112.3Abstract (summary)
When we bear in mind this original five-act structure, some telling emphases are revealed. For example, the very middle episode (Season III, Episode 7) is the one in which Dr [Jennifer Melfi]'s own mentor, the elderly Jewish psychiatrist Dr Krakower (Sully Boyar), tells [Carmela] she has been enabling Tony's evil. He goes so far as to refuse to accept a fee for seeing her, spurning her "blood money." The old man leaves her with the words: "One thing you can't say- that you haven't been told." This Old World therapist has more moral heft than the modern Melfi who, despite her best intentions and ethics, has only helped Tony become a more effective - and better adjusted - gangster. For the second half, then, Tony's evil is less the point than Carmela's - and thereby our response to it. How will the man's malevolence affect our identification with him, our support for him?
Similarly, at the one-quarter mark (Season II, Episode 4) the show introduces Furio (Federico Castelluccio), Tony's vicious Old School hitman, whose love for Carmela reforms him and sends him back to Italy. At the half, again, Carmela considers leaving Tony. At the three-quarter point (Season rv, Episode 10) Carmela first realizes she loves Furio. There are also dramatic possibilities for the hoods' redemption at the one-third point - henchmen Christopher ([Michael ImperioLi]) and Paulie (Tony Sirico) contemplate Hell (Season II, Episode 9) - and at two-thirds, when the suicide of Tony's mistress Gloria (Annabella Sciorra) confronts him with his "toxic nature." In contrast to Furio's principled flight from temptation, Tony, Chris, and Paulie revert to their criminal indulgence - as Carmela will do when she continues to let Tony bribe her to stay (and to return after she leaves him).
The topicality grew in the fifth season, which played off the political issues of America's election year. In a parody of Donald Rumsfeld's misguided expectations for Iraq, one hood urges a gang war: "We go all out. We steamroll right over John. And I predict the guys on the street in Brooklyn and Queens, they'll welcome us as fuckin' heroes. It'll be easy" (Season V, Episode 4). Tony's own rhetoric echoes President Bush's "Those who are not with us are against us" (Episode 13).
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Headnote
The phenomenal Sopranos TV series has a very modest origin. In the beginning was a galley proof of a Mafia page-turner by an unknown Mario Puzo. As it did not seem promising, the film project was palmed off on a young, untested Francis Ford Coppola, with a no-name cast bolstered by the washed-up Marion Brando. The resulting Godfather trilogy (1972, 1974, 1990) made stars of all the principals and revived the gangster genre. It is also one of the great epic works of art and a searing examination of how the American Dream has been corrupted. And so The Godfather begat The Sopranos, perhaps America's most revealing TV series ever.
THE VERY first line spoken in The Godfather is the undertaker Bonasera's "I believe in America." Behind his exchange with Don Vito Corleone (Marion Brando), we glimpse Sonny Corleone (James Caan), whose slaughter will enable Bonasera to repay the Don's favour. Of course the immigrant Bonasera believes in "America." That's by definition. But the America in which he has learned to believe requires a gangster to provide anything like justice (in this case, for the violation of his daughter). The courts have failed him. His idealized "America" doesn't work, but the compromised America will - but for a price, perhaps of a favour, perhaps of his soul.
The Godfather trilogy traces at least two arcs. In the psychological, the foreground follows Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) deeper into the family business, as he mounts to Milton's "bad eminence." This corrupt success shatters Don Vito's dream that Michael would stay pure, sanitize the family's wealth, and restore their honour in the "legitimate" world. At his sister's wedding, Michael is still the "civilian" in the gangster family, paradoxically wearing his army uniform. In this wardrobe pun the Corleone world reverses normal values.
Michael joins the family business in order to avenge an attempt on his father's life, which has left the aging don incapacitated, his family vulnerable. The first film ends with Michael becoming Godfather, at the cost of literally shutting out the human values represented by his ail-American wife Kay (Diane Keaton). The last shot closes his door against her.
In The Godfather, Partn, set in the late 1950s, Michael faces a congressional hearing and must fight off more underworld rivals. As in the first film, he must steel himself to uncover the traitor within his own family. His dedication to this cause alienates him further from Kay and from their children and finally leads him to have his brother Fredo (John Cazale) killed.
In Part III, the year 1978 finds Michael labouring to improve his public image and his relations with Kay and his children, but his philanthropy cannot overcome his decades of corruption. In the climactic scene, he sees his beloved daughter killed in his stead. Lacking the self-respect to accept the Catholic Church's redemption, he dies in despair. Where Don Vito ends in his own Eden, playing with his grandson among his tomato plants, Michael dies alone in an arid retreat, uncomforted. Michael dies in Hell, whether there is one or not. That's the price he pays for his living of the American Dream, from immigrant rags to American riches.
The social background provides the trilogy's other main arc. The first Godfather parallels the Mafia and mainstream capitalism. Hence the hoods' board meetings, deals, negotiations, all focused on growing their profits. Reversing the equation, American business becomes a form of criminal self-service that keeps legal and moral restrictions elastic. In the second film, the Mafia is paralleled to American politics, with the vile senator demanding bribes from the Corleones while in public playing ignorant of their name. Where the first film saw the Corleones buying business partners, here they have bought congressmen, governors, and judges. In the (much undervalued) third film, Coppola relates the Mafia to the Catholic Church, with its shady business deals, chain-smoking ecclesiastical managers, hollow pretences to virtue, and machinations that even include murder. If these charges seemed far-fetched, the reader should bear in mind that since this film was made in 1990 the Vatican has hardly shown itself a paragon of selfless rectitude. In Coppola's trilogy, systematized pragmatism, greed, and hypocrisy have corrupted the three most vaunted institutions of Western culture - commercial order, democratic government, and religion. Thank heaven for Art.
AND THAT includes television, now that The Sopranos production has demonstrated that one can write up to a TV audience. David Chase's Home Box Office series revolutionized at least the cable medium by presenting an unflinchingly adult drama. The language is profane (while still poetic), the characters consistently surprising, the moral complexities irresolvable, and the worldview as disturbing as anything between Bosch and Bunuel.
The show advances the classic gangster film, a genre which, along with the Western and the musical, defined the American Dream. The individualist hero rises out of the mass - schnooks, sodbusters, and chorus line, respectively - to become rich and famous. The Western and gangster hero must transcend (i.e. break) the law, but the musical hero gets away with a talent that doesn't involve killing. Because James Cagney became an icon in all three genres, he is the true Yankee Doodle Dandy (even beyond his portrayal of George M. Cohan in Michael Curtiz's 1942 film of that name).
The Sopranos upgrades the genre with its poetic resonance of psychological, social, and political meaning. It is both more explicit and more subtle than anything American television has ever offered. Each episode is a self-sufficient weave of two or three subplots, yet still advances the overall character and thematic development. For anything approaching this show one reaches to Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) and Dennis Potter's original The Singing Detective (1986). But at 65 hours and counting, The Sopranos reduces the 15-hour Fassbinder and the 6-hour Potter to short story status.
Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) is a New Jersey Mafia captain whose black-outs have brought him into therapy with Dr Jennifer Melfi (Lorraine Bracco). Tony has the usual family issues with - in descending order of murderousness - his mother, his uncle, his wife, his mistresses, his children. As for his mob family issues: a different gang rival challenges him each season while the fumbling FBI close in, coercing weaker - i.e. more womanly - colleagues than the Sopranos to "sing" to the feds. As Tony opens up in therapy, the movie-loving mobster begins to outgrow the stoic silence he has long associated with manly Gary Cooper. But thinking and talking about one's fears and weaknesses is a dangerous habit in Tony's world.
The Sopranos is the first major television work for the DVD generation - rich enough to reward, indeed to require, multiple viewings. It is the first American television series that sustains analysis of even the single frame. For example, the very first shot - Tony squirming in Dr Melfi's waiting room, framed between the legs of a bronze nude woman - introduces the series' major issues: manliness, authority, responsibility, honour, and identity. Tony is uncomfortable with any abstraction, with any naked truth, and with the power of women. Even the manner in which he wields his own power is evidence of his psychological insecurity and moral weakness. Moreover, that shot's composition is precisely reversed in a much later episode when Tony accompanies his wife Carmela (Edie Falco) to her doctor. With such concentration and cross-connections, it is clear that each season, episode, scene, and even shot is planned with the sensitivity and ambition that used to characterize our best films - like The Godfather.
In fact, the Sopranos characters live The Godfather dream. Other gangster films feed into the series, most notably The Public Enemy (William Wellman, 1931) and Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese, 1990), but The Godfather trilogy is a constant presence. The Jersey mobsters quote Coppola's films, debate their favourite elements, and draw their vocabulary, personal styles, and delusions from that cultural landmark. As they extend the Corleones' inversion of values, they aspire to the power Coppola deplored. They kneel to the pretentious code and style Coppola exposed. They think they are living the noble opera of The Godfather, but - as Chase's rock soundtrack reminds us - they really live the sordid treacheries of Goodfellas.
As Tony tells Dr Melfi in the opening episode, he feels that he has come into the American Dream too late, without the prospects that fired his hard-working immigrant grandfather. He is shaken by the departure of a family of ducks he has nurtured around his swimming pool, as it suggests the irretrievable loss of innocence and foreshadows the loss of his own family. Because Tony is our main figure of identification, he commands our sympathy, and we find ourselves siding with him against the FBI, even after we watch him kill a man.
AS IT HAPPENS, I have a pertinent theory. The show was originally planned to run for five seasons. Only after its phenomenal success was producer/creator David Chase persuaded to add a twelve-episode sixth season (to begin its HBO/Movie Central run next March) and a final eight-show "bonus" series from January 2007. As originally conceived, The Sopranos would have been a 65-episode drama - that is, a 65-hour play of five acts. Having agreed on the extension, Chase may well have delayed his original conclusion, so the Season V ending - a half-frozen Tony stumbling back to Carmela's compromised warmth - was probably not the final resolution.
When we bear in mind this original five-act structure, some telling emphases are revealed. For example, the very middle episode (Season III, Episode 7) is the one in which Dr Melfi's own mentor, the elderly Jewish psychiatrist Dr Krakower (Sully Boyar), tells Carmela she has been enabling Tony's evil. He goes so far as to refuse to accept a fee for seeing her, spurning her "blood money." The old man leaves her with the words: "One thing you can't say- that you haven't been told." This Old World therapist has more moral heft than the modern Melfi who, despite her best intentions and ethics, has only helped Tony become a more effective - and better adjusted - gangster. For the second half, then, Tony's evil is less the point than Carmela's - and thereby our response to it. How will the man's malevolence affect our identification with him, our support for him?
Similarly, at the one-quarter mark (Season II, Episode 4) the show introduces Furio (Federico Castelluccio), Tony's vicious Old School hitman, whose love for Carmela reforms him and sends him back to Italy. At the half, again, Carmela considers leaving Tony. At the three-quarter point (Season rv, Episode 10) Carmela first realizes she loves Furio. There are also dramatic possibilities for the hoods' redemption at the one-third point - henchmen Christopher (Michael Imperioli) and Paulie (Tony Sirico) contemplate Hell (Season II, Episode 9) - and at two-thirds, when the suicide of Tony's mistress Gloria (Annabella Sciorra) confronts him with his "toxic nature." In contrast to Furio's principled flight from temptation, Tony, Chris, and Paulie revert to their criminal indulgence - as Carmela will do when she continues to let Tony bribe her to stay (and to return after she leaves him).
In addition to the artistic ambition to make serious TV, Chase has shown two other forms of creative courage. One is his refusal to be intimidated by knee-jerk political correctness. He expresses his feminism through some complex sexist characters, language, and situations. And for choosing a Mafia soul-searcher as his representative American, Chase has incurred allegations of anti-Italian stereotyping and prejudice. This charge ignores the mass of dialogue that extols the values of the Italian-American community, its history, and the original function of the Mafia. Furthermore, Chase provides a complete moral spectrum among the Italian characters - as among the Jewish, black, and "white bread" characters. There are Jewish, black, Indian, Hispanic, and white criminals here, even of the professional class. There are also prominent virtuous Italians, including FBI agents, doctors, lawyers, and shrinks. Indeed, if Dr Krakower (who appeared briefly in one episode) provides one moral centre, the major ethical presence here comes from the ongoing role of Italian-American wife Charmaine Bucco (Kathrine Narducci). Her moral effect on her husband Artie (John Ventimiglia) makes her an opposing force to Tony and an effective alternative to Carmela.
Second, Chase has rooted his overview of American compromise explicitly in the here and now. In a hundred years, the show will still work as well as Hamlet, but it too will have lost some of its topical punch. For example, after the Enron scandal Tony wishes he had "those Enron-type connections" (Season IV, Episode 1) to make "legit" investments. This allusion will require a footnote. The show also included references to 9/11 (and was, of course, forced to drop an image of the twin towers from its opening credit montage), locating its characters in our present society and psyche.
But the topicality grew in the fifth season, which played off the political issues of America's election year. In a parody of Donald Rumsfeld's misguided expectations for Iraq, one hood urges a gang war: "We go all out. We steamroll right over John. And I predict the guys on the street in Brooklyn and Queens, they'll welcome us as fuckin' heroes. It'll be easy" (Season V, Episode 4). Tony's own rhetoric echoes President Bush's "Those who are not with us are against us" (Episode 13).
But when Tony, ostensibly a proud American, considers his role in the ongoing theft of cargo from the New York waterfront, he has a sobering realization: the same corruption and laxity that facilitate his larceny may well enable another 9/11 (Episode 10). The gangsters - thriving on the perversion of American politics and business - are as real a threat to the American ideal as the terrorists. For a moment, Tony realizes his complicity in his country's deterioration. But, as always, there are pressing business and family matters to bring him back to himself.
In this light, the moral failure behind all of Tony's professional successes - from his destructive business activities to the direction his spoiled, sulky children are taking in life - suggests that America has failed in its original idealistic undertaking: to balance its vaunted individualism with responsibility to the larger community - local, national, and global. In its 65-hour traffic of the stage, The Sopranos may first have hooked us with its sophisticated soap opera of domestic, romantic, and business conflicts, but its most serious hold now lies in its fascinating anatomy of a great and powerful nation surrendering itself to selfishness, materialism, and hypocrisy.
Tony began as the classic two-bit gunsel who gave us law-abiding schnooks a vicarious thrill with his rise, then a righteous reassurance with his fall. But he has become much more than that. He has swelled into America itself, a well-meaning, muddle-headed brute whose pretence of defending traditional ideals no longer convinces.
Indeed, Tony's shaky pretence seems very familiar. He and his cronies tell themselves that they are only providing the goods and services - gambling, loan-sharking, prostitution, dope - that their fellow citizens have always demanded. But as one of their ruined "bust-out" victims cries in desperation - "they're like termites." They get into everything. They scam the poor and vulnerable and innocent along with the rich and crooked. Their countless rackets manipulate public programs designed to aid the needy; their payoffs and intimidation tactics gnaw away at the integrity of labour unions, law enforcement agencies, the legal system, government, and even the church.
Is this so different from the wealthiest nation in human history professing to be a beacon of civilization and Christian charity - while turning its back on the poor, the sick, and the needy? Consider the Haliburton rake-off in Iraq or America's bullyboy attitude to Canadian softwood lumber, or the way the us trumpets the virtues of free trade even as it dumps its own heavily subsidized agricultural products into developing nations while refusing to import their foodstuffs.
TONY SOPRANO would certainly concur with President Bush that his standard of living is "not negotiable" - no matter what the cost to other human beings, the environment, or future generations. In the end, it's all a matter of what you can get away with. And so the United States remains fascinated by the new American Everyman, our Tony. There is some comfort, it is true, in following the progress of a character who is so much worse than the rest of us. But, at the same time, it is horrifying to consider all the other American passions and virtues and ambitions that have somehow shrivelled into Tony Soprano.
AuthorAffiliation
MAURICE YACOWAR is a professor of English and film studies at the University of Calgary, where he teaches a course on The Sopranos. The third edition of his book The Sopranos on the Couch: Analyzing Television's Greatest Series is published by Continuum Books.
Copyright Queen's Quarterly Fall 2005
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