The Sopranos Sessions

by Matt Zoller Seitz

  The pilot established that this show exists in our world and its people watch the same crime films we do. The dialogue includes movie quotations (and misquotations), and Father Phil even asks Carmela what Tony thinks of The Godfather trilogy (his favorite is Part II because of the flashbacks where Vito goes back to Sicily—fitting his mindset of nostalgic lament—but Part III was “like, what happened?”). But when he asks about Goodfellas—a rich source of this series’ core cast—her reaction to the sound of Meadow sneaking home short-circuits whatever answer she was about to give: the screenwriting version of a record scratch. The Sopranos stays in active conversation with its own pop culture tradition, but its side of that dialogue is self-deprecating and playful, like an ambitious, smart-alecky young foot soldier who knows what happens to mooks that get too big for their britches.

  Maybe the lowercase-family scenes are crisper and more potent than stolen trucks and cars because they’re life-like and emotionally direct, and thus unafraid of judgment versus past depictions. Many of this show’s predecessors and descendants portray the protagonist’s work life more solidly than domestic life and parenting; but on The Sopranos, Tony’s off-the-clock moments are more striking from the start, and the crime stuff is going to have to work to catch up. We’ve seen Mob violence like the Comley hijacking go awry in other gangster tales (Scorsese’s in particular), but the Tony–Livia relationship, and the way Carmela and Melfi force Tony to discuss it, feels instantly distinct. Just check out Nancy Marchand’s sour look when Carmela talks up Green Grove, or Livia’s response to the kitchen fire—largely caused through her own paranoia—like it’s another insult this terrible world has visited on her. Or the heavy-lidded, hangdog look—which James Gandolfini has by now perfected—as Tony surveys his childhood house without its most powerful resident. Tony and Livia feel lived-in from day one, but their dynamic is so tangled and damaging to Tony that he can’t even see how destructive it is, and always was.

  The show’s sense that all its characters—civilians and gangsters—are living small, robotically materialistic lives is nearly unique in the Mob genre. “46 Long” presents lines and images about decline, decay, and the irrevocable passing of old ways, as well as an atmosphere of dissatisfaction anchored in the suspicion that things were better during some (largely unspecified) past. The Bada Bing’s new phone system is more complicated than the old one. Presented with a truckload of stolen DVD players, Tony grills Brendan about their inferior visual quality versus laserdiscs and their paucity of good movies. “But the sound? Way improved,” Brendan assures him.

  “Good,” Tony snarls, “because nothing beats poppin’ up some Orville Redenbacher’s and listening to Men in Black.”

  Paulie and Pussy’s gumshoe routine at various coffee shops22 evokes a line from Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely—“He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food cake”—but what makes it memorable is their realization that their heritage is being bastardized and repackaged by an international conglomerate and sold back to them at inflated prices. Pussy wearily accepts this reality; Paulie rages against it. “Fuckin espresso, cappuccino: we invented the shit, and all these other cocksuckers are getting rich off it . . . It’s not just the money, it’s a pride thing. All our food: pizza, calzone, buffalo moozzarel’, olive oil! . . . But this? This is the worst, this espresso shit.” When Tony enters the kitchen in a bathrobe and tries to dance with Carmela (an image that echoes his awkward dance with Livia in the pilot), he sings Procol Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” a song released thirty-two years earlier when he was in elementary school. Jackie Aprile, whom Tony says “crawled out of a sickbed” to meet with him and Junior, admits that his cancer is eating him up, then wonders aloud if he should just name a successor. “This day and age?” asks Tony, “Who wants the fuckin’ job?”

  Decline, decay, and the loss of potency and autonomy are all concentrated in Tony’s distress over Livia. Mentally and physically, she seems worse off than in the pilot. She thinks her new Trinidadian housekeeper23 stole a favorite plate from her. “You sure you didn’t give it to one of the relatives? You keep forcing your possessions on people, thinking you’re gonna die,” Tony says. “I wish it was tomorrow,” Livia replies.

  Maybe Tony feels the same way.

  This is a man who feels abandoned by his two sisters to take care of a woman who can’t live with him because Carmela “won’t allow it,” but who can’t live by herself anymore, either—and no matter what he does, Livia perceives him as an ungrateful son. Tony is so horrified by his mother’s apparent cognitive decline that he grasps after any shred of evidence that she’s doing well, such as her volunteering to drive her friends around—until Livia runs one of them over. This gives Tony the excuse he needs to move her into Green Grove. A later scene finds Tony packing up what’s left in his childhood home, including pictures of his mother when she was young, and of himself as a child and a newborn. Overcome by conflicted feelings, he fights off another panic attack by forcing himself to sit. Freud would have a lot to say about a son whose feelings about his mother are so intense that they make him feel like he’s about to die. Melfi’s prodding in therapy seems to nudge him closer to profoundly dark realizations about Livia and, by extension, himself: the apple and the tree.

  When Tony confirms Livia is physically healthy—“like a bull”—Melfi suggests that she be examined for depression, because “you know from your own life that depression can cause accidents, poor performance, or worse.”

  “What are you saying, that unconsciously she tried to whack her best friend?” Tony asks. Tony’s depression is exacerbated by many factors, but his mother towers above everything else. Though she’d never characterize herself this way, Livia’s still mourning her husband Johnny, whose death left her feeling emotionally and physically abandoned. She may miss Johnny for selfish and narcissistic reasons, but the ache is real. Part of her hostility toward her son might stem from the feeling that Tony, Livia’s makeshift Johnny, is also abandoning her now, and she can’t stop it. Viewed this way, the moment when Livia nearly kills her best friend feels like a form of projection. A boy’s best friend is his mother.

  Melfi finds it “interesting” that Tony would classify suppressed murderous rage against a loved one as another byproduct of depression, but she doesn’t follow his remark to its logical conclusion. If the son is anything like the mother, he might be capable of the same subconscious mental calculus, and the same result: violence against a “best friend.”

  The episode’s conclusion implies that Tony might have made this connection on his own. Fed up with Bing bouncer Georgie’s (Frank Santorelli) inability to transfer a call, Tony goes berserk and smashes him in the head with the receiver.24 One of the pieces of evidence that Tony presented to Melfi as proof of his mother’s decline? “She can’t manage the telephone.”

  “DENIAL, ANGER, ACCEPTANCE”

  SEASON 1/EPISODE 3

  WRITTEN BY MARK SARACENI

  DIRECTED BY NICK GOMEZ

  Protocol

  “If all this shit’s for nothing, why do I gotta think about it?” —Tony

  James Gandolfini didn’t quite come out of nowhere to star in The Sopranos, but he was obscure enough that, coupled with the titanic force of his performance, it was easy to view him as always having been Tony Soprano. The perceived lack of a border between actor and character back then worked to the show’s benefit: no viewer thought, “Oh, James Gandolfini wouldn’t really do that” because they had no other frame of reference. When revisiting the series, however, it can be difficult to resist projecting Gandolfini’s death at the relatively tender age of fifty-one onto his most famous character—the protagonist of a series preoccupied with decline, waste, and missed opportunities, filled with images of death both unnatural and natural.

  An hour like “Denial, Anger, Acceptance” is thus particularly tough to get through. Its core is about Tony confronting his own fragile mortality as he experiences the
eponymous stages of grief over Jackie Aprile’s impending demise. Gandolfini was a very different, and better, man than his alter ego, but in listening to Tony struggle with the meaning of life and death with Dr. Melfi, it’s still hard not to imagine that it’s the actor having the same conversation—or simply to think of him dying, like Jackie, far too soon. The Godfather-style sequence where Meadow’s choral performance is intercut with the attacks on Christopher and Brendan is particularly powerful beyond Chase and company’s obvious intent. Seeing Christopher plead for his life, and then watching Mikey Palmice end Brendan’s, is intense, and Brendan’s death is the show’s first real whacking of a notable character (Little Pussy Malanga was more talked about than experienced; we barely saw his face). But it’s nothing compared to the moment in the school auditorium, as Tony’s emotions find an outlet in the music, in the experience of seeing his daughter shine, and the brief realization of how much he needs to treasure these moments, for however long he has on this earth.

  This is a great episode for both Tony and the actor who almost played him, Michael Rispoli. As consolation roles go, Jackie Aprile isn’t a super-lucrative or long-lasting one, but Rispoli makes the most of his time. He nails the comic beats in the scene where Jackie doesn’t realize that the “nurse” who visits him in the hospital was hired by Tony to give his day a happy ending, but also the dramatic ones, particularly where Tony wants to relive the mayhem at the motel while Jackie is obsessing over his temperature.

  Gandolfini’s performance and the struggle inside Tony that fuels it are strong enough to carry the episode. But although “Denial, Anger, Acceptance” is engrossing, it also feels unsteady. Livia appears only briefly and late, though it’s notable for how casually she sentences Brendan to death, knowing what Junior will do with her advice; this is a cold, dangerous woman, not the warm maternal presence Tony keeps trying to convince himself that she is. The Mob Case of the Week, involving the Hasidic motel owner,25 feels, much as Pussy and Paulie’s stolen car investigation did in the previous episode, like Chase still experimenting: Hey, wouldn’t it be funny to see these tough Italian American wiseguys be stymied by a bunch of Jewish guys with strange hats and sideburns? It turns out to be a bit more than that, partly because Ariel’s willingness to die out of principle connects to Tony and Jackie’s reckoning with their own mortality, but it’s still less compelling than almost every other corner of the episode.

  The hour’s most welcome new development is Carmela’s first dedicated subplot; it works both as a short story carved into the episode and as a new lens through which to view all the other narratives happening around it. Carmela invites Artie and Charmaine Bucco to cater her hospital fundraiser, to help them move beyond the trauma of losing their old restaurant and put money in their pockets while they wait for an insurance payout; but she winds up making her “friend” Charmaine feel even smaller about her status compared to the wealthy and powerful Sopranos. This subplot shows us that Carmela compels as much deference in her domestic sphere as Tony does on the streets.

  It might seem odd to call a show populated by this many vulgar people a comedy of manners, but protocol, social status, and awareness of power dynamics are sunk as deep into The Sopranos as they are in the novels of Kazuo Ishiguro or Edith Wharton. Representatives of different cultures, classes, and levels of influence strive against one another for the upper hand. The Hasidim have a value system and code of honor as intractable and machismo-based as the one animating the Italian Americans hell-bent on rattling them. Carmela’s desire to raise funds for the hospital is fueled by her wish to be seen as respectable. Chris is going against Junior largely because he feels the Family has denied him the promotion he believes he’s already earned; by taking money out of Junior’s pocket, he’s denying Junior’s power over him as a Family leader as well as being Chris’s kind-of-uncle. “Him and his little friend, they’re slapping me across the face, and they’re hiding behind Tony,” Junior tells Livia, tacitly seeking approval to crush the kid. No dice. Chris isn’t a son to Tony, Livia explains, but he loves him like one. “And so do I, Junior,” she adds, her widening eyes signaling that she’s using her emotional sway over him to veto any retaliation in the works.26

  The subplot about Chris selling amphetamines to Meadow to help her stay up longer while she’s studying for finals parallels the bucking of protocol in the Carmela–Charmaine story. Meadow is leveraging her greater social status (plus sentimental family bonds) to pressure another character into doing something they’d normally avoid. Meanwhile, we see how Chris, the product of a virulent patriarchal subculture, looks down on his girlfriend Adriana (Drea de Matteo27) because she’s a woman (ordering her to go answer the door while he smokes pot and watches TV). And we see how Adriana resents Christopher for earning stacks of cash through quick bursts of criminal activity and vegging out the rest of the time, instead of working a regular job like hers. (“Restaurant hostess, real tough work,” Chris sneers, while Brendan does pull-ups in a nearby doorway.) Charmaine’s revenge is both effective and the kind of thing that only someone in her unique position—someone who grew up with Tony and Carmela but deliberately lives just outside their world now—could devise. The show has a great eye and ear for insults—particularly unintended ones—and this episode contains an especially wrenching example: Carmela can’t even recognize that she’s beckoning for Charmaine in the same haughty manner she used earlier for the housekeeper. In return, Charmaine sticks in the knife by revealing that she and Tony hooked up back in the day and could have ended up together if she’d wanted, then twists it by adding, “We both made our choices. I’m fine with mine.”

  After the sting of this exchange fades, Carmela will still have her McMansion, and Charmaine and Artie will be living in their “cozy” fixer-upper and praying for their insurance money. But we’ve already seen in two episodes that Charmaine is determined not to be affiliated with Mob business. On a show in which almost every character is somehow compromised, she’s an anomaly.

  “MEADOWLANDS”

  SEASON 1/EPISODE 4

  WRITTEN BY JASON CAHILL

  DIRECTED BY JOHN PATTERSON

  The Casual Violence

  “Here we go: the War of ’99.” —Big Pussy

  After a couple of outings where the family material is notably more compelling than the Family material, “Meadowlands” strongly balances Tony’s two worlds, partly because the lines separating them are so blurred. This blur is certified in the array of everyday household objects that become weaponized (a yo-yo, a woodchopper’s axe, and a staple gun) and in Melfi’s description of “the climate of rage in modern society . . . the casual violence”—the latter depicted repeatedly in this episode.

  “Meadowlands” starts with Tony’s nightmare about members of his crew learning that he’s talking about his mother28 in therapy, before he discovers that Silvio’s dentist works in Dr. Melfi’s building. These developments kick his paranoia into overdrive, to the point where he sends crooked, degenerate-gambler cop Vin Makazian (John Heard29) to investigate his therapist. Brendan’s murder, followed by Jackie’s death, forces Tony into a confrontation with Junior he was hoping to avoid. Jackie’s funeral—with all the wiseguys in attendance, and FBI agents photographing them—is an eye-opening experience for AJ, who’s only just been told what his father actually does for a living. (The titular word “Meadowlands” refers to a real area of northern New Jersey, a swamp near what was then Giants Stadium—now MetLife Stadium—that’s been a dumping ground for murder victims through the ages; but it’s also the psychological space where Meadow, who knows her family’s secret, has been living for some time, and where she guides her brother in this episode. This is Meadow’s Land.)

  The Tony–Junior tensions that have been simmering for weeks hit a full boil here, though the only gun Tony uses is the staple gun he swipes from the hospital to let Mikey Palmice know how much he disapproves of Brendan’s murder and Christopher’s beating.30 But for all of Chris’s indignant dem
ands for retribution, and the support of his fellow captains in calling for Junior’s death, Tony instead—with some (maybe) unintentional help from Dr. Melfi—figures out a way to win the peace, by letting Junior think he’s the new boss when he’s really just a figurehead. The scene where Tony marches into Junior’s favorite lunch place—armed, as Junior had suggested—and surprises his uncle with the offer is a series peak for tension. It’s also a great indicator of what a savvy tactician Tony can be when he’s not using phone receivers as cudgels: he doesn’t just position Junior to take all the heat while Tony makes most of the decisions, but also exacts lucrative control of Bloomfield and the paving union.

  As ways to learn your family’s dirty secret go, AJ being spared a schoolyard beating because the bigger kid’s father warned him not to touch Tony Soprano’s kid isn’t a bad one. The writers tend to let AJ be a profoundly spoiled but otherwise unremarkable boy: inarticulate, clumsy (his two hallway scuffles are among the most realistically ineffectual underage fights on TV), and slow on the uptake, even as Meadow patiently leads him to realizing their dad is a prominent mobster. AJ’s dawning recognition as he surveys Jackie’s funeral is a strong way to end an episode concerned with the crumbling walls between Tony’s work and home lives.

  And then there’s the Dr. Melfi situation.31 “It’s complicated” would be an understatement; Melfi herself might need several sessions to dig through all the layers. Even before she backs into playing war consigliere in Tony’s dispute with Junior, we see Tony battling three dueling impulses. First, he’s attracted to his shrink. Second, she’s helping him deal with his panic attacks and the ongoing emotional turmoil that comes from being Anthony Soprano. Third, if Silvio or, worse, Uncle Junior, finds out he’s spilling his guts to an outsider—even someone bound by doctor–patient confidentiality—he could wind up in the ground with his friend Jackie.