It’s here that the driver and his family live. A journey of cultural transformation starts with a shot of the Lincoln Tunnel’s ceiling and ends with a man pulling into the driveway of a spacious house in hilly northern New Jersey6 and exiting his vehicle. This sequence of shots compresses the twentieth-century East Coast immigrant experience into fifty-nine shots lasting eighty-nine seconds.
But the image of the driver shutting the car door and leaving the frame doesn’t feel like a neat and comforting conclusion. There’s an unstable, unfinished quality, conveyed by the needle scratch in the song (universal signifier of something cut short); by the unmoored and jittery way the filmmakers present the terrain; and especially by the character who guides us through it. The rings on Tony’s meaty fingers, the thick dark hair on his forearms, the cigar between his teeth, the smoke trailing from his mouth as he checks the rearview mirror, the shots of the neighborhoods where he grew up but would never live today: these details describe a leader and father who was raised a particular way but aspires to be something more—or something else.
Cut to the driver, Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini7), sitting in a handsomely decorated waiting room, looking up at a statue. The first shot finds Tony in the background, between the statue’s skinny legs. The second is a close-up of the statue from Tony’s seated perspective, framed from solar plexus up: an inferior POV, looking up as if in awe, fear, or adoration. The statue is a female form, bare-breasted. Her arms crossed behind her head. People don’t generally hold their arms like that unless they’re posing or stretching athletically. The outline of the arms evokes wings—angel or demon wings? The elbow points suggest horns. The body is lean but strong. It is an image of mystery and power, strong without seeming noble.
This is a woman of secrets.
The framing in the first shot makes Tony seem like a child gazing up at the opening from whence he came.
This is also an image of biological elimination/evacuation: Tony is a human turd, shat out by a mother who treats her son like shit. Tony, we learn, is a “waste management consultant” who frequently feels like shit, or a piece of shit—because his uncle is in charge of the Mob Family Tony holds together; because his son is a doofus and his rebellious daughter hates her mother; because the Mafia is in decline and “things are trending downward”; and, most of all, because of his mother, Livia (Nancy Marchand8), whose profile vaguely resembles that of the statue Tony can’t stop staring at.
Livia is a dour, relentlessly negative woman who cannot accept the love Tony gives her. She rejects the new CD player he brings over and the recorded music he knows she likes—What a good son!—and rebuffs his sad attempt to dance with her in her kitchen. She grouses that Tony isn’t taking care of her in a loving, respectful way, even though he’s supporting her in the house where he and his sisters grew up—a house that Livia suddenly treats as her own little Eden once it becomes clear that Tony is about to move her into a nursing home.
Between his emotional deprivation as a child, and the oppressively patriarchal culture of the Italian American Mob and gangsters, generally, Tony has issues with women, period. We see this between Tony and his wife Carmela (Edie Falco9), who knows he’s a cheater and tells him right before his MRI that he’s going to go to Hell when he dies; his daughter Meadow (Jamie-Lynn Sigler), who resents Carmela for posing as a righteous person after decades as a mobster’s wife; and Tony’s mistress (or goomar) Irina,10 a Kazakhstani kitten who stubbornly dons JFK’s yachtsman’s cap. Then there are the dancers at the Bada Bing, the strip club/money-laundering front Tony frequents: silent, sexually available, semi-nude, yet rarely ogled by Tony and the other gangsters, part of the decor.
Tony treats men and women very differently. With men like his protégé, nephew Christopher (Michael Imperioli11), he communicates through jocular banter that feels warm and knowing even when he’s “breaking balls.” He’s clearly more emotionally accessible to men in, say, the pork store scenes. When he’s with women, Tony alternates between courtly and protective, and peevish, possessive, and crude, depending on the woman. He’s most likable around Meadow, who’s not as cutting with her dad as she is with her mother. But Tony always shows a suppressed, volatile helplessness around women—an undertone of childlike delight, predatory anticipation, or beleaguered resentment—and it’s captured in Tony’s study of Melfi’s statue.
The angles signifying the statue’s dominance and Tony’s inferiority continue in an exchange of dolly shots that move us closer to both. Tony is staring hard at the statue—as if that will help him figure out why he can’t stop staring at it.
When Dr. Melfi opens her office door and invites Tony in for the first time, Tony is still seated, which means that when he acknowledges her, he’s looking up at her just as he was at the statue, from an inferior, “awed” position.
Images matter here as much as words—not a common approach in 1990s television. Despite inventively directed predecessors like Miami Vice, Twin Peaks, The X-Files, and Sex and the City, dramatic information on scripted shows was conveyed mainly through close-ups of people talking. Critics noticed the evident care that Chase and his collaborators took in deciding what to show us, from what angle and for how long, and what to cut to next. This care proved crucial to the series’ success: it invited audiences into the drama rather than spoon-feeding them exposition. The implacable wordlessness of images, scored to music or just ambient noise, sends the imagination pinballing from one association to another.
This is crucially important on a TV series concerned with psychology and therapy. Therapists look for connections and symbolism in the text of the patient’s life story, analyzing it as scholars might parse a novel or painting. They find deeper meanings in dreams, fantasies, and seemingly random events, and uncover suppressed truths by perceiving patients’ tone and word choices when talking about themselves, their relationships, and their thoughts.
As the pilot unfolds, we learn to read The Sopranos this way. We quickly notice the difference between Melfi and Livia in relation to Tony: Melfi is compassionate and Livia is not. Melfi listens because she’s interested in her patients and works to help them understand themselves. Livia only listens for information she can use to improve her own position or inflict pain on others. Other people exist to Melfi; to Livia, they don’t, except as extensions of herself or indicators of her power over others. Even though Melfi has been in Tony’s life for less than half an hour (he storms out at the twenty-eight-minute mark after she presses him about his mother) she’s already being positioned, in the viewer’s minds if not his, as the anti-Livia: nurturing, caring. The sanctuary-womb of Melfi’s office with its curved walls, integral bookshelves, window bands of sunlight, and tissue box give Tony a safe harbor to discuss subjects weighing on him.
Tony addresses several in his first session. The device of putting the hero in therapy lets Chase deliver reams of information about Tony, his crew, his bosses, his family, and their overlaps, along with the points where Tony’s personal and professional distress are inseparable, all without the usual pilot-episode busy work. Tony’s ruminations to Melfi start in therapy and then become voice-over narration, taking us in and out of Tony’s consciousness. When we’re in that room with them, we’re hearing Tony speak, but when the episode cuts to the action he’s recounting, suddenly we’re feel as if we’re in his head. The first such cut shows us the exterior of his house, then cuts to a God’s-eye view of Tony lying in bed looking as if life has run him over with a garbage truck; there’s even a tight close-up of one of Tony’s bloodshot eyes, a composition more common to experimental films and science fiction epics like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Blade Runner than gangster tales.
Voice-overs always risk becoming a crutch for storytellers to spew facts about the characters that we could have figured out given cleverer direction or dialogue (“That’s Livia, my mother,” a network version of the show would’ve told us). This episode mostly avoids this tendency through comical and often surprisingly placed in
terruptions. Time and again, Melfi or Tony stops the story, so the characters can decide how complicit Melfi might become, and Tony can modulate the hard truth about himself or shade things for sympathy. These moments of negotiation and retrenchment add droll laughs to an episode that otherwise derives its humor from aggressive displays of ignorance (“Czechoslovakian, what, that’s a type of Polack, right?”), misquotes of famous movie lines (“Louis Brasi sleeps with the fishes!”), and hard-edged pay cable schtick (Carmela toting an AK-47 to investigate a possible prowler who turns out to be Meadow; Christopher and Big Pussy tossing Emil’s corpse into the side of a dumpster).
These interruptions also illustrate a central problem with the gangster lifestyle. These criminals are constantly doing things that are morally and/or legally appalling, but to survive, they still have to present as a “regular” person. Tony entered therapy to understand himself better, so that he could stop having panic attacks, but from his first session it’s obvious that Melfi wants to open doors he’d rather keep locked. Some of the patient–therapist misunderstandings are hilarious in an Abbott and Costello sort of way, in particular Tony mentioning that it’s become harder to do his thing “because of RICO” and Melfi asking if that’s his brother, and the exchanges that could be captions from an unpublished New Yorker cartoon. (“Hope comes in many forms.” “Well, who’s got time for that?”)
As Tony describes his world to Dr. Melfi, we realize that there’s barely a boundary between family and Family for Tony. When Uncle Junior (Dominic Chianese12), captain of a rival crew in the DiMeo Family, objects to Tony’s attempt to stop him from killing Little Pussy Malanga13 at Vesuvio, the restaurant run by Tony’s childhood friend Artie Bucco14 (John Ventimiglia), he spits, “How many fuckin’ hours did I spend playing catch with you?” One should have nothing to do with the other, but Junior feels entitled to Tony’s unconditional fealty—even though, as Tony confesses to Melfi, “When I was young, he told my girl cousins I would never be a varsity athlete, and frankly, that was a tremendous blow to my esteem.” In this small, interconnected world, where past slights are remembered and exploited forever, everyone seems blind to their true cost. When Tony expresses misgivings to Dr. Melfi about the current state of the Mob, it’s not about the greater morality, just the inconvenience of so many wiseguys turning rat when arrested.
The pilot episode makes this point with blunt comic force. Tony literally drives over Alex Mahaffey (Michael Gaston) because Mahaffey owes him money. Christopher guns down Emil Kolar (Bruce Smolanoff) not because Emil poses an imminent threat to Chris or the Family, but because it’s the simplest way to eliminate a competing bid from a rival garbage company, and to try to impress his mentor Tony. It’s monstrous, all of it, and deep down perhaps these guys know that, but they squelch those feelings to get through the day, leaving Tony in such denial that he can complain to Melfi, “I find I have to be the sad clown” without a trace of self-awareness.
The first therapy session, like this entire episode, keeps circling back to Tony’s relationship with his mother. She’s not on-screen much—her presence is as sparing as Brando’s in The Godfather—but when she is, her rocklike peevishness and furtive expressions pull focus from dynamic figures like Tony, Carmela, and Uncle Junior, who drives Livia to Anthony Jr.’s (Robert Iler) birthday party—a job she asked Tony to do—and implies that Tony should get whacked for interfering with the Malanga hit.15 And when Livia’s not on-screen, other characters talk about her, as in the infamous “So, what, no fucking ziti now?”16 scene where Tony and Carmela talk with her “spiritual mentor” Father Phil Intintola,17 and AJ reports, “She’s not coming. Grandma just called. She started crying and hung up.”
“She needs a purpose in life,” Tony grumbles.
Anxiety about Livia triggers both of Tony’s panic attacks. Cause and effect are obvious when he, Carmela, and the kids are touring the Green Grove Retirement Community with Livia and she spies its nursing home wing and accuses Tony of dumping her. But Tony’s first attack has a more oblique connection. Near the end of the pilot, Melfi strives to steer Tony toward realizing he’s doing better not because of his Prozac prescription, but because he’s talking about his problems instead of holding them inside like Gary Cooper, “the strong, silent type.” Then he tells Melfi about a dream he had about the ducks that, by flying out of Tony’s yard, sparked his first attack: he unscrewed his navel until his penis fell off and a bird flew away with it. Tony describes the bird as aquatic in type, but resists calling a duck a duck even after Melfi pushes him to make this small breakthrough. The mother duck birthed its young and raised them behind the Soprano house, but in Tony’s dream, the duck became an arbitrary destructive force. The life giver, the protector; the tormentor, the destroyer.
“It was just a trip having those wild creatures come into my pool and have their little babies,” Tony tells Melfi. Then he chokes up at his own description. The sentimental tableau he’s just described reveals his largely unrealized capacity for a gentleness that even waterfowl can sense, and that somehow survived within him, despite having a legendary gangster father and a punitive, withholding mother. But Tony would never intuit all this. “I was sad to see them go,” he says, then moves outside of himself verbally, nearly mocking his own distress: “Jesus, fuck, now he’s gonna cry!” Tony adored the ducks in the pool because they were guarded by a mother who protected and nurtured them in a manner free of ulterior motive, of deceit and manipulation, of the urge to annihilate. Livia, for all her evident helplessness, is the most actively destructive force in the pilot, a black hole vacuuming up hope.
But Tony can’t or won’t grasp this—not yet. He ultimately decided that he’s crying because he’s afraid he’s going to lose his family. To what, though? A bullet? Prison? A heart attack from eating too much?
“What are you afraid of?” Melfi asks him.
“I don’t know,” he says.
But even if Tony doesn’t know, The Sopranos is surely mulling it over.
Tony’s two panic attacks were false deaths that felt like heart attacks or strokes. Near-death experiences often convince people to take stock and become emotionally or mentally healthier, stronger—more evolved. But Tony doesn’t seem like that kind of man. Is there hope? Maybe Tony’s distress is about his fear that there isn’t—that maybe there’s too much Livia in him, and it’ll always be there no matter what he does, pulling invisible strings.
“46 LONG”
SEASON 1/EPISODE 2
WRITTEN BY DAVID CHASE
DIRECTED BY DAN ATTIAS
A Boy’s Best Friend
“But she’s my mother. You’re supposed to take care of your mother.” —Tony
The Sopranos pilot was shot in 1997, to be presented to the network as a proof of concept. The second episode, “46 Long,” was produced in 1998 as part of a package of 12 more episodes. The elapsed time can be seen both visually (Gandolfini is heavier, Robert Iler taller) and dramatically, as Chase and company try to decide how much of a television series this anti-television series needs to be to survive. Some of “46 Long”—particularly anything involving Tony and Livia, the starting point for this whole endeavor—feels fully formed. For much of it, though, David Chase is still fiddling with the controls: how to balance the comedy and drama, how it should look. (Dan Attias, who would direct a few later episodes, leans harder on extreme close-ups than Chase did in directing the premiere.) It’s an engrossing but occasionally awkward episode that alternates tones and modes.
In the scenes with Big Pussy and Paulie Walnuts investigating the theft of AJ’s teacher’s car, Paulie’s obsession with the appropriation of Italian culture is on the lighter, at times sitcom-like end of the comedy spectrum, and seems to validate the idea that The Sopranos was Analyze This: The Series. The trouble that Christopher and his meth addict pal Brendan Filone (Anthony DeSando) get into when they start robbing trucks protected by Uncle Junior has more of a black comic spirit, and starts amping up the tensions among Tony,
Junior, and Tony’s own idiot nephew.18 Silvio Dante (Steven Van Zandt19) convincing Tony to hang on to a suit or three before Christopher returns the truck speaks nicely to the hypocrisy of the whole endeavor: in this world, Tony and other authority figures lecture underlings about codes and rules that should never be broken, but flout them whenever it’s convenient.
Christopher and Brendan’s drug use and refusal to follow the rules recalls the cold open, where a wiseguy-turned-author on the Bada Bing’s office TV explains that the golden age of the Mob is gone thanks to drug trafficking and other deviations from tradition. “The shoe fits,” Tony says sadly, and of course he would: he told Melfi in the pilot that he feared he’d come in at the end. Tony’s gesture of shooting a rubber band at the TV when a former foot solder turned state’s witness appears is not only nonlethal, it’s childish—the kind of thing a badly behaved kid would do to show off in class—and confirms the author’s point. The fear that 1990s hoods are puny facsimiles of their predecessors is echoed in the scene where Brendan hijacks another one of Junior’s trucks with two African American gangsters who are no more menacing or competent than he is.
When you look back across “46 Long,” the cold open feels like a self-deprecating way of acknowledging that The Sopranos is anxious about following in the footsteps of classic gangster films, even while doing a new dance. Chase’s characters react to the interview in the background either with sad nods or defensive bursts of derision. (“They pay this chiachiadon20 by the word?” Paulie snarls.) The scene ends with Silvio impersonating Al Pacino in The Godfather Part III21 at Tony’s request, as if to say, Well, if we are just imitating what came before, let’s at least do it with gusto. Not for nothing is Big Pussy reading a newspaper story about cloning. The Mob expert might as well be a TV critic complaining that the Mob movie genre, like the Mafia itself, is played out, and that even if it weren’t, these small-screen hoods would still just be clones who couldn’t live up to the example of their big-screen ancestors.
The Sopranos Sessions Page 3
