilogy (1972, 1974, 1990), and, most pertinent, Goodfellas (1990), which ends with the mortal boredom of the “schnook.” In addition, Chase has established a tightening noose around Tony. Over the course of the final-season epilogue we see Uncle Junior disintegrate, lovable Bobby killed, Silvio near-fatally wounded, Phil Leotardo squashed, A.J. flub his suicide, and even Tony’s beloved Christopher snuffed by Tony himself. In the lingo of the presidential race and the other Super Bowl, Big Old Moe Mentum has switched from Survival to Death. Chase leaves Tony’s fate ambiguous not because Tony escapes death, but because Chase—as he has throughout the six seasons—rejects closure, would rather unsettle than pacify his viewer, and again declares his independence from narrative convention. To the end more like life than like TV, this one last reticence settles nothing—and everything. Consistent with the drama’s penchant for lifelike paradox, Chase’s ending is both happy and tragic. Tony’s survival would be happy for him, but is tragic insofar as it extends and validates his moral failure and his damage to others. His death, which would perhaps not be that positive to him, would be the broadly happy ending because it would betoken justice, not just civil but poetic. The ambiguity of that blank screen admits both endings, both satisfactions. That suggests that whether Tony lives or dies is ultimately insignificant. His human failure leaves him in the state of death-in-life. This balances off Tony’s life-in-death experience at the beginning of the drama’s epilogue, season six, when his near death leads to a spiritual awakening and a harmony with the universe. Throughout the season, that harmony and the new Tony disintegrate. In the last episode, at Bobby’s wake, Paulie encapsulates this introspective ambiguity: “In the midst of death, we are in life. Huh? Or is it the other way around? . . . Either way, you’re halfway up the ass” (“Made in America,” 6.21). Perhaps Tony has to be left in limbo because he has come to personify the contemporary American pragmatic capitalist—and that just carries on. Indeed, The Sopranos could have carried Orson Welles’s working title for Citizen Kane (1941): “The American.” As the last episode title, “Made in America,” confirms, the general mix of idealistic pretense and corrupt practice, delusions, denial, and defeat, covers a considerable stretch of contemporary American culture. More-innocent national satires, the contemporary Little Miss Sunshine (2006) and the

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classic Twilight Zone (1959–1964), play respectively on the comatose Silvio’s TV and in Tony’s safe house. Tony’s failure appears in his children’s moral decline, like the fast flare and funk of A.J.’s idealism. At Bobby’s wake, A.J. contends that enlisting to “go kill some fuckin’ terrorists” would be “more noble than watching jerk-off fantasies on TV.” He echoes Tony’s immigrant idealism: “It’s like—America, this is where people came. To make it. It’s a beautiful idea. And what do they get? Blame? And come-ons for what they don’t need and can’t afford.” A.J. tells his new therapist that his SUV’s explosion felt like a cleansing. “We have to break our dependence on foreign oil,” he recites. But even as A.J. buys Arabic-lesson CDs, his idealism remains materialistic. When the army’s helicopter training could get him a job with Donald Trump, his ambition stays in the TV fantasies (Trump’s “reality” show) that he has just spurned. A.J. readily abandons his military sacrifice for a film job—which brings a sporty new BMW. This career puts A.J. on the film course that doomed Tony’s adoptive “son,” Christopher. A.J.’s film project is about a private eye who is sucked into the Internet to solve the murders of some virtual prostitutes. Chase has consistently teased the relationship between life and fiction, between actor and role. A real character’s need to solve the murder of fictional prostitutes reflects upon the conventions of fiction suspended by Chase’s open ending. Like A.J.’s, Meadow’s career—in the law—reverts to her past. She switched from medicine when her father’s arrests proved that “the state can crush the individual.” Echoing Carmela’s denial—which she used to reject—Meadow blames Tony’s arrests on anti-Italian prejudice, as if his guilt were irrelevant. As well, she moves from her volunteer work defending oppressed minorities, such as blacks and Muslims, into her fiancé’s big law firm—where she will start at $170,000—which defends a politician against corruption charges involving bid rigging, bagmen, and whores. In contrast, her bulimic classmate Hunter (played by David Chase’s daughter) has straightened out and is in second-year medicine. That is, Hunter escapes her dysfunction while the healthier Meadow relapses into her father’s. The other supporting characters, trapped in their selves, confirm the death-in-life pattern. Janice tries to inveigle Uncle Junior out of his missing money and claims improvement: “I had therapy. I’m a good mother. I put Ma and all her warped shit behind me. . . . Not that I get any thanks for it.” Within a breath her Livia element rebounds. So, too,

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Uncle Junior doesn’t recognize Janice or Tony, but he proudly remembers “this thing of ours”: “I was involved in that?” As patterns persist, A.J.’s new therapist is a WASP Melfi who crosses her long, lovely legs and evokes both Tony’s old claim—an unloving mother who “was a borderline personality”—and Carmela’s denial: “Maybe the army’d be great for [A.J.], if there wasn’t a war going on.” In fact, the only major character to change is the once-virtuous Agent Harris of the FBI—as he sinks into Tony. By the old proverb, whoever touches pitch is defiled. After the FBI surveillance protects the Sopranos at Bobby’s funeral, Harris fingers Tony’s nemesis Phil Leotardo. Harris reacts to Phil’s death as if he were on Tony’s team: “Damn, we’re gonna win this thing.” Big Pussy Bonpensiero came to see himself as an FBI agent; Harris has turned Soprano. As he betrays his wife with his colleague-mistress, he betrays his colleagues with his support of Tony. The scene in which Tony leaves Paulie sunning himself outside Satriale’s replays the ending of “House Arrest” (2.11), where Agent Harris drops by to introduce his new partner to Tony. Paulie’s antagonism toward the cat that stares at Christopher’s photo coheres with his superstition-based religion. To his claim he saw the Virgin Mary at the Bada Bing (presumably after hours), Tony shows limited support: “Why didn’t you say something? Fuck strippers, we coulda had a shrine. Sold holy water in gallon jugs, we coulda made millions.” Paulie’s reluctant acceptance of his promotion—“I live but to serve you, my liege”—raises the suspicion that he could (again) betray Tony. Tony’s soft spot for the stray cat—an antithetical reminder of his ducks in the pilot episode—and his pause to enjoy the air as he rakes around his pool recall his postsurgery spirituality earlier in the season. Season six traces his relapse into selfish brutishness and his consequent isolation. Perhaps Tony’s last emblem is his last supper’s onion ring— flavorful but unhealthy, discomfiting, and hollow at the core. Indeed, as the Sopranos swallow the whole ring sans bite or chew, it suggests a profane deep-fry communion. The closing restaurant scene feels ominous. As we get Tony’s perspective on the bystanders we taste the crime boss’s restless fear. They are the “schnooks” to which Harry Hill, the turncoat hero of Goodfellas, was reduced, so even as innocents they embody Tony’s dread. Whereas Bobby’s wake was at Vesuvio’s, the Holsten’s diner suggests cheap comfort, not class. It images Tony’s decline from Artie Bucco’s restaurant— and his Charmaine-induced self-realization. As Little Italy is “now

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reduced to one row of shops and cafes,” the diner is another comedown, like Carmela’s refuge here, an old house reeking with the previous owners’ urine. Tony takes a booth from which he can watch the door—and not just for his family’s separate arrivals. In a medley of metaphors, from the tabletop jukebox he plays Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’.” Journey sings off the end of Tony’s, and Chase’s, journey. The lyrics point to the ambiguous end: “Some will win, some will lose, some were born to sing the blues. Oh, the movie never ends. It goes on and on and on and on.” As Tony scans the juke, the song’s flip side explicitly assigns the ending to the viewer: “Any Way You Want It.” Tony also lingers over Heart’s “Where Will You Run To?” and “Magic Man” and Tony Bennett’s “I’ve Gotta Be Me” and—for Tony—the synonymous “A Lonely Place.” As the titles summarize Tony’s condition and his perspective on the other diners, the very last shot, the no-life blackout, signifies his last view. That makes it the reverse of the episode’s opening shot, in which Tony wakes up—that is, resumes consciousness—in the safe house. At the end he goes into the long sleep. Although A.J. cites Tony’s valediction from the end of “I Dream of Jeannie Cusamano” (1.13)—“Focus on the good times”—we project Tony’s educated suspicion onto the truck driver in a USA cap, the strong young man with a date, the black duo who enter last. Even the man with three boy scouts disturbingly recalls the customers at the hobby shop where Bobby is killed (“The Blue Comet,” 6.20). Most important, the man who walks past the Sopranos to the bathroom behind Tony recalls Michael Corleone’s Family initiation, when he retrieves a gun from the toilet box to avenge his father in The Godfather. The “Members Only” jacket repeats the title of the opening episode in Chase’s final season (“Members Only,” 6.1) after the jacket Eugene Pontecorvo wore when he killed a man in a diner like this one. Tall, dark, and lanky, the man resembles Eugene, who killed himself when Tony wouldn’t release him from the mob. Earlier, Eugene’s wife said someone should “put a bullet in [Tony’s] head”—perhaps setting up a contract fulfilled now. Meadow’s difficulty in parking her car establishes a suspense we assume is life or death. As Alfred Hitchcock contended, dramatic power lies not in the explosion, but in its expectation. Will she get there in time to die or late enough to be saved? The last words, as Tony sees someone approach—maybe Meadow, maybe not—are Steve Perry’s, his song interrupted at “Don’t stop.” But as art—whether a song or an epic TV

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drama—can’t control life, the show and, I suggest, Tony’s life both do stop. We’re deprived of Perry’s last “believin’.” Reading the blank screen as Tony’s death also fulfills Bobby’s remark about assassinations in “Soprano Home Movies” (6.13): “You probably don’t hear it when it happens, right?” In “Stage 5” (6.14), when Gerry Torciano is killed, “He did not hear a thing” and didn’t realize anything “until it was over.” That’s how Bobby himself got it (“The Blue Comet,” 6.20), how Phil gets it here, and, by extension, Tony now. Further, this is one of only three Sopranos episodes without music over the end credits. Where “Full Leather Jacket” (2.8) ended on the beep of the wounded Christopher’s life-support system, Tony at the end has no life support. “Members Only” ends with Tony shot by Junior, unconscious, with no sound over the end credits. The endings of the first and last episodes of Chase’s epilogue take their cue from Hamlet: “The rest is silence.” Nevertheless, all this I hope persuasive evidence remains surmise. We don’t know Tony has been killed because we haven’t seen it. The conclusion spares or deprives us of the sensation, thrill or more cerebral satisfaction, of his death, as Chase denied us Melfi’s vengeance against her rapist (in “Employee of the Month,” 3.4). Because we have suspended our moral rigor to cheer Tony on all these years, Chase won’t give us any easy way out. This reticence is a moral imperative. Knowing Tony is dead could give us false confidence that such unfathomable evil has been controlled. However directed his conclusion, Chase leaves Tony in limbo for the same reason Shakespeare leaves Iago alive and silent at the end of Othello—because such massive evil remains a living danger. We may assume he’s dead, but assurance lies elsewhere. As John Allemang put it, “For closure, look to M*A*S*H or Friends / But Tony’s torment never ends.” And yet . . . Tony has to be killed. It can’t be over till the fat Soprano croaks.

No Justice for All The FBI, Cut to Black, and David Chase’s Final Hit Douglas L. Howard

And so it ends, not with a bang or a whimper, but with an order of onion rings, a few tense moments in a restaurant, some sentimental Journey music, and one jarring cut to black that left us all scrambling for our remotes and wondering whether our televisions had cruelly cut out at the fatal moment. In television series history, it was, and perhaps always will be, the night that the lights went out, the night that David Chase threw some horrific existential void out onto our screens and dared us to make sense of it, driving so many to contemplate taking peyote as they replayed the final sequence on their Tivos, if only for a moment to say, “I get it.” One of the most intriguing things about the end of the series, though, is where our focus as an audience was and where, perhaps, it continues to be. Victoria O’Donnell, in her 2007 book Television Criticism, has classified the show as a family drama, yet, approaching that final episode, no one wondered whether Tony and his wife and kids would get a chance to sit down to one last meal or whether onion rings would be on the menu. Rather, the big question on everyone’s mind was: Will Tony get whacked, or will he go to jail? In his interview with Brett Martin not long after the conclusion, David Chase himself seemed shocked to realize that his viewers wanted some kind of “justice” (184), poetic, legal, or otherwise. Although he may well have been playing the enigmatic artiste for Martin, I think that his shock was legitimate; in this regard, I would argue that justice was the last thing the series could ever

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give us and that any attempt at finality on the show would be nothing more than a shot in the dark. If we were looking for justice, probably the first place that we would turn would be the FBI. One of the possibilities that was offered by viewers as the series worked its way toward the final episode was that Tony, in a bitter mob war with New York boss Phil Leotardo, would be forced to surrender to longtime FBI foil Agent Harris. Perhaps the best of these scenarios came from David Bianculli, who, in his June 8 New York Daily News column prior to the last episode, envisioned the following: “Phil . . . makes it personal and goes after Tony’s family. [After] his family is threatened Tony [goes] to the federal agent who tipped him off about Phil and enter[s], with his family, the witness protection program. . . . Finally living up to his name and the show’s title, Soprano sings. And his swimming pool has been drained, so the final shot can have the ducks flying home to nothing” (“‘Sopranos’ Swan Song”). Another theory was that Tony would get arrested, a theory that some viewers believed was implied in the episode itself. From Tony’s stressed-out conversation with Mink over hamburgers and ketchup at the Bing to his admission to Carmela in the final scene that flipped mobster Carlo Gervasi would be testifying, poster “lanskyspe” on Alan Sepinwall’s All TV blog was convinced that, “ultimately, [Tony was] going to go to prison.” Although these endings might have satisfied the initial desire for closure, that satisfaction probably would have been short lived. Within the scope of the show, any conclusion involving an FBI victory (as opposed to Harris’s new definition of one) is less than plausible and hardly justified. Throughout the series’ six-season run, the feds consistently are portrayed as fools, clowns, and buffoons. They are the butt of some of the show’s most comic moments, from Tony telling Harris that he can keep any spare change that he finds during a search of his couch cushions in “The Legend of Tennessee Moltisanti” (1.8), to Big Pussy’s bizarre Stockholm-syndrome relationship with Skip Lipari in season two, to the botched bugging of Tony’s basement in “Mr. Ruggerio’s Neighborhood” (3.1), to Adriana La Cerva’s horrific projectile vomiting scene in “No Show” (4.2). Every lead that they ever have dries up. Every witness that they ever have dies or is killed—Jimmy Altieri, Fabian Petrulio, Big Pussy, Jack Massarone, Adriana, and so on. Even Ray Curto, who looks like he just might be the one to bring Tony and the rest of the DiMeo crime family down, drops dead in Agent Sanseverino’s car at the start of season six. (Could their luck be any worse?) Regardless of

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how concerned Tony seems to be at the end, given their track record, Carlo clearly has more to be worried about. The FBI rarely catch a real break that puts Tony in any danger, and, when they do, the series consistently gives you the sense that, somehow, they will screw it up. As Maurice Yacowar describes them in The Sopranos on the Couch, they are, in many ways, another “gang like Tony’s,” except “not as effective or smart” (126).1 The final season only served to drive this point home, that the feds are no better (and often much worse) than the mobsters themselves, threatening and extorting informants to the point of suicide or homicide, positioning themselves through parking-lot negotiations, cutting deals to get what they really want in the service of an agenda that is constantly changing.2 As Agent Harris and the FBI let up on the mob to chase down terrorists (which, I must admit, as a viewer, did not make me sleep any better at night), Tony quickly becomes the lesser evil, a necessity that Harris and the bureau can tolerate in the service of some illusory greater good. By the final episode, Harris is revealed to be just as morally questionable and corrupt as Tony himself, a veritable “friend of the family” for all of his FBI credentials and seeming dedication to law and order.3 Not only is he shown fighting with his wife on the phone and cheating on her with another officer (apparently for information on Phil Leotardo, no less), but he also helps Tony resolve his long-standing feud with the New York boss by passing on a lead as to Phil’s whereabouts and essentially becoming an accessory to his hit. In one of the highlights of the finale, Harris perks up when a fellow agent tells him that Phil “got popped” and gleefully, bizarrely, conceives that they might just “win this thing” (6.21), a reaction reportedly inspired by the real-life exploits of FBI agent Lindley DeVecchio.4 Whereas Tony was once the sole focus of his investigations and the “bad guy” that he wanted to bring down, Harris has now become seduced into believing that Tony has somehow become one of the “good guys” (or, at least, the devil he knows) and that Phil’s grisly, brain-splattering death at the gas station is a victory in disguise. So, in this context, would it have been realistic to believe that Harris and company could, at the last minute, find a way to outsmart Tony and come across some kind of evidence that would put him away for good? Or would it have been consistent with the framework of the show’s narrative or with the character of the FBI as portrayed on the show to

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believe that Tony, so long a bitter hater of rats and informants, would, in the end, give Harris the bungler a lifetime’s worth of Mafia information to save himself and his family, and that these Keystone Kops would do some legitimate good with it? Would good have won out over evil and would it have been justice or justified if the feds, who were responsible for as many, if not more, deaths than Tony and his crew over the course of the series, had shut down the Bada Bing and taken the remaining family members to task with some punitive prison term? (Inasmuch as Chase was extremely aware of and sensitive to other films in the genre, Tony turning state’s evidence and going into witness protection essentially would have been Martin Scorsese’s ending to Goodfellas [1990] all over again.) Given the complexity of law and order as Chase presented it over the course of the series, the answer to all these questions has to be a resounding “Fuhgedaboutit.” Since we could not and would not find justice in the offices of the FBI, the only other possibility—one that was a matter of much speculation before the ending and that has continued to be the subject of much debate since the series “went dark”—was that Tony would be killed: yet another casualty in a vicious mob war or, as some believe he was, the target of a carefully orchestrated hit by one of his own crew or a rival family member. For all the compelling evidence that might lead us to the conclusion that Tony is killed in that restaurant—Bobby Bacala’s speculation about the nature of death at the start of the final episode, the point-of-view film shots in the restaurant, the various “Members Only” references connected to his potential killer, and the sudden cut to black at the end—the skeptic in me still comes back to the incontrovertible fact that we never see it. We never see someone draw a gun. We never hear a gunshot. We never hear a scream. We never see a body. We never see it. Perhaps this will remain one of those great philosophical conundrums along the lines of the proverbial tree falling in the forest: If a hit man goes into a restaurant and we never see the hit, does the mob boss get whacked? Returning to his response to Martin in its entirety, Chase himself had this to say about the audience’s reaction to that final scene in Holsten’s: “The way I see it is that Tony Soprano had been people’s alter ego. They had gleefully watched him rob, kill, pillage, lie, and cheat. They had cheered him on. And then, all of a sudden, they wanted to see him punished for all that. They wanted ‘justice.’ They wanted to see his brains splattered on the wall. I thought that was disgusting, frankly”

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(184).5 Chase suggested, then, that the audience’s call for Tony’s death at the end completely conflicted with their previous identification with him and that this notion of “justice” and punishment was not in line with what he ultimately gave them. But let’s play it out. If Tony was murdered that night, what would have been the message? Would Chase’s point have been that violence begets violence? This seems like a rather mundane statement to take six seasons to make, and, if we had not gotten this already from seeing Sonny Corleone gunned down at the tollbooth or Goodfellas’ Tommy DeVito shot in the head as “revenge for Billy Batts,” we probably would have known it long before Bobby Bacala went into the hobby shop to buy a Blue Comet or Patsy and Silvio tried to drive away from the Bada Bing. Would Chase’s point have been that crime does not pay or that it leads to no good? Based upon the lifestyle that Tony and some of his criminal brethren lead, the implication is that crime clearly does pay, from the lavish trips to Las Vegas and Atlantic City, to Tony’s sprawling mansion in New Jersey, to his SUVs and his luxury boat, The Stugots. And not all of the criminals that die on the show or are taken out of action meet with a grisly end. For all his crimes, Uncle Junior is left with senile dementia. Gigi Cestone has a heart attack on the toilet in season three’s “He Is Risen” (3.8). Johnny Sack dies of lung cancer in the final season, and Jackie Aprile Sr. dies of intestinal cancer in season one. Do their deaths leave us with the message that crime is to blame, that it does not pay, that it leads to no good, or that justice has been served? Even Tony himself is not “completely evil.” Part of the genius of The Sopranos is that Tony’s character is fleshed out in such rich and detailed terms. Although he is indeed a killer, a thief, a liar, a cheat, and a sociopath, there are also those moments in the show when we see other sides to him, moments of strong sympathy and humanity. (Speaking to this issue, James Gandolfini argues that Tony’s “really not that different from anybody else” [Martin 65].) Consider Tony crying over the family of ducks and, symbolically, over the future of his family in the pilot, or season four’s “Pie-O-My” (4.5), in which he takes care of the sick racehorse when Ralphie does not. Or even look at “The Second Coming” (6.19) in the final season, in which Tony saves A.J. from suicide and then comforts him by the side of the pool (“You’re all right, baby,” he says, as he cradles the sobbing youth). Glen Gabbard agrees that “Tony is capable of genuine concern,” as evidenced by his attention to Melfi after her rape or the “fatherly role” that he takes with the Bada Bing

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dancer Tracee (32), and that these moments account for “the audience’s continued involvement with [him]” (35). From his sessions with Melfi and the portrait that we get of his childhood, there is also the sense that Tony Soprano the criminal was literally “made,” not born, in America. In “Funhouse” (2.13), Melfi explains that Livia must have “inflicted serious psychic injuries [upon him] that are still there.” Wouldn’t this complexity, as well as the loss that it would pose to his family, make the prospect of Tony’s violent death a difficult thing to accept or witness? Consider this in light of his near death at the start of season six. We even see how Tony’s death might affect “both” of his families, from Paulie to A.J. Tony’s survival here seems rather odd if Chase intended to turn around and kill him ten episodes later. Regardless of how far-fetched or implausible some of the explanations of the ending may be, the impassioned responses of these Sopranos “closure junkies,” as Paul Levinson has called them (see his essay in this volume), may well stem from some deeper psychological sources. As Chase told Martin, the “need for finality exists in human beings” (184), although he also suggested that this may be something of a childish response, one that we need to dismiss as we engage the adult world and involve ourselves in the adult viewing experience of The Sopranos. Levinson, however, does not limit the desire for closure to children; neither does Frank Kermode, who similarly argues that this desire serves some greater personal service. “For to make sense of our lives from where we are, as it were, stranded in the middle,” Kermode maintains, “we need fictions of beginnings and fictions of ends, fictions which unite beginning and end and endow the interval between them with meaning” (190). Whether the series ultimately was a morality tale, many viewers both wanted and needed “the sense of an ending” specifically because, on some level, it would give the series (and, by association, their lives) some larger, more universal meaning and satisfy some psychological craving, hidden or otherwise, that had kept them watching all along. As fictional as it all may have been, then, the meaning for these viewers was not just TV; it was real life. With the ending of The Sopranos, though, the desire for closure was not just about an ending or a final note, but, specifically, about justice, and this desire bears further investigation and explanation. Why would people be so preoccupied with that particular kind of conclusion? O’Donnell believes that “television viewers make what they watch fit their own lives and experiences” (8). I would agree with this to a degree.

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In many ways, we watch television to find our own values and attitudes reaffirmed on some level, conscious or otherwise. Television, though, is also escapism, and, in other ways, we watch to get away, to lose ourselves in someone else’s character, problems, and experiences. As television, from cable to the broadcast networks, has more explicitly catered to our dark sides and found unique and more overt ways to tap into our more unusual desires and fantasies, however unsavory, sadistic, immoral, or perverse they may be, this escapism has become more extreme and perhaps even more disturbing. (How else can we explain the success of shows like The Moment of Truth [Fox, 2008–2009]?) In its absurdity, television has become the contemporary equivalent of what the critic Mikhail Bakhtin described as the carnival in the Middle Ages: “that temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and the established order,” that comic expression of folk culture that “marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions” (10). In watching the “festivities” on The Sopranos, we can watch justice gone awry and vicariously participate in and laugh at it, just as we might participate in and laugh at moments like Christopher’s intervention, Adriana’s vomit, the FBI warnings on the bootleg DVDs that Tony and his family watch, or even Agent Harris’s bizarre response to the news of Phil Leotardo’s death. (In the physical examples of excess and obesity, the preoccupation with food and eating, the various incidents of indigestion and illness, and the numerous physical and verbal attacks upon body parts and bodies, we also have carnivalesque moments of the Bakhtinian grotesque body.) And, like Harris, we can root for Tony, for all of his criminal activities and psychological toxicity, from the safety of our living rooms as he tries to manage his “families” and outwit his enemies without the risk of federal prosecution for racketeering. Terry Eagleton, however, maintains that carnival is not an unsanctioned expression of excess. Rather, it “is a licensed affair in every sense, a permissible rupture in hegemony, a contained popular blow-off” that admittedly exists amid the backdrop and the value system of the establishment (148), and so, while we watch, and, on some occasions, even endorse the murder and “Mayham” that we witness on this show and others that have followed in its “wake” (such as Deadwood [HBO, 2004– 2006], 24 [Fox, 2001–2010], Rescue Me [FX, 2004–], The Shield [FX, 2002–2008], and Dexter [Showtime, 2006–]), we still have an expectation in the end that the other, older order, the one that we can trust and understand and believe in, however illusory and predictable it may

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be, will reassert itself. After all is said and done, we want to believe, in the words of the 1980s band a-ha, that “the sun always shines on TV.” On that night in June (in the United States), in spite of all of the robbing, killing, pillaging, lying, and cheating that we had watched and frequently endorsed, many of us still had an expectation (and perhaps still maintain one) of a more morally defined, black-and-white order and believed that the carnival would come to an end, that Tony’s violent, sociopathic lifestyle would catch up with him, that what Ellen Willis has called our “predatory lust and aggression” (8) would be reined in, and that, regardless of the aesthetic continuity of the series or the development of the characters up to this point, some universal justice would finally be served through his death, the ultimate punishment. Chase perhaps gave us some sense of his “world view” in his subsequent discussion of Melfi’s rape in Martin’s Sopranos book. In “Employee of the Month” (3.4), after police botch her assailant’s arrest, she finds out who her attacker is and where he works. All that remains is for Melfi to tell Tony what happened and then let the fearsome rottweiler do his work. As Chase explained, at this point, “if you’re raised on a steady diet of Hollywood movies and network television, you start to think, Obviously there’s going to be some moral accounting here. . . . That’s not the way the world works” (181). Rather, Melfi keeps quiet, the rapist goes away, and Tony never knows. Unlike in Hollywood movies and network television, then, in The Sopranos, justice is never cut-and-dried or final and frequently is harder to find than a mob boss going to the mattresses. For all the capos and criminals who degenerate and deteriorate and for all the hot-tempered thugs who die violently, there are always others who rise up to take their places. Crime and vice, as opposed to law and order, is the one constant, a hydra always ready to replenish itself in the service of the whole. Tony moves up with the death of Jackie Aprile, and Phil’s death is predicated on arrangements for his replacement in New York. So, even if Tony died that night, in a bloody haze of bullets and onion-ring batter, and even if his family was forced to watch as his dead body slumped over the table, given what Chase had shown us over the course of the series, we could not turn off the television, pull the covers up to our necks, and turn out the light secure in the knowledge that the bad man was no more. Instead, the carnival did not end, and the establishment did not reassert itself. We never got the satisfaction that we might have been looking for, and the emotional, impassioned reactions to the ambiguity of the

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void that we did get from critics and viewers perhaps betray the uncomfortable nature of what remains:6 the disturbing possibility that the sometimes sympathetic criminal, after all his wrongdoing, sat down and ate his dinner (albeit amid the anxiety of a roomful of potential threats), that the guilty go free and live their lives in the world around us, that “justice” and “accountability” are just words with no absolute meaning. (In this regard, the possibility of law and order on television, where the criminals are caught, arrested, and punished in the span of an hour, may be the real “carnival,” and the ethical chaos, disorder, and uncertainty may be more indicative of the “establishment,” the norm.) In those few seconds of darkness, we may have seen something a little too close to home, a dangerous kind of reality that dare not speak its name and that we dare not think of, a world in which the larger moral order often does not make sense. It just goes on and on and on and on. At the start of season four, during a therapy session with Melfi, Tony, in an ironic way, may well have told us how it was all going to end. Reflecting on his future in “For All Debts Public and Private” (4.1), he notes, “There’s two endings for a guy like me. High-profile guy. Dead, or in the can. Big percent of the time.” From these two traditional mob endings, however, he offers an alternative: “There’s a third way to wrap it up. You rely only on family.” And although this was not exactly how he meant it, family is what we got at the end of that final episode, Tony Soprano and his wife and children sitting down to one more meal and talking about life. But maybe family is not your cup of tea, and maybe “cut to black” is about as annoying to you as an orange tabby staring at a picture on the wall. Maybe it does not meet with your sense of fair play. In that case, I would direct your attention to what, for me, is Chase’s truer statement on the future of the Sopranos and organized crime, the final episode of season two, “Funhouse” (2.13). As that episode comes to a close, the camera moves through several different shots, from a garbage truck collecting, to an adult movie theater, to the empty Webistics offices, to the illegal calling-card sales, to card games and piles of cash, to the ocean rolling in on the shore, the ocean that has now become the final resting place of poor, traitorous Big Pussy. While Meadow enjoys her lavish graduation party at the family’s palatial mansion and Tony enjoys a long puff on his cigar, the mob benefits from all of these enterprises in progress, and there are signs of its work all over, from shore to city. Its machinery is persistent and perpetual, “open twenty-four hours,” as the Rolling Stones remind us in the background. Regardless of what

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happened to Tony that night in the restaurant, this is the truth that, in the larger scheme of things, remains beyond the darkness, and this is the truth that, on an aesthetic and thematic level, does The Sopranos the most justice.

Notes 1. See also my own essay on the FBI, “Tasting Brylcreem.” 2. In the season opener, “Members Only” (6.1), hapless Gene Pontecorvo becomes yet another casualty in the ongoing war between the feds and the mob, as neither allows him to take his aunt’s inheritance and move down to Florida. In spite of both killing for the mob and ratting for the FBI like Big Pussy, Gene is told that his dream of getting out is a “no-go” on both sides. Unable to serve two masters, he instead chooses to hang himself in his basement. 3. In a far cry from his attempt to search Tony’s couch cushions or bug his basement earlier in the series, Harris, during their parking-lot meeting at the opening of the episode, even greets Tony with the more familiar question, “What’s up, my friend?” (6.21). 4. In a Daily News column on DeVecchio’s trial in the fall of 2007, Scott Shifrel and Helen Kennedy note that “‘Sopranos’ creator David Chase lifted [the agent’s comment about a mob hit] for the finale of his HBO series, putting it in the mouth of a G-man who had become too close to Tony Soprano.” The case against DeVecchio was dismissed, however, after key witness Linda Schiro’s testimony about his involvement with the mob was discredited. 5. Mark McGuire demonstrated exactly the kind of sentiment that Chase mentioned in his interview: “Tony Soprano must die. . . . Sorry, big fella: We love you, but that’s the rule. Not to be blasphemous, but you have to pay for our sins.” 6. Salon.com’s Heather Havrilesky, for example, concluded that “Chase played us like a grand piano, dragging out every suspenseful trick and visual reference in the book,” while poster “Christian” on Maureen Ryan’s blog The Watcher argued that the debate itself “is ridiculous. Tony is dead. That’s the point!! . . . The ending was brilliant and NOT subject to interpretation . . . . Where’s the controversy? There isn’t any. R[est] I[n] P[eace].”

The Sopranos and the Closure Junkies Paul Levinson

In the minutes after the sudden darkness at the end of The Sopranos, I struggled to make sense of what I had seen. Actually, that struggle lasted hours, days, months . . . years. In some diminished form, it’s still going on. And perhaps “struggle” is not the best word, because I’ve enjoyed this process. Like all fine intellectual jousts, there’s fun to be had in the clash of competing possibilities and theories, especially when they continue for years, and what I suspect will be decades and longer. It was an ending like no other. On the one hand, nothing happened, life was apparently just going on for most of the characters, just as it had been for the six seasons of the series. On the other hand, maybe that was the most powerful ending of all—which, if so, would mean that something profound did happen. Not everyone saw this in the ending. Some thought that something palpable and real had happened, had been clearly and explicitly signified, with the screen cut to silent black. They were sure that the guy who went to the bathroom had emerged with a gun in his hand, a hit in his heart, and shot Tony dead at the table. They were sure that the sudden darkness was Tony’s brain on bullets. But what was such surety based upon? We in fact had not seen Tony shot, had not seen a gun in the bathroom guy’s hand, had not even seen him emerge from the men’s room. Fans of surety countered that the last images before the darkness were what Tony was seeing in the diner, so the sudden darkness was Tony being shot but not seeing it coming. This was buttressed by further evidence: Tony and Bobby talking about not seeing “it [death] coming” in “Soprano Home Movies” (6.13), Tony

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flashing back on that (after Bobby has been killed in the toy train store) in “The Blue Comet” (6.20), and, just for good measure, Tony getting shot by Uncle Junior at the end of “Members Only” (6.1) (the presumed shooter in the diner, the guy who went to the men’s room, wore a “Members Only” jacket). But this is really supposition and logical analysis, not evidence— that is, the events described did indeed occur in The Sopranos, but they are not proof that Tony was killed. Rather, they are evidence to support a conclusion, reached by logic, for which there is no evidence. And although the conclusion that Tony was killed is supported by one train of reasoning, there is another train with a big piece of evidence—namely, that we did not see Tony being killed—that supports the conclusion that Tony was not killed at the end of that scene. So why are some viewers so positive that Tony was killed? Welcome to the world of the closure junkies. This is a world that at one time or another includes everyone, all of us. Real life often does not have definitive endings. So we crave them in our re-creations, our recreations, our fiction. We may desperately desire a happy or a sad ending, a villain to get his just desert, a broken heart to find true love, but what we want even more than that is some kind of ending that we can hang our hat on, wrap our minds around, an ending that lets us exhale. That’s what fiction is supposed to be about, isn’t it? Perhaps. But fiction also can sometimes satisfy, and satisfy even more deeply, by not resolving much of anything, by obliging us to keep holding our breath. There are precedents for this. Consider, for example, Frank R. Stockton’s short story “The Lady, or the Tiger?,” first published in 1882, which went on to become an all-time classic. A suitor for the princess of a kingdom is put on trial by the king. He is put in an arena and asked to pick one of two doors. Behind one is a lady, behind the other is a tiger. If he picks the door with the lady, he will be set free and will live, but will be obliged to marry the lady. If he goes for the door with the tiger, he’ll be ripped to shreds. The suitor, of course, does not know what is behind either of the doors. He loves the princess, so choosing the door with the lady may leave him heartbroken, but at least still alive. The princess knows what is behind each door. She loves the suitor. She gives him a signal indicating which door he should choose. If he chooses the lady, the princess will have to see the man she loves spend his life with another woman. If he chooses the tiger, the princess will see him die.

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He opens the door, and—the story ends right there. Much like The Sopranos’ cut to black. So has David Chase given us a “Sopranos, or the Tiger” ending, in which he’s the princess—he knows what’s behind the door of darkness—and we are all suitors in the arena, trying to guess Chase’s intentions, what was in Chase’s mind? Unlike the princess, however, Chase is not clearly pointing to any door, and unlike the suitor, we may have more choices than two for the characters of The Sopranos, the multiplicity of choices that come with life going on as usual. Also unlike the suitor, we—or our surrogate questioners in the media—can ask David Chase what he meant to convey. Or, we can scour what he said prior to the ending of The Sopranos, and see if we can find any clues. The most we have gotten from Chase, as of this writing, is in an interview by Alan Sepinwall, published June 11, 2007, a day after the sudden black ending. “I have no interest in explaining, defending, reinterpreting, or adding to what is there,” Chase said—adding that, for “anybody who wants to watch it, it’s all there” (“David Chase Speaks!”). This seems like a pretty clear refusal to provide any clues, yet the closure junkies have interpreted the “all there” as a pointer to the “Soprano Home Movies,” “The Blue Comet,” and “Members Only” “evidence.” But what if Chase someday says, definitively, that Tony was not killed— would believers in his demise believe Chase? Or, what if Chase clearly says the opposite, that his intention with the cut to black was to show Tony’s death? If you are reading this essay, should such a definitive statement by Chase be more than enough to warrant your putting it down right now? I. A. Richards and his approach to literary interpretation would say no, and also that Chase was wise to refrain from offering any “reinterpretation” of his ending. In Richards’s Practical Criticism (1929), he cautions against what he calls the “intentional fallacy” in literary analysis—that is, the error of seeking the author’s testimony about his or her intentions in a narrative, or, in plainer terms, asking the author what he or she meant to convey in a work as a means of uncovering the true meaning of a work. To use a celebrated example from long after Richards published his book: John Lennon denied that “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” was about LSD, even though it was taken to be an LSD anthem when it was first released on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967. Lennon said the title came to him when he heard his young son Julian talking about a picture he had drawn in school—it’s

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about Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, John said Julian had said (see Sheff). Should we believe John? More important, Richards would say, is that it does not matter what John Lennon’s intentions were in writing this song—what counts is the listener’s objective perception. John Lennon’s murder in 1980 means we will never get a chance to ask John for another answer. But in 2004, Paul McCartney told the BBC that it’s “pretty obvious” that Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds was inspired by LSD (“Sir Paul Reveals Beatles Drug Use”). Should we believe Lennon or McCartney? Richards’s advice that we should believe neither, but instead interpret the song on the basis of its “text” rather than its author, seems well taken. The testimony of David Chase, then, whatever it might be now or in the future, cannot save the conclusion of The Sopranos from being unfinished business. Although the closure junkie in all of us might want something different, the abrupt ending of The Sopranos seems more in league with “The Lady, or the Tiger?” or Hamlet’s famous, many-sided, ambiguous last line—“The rest is silence”—where the “rest” could mean respite, sleep, or remainder, and the “silence” could mean quiet or death. Silence, like darkness, is vastly more open than death. It certainly admits death as one of its possibilities, but along with the infinity of other possibilities of life. Yes, Tony might have died in that ending, may well have been hit by someone other than the Members Only guy a few minutes after the ending, or he may live another forty or fifty years. That opening, that silence, that darkness, that ambiguity is what Marshall McLuhan had in mind when he talked about “hot” and “cool” media. Hot media instruct us, inform us, impose their message upon us. Cool media are more blurry and allow us to fill in the blanks and the details, to become in part the authors of the story, much as Richards finds the ultimate meaning of a narrative in its reader (and now, viewer), not its author. So the rest of The Sopranos is not only silent or uncertain, but will be filled with debate as we continue to ponder and, to some degree, even create its meaning. And to make one last point, I would suggest that—

Acknowledgments Thanks to Al Auster for help with organization of the Sopranos conference at Fordham University; Bob Milang for facilitating arrangements for the interview with Dominic Chianese; and Tina, Simon, and Molly for great conversations as we watched The Sopranos at home. —Paul Levinson Thanks to David Lavery and Paul Levinson for all of their work in putting the Wake together at Fordham and bringing this book together for the University Press of Kentucky. Thanks to the authors for all of their insightful contributions, to the conference as well as to this collection. And, finally, thanks to Jennifer and Carolyn for all of their love and support. —Doug Howard Thanks to all our contributors for their excellent essays. Thanks to Gary Edgerton for his help in securing a publisher for the third volume of my Sopranos trilogy; to Paul Levinson for giving the Sopranos Wake a home; to Doug Howard for his hard work on the conference and this book; to Barbara Villez for her special contribution; and to Janet and Kim for their advice in the run-up to the Wake and for enduring the inquisition. And thanks, of course, to my family: Rachel, Sarah (who contributed to this book), and Joyce, with whom I watched every episode. —David Lavery Thanks to actor Dominic Chianese for agreeing to a “sit-down” and allowing us to talk with him about his work on the show. —Paul, Doug, and David

Appendix A Characters A comprehensive, but not exhaustive, list of significant Sopranos characters and (in parentheses) the actors who played them. Jimmy Altieri (Joseph Badalucco Jr.) Annalisa (Sofia Milos) Perry Annunziata (Louis Gross) Giacomo “Jackie” Aprile (Michael Rispoli) Giacomo “Jackie Jr.” Aprile Jr. (Jason Cerbone) Richie Aprile (David Proval) Rosalie Aprile (Sharon Angela) Bobby “Bacala” Baccalieri (Steven R. Schirripa) Bobby Baccalieri Jr. (Angelo Massagli) Bobby Baccalieri Sr. (Burt Young) Larry Boy Barese (Tony Darrow) Dick Barone (Joe Lisi) Matt Bevilaqua (Lillo Brancato) Tony Blundetto (Steve Buscemi) Angie Bonpensiero (Toni Kalem) Salvatore “Big Pussy” Bonpensiero (Vincent Pastore) Artie Bucco (John Ventimiglia) Charmaine Bucco (Kathrine Narducci) Lorraine Calluzzo (Patti D’Arbanville) Brian Cammarata (Matthew Del Negro) Gigi Cestone (John Fiore) FBI Agent Deborah Ciccerone (Lola Glaudini) Ralph Cifaretto (Joe Pantoliano) Cookie Cirillo (Anna Berger) Agent Frank Cubitoso (Frank Pellegrino) Raymond Curto (George Loros) Dr. Bruce Cusamano (Robert LuPone)

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Jean Cusamano (Saundra Santiago) Gabriella Dante (Maureen Van Zandt) Silvio Dante (Steven Van Zandt) Hugh DeAngelis (Tom Aldredge) Mary DeAngelis (Suzanne Shepherd) Finn DeTrolio (Will Janowitz) J.T. Dolan (Tim Daly) Benny Fazio (Max Casella) Fran Felstein (Polly Bergen) Brendan Filone (Anthony DeSando) Dr. Ira Freid (Lewis J. Stadlen) Beansie Gaeta (Paul Herman) Dominic “Fat Dom” Gamiello (Tony Cucci) Angelo Garepe (Joe Santos) Georgie (Frank Santorelli) Little Paulie Germani (Carl Capotorto) Carlo Gervasi (Arthur J. Nascarella) Barbara (Soprano) Giglione (Nicole Burdette/Danielle Divecchio) Sean Gismonte (Chris Tardio) Furio Giunta (Federico Castelluccio) Agent Frank Grasso (Frank Pando) Nucci Gualtieri (Frances Ensemplare) Paulie “Walnuts” Gualtieri (Tony Sirico) Agent Dwight Harris (Matt Servitto) Father Phil Intintola (Paul Schulze) Svetlana Kirilenko (Alla Kliouka Schaffer) Emil Kolar (Bruce Smolanoff) Dr. Elliot Kupferberg (Peter Bogdanovich) Adriana La Cerva (Drea de Matteo) Feech La Manna (Robert Loggia) Valentina La Paz (Leslie Bega) Jason La Penna (Will McCormack) Dr. Richard La Penna (Richard Romanus) Billy Leotardo (Chris Caldovino) Phil Leotardo (Frank Vincent) Skip Lipari (Louis Lombardi) Carmine Lupertazzi (Tony Lip) “Little” Carmine Lupertazzi Jr. (Ray Abruzzo) Detective Vin Makazian (John Heard) Jack Massarone (Robert Desiderio) Dr. Jennifer Melfi (Lorraine Bracco) Attorney Hal Melvoin (Richard Portnow)

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Rusty Millio (Frankie Valli) Neil Mink (David Margulies) Coach Molinaro (Charley Scalies) Christopher Moltisanti (Michael Imperioli) Vic Musto (Joe Penny) Mikey Palmice (Al Sapienza) Jason Parisi (Michael Drayer) Patrick Parisi (Daniel Sauli) Patsy Parisi (Dan Grimaldi) Irina Peltsin (Oksana Lada) Devin Pillsbury (Jessica Dunphy) Eugene “Gene” Pontecorvo (Robert Funaro) Herman “Hesh” Rabkin (Jerry Adler) Carlo Renzi (Louis Crugnali) Jesus Rossi (Mario Polit) Allegra Sacramoni (Caitlin Van Zandt) Ginny Sacramoni (Denise Borino) Johnny “Sack” Sacramoni (Vincent Curatola) Agent Robyn Sanseverino (Karen Young) Alan Sapinsly (Bruce Altman) Hunter Scangarelo (Michele DeCesare) David Scatino (Robert Patrick) John Schwinn (Hal Holbrook) Charles “Chucky” Signore (Sal Ruffino) Julianna Skiff (Julianna Margulies) Anthony “A.J.” Soprano Jr. (Robert Iler) Carmela Soprano (Edie Falco) Corrado “Uncle Junior” Soprano (Dominic Chianese) Janice (Parvati) Soprano (Aida Turturro) John “Johnny Boy” Soprano (Joseph Siravo) Livia Soprano (Nancy Marchand) Young Livia Soprano (Laila Robins) Meadow Soprano (Jamie-Lynn Sigler) Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) Teenage Tony Soprano (Danny Petrillo) Brian Spatafore (Vincent J. Orofino) Vito Spatafore (Joseph R. Gannascoli) Vito Spatafore Jr. (Frank Borrelli) Noah Tannenbaum (Patrick Tully) Tracee (Ariel Kiley) Gloria Trillo (Annabella Sciorra) Robert Wegler (David Strathairn)

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Appendix A

Jeffrey Wernick (Timothy Nolen) Leon Wilmore (Charles S. Dutton) State Assemblyman Ronald Zellman (Peter Riegert) Dino Zerilli (Andy Davoli)

Appendix B Episode Guide Episode number / Title / Written by / Directed by / Air date 1.1 (1) / Pilot: The Sopranos / David Chase / Chase / 1/10/99 1.2 (2) / 46 Long / Chase / Daniel Attias / 1/17/99 1.3 (3) / Denial, Anger, Acceptance / Mark Saraceni / Nick Gomez / 1/24/99 1.4 (4) / Meadowlands / Jason Cahill / John Patterson / 1/31/99 1.5 (5) / College / Jim Manos Jr. & Chase / Allen Coulter / 2/7/99 1.6 (6) / Pax Soprana / Frank Renzulli / Alan Taylor / 2/14/99 1.7 (7) / Down Neck / Robin Green & Mitchell Burgess / Lorraine Senna / 2/21/99 1.8 (8) / The Legend of Tennessee Moltisanti / Renzulli & Chase / Tim Van Patten / 2/28/99 1.9 (9) / Boca / Cahill, Green & Burgess / Andy Wolk / 3/7/99 1.10 (10) / A Hit Is a Hit / Joe Bosso & Renzulli / Matthew Penn / 3/14/99 1.11 (11) / Nobody Knows Anything / Renzulli / Henry J. Bronchtein / 3/21/99 1.12 (12) / Isabella / Green & Burgess / Coulter / 3/28/99 1.13 (13) / I Dream of Jeannie Cusamano / Chase / Patterson / 4/4/99 2.1 (14) / Guy Walks into a Psychiatrist’s Office / Cahill / Coulter / 1/16/00 2.2 (15) / Do Not Resuscitate / Green, Burgess & Renzulli / Martin Bruestle / 1/23/00 2.3 (16) / Toodle-Fucking-Oo / Renzulli / Lee Tamahori / 1/30/00 2.4 (17) / Commendatori / Chase / Van Patten / 2/6/00 2.5 (18) / Big Girls Don’t Cry / Terence Winter / Van Patten / 2/13/00 2.6 (19) / The Happy Wanderer / Renzulli / Patterson / 2/20/00 2.7 (20) / D-Girl / Todd A. Kessler / Coulter / 2/27/00 2.8 (21) / Full Leather Jacket / Green & Burgess / Coulter / 3/5/00 2.9 (22) / From Where to Eternity / Michael Imperioli / Bronchtein / 3/12/00 2.10 (23) / Bust-Out / Renzulli, Green & Burgess / Patterson / 3/19/00 2.11 (24) / House Arrest / Winter / Van Patten / 3/26/00

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Appendix B

Episode number / Title / Written by / Directed by / Air date 2.12 (25) / The Knight in White Satin Armor / Green & Burgess / Coulter / 4/2/00 2.13 (26) / Funhouse / Chase & Kessler / Patterson / 4/9/00 3.1 (27) / Mr. Ruggerio’s Neighborhood / Chase / Coulter / 3/4/01 3.2 (28) / Proshai, Livushka / Chase / Van Patten / 3/4/01 3.3 (29) / Fortunate Son / Kessler / Bronchtein / 3/11/01 3.4 (30) / Employee of the Month / Green & Burgess / Patterson / 3/18/01 3.5 (31) / Another Toothpick / Winter / Jack Bender / 3/25/01 3.6 (32) / University / Teleplay by Winter & Salvatore Stabile; story by Chase, Winter, Kessler, Green & Burgess / Coulter / 4/1/01 3.7 (33) / Second Opinion / Lawrence Konner / Van Patten / 4/8/01 3.8 (34) / He Is Risen / Green, Burgess & Kessler / Coulter / 4/15/01 3.9 (35) / The Telltale Moozadell / Imperioli / Attias / 4/22/01 3.10 (36) / To Save Us All from Satan’s Power / Green & Burgess / Bender / 4/29/01 3.11 (37) / Pine Barrens / Teleplay by Winter; story by Van Patten & Winter / Steve Buscemi / 5/6/01 3.12 (38) / Amour Fou / Teleplay by Renzulli; story by Chase / Van Patten / 5/13/01 3.13 (39) / Army of One / Chase & Konner / Patterson / 5/20/01 4.1 (40) / For All Debts Public and Private / Chase / Coulter / 9/15/02 4.2 (41) / No Show / Chase & Winter / Patterson / 9/22/02 4.3 (42) / Christopher / Imperioli & Maria Laurino / Van Patten / 9/29/02 4.4 (43) / The Weight / Winter / Bender / 10/6/02 4.5 (44) / Pie-O-My / Green & Burgess / Bronchtein / 10/13/02 4.6 (45) / Everybody Hurts / Imperioli / Buscemi / 10/20/02 4.7 (46) / Watching Too Much Television / Teleplay by Winter & Nick Santora; story by Chase, Green, Burgess & Winter / Patterson / 10/27/02 4.8 (47) / Mergers and Acquisitions / Teleplay by Konner; story by Chase, Green, Burgess & Winter / Attias / 11/3/03 4.9 (48) / Whoever Did This / Green & Burgess / Van Patten / 11/10/02 4.10 (49) / The Strong, Silent Type / Teleplay by Winter, Green & Burgess; story by Chase / Taylor / 11/17/02 4.11 (50) / Calling All Cars / Teleplay by Chase, Green, Burgess & David Flebotte; story by Chase, Green, Burgess & Winter/ Van Patten / 11/24/02 4.12 (51) / Eloise / Winter / James Hayman / 12/1/02 4.13 (52) / Whitecaps / Green, Burgess & Chase / Patterson / 12/8/02

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325

Episode number / Title / Written by / Directed by / Air date 5.1 (53) / Two Tonys / Chase & Winter / Van Patten / 3/7/04 5.2 (54) / Rat Pack / Matthew Weiner / Taylor / 3/14/04 5.3 (55) / Where’s Johnny? / Michael Caleo / Patterson / 3/21/04 5.4 (56) / All Happy Families / Toni Kalem / Rodrigo Garcia / 3/28/04 5.5 (57) / Irregular around the Margins / Green & Burgess / Coulter / 4/4/04 5.6 (58) / Sentimental Education / Weiner / Peter Bogdanovich / 4/11/04 5.7 (59) / In Camelot / Winter / Buscemi / 4/18/04 5.8 (60) / Marco Polo / Imperioli / Patterson / 4/25/04 5.9 (61) / Unidentified Black Males / Weiner & Winter / Van Patten / 5/2/04 5.10 (62) / Cold Cuts / Green & Burgess / Mike Figgis / 5/9/04 5.11 (63) / The Test Dream / Weiner & Chase / Coulter / 5/16/04 5.12 (64) / Long Term Parking / Winter / Van Patten / 5/23/04 5.13 (65) / All Due Respect / Chase, Green & Burgess / Patterson / 6/6/04 6.1 (66) / Members Only / Winter / Van Patten / 3/12/06 6.2 (67) / Join the Club / Chase / David Nutter / 3/19/06 6.3 (68) / Mayham / Weiner / Bender / 3/26/06 6.4 (69) / The Fleshy Part of the Thigh / Diane Frolov & Andrew Schneider / Taylor / 4/2/06 6.5 (70) / Mr. and Mrs. John Sacrimoni Request / Winter / Buscemi / 4/9/06 6.6 (71) / Live Free or Die / Winter, Chase, Green & Burgess / Van Patten / 4/16/06 6.7 (72) / Luxury Lounge / Weiner / Danny Leiner / 4/23/06 6.8 (73) / Johnny Cakes / Schneider & Frolov / Van Patten / 4/30/06 6.9 (74) / The Ride / Winter / Taylor / 5/7/06 6.10 (75) / Moe n’ Joe / Weiner / Steve Shill / 5/14/06 6.11 (76) / Cold Stones / Frolov, Schneider & Chase / Van Patten / 5/21/06 6.12 (77) / Kaisha / Winter, Chase & Weiner / Taylor / 5/23/06 6.13 (78) / Soprano Home Movies / Frolov, Schneider, Chase & Weiner / Van Patten / 4/8/07 6.14 (79) / Stage 5 / Winter / Taylor / 4/15/07 6.15 (80) / Remember When / Winter / Phil Abraham / 4/22/07 6.16 (81) / Chasing It / Weiner / Van Patten / 4/29/07 6.17 (82) / Walk Like a Man / Winter / Winter / 5/6/07 6.18 (83) / Kennedy and Heidi / Weiner & Chase / Taylor / 5/13/07 6.19 (84) / The Second Coming / Winter / Van Patten / 5/20/07 6.20 (85) / The Blue Comet / Chase & Weiner / Taylor / 6/3/07 6.21 (86) / Made in America / Chase / Chase / 6/10/07

Appendix C Intertextual References and Allusions in Season Six Compiled by Sarah Caitlin Lavery Intertext/Allusion—Context

Annotation

A&E—While staying with Tony in the hospital, Carmela watches a special on A&E called “Growing Up Soprano” featuring an interview with A.J. (6.3).

A television network that originally focused programming on biographies, documentaries, and drama series (especially crime dramas and mysteries).

Adams, Grizzly—After their wine heist, Christopher calls one of the bikers they stole from “that Grizzly Adams motherfucker” (6.9).

(1812–1860) A famed U.S. outdoorsman and a performer in P. T. Barnum’s shows, later popularized by a television series starring Dan Haggerty in 1977.

“American Girl”—Carmela plays this song for Tony to keep him engaged while in a coma. She tells him they played it in Tony’s car an entire weekend at Long Beach Island (6.2).

The second single from Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ self-titled debut album. The song is believed to be about a girl who committed suicide by jumping from the Beaty Towers dormitory at the University of Florida in Gainesville, where Petty grew up.

American Idol—At Bobby’s funeral, Meadow and friends discuss this show, questioning whether recording artist Jennifer Hudson was the winner. Carlo’s son Jason comments that “Jason G.” was the winner of Italian American Idol and that he could say “‘fuck’ more times in a sentence than any other contestant” (6.21).

A reality competition to find new solo musical talent, created by Simon Fuller. It debuted in 2002 on the Fox network and has since become one of the most popular shows on American television, with similar shows created in countless countries.

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Intertext/Allusion—Context

Annotation

Aqua Teen Hunger Force—A.J. watches this cartoon while battling a hangover after a night out clubbing (6.8).

An animated television series shown on Cartoon Network as part of its Adult Swim late-night programming block, following three anthropomorphic fastfood items and their next-door neighbor in suburban New Jersey.

Atkins—Vito Spatafore asks Agent Dwight Harris if this diet is the reason for his weight loss. Harris responds that it’s instead due to a parasite he caught while serving the terrorism department in Pakistan (6.1).

A low-carbohydrate diet created by Dr. Robert Atkins. He popularized the Atkins diet in a series of books, starting with Dr. Atkins’ Diet Revolution in 1972. The diet is the driving force behind the “low-carb” craze during the new millennium.

Bacall, Lauren—Christopher and Little Carmine run into this actress while in Los Angeles trying to garner interest in their film project. Christopher tells her he loved her in The Haves and the HaveNots and later robs her for her awards show swag (6.7).

(1924–) An American film and stage legend known for her husky voice and perhaps best known for being a film noir leading lady in such films as The Big Sleep (1946) and Dark Passage (1947).

Baldwin, Daniel—This actor plays the mob boss in Christopher’s art-imitateslife mafia film Cleaver (6.14).

(1960–) An American actor, producer, and director and the second oldest of the four Baldwin brothers, all of whom are actors.

Batman—Silvio makes a reference to throwing acid in Johnny Sack’s face during his trial, similar to the way that Harvey Dent was transformed into TwoFace in DC Comics’ Batman universe (6.10).

Harvey Dent, formerly the district attorney of Gotham City and an ally of Batman, goes insane and becomes the crime boss Two-Face after the left half of his face is hideously disfigured in the famous comic book series.

Beowulf—Addict and screenwriter J.T. tells the group at a Writers Guild meeting that they are all mythologizing their inner narratives, just like Grendel in Beowulf (6.3).

An Old English epic poem of unknown authorship. It dates from between the eighth and the early eleventh centuries and is commonly cited as one of the most important works in Anglo-Saxon literature.

Blood, Sweat and Tears—Silvio, looking for a nowhere-to-be-found Vito, tells his wife that he just stopped by to drop off Blood, Sweat and Tears tickets with backstage passes (6.6).

An American music group, originally formed in 1967 in New York City, noted for its fusing of rock, blues, pop music, horn arrangements, and jazz improvisation into a hybrid that came to be known as jazz-rock.

Intertextual References and Allusions in Season Six

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Annotation

Borat—Meadow tells A.J. she just watched this film on cable, saying “you can watch it fifty times and it’s still hilarious” (6.19).

A 2006 mockumentary film, written and produced by and starring the British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen in the title role of a fictitious Kazakh journalist traveling through the United States recording real-life interactions with Americans.

Born Yesterday—At Christopher’s urging, J.T. tells Tony he based the mob boss character and his love triangle in Cleaver on this film, which Tony later watches (6.14).

A 1950 film about a corrupt tycoon who brings his showgirl mistress with him to Washington to try to buy a congressman.

Brown, James—Tony calls Christopher’s (1933–2006) “The Godfather of Soul,” an American entertainer recognized as mom “fucking James Brown” after she breaks down in tears at his funeral (6.18). one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century popular music and for his feverish, emotional dancing. Carnac the Magnificent—Phil says he could sense that Vito was in town, to which Tony responds, “You’re fucking Carnac the Great, now, too?” (6.12).

A role played by Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, and later continued on Late Show with David Letterman. Carnac was a psychic with a large, elaborate turban.

Chase, Chevy—While driving through Maryland, Paulie sees a road sign for the town Chevy Chase but mistakes it for a reference to the actor. He asks whatever happened to him (6.15).

(1943–) An American Emmy Award– winning comedian, writer, and actor who got his start on Saturday Night Live and found fame with his National Lampoon’s Vacation film series.

Cinderella Man—Carmela finds out that A.J. has been fired from Blockbuster after she tries to rent Cinderella Man; Tony calls it a “classic” (6.11).

A 2005 film directed by Ron Howard about the life of heavyweight boxing champion James J. Braddock.

Columbine High School Massacre— Christopher says that Vito’s disturbed son Vito Jr. is probably sitting in his room “planning another Columbine” (6.16).

On April 20, 1999, two senior students, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, embarked on a massacre in their Littleton, Colorado, high school, killing twelve students and one teacher in the fourth-deadliest school incident in history.

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Appendix C

Intertext/Allusion—Context

Annotation

A song by the English progressive rock “Comfortably Numb”—On his way band Pink Floyd, which was released on down the stairs after waking up, Tony the 1979 double album The Wall. sings this song (6.18). In the following episode, Christopher plays the same song from the soundtrack to The Departed right before their car accident (6.19). CSI—On the hunt for Vito, Carlo tells Tony his detective friend can track somebody “from the corn in his shit.” Tony says he saw that on CSI (6.7).

An American crime drama television series that follows criminologists as they use physical evidence to solve grisly crimes. A ratings smash for CBS.

Darin, Bobby—Paulie asks Walden “what fuck kind of a name is [Walden] for an Italian?” Walden responds that he was named after Mr. Bobby Darin, “Walden Robert Cassotto” (6.21).

(1936–1973) An Italian American singer, actor, and musician born Walden Robert Cassotto who found fame in the 1960s in a range of music genres, including pop, jazz, folk, and country.

Departed, The—Just before the car accident that claims his life, Christopher puts on the soundtrack to The Departed and calls it “fucking killer.” Tony says he also owns it (6.19).

A 2006 American crime film about the Irish American mob directed by Martin Scorsese and winner of four Academy Awards.

Devil in the White City—Vito’s lover, Jim Witowski, reads this best-selling novel in bed (6.10).

A 2003 nonfiction book by Erik Larson that tells the story of the World’s Columbian Exposition held in Chicago in 1893 to commemorate Christopher Columbus’s “discovery” of America.

DiMaggio, Joe—Vito tells Tony that the guy from the planning commission overseeing the municipal swimming-pool bids is willing to play ball, saying he’s “fucking Joe DiMaggio” (6.5).

(1914–1999) An American baseball player for the New York Yankees, voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1955. DiMaggio was a three-time winner of the Most Valuable Player award and thirteentime All-Star, and the only player to be selected for the All-Star Game in every season he played.

Dreamgirls—Meadow’s boyfriend Patrick Parisi invites A.J. to join their conversation about this film while at Bobby’s funeral, sending A.J. on a rant about “living in a fucking dream” (6.21).

A 2006 Oscar-winning American musical film following the lives of three young women who form an R&B singing trio in Detroit, Michigan, called the Dreamettes.

Intertextual References and Allusions in Season Six

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Annotation

Dylan, Bob—A.J.’s girlfriend Rhiannon plays Dylan’s song “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” right before their car catches fire. She remarks that although the song was written decades ago, “it’s about, like, right now” (6.21).

(1941–) An American singer-songwriter, musician, painter, and poet and a major figure in popular music for five decades. The song played was written in 1964 and has been described by one of his biographers as a “grim masterpiece.”

Fogg, Phileas—Vito calls Meadow’s boyfriend Finn DeTrolio this when he accosts him coming off the hospital elevator (6.4).

The main fictional character in the 1873 Jules Verne novel Around the World in Eighty Days.

Gaye, Marvin—While discussing Uncle Junior’s fate after he shoots Tony, Vito remarks that he “Marvin Gayed” his own nephew (6.2).

(1939–1984) Gaye’s father fatally shot him after the wildly successful singer moved back home. An argument allegedly started between his parents over misplaced business documents, and when Gaye attempted to intervene, his father killed him using a gun that Marvin Jr. had given him just four months before.

Giancana, Salvatore—The FBI agents questioning Carmela after Tony is shot say Uncle Junior keeps making pointed references to Sam Giancana. Carmela responds with, “You mean the Kennedy assassination? As related to this? My husband was three years old” (6.2).

(1908–1975) A mobster and boss of the Chicago Outfit from 1957 to 1966. It is widely reputed that Giancana and other mobsters were recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency during the Kennedy administration to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Giancana is also rumored to be responsible for JFK’s assassination because the president stepped up persecution of the Chicago mob.

Godfather, The—After Tony scolds A.J. for carrying a knife to visit Uncle Junior, A.J. calls his father a hypocrite, reminding him that his favorite scene in The Godfather is the one in which Michael Corleone shoots the men who tried to kill his father (6.8).

An Academy Award–winning film from 1972 chronicling the fictional Italian American Corleone crime family.

Hootie and the Blowfish—Uncle Junior brings Carter a Hootie and the Blowfish CD in an attempt to cheer him up (6.15).

An American rock band that enjoyed widespread popularity in the second half of the 1990s with a debut album that is one of the best-selling albums of all time.

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Appendix C

Intertext/Allusion—Context

Annotation

Jamba Juice—The hugely popular franchise sends a Century 21 real-estate agent to try to persuade Tony to sell a building he owns, the one he is renting to Caputo’s Poultry (6.8).

A trendy chain of smoothie restaurants with more than seven hundred locations operating in thirty states.

Kennedy, Jackie—At Christopher’s funeral, Tony calls his wife Kelli “Jackie Kennedy” because of her all-black ensemble and oversized sunglasses (6.18).

(1929–1994) The wife of the thirty-fifth president of the United States, John F. Kennedy, who served as first lady during his presidency from 1961 until his assassination in 1963. Known for her signature style and elegance.

Kingsley, Ben—Christopher and Little Carmine travel to Los Angeles to meet with a reluctant Sir Ben Kingsley, whom they want to play the boss in their film project (6.7).

(1943–) An English actor who’s been awarded an Oscar, a BAFTA, a Golden Globe, and a Screen Actors Guild award.

Knucklehead Smith—When Janice asks about Uncle Junior’s deteriorating condition, Tony refers to him as “Knucklehead Smith,” calling him “fucking paranoid” (6.1).

A dummy on the variety program Circus Time, shown in the United States by ABC from 1956 to 1957. The host was ventriloquist Paul Winchell, who was “assisted” by his dummies Jerry Mahoney and Knucklehead Smith.

Kung Fu—Tony watches an episode of this show titled “The Praying Mantis Kills” while in the hospital, telling Paulie he used to watch it all the time when he was a little kid (6.4).

An American television show that follows the adventures of a Shaolin monk, Kwai Chang Caine, played by David Carradine, who travels through the American Old West.

L Word, The—Tony references this show as the “thing with Jennifer Beals” while talking with Dr. Melfi about Vito’s homosexuality, using it as an example of how rampant he thinks it’s become in pop culture (6.6).

A television drama series starring actress Jennifer Beals portraying the lives of a group of lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people in West Hollywood.

Little Miss Sunshine—Tony watches a scene from this movie while visiting Silvio in the hospital (6.21).

A 2006 American film about a family’s road trip to their young daughter’s beauty pageant, with a large portion focusing on events related to the family car.

Lohan, Lindsay—Christopher tells Tony (1986–) An American actress, model, and singer whose career has mostly that not much came out of his trip to Los Angeles except a sighting of Lindsay degenerated into tabloid fodder. Lohan, whom he calls a “total piece of ass” (6.7).

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Annotation

Lord’s Prayer, The—Meadow reads a version of this traditional Christian prayer to her comatose father. The poem she reads is written by the French poet and screenwriter Jacques Prévert. We hear her recite the following lines “Our Father who art in heaven / Stay there / And we’ll stay here on earth / Which is sometimes so pretty” (6.2).

Prévert wrote the film Les enfants du paradis (The Children of Paradise, 1945), which often appears on critics’ lists of the greatest films of all time. His poems are often about life in Paris and life after World War II.

Lou Gehrig’s Disease—At the funeral for Raymond Curto, Christopher asks if anyone ever notices how coincidental it is that Lou Gehrig died of Lou Gehrig’s disease (6.1).

(1903–1941) An American baseball player in the 1920s and 1930s, chiefly remembered for his prowess as a hitter. He left the game at age thirty-six, when he was stricken with a fatal disease later named after him.

Marciano, Rocky—During his hideout, Vito lives under the pretense that he’s a writer working on a book, which he originally tells his lover-to-be is about Marciano (6.8).

(1923–1969) The heavyweight champion of the world from September 23, 1952, to April 27, 1956, when he became the only heavyweight champion in boxing history to retire having won every fight in his professional career.

Mathers, Jerry—Julianna tells Christopher he might want to rethink the title of his film, Cleaver, because of the Jerry Mathers connection.

(1948–) An American television, film, and stage actor best known for his role in the sitcom Leave It to Beaver (1957– 1963), in which he plays Theodore “Beaver” Cleaver.

McGuire Sisters, The—The FBI agents questioning Carmela after Tony is shot say that Uncle Junior has been frequently referencing the McGuire Sisters and the Kennedy assassination (6.2).

A singing trio popular during the 1950s. One of the sisters, Phyllis, was rumored to have had a long-lasting affair with Chicago mob boss Salvatore “Momo” Giancana. She was also romantically linked at the same time to President Kennedy.

Meatpacking District, The— Christopher’s film Cleaver has its premiere in the trendy Meatpacking District of New York City, to which Tony exclaims, “But I’m a happily married man!” (6.14).

A neighborhood in the New York City borough of Manhattan that runs roughly from West Fourteenth Street south to Gansevoort Street and from the Hudson River east to Hudson Street. It saw a spike in trendiness and popularity during the first decade of the new millennium.

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Appendix C

Intertext/Allusion—Context

Annotation

Metalocalypse—A.J. watches this cartoon in the common room at the mental health hospital (6.20).

An American animated television series, parodying other “band” and supernatural programs by following the exploits of the part-American/part-Scandinavian deathmetal band Dethklok.

Monopoly—Tony, Carmela, Bobby, and Janice play this popular board game during Tony’s birthday weekend, leading up to a violent fight between the two men (6.13).

A board game published by Parker Brothers and named after the economic concept of monopoly, the domination of a market by a single entity. The most commercially successful board game in U.S. history, with 485 million players worldwide.

Montalbán, Ricardo—Carmela tells Rosalie that Tony used the only six words he knew in Spanish while they were in Miami, like he was “Ricardo Montalbán or something” (6.11).

(1920–2009) A Mexican-born American radio, television, theater, and film actor with a career spanning seven decades (motion pictures from 1943 to 2006) and multiple notable roles.

Navarro, Ramon—Right before he’s stabbed to death by Silvio and Carlo, Fat Dom Gamiello jokes that the “old homo actor Ramon Navarro had an ivory dildo stuck up his ass when they found him,” comparing him to Vito (6.11).

(1899–1968) A Mexican actor who achieved fame as a “Latin lover” in silent films. He was murdered by two men he’d hired for sex from an agency.

Nuremberg trials—The paramedic Tony accuses of rifling through his wallet says he was “just doing his job.” Tony tells him they heard a lot of that at Nuremberg (6.4).

German officials involved in the Holocaust and accused of other war crimes were brought before an international tribunal in the Nuremberg trials between 1945 and 1946.

Paths of Glory—Uncle Junior watches this film while home alone. With the movie playing in the background, Junior shoots Tony, believing him to be “Little Pussy” Malanga (6.1).

This 1957 war film was directed by Stanley Kubrick, after the novel of the same name by Humphrey Cobb. The film is based loosely on the true story of four French soldiers under General Géraud Réveilhac, executed for cowardice during World War I.

Philadelphia lawyer—Tony calls his bodyguard Perry Annunziata this term before beating him up in a one-sided fight (6.5).

A term used to describe a lawyer who knows the most detailed and minute points of law, rumored to have started with Andrew Hamilton in 1735 for his legal victory on behalf of printer and newspaper publisher John Peter Zenger.

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Annotation

Porsche Cayenne—Tony gifts Carmela this car, and she later shows it off to Angie Bonpensiero after they patch up a long quarrel (6.1).

A five-seat, midsize luxury SUV manufactured by Porsche since 2002, with North American sales beginning in 2003. It is the first V8-engined vehicle built by Porsche since 1995, when the Porsche 928 was discontinued.

Ray, Rachael—Carmela and Meadow stay up late because they saw Rachael Ray on Late Show with David Letterman and got hungry (6.17).

(1968–) An American television personality, chef, and author who hosts the Rachael Ray Show and three Food Network series, 30 Minute Meals, Rachael Ray’s Tasty Travels, and $40 a Day.

Rebel in Chief—Carmela reads this book in bed before Meadow comes in to discuss A.J.’s mental health (6.17).

A best-selling book by Fred Barnes, published in 2006, about the “bold and controversial” presidency of George W. Bush.

A 2005 horror film and sequel to Saw, it Saw II—Christopher watches this film right before his girlfriend announces her features the latest murders of the Jigsaw Killer. pregnancy, possibly a reflection of his failed “Saw meets The Godfather” slasher film, which is referred to in previous episodes (6.9). Sinatra, Nancy—This singer serenades Phil with her song “Bossman” at a gathering of the New York and New Jersey families (6.16).

(1940–) An American singer born in New Jersey and daughter of singer Frank Sinatra, best known for her 1966 hit “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’.”

A subgenre of the horror film genre Slasher films—Screenwriter J.T. proposes a film about a whacked mobster typically involving a psychopathic killer stalking and killing a series of victims. come back to life, sparking a debate between Christopher and Silvio about what constitutes a true slasher film (6.3). “Smoke on the Water”—Tony’s doctor tells his family to keep him engaged while he’s in a coma and to play his favorite music. Carmela first plays “Smoke on the Water” by Deep Purple (6.2).

A song by the British hard-rock band Deep Purple. It was first released on their 1972 album Machine Head. The song is known for its central theme, a four-note “blues scale” melody harmonized in parallel fourths.

Superman—On hearing the news of Vito’s death, Silvio responds that Carlo Gervasi is a “regular Jimmy Olsen.”

Olsen is Superman’s young photographer friend at the Daily Planet in the famous DC comic.

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Annotation

Travolta, John—Phil tells Vito that when he married his cousin years ago, everyone thought the now overweight mobster looked like John Travolta (6.3).

(1954–) An American actor who found fame in the 1970s after starring in Saturday Night Fever and Grease.

TV Land—Tony tells Carlo to “start sucking cock” instead of watching so much TV Land when he attempts to explain an episode of The Twilight Zone, because “Vito brought in three times more” than Carlo in construction (6.16).

An American cable television network launched in 1996 based on the success of Nickelodeon’s “Nick at Nite,” featuring classic sitcoms, dramas, and variety shows.

Twilight Zone, The—Carlo attempts to equate the episode titled “A Nice Place to Visit” to Tony’s situation with Hesh’s vig. The episode features a dead gangster, Rocky Valentine—whom Carlo mistakenly calls “Phil”—who is unable to lose when gambling. At first, he believes himself in heaven, until it is revealed he is actually in hell (6.16). In the series’ final episode, Tony and the crew watch another episode of the show while in hiding (6.21).

An American television series that ran for five seasons from 1959 to 1964 consisting of unrelated vignettes depicting paranormal, futuristic, dystopian, or simply disturbing events.

Valderamma, Wilmer—While watching Sir Ben Kingsley claim his swag in Los Angeles, Christopher sees Valderamma posing for photos (6.7).

(1980–) An American actor and television personality best known for playing Fez in the popular sitcom That ’70s Show.

Van Helsing, Abraham—At Carmela’s request, Paulie takes A.J. home from the hospital during Tony’s second night there. Paulie refers to A.J. as Van Helsing while trying to get him in the car (6.2).

Professor Abraham Van Helsing is a character from Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula. Van Helsing is a Dutch doctor best known as a vampire hunter and the archenemy of Count Dracula.

Village People, The—Christopher says that Vito was spotted in a “fag bar” dressed in a motorcycle outfit like someone from the Village People (6.6).

A disco group formed in the 1970s known for its onstage costumes and suggestive lyrics. The group was originally created to target disco’s primarily gay audience.

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Annotation

Yeats, W. B.—A.J. studies his poem “The Second Coming” for school in the episode that shares the same name, culminating in his suicide attempt. Carmela later asks, in A.J.’s therapy session, what kind of poem it is to teach college students. A.J. recites part of the same poem (“What rough beast . . . Slouching towards Bethlehem”) to Meadow and Patrick during Bobby’s funeral (6.19, 6.21).

(1865–1939) An Irish poet, William Butler Yeats wrote “The Second Coming” in 1919, using Christian imagery regarding the Apocalypse as allegory to describe the atmosphere in postwar Europe.

Note: A compendium of intertexts and allusions for all six seasons is available at http://davidlavery.net/sopranos.

Appendix D A Conversation with Dominic Chianese, The Sopranos’ Uncle Junior The Sopranos: A Wake, Pope Auditorium, Fordham University, Lincoln Center campus, New York, May 23, 2008

Paul Levinson: Welcome to Fordham University and our conference on “The Sopranos: A Wake.” My name is Paul Levinson. I’m chair of the Department of Communication and Media Studies. Let me introduce you to David Lavery. There’s probably no one in the world who knows more about television—not just The Sopranos, but Lost, Buffy, Heroes—than David Lavery. So I am very happy that David is here with us. [audience applause] And sitting next to David is someone who was born in the Bronx in 1931. He may look familiar to you because in The Godfather II, you may recall that tall, sinister figure, Johnny Ola, [applause] but of course he’s far better known, in addition to that role and many others over the years, for the part he played in The Sopranos as Uncle Junior, [applause] otherwise known as Corrado Soprano. His name is Dominic Chianese. [audience applause] Why don’t we start at the end, if that’s okay. One of the things that struck me with the final season of The Sopranos was the diminished role that Uncle Junior had on that show, and I was wondering if you could perhaps speak to that. How did you feel about approaching that as an actor? Were you disappointed in that? Did you think the story called for that? Dominic Chianese: The final season . . . well I think the ending is a good indication of, I think, what David [Chase] was trying to write. I noticed that when we read the script, the final script, we

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were amazed at the quietness of the ending. However, when all the actors read the final script, there was no indication that there would be a blackout for maybe fifteen or twenty seconds. We just thought they’d end up having an ice-cream soda and onion rings together, and that was it. Finito, complete, you know. Even David said, “Why not?” So we were all surprised when the blackout came. My wife and I thought, of course, we had lost television. But, my daughter pointed out something out to me, which I think is very interesting. David—the greater genius that he is—he may put clues in sometimes, and we don’t realize it. I haven’t checked on it, but if you go home and check on the jukebox that he was playing at the table, it had a song in it—“Don’t Stop Believin’.” There was a “B” side to that. Does anybody know what the title of the “B” side was? Audience member (AM) #1: “Any Way You Want It.” Chianese: “Any Way You Want It.” [audience laughter] I think maybe that’s David’s motive or idea for putting it in, and that struck me as something David possibly would do. Any way you want it. You make the idea. A lot of teenagers come up to me and got mad at me, and said, “Why don’t you kill him?” What am I gonna say? [audience laughter] David Lavery: Paul started at the end. I would like to go back to start at the beginning. Could you reflect or remember anything about the casting, about how you were actually cast in the show? Chianese: The usual way. Georgianne Walken and Sheila Jaffe were summoned to be casting directors, and they do a lot of New York actors. I remember being involved in the casting, reading a scene, they were casting for Livia and Nancy Marchand’s name was not mentioned until later, I guess. But I was so happy when she got it because I knew her work. And I just auditioned. It was a very regular, normal audition. I was just called up to read, and then called back to read. So that was the only indication I had. Later on I found out Jimmy Gandolfini was cast as Tony and that was good because we had both worked on a previous Sidney Lumet film, Night Falls on Manhattan, and Jimmy and I were both happy to see each other because I really respected his work. Obviously he liked me too, so . . . that’s how I remember it. I didn’t even know if I was going to get it. You know, I was just lucky. Some actress called me and said, “You got it!” “I got what?” “You’re Uncle Junior.” I

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said, “Wow, I’m Uncle Junior.” An actor. Not even my agent called me. [audience laughter] Levinson: You are an Italian American and there has been some criticism of the show by Italian Americans. What’s your response to that? Chianese: Oh, God bless America. That’s my response. I think it’s a very serious question and I first became aware of it when some professor—I won’t mention his name—said to me, “Dominic, you were in Godfather.” I said, “Yeah, I played Johnny Ola.” He said, “Don’t you feel like you’re disgracing the Italians?” Some comment. And I thought about it. That’s the first time I became aware of this . . . why would I disgrace my roots which I love dearly? “I’m an actor,” I told him, and that’s the only statement I can make. I say that in all truth. I’m an actor who is living the American dream because my grandfather and my father made it possible for me to get an education, so how could I put down a vehicle which shows my talent as an American citizen? I feel that besides that, to me a man can write anything he wants in this country, and I don’t think you should be criticizing when he is expressing his soul. That show came from David’s own relationship with his own mother—I know that for a fact. And you can’t stop an artist from being an artist. If you do, we’re on our way to being lost. Lavery: Let me just follow that a little bit further—Paul’s excellent question to you. How conscious were the people making the show, including yourself, of that question? Because the show, one of the things that I thought that Sopranos did ingeniously, was they incorporated the debate into the show. We had the Ralphie family sitting around debating it, we had the Columbus Day issues. I mean, was it known on the show that they were responding purposely? Chianese: First of all, as an ensemble, what made the ensemble, was, of course, a complete dedication to the script. In the making of a show, you go to Silvercup [Studios], you go to location, you work, you don’t have time to question why we’re doing it—you’re just concentrating on doing your job. If the question has to be answered sociologically, you have to ask the writers. The writers are the ones . . . our job was to make those characters come alive, so I don’t think we were really conscious of any kind of controversial subjects at all. I think David put that in there just so, maybe just

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so, we could have conferences like this one. [audience laughter] So he knew that. To me it’s about education and it’s about dialogue and I think it’s good to open up issues like this. We should talk about prejudices and intolerances and issues. I’m an advocate of the arts. I’m starting a public charity, arts . . . it’s called Joy for the Arts Foundation. Bank of America is giving money now to send artists into the community. And I think just by being an artist you’re already trying to help, you’re trying to help our country, and I think you’re helping by opening this up to discussion too because it clears the air and makes people communicate and that’s the beginning I think of education. It’s communication. But I always really believed in my heart that the word education means to re-juice and to draw forth that which our citizens have in them, so our job is to bring out the goodness, the learning, the skills, the talents and abilities of individuals. I think David has really written a wonderful piece in The Sopranos and he’s given a lot of Italian American actors a chance to really draw on their images of their own culture, and that to me is a good thing, it’s an artistic thing, it’s an artistic choice. I remember when we were in California. The global people were there—reporters from all over the world. They said, “Dominic, what do you like about being Uncle Junior?” I said, “Well I like it because like he yells . . . I had an uncle who used to yell like that. He’d get angry over nothing. Why’d you order the pasta fagioli? Why did you order pasta fagioli?” He was nuts, but he was a good-hearted person. He made me feel Italian. And then they laughed. [audience laughter] It was a good thing. Levinson: Looking at the artistic side of the writing and your acting, you have people like Marlon Brando who, correctly or not, always said he came up with all the great lines—that whatever the writers wrote was just a springboard—and then there were other actors and actresses who religiously followed what was written. What was the situation with your character? Chianese: Well the writing itself, Paul, I think it’s funny because David’s grandfather was a stonemason and so was my grandfather, a stonemason, so, I’m just making a little analogy here, those words were written in concrete, you don’t change it. We had a guy acting from LA one time, and I said to him, “Don’t change it, don’t make it any better because you’ll never work again,” you know. It’s true, they worked very hard and I crammed the writing. Each little

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semicolon and comma was important. That’s the way I looked at it. It was really very important I think. Lavery: There’s an interview with Chase, it might be in Martha Nochimson’s book, where he says that, he sort of answers that question, “No, the actors don’t get to make up what they’re going to say. They do what we tell them.” Chianese: That’s right, and he’s right. He’s 100 percent right because to me those words, to me they were treated like Shakespeare, or the Bible—they were very well put. I did have a problem, to answer your question before. One time the F word was to be used in front of Livia, and I really agonized over it; I couldn’t sleep. I said, “Oh my God.” I was talking to my wife about it. I was saying, “Oh God . . . I can’t say the F word.” First of all, my Aunt Rose would be mad at that. [audience laughter] My sister, when I said the C word, called me up and complained. [audience laughter] “How dare you.” She’s twenty years younger than me. She’s my baby sister; I’m like a father to her. “How dare you say the word when you fell in the tub. You said that word.” I said, “Gina. Take it easy, relax would ya.” My brother-in-law was laughing. But she really acted as if it was truth. “How dare you use the C word.” I forgot the question. [audience laughter] Levinson: That’s what happens when you start talking about the C word. [audience laughter] Actually, I don’t have any questions. [audience laughter] Lavery: I have one. I think it’s on the DVD commentary, David said that there’s a scene in the pilot where Gandolfini responds to [Michael] Imperioli by virtually picking him up off of the ground when he suggested the first time he was going to write a screenplay. Chase said that that moment was the first time he first realized what he actually had there with Gandolfini. Can you remember that instance? Chianese: I do remember. I think when I saw it, I wasn’t there for the shooting of that particular moment, but when I saw it on the screen . . . I think the implication is that David is saying that the actor brings something to the character. That was Jimmy’s own improvisation, his own take on the character, that moment, and that’s what David meant. We expose the character. It’s a creative process. We help David write. David always gave us credit. He said, “I loving writing for you. I love writing because I know you’re going

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to bring something to life,” and that’s very smart I think. It inspires us for the next episode. That’s the creative process. That’s what made the show so wonderful. We fed off each other. For example, he let me sing in one of the episodes because he knew I could sing. That story came about because we were at Lorraine Bracco’s house. Her father is Italian. Neapolitan Italian . . . I’m not sure— he’s from the south anyway—and I was singing this particular song, “Cuore Ingrato,” and David came up to me at the party—a year before it was put into the script—and asked me what one of the lines meant. He knew I was a singer, he heard me sing, and he asked me what that line means in “Cuore Ingrato,” “Tu nun’ce pienze a stu dolore mio,” and I said, “It means that you’re not thinking of my pain,” and a year later he puts this into the script, so you know he’s using the actors’ talents and abilities. Levinson: A follow-up to that. You’re a very distinctive actor and as you said earlier, you auditioned for the part like everyone else. Did you see the part, as it developed, being written more for what you uniquely brought to it, as the series went on? Chianese: Well I did. I think it’s because the lines that were given to Uncle Junior were so funny that every staged reading we had— we all sit around a big table, people constantly laughing—I think that’s where the writers started to realize Uncle Junior, because they knew I could deliver a line and I think that’s important, but they also kept it true to the character. Every one of his funny lines comes out of his own dilemma, or his own perceived dilemma where he’s seen in dementia, or his hatred, his anger. That’s what makes him so funny. He’s kind of narrow focused. He always saw things his own way. If you’re thinking about Commedia dell’arte, the audience would laugh at him because they thought who the heck did he think he was. He’s so self-centered, that kind of thing. That’s a good kind of comedy. Levinson: Why don’t we start opening up for questions from the audience. AM #2: I have a question for Dominic. In the scene when Junior shoots Tony, he says something in Napolitano. Even though I grew up in the language, I couldn’t catch what he said. Could you say what that line was? Chianese: “Non me fu cazzare, Malanga” . . . which means, [audience laughter] well it’s hard to put. If there are any old-fashioned Italians

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willing to say it, you know . . . but it’s really saying: Don’t really make me angry because you’re gonna be sorry. That’s basically what he’s saying. I’ll strike you. Non me cazzare could be, don’t break my you-know-what. AM #3: Looking back on the series now, how do you feel about Uncle Junior, about the character that you played? Chianese: I’m still in the dark because I still don’t know if the guy was faking or not. [audience laughter] I had to play it like he was faking it, but it’s in the writers’ hands. Isn’t that wonderful? Of course I played it like he was losing it. I had to play it like that, but it’s very possible that he could be faking too. Probably not, he ended up in a wheelchair . . . you know, really out of it, but he had his moments of lucidity. I personally think that he had a downward spiral. When I shot Tony, I knew that I was . . . first of all I said, “Who’s down there.” He said “Artie Shaw.” I said, “Artie Shaw, you can’t bullshit me, it’s not Artie Shaw, he’s dead.” So you know, I used that, and I didn’t know what I was doing, and we even had a moment where the gun went off by accident because it was an old gun. You don’t live in a closet unless you are losing it. I played him like a man losing it, and scared of what he did. I found myself shaking. That was a choice I had to make, and David said, “Do it the way you want to do it.” But then I look back on it, and it’s very possible that maybe he is faking, who knows . . . I doubt it. Levinson: There was a real-life mafioso who did pretend, who was wandering around the streets of New York—Gigante, was that it? He was faking . . . AM #4: First, I want to congratulate you about your charity. It sounds absolutely terrific, and it’s very exciting. Chianese: Yeah, let’s all light a candle for that. I think it’s important. The arts are important. AM #4: I do, I do. It’s exciting to be received that way. It’s going to mean so much to New York for you to do that, so thank you. Another thing is I loved your performance. One thing that I especially loved was there was a gesture that you had where you would lower your eyelids and raise your eyebrows, you know like this . . . it was the character distilled and I wondered where did you get that from? It was amazing. Chianese: Genetic, I don’t know. [audience laughter] My grandfather had a look. I remember when I was a kid, at a bowling alley in the

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Bronx, fourteen to fifteen, and we played barrel pins and we tried to hustle each other, you know for barrel pins, a dollar a game or something, and my grandfather used to come and stand at the door, and I could see him from like a hundred yards away with that look he had. A lot of it is genetic. And you know who had a wonderful look, was Nancy Marchand. She could stare you down with one look. That’s very important, and the eyes of course, as we know, are very important in acting. Levinson: Let me just ask a question about Nancy Marchand. How do you think her death, and therefore taking Livia out of the story, had an impact on The Sopranos? Chianese: When we went to Nancy’s memorial, David mentioned right off the bat, he said that it would never be the same. He had to make changes, I’m sure. It would never be the same. Nancy had been sick for the first two seasons. She had COPD [chronic obstructive pulmonary disease]. The trooper that she was, as sick as she was, sometimes she had to have oxygen given to her after the end of the day’s work. She would have lasted a long time. What we realized is Nancy passed away because she had lost her husband of forty-seven years. When she lost him, something gave out. She never made it to the third season or the fourth season, whatever it was. But I know that when her husband Paul died, that took the fight out of her, but she was a real trooper, a wonderful actress, and she was sorely missed. Everybody was crying. I remember handing Gandolfini Bounty tissues. We were crying so hard because she was so loved, you know, and we all had worked with her for two seasons, so David did say it would be different. He never extrapolated on that remark, but I know that it was different. He had to make changes, but she was always remembered and talked about, and that’s life. It goes on. Levinson: And I think that The Sopranos did a lot better than Dallas, for example, when they basically just put in a different actress to play Miss Ellie. Lavery: But then brought the original one back. AM #5: I’d like to ask about the writing issue: everyone talks about it being David Chase’s show, but as you say, there’s a group of writers, and I’m curious, when you read a script, could you feel, as you read the lines, a difference between a [Robin] Green and Mitchell Burgess script or a Frank Renzulli script or a Matthew Weiner

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script? Is that something that you felt, or did you feel that it was Chase everywhere? Chianese: I noticed. Frank Renzulli was writing for the first two seasons, but then it depends on the assignment that David would give to certain writers, whether Renzulli’s style would fit it, or Weiner’s style would fit it, or Mitch and Robin. They did have different styles. I could see that, but it would disappear once the script came. Then it did not become obvious, so you knew that they were sticking to the characters’ intentions. I liked Renzulli’s kind of pattern. I remember liking it as Uncle Junior, but I never noticed any real difference later on. Everything was real. There may have been slight differences, but not enough to affect my intention of the character. The only time was when the F word was used. I didn’t want to use it in that scene. And they argued with me, they said, “But Dominic, he’s very angry at her.” I said, “I know, but still, a man of that generation would not be saying the F word in front of a woman, especially his sister-in-law. It’s just disrespectful.” So I did it, but I did it very operatically, and it worked I guess. AM #6: Just going on to another point—how did that marvelous scene come about when Uncle Junior suffered from dementia and sees Curb Your Enthusiasm on TV? Chianese: That was strictly the writers’ idea. I never gave any ideas to David. I don’t think any actors gave any ideas. Just by acting what was written. David would come up with the complete ideas. I think there was one idea that was given to him. When Joe Gannascoli [Vito Spatafore] had mentioned a newspaper account of a man in the Mafia who was chastised for being homosexual. I think that David used that. But I don’t know where they got their ideas for that Larry David scene. It was very much of an in-idea I think, and it makes sense because we do look alike . . . with glasses. [audience laughter] AM #7: When you sing “Ungrateful Heart” at the end of season three, David Chase remarked that the song reveals hypocrisy in the family. How did you choose to play the singing of the song? Chianese: I think David used the words of the song. I was told that my own grandfather would sing at Italian American weddings back in the 1930s. With David’s dark sense of humor, if you remember, it was not a wedding, it was a funeral, and they asked Uncle Junior

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to sing, and he doesn’t want to sing, but he does want to sing. He had a couple glasses of wine, and what does he sing—“Ungrateful Heart.” But David is using it because the words indicate Tony Soprano’s feeling towards his own family, his children especially. That’s why they try to hit me with those meat balls—they’re criticizing their father . . . You get the feeling that Tony is not being appreciated by the kids. AM #7: Meadow throws the bread balls at you. You say Meadow’s throwing those pellets because she disapproves of what her father is doing, but she’s throwing them at Uncle Junior. Is that a symbol? Chianese: Yeah, it’s also a symbol of her anger at me for trying to have her father killed, you know that’s part of it. It’s the last show of that particular season, and somebody’s ungrateful. [audience laughter] The song works with my character. I can sing “Ungrateful Heart” because Uncle Junior has feelings—he had a girlfriend—he has feelings, and the song is really about you leaving me, and you don’t understand my pain. And Uncle Junior does have pain, it’s probably one of the only times he could express it in the show. AM #8: First I’d like to sing “Melancholy Baby.” [audience laughter] Meadow’s also suffering the pain and the loss of Jackie Jr., so the irony is that your song is actually singing her feelings, that she’s so cut off, that she’s not seeing that it’s speaking for her. Chianese: You’re probably right. I never thought of that. She lost her boyfriend. Her boyfriend was probably killed and she knows, she suspects her father to be responsible. Levinson: See, this is the purpose of academics, to tell actors what the lines really mean, four, five years after the show. [audience laughter] AM #9: I wanted to say how much I enjoy the “NY 1” spots that you do. Chianese: Thank you, I hate it, but go ahead. [audience laughter] AM #9: Well I don’t know if you hate it, but it’s a real treat to hear your voice and see you on that, and my question is kind of on the lighter side. Uncle Junior had a very distinct look, which is very different than Dominic’s look, and a couple of years ago Six Flags, the amusement-park company, had a commercial, a series of commercials with someone . . . Chianese: Oh that was me all the way. [audience laughter] Mikhail Baryshnikov and I worked on that for hours. [audience laughter] It was probably Malanga actually. [audience laughter]

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AM #9: Was that a dancing Uncle Junior? Chianese: They kept saying, were you the guy dancing on that? AM #9: You did hear that a lot? Chianese: At the time, yeah, thank you, that was fun. It was a lefthanded compliment . . . a bald guy . . . it must have been a seventeen year old. [audience laughter] AM #10: You mentioned watching the final episode at home and being surprised by the . . . Chianese: Blackness. AM #10: Blackness and how long it lasted. I was wondering if you made it a habit of watching the show, because I read a lot of actors saying, “No I never watch things I’m in.” Also, I’ve read that a lot of the show was constructed not only through the writing primarily, but then also through the editing, and how things were put together and changed. I was wondering if, when you watched the show, you were often surprised by things that you saw that you weren’t expecting to see. Chianese: Yeah, I purposely waited to watch like everybody else. It’s hard to be your own judge, but I watched it with my wife, and I watched her reaction. When I shot Jimmy, she said, “[gasp] You’re gonna kill him.” For eleven months that was kept a secret. But I always ask my wife. She never said anything negative, so I knew I was doing the right job. But I would watch very carefully. I was surprised only once when Jimmy said to me at one point, I think it was the last season, he said, it was a very, very tender moment, and he said, his character says to Uncle Junior, “Don’t you love me.” It was very powerful. When I saw it I was crying because I didn’t realize how powerful that moment was while we were doing it. It shows the whole dynamic of what’s happening, and the arc of Uncle Junior was starting to fade away, and the tears came out of frustration, and all kinds of inner dynamics that I can’t even explain as an actor. But you know that something’s going to change. I think that was my most powerful moment. AM #11: I have a question about the long periods of time between seasons. I’d like to know how that affected the actors. Were you filming all that time, or were there periods where you didn’t know if you could take another job? Chianese: That’s a very good question. I was a stage actor many years ago. In 1985 we had a hiatus. I was doing a show with John

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Lithgow called Requiem for a Heavyweight, and I remember we had done it at the theater. And we had a long layoff of nine months. It’s interesting that it was nine months because it is like gestation, it’s like giving birth, you know, and I think that to a real actor the time doesn’t hurt. It gives you a chance to just let it grow. When we went back, we didn’t really lose the art. I think it affects the writer, and I think they gave David time off because they knew that he’d come up with something, and I think that the more time you give a writer, the more you’re gonna get too, so he came up with a lot more than seven or eight episodes in that fifteenmonth hiatus. But it didn’t affect me personally at all, and it gave Gandolfini a rest, which he needed. Nobody has ever worked so hard as far as I know in my life. He was thirty-five when he started, he was working seven days a week constantly. I don’t know how he did it. He has tremendous stamina, and he deserves a lot of credit, James. But time off didn’t hurt. Lavery: A quick question. I am probably not alone in this, but maybe my favorite Uncle Junior episode, I guess I call it Junior-intensive episode, is “Boca.” Chianese: My favorite too. [audience laughter] Lavery: I don’t know if that was the one you had the most lines in, for example, I’m guessing it probably was the most . . . Chianese: I enjoyed that. [audience laughter] Lavery: How many takes did it take to hit him with the pie? Chianese: This poor apprentice. They hit him eleven times with coconut, custard, chocolate. I said to him, “You’re gonna end up using custard,” because that’s what they did in vaudeville, you know. They said, “No let’s try something else.” They hit him with cherry pie. This poor kid, young man. He said, “I’ll volunteer.” He got hit eleven times or twelve times. We ended up, of course, using the custard. That was my favorite scene. It was also the most frustrating because I had to run out and hit her with a pie, and of course they measured with tapes, and it becomes a technical thing, you know, but it was one of my favorite things to do, and of course, Robin, the actress, was wonderful to work with, and I enjoyed it. All my ex-wives got it right in the face. [audience laughter] Lavery: Given our controversy about the language, I hesitate to bring this up, but it has been pointed out by Sopranos scholars that the title of the episode, Boca, is Spanish for mouth.

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Chianese: Si, si. Lavery: And you were aware of that? Chianese: Jimmy and we all had a good laugh on that one. Even Lorraine Bracco called me and everybody was starting to laugh. I remember Edie Falco was laughing. “What are you laughing at?” I said, “We read the script.” “What about it?” “You’ll find out on set.” [audience laughter] On the golf course, Jimmy and I had a lot of fun with that. Levinson: That’s a classic example of: it’s a tough job, but somebody has to do it. [audience laughter] AM #12: You mentioned before about having to create the internal life for Uncle Junior, and I’m wondering if you could tell us about Ercoli. Chianese: Ercoli was the brother who was retarded, and he was loved. I know Uncle Junior loved his brother and felt sorry for him, but obviously he died young. And Ercoli probably had some kind of Down syndrome or something, but Uncle Junior liked him . . . so you know Uncle Junior had a heart. And then we have what we call “Ercoli Awards.” I think it was Terence Winter who told David, “Let’s do a little private thing.” We have these Ercoli awards that they would give when we went to parties after the end of the season at Brad Grey’s house in California. They’d hand out these Ercoli awards. I have three of them in my office. It’s just a white ball on top of a square black thing, but it’s kind of nice. Ercoli meaning Hercules, I guess, in Italian. Lavery: Was there ever any talk of maybe, actually showing him in a flashback? After all, there was an actor who played your younger self. Chianese: Yeah . . . well, no they never showed Ercoli. Lavery: No, but was there ever any talk of that actually happening? Chianese: David and the writers never talked about what was possible to the actors. I think it would only add tension or pressure. It was not our job. At least that’s the way I looked at it. I always looked at it as getting the script as soon as possible and then interpreting, because you had the character by that time, you knew the characters, you know, better than anybody else by then. If you had something good going, just keep it, and get in front of that camera and give it your best shot. AM #13: You’ve worked with three great authors: Coppola, Chase,

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and Wolf on Law & Order. On Law & Order you were a judge. It’s different from Uncle Junior who was on the other side of the law, but how do these three different authors work, and how do they affect the actors, and which—obviously I’m pretty sure it was David who was your favorite—but how did they differ in the way they worked with their actors? Chianese: The craft of acting comes through text. Now, the intention of the text is where your work is. King Lear is different from Jimmy Durante. [audience laughter] But King Lear could say, “Everybody wants to get into the act,” as King Lear, and Jimmy Durante could say, “Everybody wants to get into the act,” as Jimmy Durante. So basically it’s the intention of the words that counts, it’s not about the characters outside of it, so the writer really holds the key. I could say “good morning” to you in fifty different ways. It depends on my intention. Am I setting you up to murder you? Am I happy that you just came from a quadruple bypass, and I’m saying, “Good morning.” So the question is really how do you interpret it? To be or not to be, that is the question. How do you interpret it? You have to look at the scene, and realize, “What does this writer really want in this scene?” and then go according to where the character would go with it. Levinson: Let me ask a follow-up. Let’s take Wolf out of it; Law & Order is excellent, but I don’t think it’s in the same universe as either The Sopranos or the Godfather saga. So you’ve played two enormously important roles, and even though the obvious answer I guess would be The Sopranos because we’re much closer to it, but in your heart of hearts, which role has brought you more satisfaction, Johnny Ola or Uncle Junior? Chianese: Uncle Junior I would say. Uncle Junior because you see his life, you see his heart. As an actor he was . . . you know, I miss that paycheck. [audience laughter] Levinson: So you made more money from The Sopranos than from Godfather II. Paramount’s cheap? Chianese: No, it’s just that it’s steady work. It was a nice character to work on. And there were three dimensions to the man that we could bring to it. Just the way that Jimmy and Edie brought three dimensions to their characters. It was a well-written piece of work. To me it’s like the Shakespeare of television. I hope I’m not overstating it. To me David was an incredible writer.

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Levinson: You’re not overstating it at all. In fact, I was quoted in the New York Post just last week saying that I thought The Sopranos was on par with Shakespeare and The Beatles, and then some smart alec on the blog said, “Isn’t that a little bit of hyperbole professor?” and I answered, “Definitely, definitely, definitely not.” [audience laughter] Lavery: I would point out that even the maid in the Soprano household was one of the best-known characters. That was the genius of the show. There wasn’t a character in the show, including Lilliana, who wasn’t filled out. Chianese: They were real, you knew that they were real. Lavery: The FBI agents, the gardener. The poor gardener I think is a tragic figure. [audience laughter] You know, he gets beaten up by Robert Loggia, and then even after Johnny Sack is convicted, he still had to cut his lawn. [audience laughter] AM #14: Mr. Chianese, the apprentice in the pie scene. Was he an apprentice who was handing you pies or did a stunt person get the pies in the face? Chianese: Yeah, the apprentice, they were trying out different pies, so that they would fall off the face in a certain way. They wouldn’t stick too much. And a young stagehand was there and he just volunteered, so they hit him eleven times with the pies. AM #14: They tried out the pies . . . Lavery: Again just like Hitchcock, he tried about twenty-seven different fruits to get the knife sound in Psycho. Chianese: And Johnny Ola got strangled at least a dozen times with a coat hanger. It wasn’t painful, but the actor was a little shorter than me so it made it harder on him and difficult. My neck hurt for a while there. Levinson: Apropos Johnny Ola, how was it acting with Al Pacino? How would you compare Al Pacino to James Gandolfini? Chianese: Well, like I said before, I was a stage actor. Basically, in Godfather II, I think Francis was looking for stage actors who had never been on screen, so that when you saw them on screen people would say, “Where did that face come from?” So what happened, when I got onto the set, my monologue with Pacino, who was sitting in a chair looking at me with—talking about eyes, when Al looks at you, he looks at you—and I had to give this whole speech to him, and I was prepared because I had weeks to learn the darn

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thing, and when I sat down in front of Al to do the speech, I got a couple of sentences out, and Francis Coppola said, “Hold it! Cut! Dominic, could you change the name of that lawyer? It’s not Jim Lewis, it’s Green. Change it to Jim Green would you, please?” I said, “Sure, Mr. Coppola, no problem.” I look at Al Pacino, his eyes again, I’m sitting there, I’m saying “Hyman Roth always makes money for his partners,” and I couldn’t think of the name. “Cut, Dominic it’s all right, I’m sorry, go back, go back to the original script,” and I’m looking at Al and Al is looking at me. “Change it to Brown.” “Alright Mr. Coppola.” I had no idea what he was doing to me. He was manipulating me, obviously, but I didn’t know that. I had no idea. In fact, Al got up and walked away at one point, I said, “This is the end of my movie career, my first and last movie.” Al came back and I said, “I’m so sorry.” He said, “Dominic,” he put his hand on my shoulder and said, “It’s not you, it’s not you, don’t worry about it.” He got me so nervous that the speech came out right. He made me understand that you don’t act in front of the camera, and he was right. Then the Bronx came out of me. [audience laughter] So, the next scene I’m sitting there, and this little kid with a communion suit is approaching over Al’s shoulder, and he had the little white thing that we do when we receive communion, we have black suits with a ribbon, you know. It’s a bar mitzvah with a ribbon, that’s basically what it is. You’re looking at Judeo-Christianity. All right, so I got the ribbon here. So I see the kid approaching over Al’s shoulder, and folks, I must have lifted my eyebrow an eighth of a millimeter or an inch. Al said, “That’s too much Dominic.” That was the best acting lesson I ever had. You do not act in front of a camera, folks. Remember that. Just feel it to do it. Know your intention. Don’t try to indicate anything, because the camera makes you look like a jerk . . . I’m glad you reminded me about that story. That’s my favorite story about teaching people about acting in front of the camera. That’s true. Levinson: I just have to add, with names like Green and Brown being batted around, I wouldn’t be surprised if Quentin Tarantino was hanging around there somewhere and that’s how he got the names for Reservoir Dogs. [audience laughter] AM #15: Bobby Bacala becomes more and more like a brother to Tony in the last seasons. What were your thoughts on the character and on the relationship of Junior to the character?

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Chianese: Yeah, Bobby Bacala was always at war with Uncle Junior, which is kind of wonderful because you know that you can yell at him, [audience laughter] and Uncle Junior likes to yell, so that went along great. And I thought that Schirripa, Steve Schirripa was wonderful as Bobby Bacala. They put a pillow on his stomach to make him fatter than he actually was. So I enjoyed working with Bobby Bacala, and it helped me because it gave me a chance to have somebody help Uncle Junior, who’s getting older, and somebody I can work off, work off against, and yet Junior had a soft spot for Bobby too. He liked Bobby, even though he always ate all his food. [audience laughter] AM #16: I just have to ask, if Chase does decide to do a Sopranos film, do you have any interest in revisiting the character, or do you feel that pretty much all that’s been done with it has been done? Chianese: Well it depends. I think if he’s dying, and if he is dead, I don’t have much interest, but if he’s faking, I would be interested. [audience laughter] But that would be interesting. You know, I don’t really miss him. I think it’s finished. I personally think it’s finished. We moved on. But I’ll always love him. Levinson: And there’s also of course a chance of a prequel, and depending upon when the prequel is set, maybe just a few years before the beginning of the series, you could still play Uncle Junior. Chianese: David never said he would not write anything. He never denied that he would, he never said, “I’m not going to write anymore,” so you never know what’s going on with his mind. Lavery: He has to sign the movie deals. Chianese: We haven’t heard anything, and we’d be the last to know I think. [audience laughter] Lavery: Not for the Sopranos film, he signed a movie deal to make other films. Chianese: He did? I hope he casts me. [audience laughter] AM #17: The episode in the last season that really had the most of your presence was the one with you and the young Asian American man who came along in the facility. What were your thoughts on the episode? Could you talk about the challenge of bringing someone new in, and negotiating the kind of relationship with that character? Ken Leung plays the character who’s the young Asian American man. He’s in conflict with his family, he’s had violence in it, in his past.

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Levinson: He’s the same actor who plays Miles in Lost. Chianese: Yeah, well what happened in the script, it was written that Uncle Junior’s holding forth in his mental institution, which I always thought, this is marvelous because maybe we can get some real comedy out of here, in this situation. A Chinese young man was assigned to me as a bodyguard in the script. You know when I saw that, I said, “This is interesting, I wonder where they’re gonna get a big Chinese guy who’s gonna be able to be my bodyguard.” And when I saw Ken Leung, who’s small, and short in stature and strong, I said, “Good, this kid must be a good actor.” We hit it off great. We really talked about the situation, and he’s an incredible young actor, and I knew that it would go well, and that’s important. I remember talking to him and getting to know him, and he liked music, we talked about music, because I knew he was special. I knew he was a stage actor too, which I liked. I find that stage actors are usually more qualified in many ways to interpret characters. Kenny was wonderful. I especially like the scene where he was with his mother, and he became extremely paranoid about his own mother, and you could see that the boy had dysfunction, and yet when we hang out together he’s very normal and a very up-beat kind of guy, and he’s a writer himself. I just love him, I think he’s great. Ken Leung’s gonna be one of the tops. AM #18: I’d just like to ask, are you still singing, and can we see you sing in the near future? Chianese: I have a band now; it’s called The New York Cycloners. I want to do more singing. I want to sing in live performances. A room like this, for example . . . and I can share my stories of my grandfather, my father, my growing up in New York, and that’s why I called the band The New York Cycloners. And right now I’m working on a script. I’m working with a writer on actually playing a character who has a band with four sons. AM #18: Is there any chance of you giving us a few bars now? [audience laughter] Chianese: The only song I always sing now is “I Like to Ride the Ferry.” [audience laughter] It was written in 1932. [sings] I like to ride the ferry Where the music is so merry Where the men who play the concertina On the moonlit upper deck arena

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Where the boys and girls are dancing Sweethearts are romancing Life is like a mardi gras Funiculi funicula Happy as we sing together Happy as we cling together Happy with the ferry boat serenade. [applause] AM #19: There’s an actor—I won’t mention the name—who’s a main wheel on the show, who I think, over the years, you could really see grow. I know they chose great actors who just maintained a certain quality. Maybe, would you admit that there was one, or maybe not, that you thought had really grown as an actor during the nine years? Chianese: I think it’s true, practice does make perfect. And I really believe that with all my heart. Somebody comes up to me and they say, “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” You know what I tell them? “You take the R train and get off at Fifty-Seventh Street.” [audience laughter] Lavery: I think she’s asking, though, if there was any particular actor in The Sopranos who really grew and developed over the course of the show? Chianese: I grew, I grew. Definitely myself. Definitely grew, because you have a chance. Especially in the film media, you learn more about relaxing in front of that camera. The more you relax, the more you’re willing to give. Sometimes, believe it or not, you give your best work when you’re extremely tired. All your defenses are down, you’re just exhausted, and you can get good results on film, not on a stage, but in film you can. Just let it all hang out, and just be honest about what’s going on. Levinson: You often hear, at least regarding the Godfather movies, that there were some real mobsters who were consulted, you know in some cases it was even said that maybe they played big parts in the Godfather saga. Now we can’t mention any names because we want to live. [audience laughter] But was there any of that in The Sopranos—real mobsters who either were consulted or in some way were contacted by the show, or perhaps they were even there playing good guys? I guess it was alleged about Goodfellas. What about The Sopranos?

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Chianese: Well, I don’t know. Tony met with Carmine one time and said, “Nobody’s going to say to you, ‘Hello. I belong to the secret society.’” [audience laughter] Lavery: It is true Tony Sirico had a criminal record though, right? Chianese: Tony, yeah, Tony mentioned that. He said that at the beginning. Later on he said, “Maybe I should’ve kept my mouth shut.” [audience laughter] But he did say, yeah, he got caught for stealing when he was a kid. You know, some kind of robbery. Levinson: Yeah, but what Frankie Valli did to music in his later years, some might say is a crime. Lavery: Yeah, but he got hits. [audience laughter] AM #20: This isn’t a question, it’s a comment, and it’s made with 100 percent sincerity. I think you were robbed for the ending in that last season of The Sopranos. Chianese: Oh thank you so much, thank you. [applause] AM #21: One thing I’ve always wondered about is the difference between working on stage and working in film. On stage you’re basically telling a story consecutively, whereas in film you’re doing things in a fragmented way. How do you get the right emotion in a scene, when the development of the character already has reached a certain point, but you need to perform something that happens earlier? How do you perform in a fragmented way like that and get the right emotions? Chianese: That’s where I think it helped me to be on the show for a long time because you do find out how your own particular preparation counts. It’s really about preparation, and of course with the stop and the go of filming it, it’s very important to prepare very, very well. When I say prepare—to know that the lines that you’re going to say are really memorized and deep inside you— because once you get in front of the camera, you’re not thinking about the intention, you’re just using your imagination and what you practiced, and you’re hoping you’ll be in the moment. When you’re in the moment, then you can create. My acting teacher once said, “Dominic, a lot of acting is about focus.” You do the preparation and it’s like sitting down at a piano—you’ve done the preparation, then you’re just going to start playing. You’re not supposed to be thinking about technique. You work through your technique, because the technique is your practice. You’ve already done your homework, you’ve practiced it. You start to express

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yourself. So it’s a question almost like saying, while I’m asking for your name, you could say, “My name is Bill Smith,” and while I’m answering that I say, “Well what’s seven times four?” “Its twentyeight,” “Where do you live?” “215 Jackson Avenue,” but yet, you still have to remember that your name is Bill Smith. The mind has to really be focused on an emotion that has to be expressed, and then you have words to say. It is a mystery, but it is a talent at the same time, and it’s not easy. You’ve gotta focus, and you’ve gotta trust. Basically, what I’m saying, you have to trust the moment. Can you imagine playing at Carnegie Hall and having to put your fingers on all those keys for an hour, or playing a violin—the practice that it takes? And what makes art I think is the moment where you improvise, and something happens, but stays within the context of the craft. I would suggest getting a book that was written by Stephen Nachmanovitch. He teaches at, I think, the University of North Carolina, and he’s brilliant. The book is called Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art, and it talks about the creative process, which involves all the arts. The man who wrote it is a violinist, but it’s not just about music, it’s about acting, and it makes you understand that you have to be in the moment. You cannot be in the past or the future. You have to be in the moment, and that’s a mystery. You know we can prepare for, but it means focusing and practicing. It’s like meditation to the nth degree. It’s very deep. I really don’t know the answer. Nobody does. There is a way to prepare. On the stage you’ve had four weeks to learn the part. It’s in your body, it’s in your whole body. You’re walking like the character. You have the costume. You know exactly where you’re gonna sit, and even then you have to wait for inspiration. If something happens you have to be there and make it work. Sometimes you’re on the stage and you knock the lamp over by accident. You have to stay in character. You know, act like it’s really happening. You have to live on the stage. And that takes preparation. It’s a craft and people who are really talented, they can make an art out of it, but it takes a lot of work. AM #22: I was wondering about the rapport that you had with Nancy Marchand. It seemed like in the scenes you played together, there was just a natural order. How that, that developed between you two. Chianese: Yeah, the chemistry between us was incredible. We never

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even had to discuss the technique or anything . . . it was just complete trust. Trust is really the word, I mean, most acting teachers will tell you how important that is. You go up to somebody in the street and you’re asking them directions, you’re not thinking of how you’re gonna do it, you just trust that he’s gonna answer you, and that’s basically what acting is really like, knowing exactly what you’re gonna do and just trusting yourself, not being hesitant. So really it’s a reenactment of real life, and depending on the text, you give it the expression it needs, and you give it the dynamics it needs, but it’s basically being truthful, and trusting yourself and the person with you. Lavery: This returns to a repeating theme here today about how to interpret the ending and other moments in The Sopranos, but did you feel, coming back to the main question about Nancy, when Livia was manipulating you into whacking Tony, or trying to whack Tony, was that read correctly, she was actively doing it? I mean it’s still unclear when you watch the first season how much of it is passive aggressive and how much of it is conscious on her part. Chianese: I believed everything she told me as a character. I had to believe that. First of all she’s Junior’s sister-in-law. I trusted her implicitly. I mean, I really trusted her. There’s no reason not to trust her because I’ve known her, she was married to my brother, so you know I had no idea she was manipulating me. Livia’s smart enough to manipulate me, and by trusting her I get myself in trouble. I really believed her when she said that it was my idea to get rid of Tony. Lavery: What did you think of the actor who played you as a young man? What was it like to be watching someone playing your earlier self? Chianese: I thought it was wonderful. Rocco Sisto is a wonderful actor. We do look alike when we put the glasses on a certain way. My own son Dominic Jr. was cast originally, but turned out he was too young for the part. He looked younger than the other character, than Joseph, so they had to let him go. He felt bad about that. AM #23: After the attempted assassination in season one of Tony, he has a very hard time forgiving his mother, Livia, but he seems to get over the fact that Junior played a role in trying to get him whacked . . . Chianese: You know that’s really a question about the relationship that

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they have to each other. Why does Tony forgive his uncle? I think it’s really that it is his uncle, and Tony realizes that he sometimes might have to make decisions that are according to your own moral code, I mean it’s up to Tony to figure that out, why does he forgive his uncle. Of course he loves his own. He feels respectful towards his uncle, and even though he may hate him for what he did, he’s gonna rationalize it, and justify it some way, which in Tony’s psyche, is one of the reasons probably why he goes to a psychiatrist, because he’s got all these demons. His own uncle is trying to kill him, so that must make him feel a little bit insecure. [audience laughter] I’m sure if I knew that my uncle was trying to kill me I’d say, “There’s something wrong here,” [audience laughter] “either he’s nuts, you know, or I’m nuts, so let me go to somebody.” So I think these are the questions that made the show so wonderful. He’s taking a chance. When I first auditioned for this role, I saw that I’m talking to my sister-in-law, saying, she’s an Italian mother, I said, I’m going to have to bump off your son, ok. I knew that David Chase was a little . . . but he’s a genius. So it turns out that he’s a genius because he made it work. That’s Shakespearean. That’s Greek mythology, that’s Greek drama. That’s heavy drama. Killing your own, God forbid, your own son or your daughter, or your brother, or your uncle. That’s drama. That’s human passion. That’s stuff that, like Oedipus, you know finding out that he’s sleeping with his mother and he killed his own father. That’s heavy stuff. That’s basically what David was writing, and Tony was definitely troubled about it and Junior was troubled about it. It wasn’t easy to kill his own nephew, but he really wanted to have it done. But he was nervous as a nut, and I think secretly he was happy that it didn’t work. Levinson: Yeah, we were happy too. Final question. We’re going to wrap up now. AM #24 : How much back story did they give you on “Johnny Boy” Soprano, Junior’s brother, and the relationship before we joined the season? Chianese: We just got what everybody else got. We just read the script. We did know from watching that they had a history as young hoods in the neighborhood, but we weren’t given any hints. We just had to use our imaginations, which is part of talent. Levinson: Well then let me just conclude, not with a question, but with

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a brief final comment. As I mentioned at the reception last night, two years ago I wrote an op-ed for Newsday that I entitled, “Only Idiots Don’t Watch Television,” [audience laughter] which actually I liked as a title, but Newsday told me to change it to a phrase that I had in the article, “The New Golden Age of Television,” which I guess is a sweeter title. Anyway, what both of those titles got to is the enormous increase in the quality of television that we’ve seen in the past ten years. So if you think about Rome on HBO, The Tudors on Showtime, Dexter on Showtime, the John Adams miniseries that concluded on HBO, you can just go on and on and on, and it’s not only on cable television, it’s on the networks— shows like 24, Lost, but when you think about where all of that started, there’s no doubt in my mind that it started in 1999, that it started with The Sopranos, and I think the world would also agree that one of the most important parts of that show is Dominic Chianese, who has spent this time with us today. So, thank you, Dominic. Chianese: Thank you. [applause]

Note Thanks to Giselle Isner for the transcription.

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Contributors KIM AKASS teaches at Royal Holloway, University of London, and manages CSTOnline. She has coedited (with Janet McCabe) several anthologies including Reading Sex and the City (Tauris, 2004) and Quality TV: Contemporary American TV and Beyond (Tauris, 2007). She is co–founding editor of Critical Studies in Television and co–series editor of the Reading Contemporary Television series for I. B. Tauris. Currently, she is writing a monograph, Telematernity: Watching Mothers on TV, which is due for publication in 2012. ALBERT AUSTER is associate professor in the Department of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University at Lincoln Center, New York. He is most recently the coauthor of thirtysomething: Television, Women, Men, and Work (Lexington Books, 2008). DAVID BIANCULLI is associate professor of TV and film at Rowan University, TV critic and guest host for NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross, and founder and editor of the website TVWorthWatching.com. His latest book is Dangerously Funny: The Uncensored Story of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour (2009). CYNTHIA BURKHEAD teaches English and film studies at the University of North Alabama. She is the author or coeditor of books on John Steinbeck and Grey’s Anatomy and has completed her dissertation on dreams and television narrative. TERRI CARNEY earned her PhD at the University of Kansas. Currently, she teaches courses in Spanish literature, culture, and film at Butler University in Indianapolis, where she also contributes to the Collaborative for Critical Inquiry into Race, Gender, Sexuality and Class. Some of her essays and journal articles appear in Letras Peninsulares, Ojáncano, Romance Notes, Bad Subjects: Political Education for Everyday Life, and Inside Higher Ed. MARISA CARROLL is staff writer for PopMatters.com and editor for Seventeen. GLEN CREEBER teaches at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. His research interests lie specifically in television, concentrating on television and tex-

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tual analysis in a number of different forms. His books include Dennis Potter: Between Two Worlds (Macmillan, 1998), The Television Genre Book (BFI, 2001), 50 Key Television Programmes (Arnold, 2004), Serial Television: Big Drama on the Small Screen (BFI, 2004), and Tele-Visions: An Introduction to Studying Television (BFI, 2006). GEORGE DE STEFANO is an author, critic, and feature writer whose work has appeared in books, magazines, academic journals, and newspapers and online. His nonfiction book An Offer We Can’t Refuse: The Mafia in the Mind of America (Faber and Faber, 2006) examines America’s enduring fascination with Italian and Italian American organized crime, as depicted in the movies, on TV, and in fiction. GARY R. EDGERTON is Eminent Scholar, professor, and chair of the Communication and Theatre Arts Department at Old Dominion University. He has published eight books and more than seventy-five essays on a wide assortment of media and culture topics in a variety of books, scholarly journals, and encyclopedias. His Columbia History of American Television (Columbia University Press, 2007) was named the 2008 John G. Cawelti Award winner for Outstanding Scholarly Inquiry into American Cultural Studies by the American Culture Association. In addition, Dr. Edgerton is the co–executive editor of the Journal of Popular Film and Television, general editor for the Essential Reader Series in Contemporary Media and Culture from the University Press of Kentucky, and an editorial board member of five other scholarly journals and two book series. CAMERON GOLDEN received her PhD in English from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro where she now teaches courses in twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature and film. She is currently at work on a project that examines autobiographical author figures within contemporary narrative. She has published articles on film, literature, and television studies in Mosaic, Critique, and Reading the Sopranos. MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM is a graduate of Harvard University and currently writes for the New York Times. DOUGLAS L. HOWARD is assistant academic chair and associate professor in the English department at Suffolk County Community College. His publications include articles, essays, and book chapters in Literature and Theology, PopPolitics.com, The Chronicle of Higher Education, This Thing of Ours: Investigating The Sopranos, The Gothic Other: Racial and Social Constructions in the Literary Imagination (coeditor and contributor), Reading The Sopranos, Reading Deadwood, Reading 24, Milton in Popular Culture, and Dexter: Investigating Cutting Edge Television (editor).

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ANTONIO INGROIA is an anti-Mafia prosecutor in Palermo, Italy. JASON JACOBS teaches at the University of Queensland in Australia. He is the author of The Intimate Screen: Early British Television Drama (Oxford University Press, 2000) and Body Trauma TV (BFI, 2008). He is completing monographs on David Milch and Deadwood. JAMES M. KENEALLY is a lawyer in New York with Kelley Drye and Warren LLP. CHRISTOPHER KOCELA earned his PhD at McGill University. He teaches courses in twentieth-century American literature, contemporary theory, and popular culture at Georgia State University in Atlanta. He has published in Pynchon Notes, Genders, and The Steinbeck Newsletter. DAVID LAVERY is the author of numerous essays and reviews and author, coauthor, editor, or coeditor of numerous books published or under contract, including The Essential Cult Television Reader (University Press of Kentucky, 2010) and volumes on such television series as Twin Peaks, The X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Sopranos, Lost, Deadwood, Seinfeld, My So Called Life, Heroes, Gilmore Girls, and Battlestar Galactica. He coedits the e-journal Slayage: The Online International Journal of Buffy Studies and is one of the founding editors of Critical Studies in Television: Scholarly Studies of Small Screen Fictions. He has lectured around the world on the subject of television. PAUL LEVINSON writes science fiction, sf/mystery, and popular and scholarly nonfiction. His Silk Code won the Locus Award for Best First Novel of 1999. His novel The Consciousness Plague won the 2003 Mary Shelley Award for Outstanding Fictional Work. He has published twenty-nine science fiction stories, some of which are now available on www.fictionwise.com. His novella Loose Ends was a finalist for the 1998 Hugo Award , the 1998 Sturgeon Award, and the 1997 Nebula Award. The radioplay of his novelette The Chronology Protection Case was nominated for an Edgar Award for Best Mystery Play of 2002. Digital McLuhan won the 2000 Lewis Mumford Award for Outstanding Scholarship. His work has been translated into twelve languages. He teaches at Fordham University. FABIO LICATA is an Italian judge. JANET MCCABE is Honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck College, University of London, and research assistant for critical studies in television at the University of Glamorgan. She is author of Feminist Film Studies (Wallflower, 2004), and has coedited (with Kim Akass) several antholo-

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gies including Reading Sex and the City (Tauris, 2004) and Quality TV: Contemporary American TV and Beyond (Tauris, 2007). Her book The West Wing is forthcoming from Wayne State University Press, and she is preparing another on cultural memory and historical amnesia in post-9/11 U.S. television drama. ROBIN NELSON is professor of theatre and TV drama at University of London (Central School) and the author of numerous publications on arts and media topics, including TV Drama in Transition: Forms, Values and Cultural Change (Macmillan, 1997). His most recent book is State of Play: “High End” Contemporary TV Drama (Manchester University Press, 2007). MARTHA P. NOCHIMSON is associate editor of Cineaste and the author of The Passion of David Lynch: Wild at Heart in Hollywood (University of Texas Press, 1997) and Dying to Belong: Gangster Movies in Hollywood and Hong Kong (Wiley-Blackwell, 2007). DAVID PATTIE is reader in theatre studies at the University of Chester. His essay “Mobbed Up: The Intertextual Gangster” appeared in This Thing of Ours. STEVEN PEACOCK is lecturer in film at the University of Hertfordshire. He is the editor of Reading 24: TV against the Clock (Tauris, 2007), the author of numerous articles on small-screen aesthetics, and coeditor of the Television Series (Manchester University Press). ROBERT PILUSO is a PhD candidate at California State University at Fullerton. NANCY MCGUIRE ROCHE earned an MFA in creative writing at Brown University. She is a doctoral candidate at Middle Tennessee State University and teaches film at Watkins College of Art and Design. SHARON SUTHERLAND teaches law at the University of British Columbia Law School. With Sarah Swan, she has published studies of legal matters in such television series as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Firefly. SARAH SWAN is a lawyer and independent popular culture scholar who has written (with Sharon Sutherland) on a variety of television series. FRANK P. TOMASULO served as editor of the Journal of Film and Video from 1991 to 1996 and Cinema Journal from 1997 to 2002. He has published widely on U.S. and international cinema, American television, and screen acting. His anthology on film performance, More than a Method (Wayne State University Press, 2004), was coedited with Diane Carson and Cynthia Baron. Professor

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Tomasulo has taught at UCLA, Ithaca College, Cornell University, the University of California–Santa Cruz, Georgia State University, Southern Methodist University, and Florida State University, as well as being an academic administrator. In 2009, he became the first recipient of the University Film and Video Association Teaching Award. BARBARA VILLEZ teaches at Université Paris 8. She is associate researcher at the Institut des Hautes Études sur la Justice and at the Laboratoire Communication et Politique du CNRS. Her Television and the Legal System is now available in an English translation from Routledge. JOSEPH S. WALKER received his doctorate in contemporary American fiction from Purdue University. He has published a number of essays on contemporary fiction and film, and has a special interest in representations of crime and violence. He lives in Indiana, where he works as a freelance writer and scholar. PAUL WRIGHT earned a PhD in comparative literature from Princeton University and teaches at Cabrini College. Current projects include a book-length study of Machiavelli, titled The Alloy of Identity: Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories Reclaimed. His published essays include pieces on Deadwood and The Sopranos. MAURICE YACOWAR is emeritus professor, University of Calgary, and the author of books including The Sopranos on the Couch: Analyzing Television’s Greatest Series (Continuum, 2007), The Films of Paul Morrissey (Cambridge University Press, 1993), and Loser Take All: The Comic Art of Woody Allen (Frederick Ungar, 1979).

Index “actor residues,” 162, 165 African Americans, 198–99, 205, 210, 215, 218, 268, 273 a-ha (rock band), 310 Akass, Kim, x, 2–4, 82, 165 allegory, 157, 159 Allemang, John, 302 Allen, Woody, 38 Altieri, Jimmy (Sopranos character), 304 Altman, Bruce, 302 Alzheimer’s disease, 161–62, 164, 212 AMC, 1, 17 American Gangster (movie), 268 American Italian Defense Association, 40 Amos ’n’ Andy (television show), 205 Analyze This (movie), 168, 268 Annalisa (Sopranos character), 235–46, 270 Annunziata, Perry (Sopranos character), 203 “Any Way You Want It” (song), 57, 301 Aprile, Jackie, Jr. (Sopranos character), 110, 175, 199 Aprile, Jackie, Sr. (Sopranos character), 262, 275, 307, 310 Aprile, Richie (Sopranos character), 117, 186, 203, 292 Aprile, Rosalie (Sopranos character), 275 Arkin, Alan, 268

Atlantic Monthly, 1 auteurs/auteurism, 41, 43–47, 49–52, 98, 138 “Baby’s in the Black Books” (song), 34, 40 Bacall, Lauren, 19, 128 Baccalieri, Bobby, Jr. (Sopranos character), 19, 75, 144, 192, 200–201, 203–4, 261–62, 264, 298–302, 306–7, 313–14 Baccalieri, Bobby, Sr. (Sopranos character), 262 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 309 Barone Waste Management, 156 Barreca, Regina, 2, 100 Barthes, Roland, 4, 49, 206 Beckett, Samuel, 64 Benjamin, Jessica, 82 Bennett, Tony, 301 Bevilaqua, Matt (Sopranos character), 60, 262 “Beyond the Bada Bing,” 94 Bianculli, David, 304 Bin Laden, Osama, 73 Birth of a Nation, The (movie), 197 black magic, 60 Blake, William, 30, 40 Blundetto, Tony (Sopranos character), 29, 75, 84, 199, 210, 212 “bobo culture,” 157, 163 Bogdanovich, Peter, 39, 46, 98, 206

384 Bonpensiero, Angie (Sopranos character), 292–93 Bonpensiero, Salvatore “Big Pussy” (Sopranos character), 58, 130, 133, 151–53, 189, 262–63, 267, 270, 291, 293, 300, 304, 311, 312 Bracco, Lorraine, 26, 36, 48, 163, 266, 268 Brooks, David, 157, 163 Brusca, Giovanni, 251 Bucco, Artie (Sopranos character), 4, 37, 168, 173, 184–85, 190–91, 193–94, 224, 233, 300 Bucco, Charmaine (Sopranos character), 162, 300 Buddha/Buddhism, 156, 159–61, 163–64, 208, 295 Burgess, Mitchell, 107, 113 Burton, Tim, 140 Buscemi, Steve, 29, 62 business culture, 159 Cannell, Stephen J., 45 Capo dei Capi, Il (movie), 251 carnival, 117, 309–11 Carter, Jimmy, 65–66, 73 casting, 18, 49, 85, 89, 162–63, 198, 206 Catholic Church/Catholicism, 60–61, 93–94, 122, 165, 223 Cestone, Gigi (Sopranos character), 307 Chase, Anthony, 221 Chase, David, ix–x, 2, 23–24, 26–28, 31–32, 58, 62, 79, 84, 89, 114, 121–22, 150, 167–68, 206–7, 246, 248–50, 252, 264–65, 272– 73, 277, 289–91, 297–99, 301–2, 303, 305–8, 310–12, 315–16 Matthew Weiner and, 17–22 politics and mindset of, 34–39 Stephen Poliakoff and, 41–53

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Index the unexpected and, 257–62 use of dreams and, 152–55 Cheney, Dick, 24, 31–32 Chianese, Dominic, 3, 25, 103, 339–62 Cifaretto, Ralph (Sopranos character), 96, 151, 170, 173, 300, 305, 262–63, 274, 280–83, 285, 307 Citizen Kane (movie), 19, 298 Clinton, Senator Hillary, 274 Cody, Iron Eyes, 271 commodification, 165 consumer culture, 68, 75, 78, 157 Corleone family (The Godfather characters), 153, 183, 267 Michael, 129, 258, 301 Sonny, 142, 307 Vito, 116, 118, 137, 142, 246, 258, 267 corporate capitalism, 45, 50, 67–68, 164 Cosa Nostra, 63, 106, 116–17, 244– 45, 252, 273 Creeber, Glen, 3–4, 18, 43, 53, 137–38, 140, 142, 144, 160, 165, 217, 278–29, 285 criminal justice system, 223, 228–29, 246–47, 249 Criminal Minds (television series), 268 cultural identity, 58, 183–85, 217 Curto, Raymond (Sopranos character), 263, 304 Cusack, John, 268 Cusamano, Dr. Bruce (Sopranos character), 271 Da Vinci Code, The (novel), 204 Dante, Gabriella (Sopranos character), 272 Dante, Silvio (Sopranos character), 109, 144, 176, 234, 267, 271–72, 298–99, 307

Index Davenport, Neil, 79 Deadwood (television series), 13, 279, 309 DeCesare, Michele, 35, 206 DeTrolio, Finn (Sopranos character), 86, 115 DeVito, Tommy (Goodfellas character), 307 Devji, Faisal, 72 Dexter (television series), 15, 19, 268, 309 Dolan, J. T. (Sopranos character), 129, 131–32, 141 “Don’t Stop Believin’” (song), ix, 58, 136, 284, 301 Dylan, Bob, ix, 76–77 Eagleton, Terry, 309 Eastern spirituality, 161 Eliot, George, 277 Ellis Island, 205 empathic synthesis, 264 English Romantics, 30, 40 ethics, 31, 34, 38, 70, 75, 165, 222, 227, 247 Europe/European, 14, 42, 44, 46–47, 226–28 existentialism, 21, 51, 57, 61, 63–64, 207, 275, 303 “faith, not works,” 61 Faithful (movie), 268 Falco, Edie, 29, 37, 99, 207 Falcone, Judge, 251 father-daughter relationships, 81–82, 84–85, 87 Faulkner, William, 30, 276 “favored daughters,” 88–89 FCC, 18 feds (in The Sopranos), 89, 247–48, 250, 259, 304–6, 312 feminism, 93–94, 99, 102

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“finooks.” See homophobia Fisher, Robert, 232 food (in The Sopranos), 183–95 Fordham University, ix–x, 1, 103–4, 285 Foucault, Michel, 96, 98, 100, 103–4, 167 Freud, Sigmund, x, 82–83, 118, 154, 210–11, 217 Friedan, Betty, 101 Friends (television series), 302 Frost, Robert, 70, 75–76, 78–79, 217 Fugitive, The (television series), 17 Gabbard, Glen O., 2, 85, 151, 168, 174, 307, 307 Gaeta, Beansie (Sopranos character), 203 Gandolfini, James, 24, 48, 158, 196–97, 207, 266, 307 Gattuso Hendin, Josephine, 85 Geertz, Clifford, 266 Gervasi, Carlo (Sopranos character), 304 “Getting to Yes,” 232, 242 Ghibelline, 274 Gilbert, Sandra, 196–97 Giunta, Furio (Sopranos character), 33, 99–100, 117, 184, 235–36, 272, 294 Gladiator, The (movie), 274 Godfather, The (movie), 109, 129, 139–40, 142, 152, 183, 207, 246, 249, 251, 258–59, 262, 267–68, 278, 298 Gomorra (novel), 244 Goodfellas (movie), 163, 183, 258– 61, 267–68, 278, 300, 306–7 Gotti, John, 207, 267, 271 Gravano, Sammy “The Bull,” 267 Green, Robin, 97, 107, 1113 Griffith, D. W., 197

386 Grosse Point Blank (movie), 268 Gualtieri, Paulie (“Paulie Walnuts”) (Sopranos character), v, 2, 19, 25, 117, 142, 153, 156, 161–63, 170, 172–76, 200, 204, 234, 236, 258, 264, 270–71, 274, 291, 295, 298, 300, 308 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and, 57–64 guilt, 33, 37, 66, 83, 88–89, 98, 128, 151, 153, 159, 188, 199, 203, 229–31, 299 Hamlet (play), 63–64, 302, 316 Harris, Agent Dwight (Sopranos character), 296, 300, 304–6, 309, 312 Havrilesky, Heather, 81, 312 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 30, 40 HBO, ix, 1–2, 7–16, 17–19, 42–45, 50, 52, 99, 260, 284 Heart (rock band), 301 heaven, 60–61, 166, 295 hell, 60, 155, 290, 294–96 Hitchcock, Alfred, 39, 282, 301 Holbrook, Hal, 25 homophobia, 115, 116, 120, 121–22, 201–3 hooks, bell, 112 Horowitz, Daniel, 67–68, 79 Hughes, Ted, 61 Imitation of Life (movie), 201 imminent expected, 259, 262, 265 imminent unexpected, 257–58, 260–65 Imperioli, Michael, 36, 163, 267–68, 272–73 incest, 83, 88, 137 intertextuality, 3, 138, 162, 201 Intintola, Father Phil (Sopranos character), 272 Italy/Italians, x, 2–3, 14, 39, 45, 59,

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Index 84–85, 106–7, 109, 114–15, 122, 138, 142, 150–51, 157, 163, 183– 86, 189–90, 192–94, 227–28, 235, 243–45, 249–53, 267, 300 history and, 269–76 The Sopranos as insulting to, 40, 196–207 whiteness and, 208–18 Jackson, Andrew, 74 Journey (rock band), ix, 24, 58, 136, 284, 301, 303 judges, 228, 240, 247, 251, 253, 280 Kahn, Michael, 82–83, 88 Kaveny, Cathleen, 157, 165 Kermode, Frank, 308 Kessler, Todd A., 19 Kieffer, Christine C., 83, 86, 88 King, Rodney, 200 Kupferberg, Dr. Elliot (Sopranos character), 36, 39, 97, 111–12, 152, 177 La Cerva, Adriana (Sopranos character), 58, 101, 109–10, 128, 130–33, 135, 153, 173, 178, 261, 263, 275, 304, 309 La Penna, Dr. Richard (Sopranos character), 107, 271 Lacan, Jacque, 204 “Lady, or the Tiger?, The” (short story), 314–16 Lanza, Mario, 204 Lasch, Christopher, 65–68, 71, 73, 75, 77 Lawrence, D. H., 297 lawyers/attorneys, 8, 32, 89, 221, 223, 227, 229–31, 247, 251, 293 Lax, Ruth F., 83, 88 legal system, 26, 96–97, 113, 221–22, 249

Index Lennon, John, 315–16 Leonardo da Vinci, 204–5 Leotardo, Billy (Sopranos character), 153 Leotardo, Phil (Sopranos character), 115, 120, 122, 154, 204–5, 209, 217, 265, 275, 290, 298, 300, 304, 309 Lipari, Skip (Sopranos character), 304 Little Miss Sunshine (movie), 298 Lo Piccolo, Salvatore, 252 long-form serial narrative, 48 Lupertazzi, Carmine, Sr. (Sopranos character), 204 Lupertazzi, “Little” Carmine, Jr. (Sopranos character), 127, 134 Lutheranism, 62 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 205 Mad Men (television series), x, 2, 17–19, 21 Mafia, 2–3, 13, 18, 79, 85, 93–95, 100, 139, 141–43, 157–64, 172, 177, 183, 185, 187, 189, 191, 193, 195–99, 207, 210–11, 213–15, 217–18, 232, 242, 276, 277, 283, 306 history and, 268–73 homosexuality and, 114–23 judicial system and, 221–31, 243–53 Mafiosi, 116–17, 243–44, 258 “Magic Man” (song), 301 Manos, Jim, Jr., 19 Marchand, Nancy, 98 Marx, Karl, 207 M*A*S*H (television series), 302 Massarone, Jack (Sopranos character), 304 McCabe, Janet, x, 2–4, 82 McCartney, Paul, 316 McLuhan, Marshall, 316

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Melfi, Dr. Jennifer (Sopranos character), 2, 26–29, 32, 35–36, 39, 47–48, 51, 66, 74, 83–84, 89, 128, 131, 133, 142, 150–53, 159, 162–63, 167–69, 172, 174–75, 177–78, 201, 205, 209, 214, 224, 237, 247, 259–61, 264, 266, 268–71, 277, 290, 292, 294, 295, 300, 302, 307–8, 310–11 feminist reading of, 94–98 men and, 110–12 rape of and, 108–9, 112–13 Tony Soprano and, 94–97, 105–13, passim Melville, Herman, 40 Metcalf, Stephen, 81 Meuci, Antonio, 270 Middlemarch (novel), 266 Mink, Neil (Sopranos character), 304 Modleski, Tania, 96 Molinaro, Coach (Sopranos character), 28–29, 31–32, 154 Moltisanti, Christopher (Sopranos character), 2, 19, 40, 46, 64, 74, 110, 151, 153, 161, 163–64, 174–76, 178, 201, 203–5, 225, 236–37, 260, 267–68, 270–71, 273–75, 280, 282–84, 295, 298–300, 302, 309 drug use of, 129–30 filmmaking and, 127–36, 137–45 Paulie Walnuts and, 59–62 Tony’s murder of, 19, 143, 164, 174, 205, 264–65, 298 Moment of Truth, The (television show), 309 Montana, Tony, 246 morality, 225–2 Mulvey, Laura, 99 Native Americans, 74, 206, 271–72 natural law, 222, 225–28

388 New Brutalism, 137–45 New York Times, 1, 12, 94, 139 Nochimson, Martha, 197 Northern Exposure (television series), 20 Oedipal complex, x, 82–83, 88–89, 98, 218 Omertá, 63, 106, 111, 259, 277 Operation Old Bridge, 2008, 249 organized crime, 114, 116, 118, 122, 144, 197, 227, 246, 249–51, 253, 268–69, 311 Othello (play), 302 “Our Mobsters, Ourselves,” 157 Oz (television series), 11 Ozu, Yasujiro, 285 Paglia, Camille, 197 Parisi, Jason (Sopranos character), 70 Parisi, Patrick (Sopranos character), 86–88, 214 Parisi, Patsy (Sopranos character), 215 Pastore, Vincent, 268 Patton, George S., 273 Pine Barrens (of New Jersey), 62 Pirandello, Luigi, 57 Pistole, John S., 249 Plath, Sylvia, 61 Poliakoff, Stephen, 2, 41, 46–49, 51 Pontecorvo, Eugene (Sopranos character), 301, 312 prison, 89, 117, 153, 161, 186, 203, 222, 304, 306 Provenzano, Bernardo, 252 Prozac, 152, 197 Public Enemy, The (movie), 23, 152, 267, 298 purgatory, 60–62, 155, 158, 265 Puzo, Mario, 183, 251

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Index Al Qaeda, 72 Rabkin, Hesh (Sopranos character), 142, 175–76, 202, 234, 265, 272–73 Reading The Sopranos, 2–3, 93 redemption, 157–59, 162, 164–65 relativity, 24–28, 32, 38 Rescue Me (television series), 309 Ricci, Franco, 72–73 Richards, I. A., 315 RICO, 169, 229–30, 271 Riina, Salvatore, 251–52 Robinson, Edward G., 267 Rolling Stones, 311 Rommel, Erwin, 273 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (play), 57–58, 64 Rosi, Francesco, 244 Rossi, Jesus (Sopranos character), 107 Ryan, Maureen, 20–21, 312 Sacramoni, Johnny “Sack” (Sopranos character), 19, 59, 83, 110, 134, 217, 262, 296 prosecution of, 229–31 Sacramoni, Ginny (Sopranos character), 107, 110, 230 Salvatore Giuliano (movie), 244 Sandokan, 251 Sanseverino, Agent Robyn (Sopranos character), 304 Santoru, Rick, 205 Sapinsly, Alan (Sopranos character), 32 Satriale’s Pork Store, 170, 184, 188, 192, 202, 300 Saviano, Roberto, 244, 253 Savio Mario, 269 Scalies, Charley, 28 Scangarelo, Hunter (Sopranos character), 35–37, 40, 299

Index Scarface (movie), 139, 246, 251 Schwinn, Christian, 25, 30 Schwinn, John, 25–26, 28–29, 39 Scorsese, Martin, 143, 183, 209, 217, 258–59, 261, 265, 267, 278, 306 “Second Coming, The” (Yeats poem), 75 Seitz, Matt Zoller, 22 Sepinwall, Alan, 304, 315 Seven-Per-Cent Solution, The (movie), 39 Sex and the City (television series), 11, 13, 93–94 Shakespeare, William, 49, 57, 198, 282, 302 Shield, The (television series), 15, 309 Sicily, 3, 116–17, 198, 227, 243–44, 250, 252, 267, 271 Sigler, Jamie-Lynn, 40 Silverstein, Elliot, 233 Simon, David, 4, 157 Sirico, Tony, 25, 163, 268 Six Characters in Search of an Author (play), 57 Skiff, Julianna (Sopranos character), 84, 131, 215 Somalia, 200 Soprano family (Sopranos characters) A. J., Jr., 2, 40, 59, 118, 161–62, 171, 173, 176, 179, 200, 204, 223, 226, 267, 270, 272, 275, 281–82, 294, 307–8; filmmaking and, 127–30, 133–36; in season seven, 297–301; narcissism of, 65–80; whiteness and, 213–17 Carmela, 3, 12, 19, 21, 29, 32–37, 62, 74, 81–82, 93–95, 110, 112– 13, 114, 118, 129, 132, 134–35, 141, 151, 154, 161–62, 165, 169, 171, 173, 176, 189–90, 192–93, 214, 223, 236, 239–42, 261, 267, 272, 274–76, 280–81, 289–96,

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389

299–301; Meadow and, 84–89; feminist reading of, 84–89, 98–103 Janice/Parvati, 108, 117–18, 161, 173, 186–88, 192, 201, 203, 299, 300 Livia, 45, 63, 70, 84, 98, 109, 115, 151–52, 173, 175, 185, 188, 200, 237, 259–60, 267, 291–92, 299, 308 Meadow, 19, 37, 40, 70–71, 99, 110–13, 115, 139, 160–61, 172–73, 176, 178, 204–5, 223, 236, 238–42, 247, 263, 270, 275–76, 290, 293, 297, 299, 301, 311; relationship with her father, 71–89; whiteness and, 208–11 Tony, 2–4, 12, 15, 19, 21, 24–40 passim, 45–48, 51, 58–60, 62–64, 66, 69–71, 74–75, 78–79, 117–18, 120–22, 127–36 passim, 137–39, 141–44, 183– 86, 188–94, 196–207 passim, 221–28 passim, 230, 244, 246–53 passim, 258–65 passim, 277–78, 280–84 passim, 289–96 passim, 297–302, 312, 313–16; Dr. Melfi and, 105–13; dreams of, 149–56; history and, 266–76; Meadow and, 81–89; Kevin Finnerty and, 157–65; negotiating style of, 232–42; therapy and, 166–79; whiteness and, 208–18; women and, 93–104 Uncle Junior, 3, 25, 31, 33, 87, 103, 128–30, 154–55, 173, 186, 194, 209, 211, 213, 216, 237, 259, 262–63, 265, 274, 280, 296, 298–300, 307, 314 Sopranos episodes “46 Long,” 59, 129, 247, 268, 270 “A Hit is a Hit,” 177, 209

390 Sopranos episodes (cont.) “All Due Respect,” 154, 230 “All Happy Families,” 118, 159 “Amour Fou,” 74, 82, 86, 205, 293 “Another Toothpick,” 74, 199, 263 “The Army of One,” 172, 174 “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” 127, 133 “The Blue Comet,” 19, 27, 35, 209, 216, 301–2, 307, 314–15 “Boca,” 103, 193, 223–25 “Bust Out,” 85 “Calling All Cars,” 178, 210 “Chasing It,” 19, 205, 264 “Christopher,” 26, 271 “Cold Cuts,” 205, 294 “Cold Stones,” 21, 177, 275 “College,” 19, 40, 84–85, 139, 160, 211, 241, 276, 295 “Commendatori,” 235 “Denial, Anger, Acceptance,” 81, 230, 234 “D-Girl,” 19, 70, 128–30, 133, 139, 204, 265 “Down Neck,” 69, 85, 128, 176, 204, 218, 226 “Eloise,” 40 “Employee of the Month,” 35, 39, 96, 105–10, 112–13 “Everybody Hurts,” 151 “The Fleshy Part of Thigh,” 25, 199–200 “For All Debts Public and Private,” 74, 204, 311 “Fortunate Son,” 19, 204–5 “From Where to Eternity,” 59, 295 “Full Leather Jacket,” 260, 293, 302 “Funhouse,” 19, 151–53, 188, 191–92, 194, 210, 308, 311 “Guy Walks into a Psychiatrist’s Office,” 168, 171, 175 “The Happy Wanderer,” 205

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Index “He Is Risen,” 19, 262, 307 “House Arrest,” 300 “I Dream of Jeannie Cusamano,” 179, 200, 218, 250, 290 “I’ve Gotta Be Me,” 301 “Irregular Around the Margins,” 130, 132 “Isabella,” 159, 177, 259 “Johnny Cakes,” 119–20, 129, 202, 215 “Join the Club,” 155, 158, 211, 295 “Kaisha,” 19, 131 “Kennedy and Heidi,” 19, 32, 40, 76, 142–43, 164, 172, 174, 178, 200, 208, 214, 264–65, 312 “The Knight in White Satin Armor,” 185, 194, 203 “The Legend of Tennessee Moltisanti,” 58, 128, 139, 151, 304 “Live Free or Die,” 121, 205 “Long Term Parking,” 101, 261 “Luxury Lounge,” 19, 128, 134 “Made in America,” 3, 36, 75, 89, 134–35, 176, 179, 204, 209, 265, 284, 289–316 “Marco Polo,” 84 “Mayham,” 19, 21, 130, 140, 155, 158, 208, 309 “Meadowlands,” 139, 208, 262 “Members Only,” 119, 209, 261, 263, 265, 301–2, 306, 312, 314–16 “Mergers and Acquisitions,” 205 “Moe ’n Joe,” 19, 68, 120, 230, 298 “Mr. and Mrs. John Sacrimoni Request,” 115, 170, 203, 264 “Mr. Ruggerio’s Neighborhood,” 263, 304 “No Show,” 200, 304 “Nobody Knows Anything,” 223, 228, 264

Index “Pax Soprana,” 151, 201, 292 “Pie-O-My,” 154, 263, 280, 282, 307 “Pilot: The Sopranos,” 13, 26–27, 66, 74, 78, 89, 139, 142–43, 150, 162, 169, 216, 290–91, 300, 307 “Pine Barrens,” 62, 64, 80 “Proshai, Livushka,” 70, 86, 152, 175, 199, 212, 217, 263 “Rat Pack,” 19 “Remember When,” 173, 177, 264 “The Ride,” 131, 295 “Second Coming,” 87–88, 200, 214, 275, 292 “Second Opinion,” 32, 173, 238, 274, 293 “Sentimental Education,” 19, 265, 294 “Soprano Home Movies,” 19, 89, 199, 201, 218, 264, 267, 302, 313 “Stage 5,” 128–29, 132, 141, 204, 302 “The Strong, Silent Type,” 176, 218 “The Telltale Moozadell,” 205 “The Test Dream,” 19, 152–55, 210, 262, 291 “To Save Us All from Satan’s Power,” 86, 151 “Toodle-Fucking-Oo,” 152, 203, 240 “The Two Tonys,” 97, 168, 262 “Unidentified Black Male,” 19, 82, 86, 100, 115, 169, 174, 199, 290, 294 “University,” 274 “Walk Like a Man,” 76, 141, 143, 204, 213 “Watching Too Much Television,” 210, 215 “The Weight,” 107, 262 “Where’s Johnny?” 177

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391

“Whitecaps,” 32, 82, 176, 262 “Whoever Did This,” 262, 280 Sopranos Wake, 1, 3, 41, 228, 285 Spatafore, Vito (Sopranos character), 36, 59, 68, 114–23, 201, 275 Spellbound (movie), 39 Starbucks, 59–60, 157 Stepakoff, Jeffrey, 18 Stockholm syndrome, 304 Stockton, Frank R., 314 Stoppard, Tom, 57–58, 62–64 strippers, 109, 163–64, 285, 300 Sun Tzu, 274 Tannenbaum, Noah (Sopranos character), 86–88, 110–11, 113, 199, 212–13, 217 This Thing of Ours (book), 1–2, 50 TiVo, 20–21, 303 Tony Soprano’s America, 157 Tracee (Sopranos character), 96, 285, 308 Tresca, Carlo, 269 Trillo, Gloria (Sopranos character), 82, 84, 115, 205, 270 Trump, Donald, 299 “TV Ruined the Movies,” 43, 137, 139, 160, 165, 278 TVI, 45 TVIII, 42, 45–47, 50 Twilight Zone, The (television series), 299 Tyler, Imogen, 65 Ury, William, 232 Valli, Frankie, 271, 320 Van Patten, Tim, 63 vengeance, 36, 63, 108, 113, 133, 223, 260, 302 venial sins, 61 Viereck, Peter, 31–32, 34 Vincent, Frank, 268

392 Waiting for Godot (play), 57 Warshow, Robert, 95, 207 Wegler, Robert (Sopranos character), 19, 118, 294 Weiner, Matthew, 1–2, 17–22 Welles, Orson, 298 Wesleyan University, 18, 22 “Where Will You Run To” (song), 301 Willis, Ellen, 157, 165, 266, 310 Wilmore, Leon (Sopranos character), 199 Winter, Terence, 19, 63 witchcraft, 61

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Index Witowski, Jim (Sopranos character), 202 Wizard of Oz, The (movie), 27, 152 Wolfe, Thomas, 271 Wordsworth, William, 30, 40 Yacowar, Maurice, 2, 4, 87, 153, 165, 171, 297–98, 300, 302, 305 Yeats, W. B., xi, 75 You Can’t Go Home Again (novel), 271 Zellman, State Assemblyman Ronald (Sopranos character), 262, 318