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HBO’s
serialized drama, “The Sopranos,”
is a sensation. For premium cable its
audience is large— as of last year, over ten million viewers. But its fame transcends its popularity. A niche audience that includes many
intellectuals accounts for serious articles in the New Yorker and the Nation, as well as front-page reviews in the New York Times, the Los
Angeles Times, the Washington Post,
and other major metropolitan newspapers.
Numerous Emmys and virtually total critical acclaim have put its
creator, David Chase, in a position to name his own ticket in the entertainment
business.
Chase
is a writer adept at character development, seconded by actors with years of
Broadway and independent film experience, whose performances evoke each
character’s complex and comic humanity.
James Gandolfini in the lead role as Mafia boss, Tony Soprano, catches
the Don’s inchoate mix of savagery and innocence; he is someone trained to be a
thug, but who can also be wide-eyed, as mopey as a kid, loving, even
gentle. Other principal characters
include: Edie Falco as Tony’s wife, Carmela, who reacts to his constant infidelity
with a mix of martyrdom, Catholic responsibility, brutal honesty, anger, and
passionate but repressed sexuality; the late Nancy Marchand as his terrifying
mother, Livia (Augustus’ murderous wife), playing against type— her usual
grande dame—as a lower-class, paranoid woman whose only joy is inflicting her
own misery on others; Dominic Chianese as Tony’s Uncle Junior (elder, but not
senior), who melds wisdom with resentment and comic pathos as a man stymied by
lifetime status as second fiddle; and, finally, Lorraine Bracco as Tony’s sexy,
dutiful, and fragile psychiatrist, Dr. Jennifer Melfi, who is attracted to him
precisely by what also repels her—his criminal penchant for violence and his
brutish masculinity.
The
show moves television forward to a place where pop culture becomes art. It achieves this formidable feat, first, by
renewing the gangster/Mafia theme so as to make public enemies into people with
whom we identify. The show also
provides, as great novels and films do, detailed information about the way we
live now—from the look of our houses and cars, to the feel of private moments
with mistresses, family, or psychiatrists, to our mode of consuming, mourning,
celebrating, and dealing with youth, middle age, old age, sickness, death,
betrayal, anxiety, and depression.
Lastly, the show focuses on a criminal who belongs to two
“families.” There’s Tony’s nuclear
family of wife, daughter Meadow, and son Anthony Jr., a family whose desire for
unalloyed upper-middle class happiness, defined partially by material success
and primarily by the capacity for self-actualization, he shares. Then there’s Tony’s professional family, the
Mafia, among whom, ostensibly, rigid old moral rules and loyalties prevail. Tony is trapped between these two families,
and through him we gain insight into our own situation as contemporary
Americans. The measure of Chase’s
achievement is his managing to make a New Jersey Mafia boss into a
representative American, a kind of contemporary Babbitt, who embodies the
culture wars—between virtue and happiness, between disciplined “character” and
the protean self, between dying traditions and a vacuous modernity—that
currently tear apart the American soul and keep us from creating the new moral
perspective, cultural identity, and, above all, new politics that we need.
Chase suffuses “The Sopranos” with references to popular culture; it’s both the subject and
object of the series. He gives us a Mafia
boss who’s seen all the Mafia films and TV series and who’s quite
self-conscious about the genre. His mob
and everyone else on the show refer to and are often ruled by the images
derived from pop culture—they parody lines from The Godfather films and Goodfellas
(“He made him an offer he couldn’t refuse”;
“He lies with the fishes”; or Joe Pesci’s famous question, preparatory
to murder, “You think I’m funny?”) Many
of the characters are pop culture addicts and wannabees. For example, Christopher, Tony’s nephew,
wants to write screenplays and acts out his aggression—Raging Bull style—when he takes an acting class. Janice, Tony’s sister, brags about a talent
for “visualization,” bills herself as a video director, and aspires to stardom
in pop music. Jackie Aprile Jr.,
Meadow’s errant boyfriend, flunks out of Rutgers but
hopes to make it in men’s fashions.
Chase
exploits the gangster/Mafia theme with great effect when Livia dies. Both before and after her funeral, Tony
watches Cagney in The Public Enemy,
desperately trying to see his vile mother in the nostalgic light of her
Depression experience and the old culture the Cagney film embodies. But Tony’s attempt at posthumous filial
affection doesn’t work. Dr. Melfi
describes his nostalgia by its right name—“whitewash”—and reminds him that his
mother was nothing like Cagney’s. Indeed
the two mothers, if equally loopy, are antithetical: Cagney’s mother loves him
in spite of what she knows about his criminality and she prays for his
salvation; Livia allows her nihilistic emotions—she hates everyone, including
herself and her children—to turn into nihilistic actions. When Tony puts her in a plush nursing home,
she is so mad at him that she conspires with Uncle Junior to have him
killed.
The
gangbuster aspect of the popular culture mob story finds its way into “The
Sopranos” via the bumbling effort of
the FBI to wiretap Tony’s mansion, only he is hardly Al Capone. Likewise, the
FBI, far from the heroic versions of Hoover and Ness that radio and television
set forth in the postwar years, comes off as both persecutory and
inefficient —part of “big government”
that we need “off our backs.” Nor are
Tony and his mob heroic. They appear
perverse, forlorn, small-time, and burdened by both their mob jobs and their
personal lives.
Chase
doubtless knows that he is writing the last act of the gangster/Mafia
theme. For the Mafia, at least in America,
now seems defunct: Gotti is in jail; Las Vegas
is a legitimate, family-oriented gambling and shopping resort; “action” lies
with Fidelity mutual funds and hedge funds like Long-Term Capital Management;
and state governments, via lotteries, have taken over the numbers game. Moreover, the gangster/Mafia theme has
considerable competition for our attention from serial murderers, angry
adolescents who wreak havoc on high schools, and global terrorism.
But
for Chase, who is an expert at drawing every possible ounce of meaning from it,
the gangster/Mafia theme is too rich an element of popular culture to
abandon. Since it began, say with the
Depression-era films of Cagney, Robinson, and Raft (and later Bogart, Widmark,
and Palance), the hallmark of the gangster/Mafia theme has been the ambivalence
of attraction and repulsion, which it elicits simultaneously from its audience. The simplest attraction of the theme is the
vicarious danger, combined with the license to kill or maim, that
representations of criminal life afford us.
Another simple attraction, in a society where individualism reigns and
urban life often means atomization, is the community that Mob life
provides. Nothwithstanding the rigor of
its rules, the Mafia can be a haven from a heartless world. Best of all, with the gangster/Mafia theme,
we can have our cake and eat it too. We
get off on vicarious aggression and a kind of romantic familialism, and at the
same time are encouraged to be moralistic: criminals live by the sword and die
by it; “crime doesn’t pay”; and in the end the good guys—honest folks like
ourselves—prevail. Moralism, the
opposite of empathy, reinforces the distance between the mobsters and us.
During the late 60s, the 70s, and early 80s,
the gangster/Mafia theme took on new sophistication—Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde and Altman’s Thieves
Like Us, or, in another vein, the Coppola masterpieces The Godfather I and II and Sergio Leone’s epic and beautiful Once Upon A Time in America, and, of course, Scorcese’s apparently
endless deepening of the theme in Mean
Streets, Goodfellas, and Casino.
All
these films attract because they allow us to recall and understand some
important aspect of our collective American and/or ethnic-immigrant past. The Penn and Altman films remain moralistic
and distancing, but they show us the Depression experience with pathos and
lyricism, and with the understanding that the public enemies of the era were
often innocent, ordinary folks driven to crime by poverty and desperation. In the Leone movie the bad guys—Jews and
Italians—are still bad, but the film spans half century of immigrant and urban
experience, allowing us to explore in detail, if also to recoil from, our
immigrant and ethnic roots.
Scorcese’s
films are about men and women who grew up in the urban Italian American
neighborhoods of the immediate postwar period.
Scorcese is measuring the historical and personal distance that
separates him and others (e.g., Mario Cuomo and Rudolph Guiliani)—the second
generation that has by now made it to the top of American culture and
society—from the peculiar and thin layer of civilization and social order,
beneath which lay savagery, that constituted the “hood” as they grew up in the
1950s. One can imagine a young,
bookish, and sickly Martin Scorcese, at once impressed by the neighborhood
social status of “made men” and frightened and repulsed by their occasional but
revealing displays of murderous aggression.
The Godfather films add further historical dimension to the Mafia theme
because they deal with subjects that Americans like to avoid, namely power and
politics. The Godfather I and II provide a vivid analysis of how Italian-Americans, early on in
their immigrant struggle for status and wealth, imported from Sicily and
established in America a countervailing system of power—an entire
quasi-governmental hierarchy of dons and capos and soldiers. This was the organization that helped
Italians deal with ethnic competition, and that mediated between them and the
larger cultural, social, and political establishment—to wit, the way that Don
Vito Corleone appropriates Irish political bosses, judges, and cops who might
have otherwise ignored or harmed Italians, or the way that the second Don,
Michael Corleone, intercedes with Senators for even bigger stakes in The Godfather II.
But
precisely because it is about a corollary government and about power and
political corruption, The Godfather series establishes considerable
distance between its principal characters and its audience. Remember that The Godfather films
appeared during the era of Vietnam
and Watergate, events that shook American society and bred cynicism about our
political system. Remember also that,
even without Vietnam
and Watergate, Americans don’t need much to be wary of power and politics. The American republic was founded on the view
that the government that governs best is the government that governs least, and
Americans are quick to accept Lord Acton’s liberal maxim that “power tends to
corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” The Godfather saga and the artful
characterizations of Brando, de Niro, and Pacino are brilliant studies in the
awesome exercise of power. But these
same characterizations confirm Americans in their belief that power is not only
inherently corruptible but dangerous to boot, and that sane people should
therefore stay as far away from politics as possible.
Anyone
who follows “The Sopranos” can see that Chase subtly plays with
the many variations of ambivalence found in gangster/Mafia films. Yet these films do not provide his principal
theme, but only a familiar subtext for another kind of story. For his story’s central theme he looks beyond
pop culture and American cinema to world literature, to a literary genre that
begins in the eighteenth century with John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera and that culminates in
the twentieth century with Brecht and Weill’s The Threepenny Opera—that is, the genre that uses criminal behavior as
a satirical and critical commentary on
extant society. In Gay’s work and even
more in the opera comique of Brecht
and Weill, one finds no ambivalence toward, nor distance between, the criminals
and the respectable folk. The world we
thought we knew is shockingly inverted: the criminals and the honest folk all
live and act in the same corrupt society, a fact which obviates any
hypocritical or invidious distinction between them. Similarly, even though Tony Soprano is a
criminal, he is a mirror image of ourselves.
Which is why his existence opens up a window on the dilemmas of American
society at the dawn of the twenty-first century.
Happiness
“The Sopranos” opening scene tells a
story about generational change and social mobility, the American Dream. Tony drives through his territory, northern
New Jersey, and as he moves along from the New Jersey Turnpike (surrounded by
the smokestacks of old industrialism), through the gritty Newark neighborhood
(the Neck and the Ironbound) of his childhood, to his new neighborhood in the
posh suburbs, many of us relive the mythological but also real American
journey—from immigrant poverty to wealth and position via professional and
business achievement.
The
introductory scene moves through the past but winds up squarely in the present,
in the driveway of Tony’s architecturally nondescript but humongous
mansion, that proclaims from every
golden brick, “We have arrived.”
Speculative builders now routinely erect such oversize houses, replete
with standard opulent accoutrements, for the newest winners in the American
success lottery—stock traders, lobbyists, doctors and dentists (profiting from
metropolitan sprawl) with both center city and multiple suburban offices. This is the House and Garden special of 2001, the edifice of happiness for new
entrants into the upper-income brackets of America’s class society.
Yet
Tony Soprano, despite his fancy house, is far from happy. Indeed his incapacity for happiness defines
the series from beginning to end. It
manifests itself in physical symptoms—anxiety attacks, swoons and momentary
loss of consciousness—as well as moodiness, depression, and sudden outbursts of
anger and aggression.
One
could easily find simple explanations for Tony’s unhappiness. One might say that his misery stems from the
guilty conscience of a criminal: Tony murders, steals, extorts, and maims; he
is sexist pig who uses women and constantly cheats on his wife; he is a bigot
who misprizes blacks and Latinos; and his wealth offers no solace because his
worldly goods are ill-gotten gains, bought, as it were, with “blood
money.” But thus far in the series, the
only crime that haunts Tony—as much for the loss of community as for the loss
of a person—is the murder of his old friend and fellow mobster turned FBI
informant, Pussy. Otherwise, Tony enjoys
his Mafia-acquired wealth and is in many ways proud of his Mob identity and status:
he values its code of honor and loyalty, and, to an extent, enjoys the
violence, and the release of aggression that it affords him.
Or
again, one might blame Tony’s unhappiness on his burdensome responsibilities:
two families (nuclear and Mob) to care for.
His children, Meadow and Anthony Jr., are self-absorbed brats who take
his money but disassociate in different ways from its source. Throughout the series he has to deal with
resentful and disloyal members of his Mob family. Yet our affection for Tony, notwithstanding
his brutal methods, stems from the fact that he is also big, generous, capable,
someone who can carry—and enjoys carrying—a bigger load than most.
The
mystery of Tony’s unhappiness only deepens when we compare him, in the
tradition of The Beggar’s Opera, with
the more respectable folk that people his world. Doctors fare very badly. Uncle Junior, believing that names are
charms, trusts a local oncological surgeon named John Kennedy. But the surgeon, loathe to operate under the
tutelage of a superior rival from Sloan-Kettering, won’t answer Junior’s phone
calls and lets him suffer through what he knows to be ineffective chemotherapy
treatments. All of Dr. Melfi’s
psychoanalytic associates act in contradiction to the “caring” values of their
profession, by advising her not to treat Tony.
Businessmen fare no better.
Though Tony exploits the gambling compulsion of a local merchant, we
feel little sympathy because the man is weak and, as someone who betrays both
business and familial responsibilities, essentially the author of his own
ruin. University officials are open to
threats and pasta bribes (a Georgetown admissions official) or are hucksterish
fundraisers (a Columbia Dean, who cadges $50,000 out of Carmela). Hollywood filmakers variously exploit Tony’s
nephew, Christopher—picking his brains for information about the Mob or
promising contracts so they can both steal his screenplay and use him for one
night of hot sex. Carmela’s priest is a
sexual tease who preys on the lonely wives of Mob men for flirtation and
food. And, of course, there are the
usual suspects—corrupt politicians and FBI agents. A congressman creates lucrative construction
“opportunities” for himself and the Mob; the FBI and other government agencies,
show no scruples in trying to nab Tony.
Violence notwithstanding, Tony conducts business in accordance with an
old code of loyalty and honor, whereas the panoply of respectable businessmen
and professionals betray personal and professional ethics—private and public
virtue—at every turn.
So
the central mystery of the series, why Tony Soprano is miserable, remains. As of now (mid-third season), neither he nor
us have a satisfactory answer. This is
where psychoanalysis comes in. Mafia
chieftains don’t usually see psychoanalysts, because the goals of therapy—
“honest consciousness” and the minimal happiness that derives from what Freud
called “rational misery”—are not likely to recommend themselves to
mafiosi. Happiness is not particularly
a Mob desideratum; the Roman motto
“Strength and honor,” affirmed before battle, is more in tune with its world view. And
“honest consciousness,” or the truthful discourse required by analysis,
is the antithesis of the Mafia code of omerta
(silence); one true word, so to speak, and a mafioso finds himself
whacked.
The
ironies here are rich and prolific. Tony
is trapped between his desire for (personal) happiness and his obligations to
his nuclear and Mafia families.
Happiness, expressed through self-actualization and hedonistic
satisfaction, is the animating principle of a contemporary culture in which
each person does as he likes, that is, makes the law unto himself and decodes
meaning and strictly situational ethics from experience. Duty, loyalty, and rigorously enforced
axiomatic laws handed down from generation to generation are the hallmarks of
the old family and Mob culture, the strictures of which, like the laws of
Moses, were written in stone for all eternity.
Tony believes he must uphold the Law as he learned it during his
childhood in the 1950s. But like the
rest of us, he lives in 2001.
Which
is why, for Tony, psychoanalysis is an endless trap. It is the trap where he must confront the
above contradictions, yet it is the act of holding these unexamined
contradictions together that constitutes the meaning of his life until
now. It is the trap where he’s damned if
he tells the truth and damned if he doesn’t (in the former case, he betrays the
mob; in the latter, he betrays himself and Melfi). And it is also the trap where, because
therapy is not intended as mere venting or insight, he is forced to make
choices among the contradictions of his existence, and having chosen, to
act. But in Tony’s circumstances, action
constitutes still another trap. If he
leaves the Mafia, he gets whacked; if he leaves his wife, he loses his nuclear
family and especially his children, which is equivalent to death. Therapy then fails to make him happy (or at
least happier), while instead and ironically it adds to his unhappiness.
In
the third season there is a conversation between Uncle Junior and Tony that
suggests what Chase may be up to.
Junior, possibly dying of cancer but still alert to Mob concerns,
quizzes Tony about how to handle a “made man” whom both know to be a fuck-up
and a possible threat. Together they
explore the situational ethics and the strategic concerns entailed in dealing
with this man. At one point Tony asks
Junior, “How do you know when you’re making the right decision?” Junior responds, emphatically, by saying
“You don’t know; you make the best choice you can, given the situation, go on
to the next thing, and in between try and take your pleasures where and when
you can.”
Junior’s
statement may be what Freud meant by happiness as “rational misery.” And it may also be the singular moral that “The Sopranos” offers: that our
current anomic society is the best we can hope for, and this being so,
psychological assumption of responsibility for ourselves—learning to cope with
isolation—is all we can do. But if this
is the moral of the story, it isn’t good enough, either for Tony or us.
For
it is precisely this despairing message that makes us all, Tony included,
unhappy. This is no place for an
extensive discussion of Freud, but I believe that, out of his own private and
political fears, he conveniently if brilliantly transposed the political to the
psychological and focused on personal rather than civic responsibility as the
means of dealing with the many dilemmas of human existence. This leaves us and Tony on our own, befuddled
by an a historical view of man and society, and obliged to face difficult
decisions relating to both private and public action devoid of either the idea
or substance of moral and political order.
Along
with the promise of equality, or the pursuit of happiness remains the core
value of American capitalist democracy.
But the pursuit of happiness in private—in the sphere of the family or
in business—depends on what the founding generation called “public happiness,”
that’s the willingness to assume civic and political responsibility for the
destiny of our nation and the world, and to continue together to build a better
(global) society. The founders were
intellectually rooted in classical thought, and they took from the Stoics the
view that human maturity and happiness were intertwined and that both depended
on the constant expansion and simultaneous transcendence of the ego outward, to
ever broader spheres of human activity beyond the self. To attain individual happiness, one had to
care for one’s family, friends, and neighbors and one had also to exercise
one’s public obligations as a citizen, or, if called to such duty and prepared
for it, as a leader and statesman. The
exercise of citizenship or leadership might be difficult, but the reward was
great and highly prized: to realize the full extent of one’s humanity as a
social and political animal; to amass honor and reputation for achievement from
those capable of bestowing it; and, finally, to make history—change the
world—not by one’s self, but happily allied to one’s peers. In the deepest possible sense, then,
happiness derives from a form of friendship and community made possible only by
public life.
Neither
Clintonian liberal incrementalism nor Bush’s reactionary and regressive Reaganism
constitutes such an assumption of civic responsibility or yields such a public
life. And happiness is hard to find in
an ultra individualist “turbo-capitalist” society where an old politics and
culture are dying or dead and where a new politics and culture are powerless to
be born. Market values alone cannot make
us happy, and the market itself, especially when denuded of political
regulation, is what corrodes traditional moral and cultural principles.
We
can, then, conclude that Tony Soprano is unhappy because, even with his many
responsibilities and numerous affective and business relationships, he remains
a desperately lonely man. Neither his
old Mafia code nor his wife and children’s belief in self-actualization nor his
shrink’s belief in “honest consciousness” are sufficient to resolve his misery,
or to restore the joy that he gets, in the first episode of the series, from
watching a covey of ducks—social animals all—who temporarily make his empty
swimming pool their home. Tony Soprano, in
short, is a new kind of Mafia boss, one with whom we can wholly identify,
because he is obliged to fend for himself—as a mobster and a man, as a Don and
a father, as a public and private figure—in a society where all the old moral
and cultural compasses are broken, and where, because of the failure of
political will, no new compasses are in sight.
Pull Quotes: Katz
1.
The show provides, as great novels and films do,
detailed information about the way we live now… (p.2)
2.
The measure of Chase’s achievement is his managing to
make a New Jersey mafia boss into a representative American, a kind of
contemporary Babbit… (p.2)
3.
The world we thought we knew is shockingly inverted:
the criminals and the honest folk all live and act in the same corrupt
society…” (p.7)
4.
The Sopranos opening scene tells a story about
generational change and social mobility, the American Dream. (p.8)
5.
Tony is trapped between his desire for (personal)
happiness and his obligations to his nuclear and Mafia families. (p.11)
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