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