After James Gandolfini’s premature death in Italy in June, a 2007 post of mine got some renewed traffic. “Sorry Folks, but Tony Soprano got whacked” came out after the mystifying last episode of The Sopranos and asserted that Tony and his whole family will get killed inside the diner seconds after the show’s ending because The Sopranos was a moral drama. And producer David Chase’s moral message was clear: Tony had destroyed a bunch of people’s lives, including his hapless daughter Meadow, whose inability to escape her fate is the excruciating drama of the last few minutes of the show, when she has car trouble and almost doesn’t make it to the diner in time for the ending. But Meadow gets there, tragically. And so she too is “drawn towards the closing vortex”– to quote another great American tragedy that ends with destruction.
I got that post from my wife, who is ten times more psychological and insightful than I am. After Gandolfini’s sad death, she rewatched a few years of The Sopranos. I asked her if she still believes what she told me in ’07. More than ever.
“Over five years what you saw was that this family slowly became entrapped by Tony. You saw the sweet young son turn into a thug. You saw the daughter who had really tried to get out thwarted by the father. You saw the wife recognize what was happening to her life and to her family and simply not being able to give up the power she wielded in the community and the material goods.
“You saw people painfully getting sucked into a vortex of Tony’s mendacious murderous Mafia behavior and the money that came from that. They all try in their own little ways, but they are not able to get out. In the end they were all in Tony’s dream, which was the fiercest and most powerful dream, and this thwarted them.
“In a famous episode, Carmela is told by a wise old Old Testament psychiatrist [Krakower], ‘You will never be happy or out of pain if you stay with this man and I will not accept your blood money.’ Well, I know, that’s implausible– no one has ever heard of a psychiatrist not accepting money. But he’s like an Old Testament prophet, and he looks at her and says, ‘You cannot say you were not told.’
“Meadow has found this boyfriend from LA who’s half-black and half-Jewish and whose father is an LA lawyer, and he goes to Tony’s house and Tony treats him terribly. Get out of here. I think he calls him an eggplant. So the father in LA does some checking, and the kid breaks up with Meadow.
“It was her first step out into the real world. Then she goes out with a mobster’s son. So she’s back in Tony’s dream.
“A lot of people said that Lorraine Bracco was the moral center of the show, Tony’s psychiatrist. But she’s not the moral center. As her shrink tells her, ‘Why did you accept him as a client? You’re allowing him to rationalize his behavior.’ Right; why is she there? Because she’s excited to be in the mob, too.
“Of course Tony himself was trapped in the family legacy. He had the meanest mother on the planet, he knew no other way. But what made the show so alive was, He loved what he was doing. Everyone else was struggling and in pain, but he loved his work.”
I asked my wife whether she felt that James Gandolfini, dead at 51, was also destroyed by Tony’s drama. She shook her head.
“I don’t know that. Of course we know that actors take on their roles. I’ve heard that when Robert DeNiro is playing a character, he’s that character all the time; and whenever he’s not playing someone, he goes into hiding. Was James Gandolfini also sacrificed to this character? It’s possible. But it’s a terrible thing to say.”
“I asked my wife whether she felt that James Gandolfini, dead at 51, was also destroyed by Tony’s drama. ”
Why would you even think that? He was an overweight middle-aged guy. Most of this post was interesting, even though I never got into the Sopranos (watched some of the episodes on cable after the show was finished). But your question is silly.
“In a famous episode, Carmen is told by a wise old Old Testament psychiatrist [Krakower], ‘You will never be happy or out of pain if you stay with this man and I will not accept your blood money.’ (…) But he’s like an Old Testament prophet, and he looks at her and says, ‘You cannot say you were not told.'”
This moment was critical for me, because the psychiatrist also told Carmella that her husband was in “the mafia.” This was one of the few times this word was actually heard on the series. The characters didn’t use it, and the audience was trained not to either. The psychiatrist broke this taboo – and uttered the truth.
Mondoweiss is fulfilling the same role, the same “Old Testament prophet” role in our lives, but saying the truth in the same way.
I never watched The Sopranos, but I’ve been watching Breaking Bad lately, and it seems like something similar. The main character ruins everyone’s lives, ostensibly for the noble goal of providing for his family. Literally dozens of people die because of his actions (mostly indirectly, but some very directly), and he only rarely seems the least bit troubled. The ends (providing for a family that is frankly starting to hate him, and should hate him) always justify the means, until pretty soon he’s just going blindly on his own (evil) momentum.
It also reminds me of Goodfellas. Once down-and-out people get a taste of the good life (and the power and esteem that go with it), who wants to go back to being a regular wage-slave schmuck?
For that matter, it reminds me of many folks in Washington… whose actions kill a lot more people than any petty criminal. Who also believe it’s better to be part of The Family than out on the street with the regular Joes, working for an honest living like a sucker, with no one to kiss your ass and give you titles and awards. (I have a feeling a lot of people in Washington would simply have no idea who they were if they left the Beltway and all its accoutrements.)
Of course, it’s all in the noble name of creating order in a chaotic world. Richard Haass said on the Daily Show the other day that if the US didn’t maintain its hegemonic power in the world, the result would be chaos.
I’m sure every empire (and spokespeople for empire) have told themselves the same thing as they meddle and burn and kill and pillage (without ever casting a glance at the actual things that cause instability — many of which they are directly responsible for).
I’ve seen several movies James Gandolfini was in in a variety of characters—thought he was a hell of an actor and sorry we wont be seeing him any more.
Saw an interview with him also and he said the Sopranos role was ‘so dark’ when you think about what Tony actually did that he had to ‘turn off’ thinking about the character when not filming.
There was one other TV show I watched, ‘Breaking Bad” which I thought illustrated
more about how “addicting” the money- power thing can be to what was once an ‘ordinary’ or average person who started out thinking about getting something for his family ….but then the power and control became it’s own high, more enthralling than the money or family.
Whereas in the Sopranos crime families the money came first, last and always and the power and violence employed was just a way to get it and keep it coming.
The Old Testament shrink’s line is indeed memorable.
The reason The Sopranos was so compelling is because it is a morality drama about the paradoxical moral codes of suburban middle class. The opening credits reinforced this central message every week. The camera follows Tony Soprano’s commute from the grungy city where he makes a living as a Mafioso to his tony, suburban home with his church-going wife and all the other accoutrements of suburbia. This transition is pitched at middle class Americans who, every day, “do what they need to do” to make a living in the city. They go home to a very different life each evening. A different morality rules their evenings and weekends with the wife and kids. Suburbia is about escaping the bigger realities and consequences of our lifestyle. For the purposes of Mondoweiss, the West Bank settlements serve the role of affordable suburbia. Middle class Israelis wanted the suburbia they saw on American
propagandamovies and TV shows.It’s no coincidence that American Jews fled the cities to create Jewish suburbia not long before the settlement project in Israel got underway. Israelis, too, want the perfect life in their settlement (or Tel Aviv) bubble knowing full well, yet willfully turning a blind eye to, what it takes to enforce the occupation and domination of Palestinians. Their sons and daughters go out every Sunday morning to do the dirty work that allows their parents to live the dream.