In their first scene together, Melfi notes that she is a proxy for all the important women in Tony’s life, and it’s fascinating to see how they’ve started to blur in his mind. A few episodes ago, he dreamed that his mother was Dr. Melfi. Here his unconscious gives him Melfi as both his mistress (even speaking with Irina’s voice) and his wife.
“What’s the one thing your mother, your wife, your daughter all have in common?” Melfi asks him.
“They all break my balls,” Tony says, making her laugh,44 then adds, “They’re all Italian, so what?”
“So, maybe by coming clean with me, you’re dialoguing with them.” Later, he pours it on by describing Melfi in terms that prize her gentleness (versus the confrontational qualities of Carmela, Meadow, and Livia) while comparing her demeanor very specifically to an Italian stringed instrument often heard in love songs. “You’re gentle. Not loud. Sweet-soundin’. Like a mandolin.”45
The problem is, he can’t perform with any of the women he’s juggling, physically or emotionally. He can’t get it up with Irina, is barely interested in trying with Carm, and gets completely shut down by Melfi, who knows transference when she sees it. Tony can’t get what he needs from them, any more than he can get Livia to be even the slightest bit affectionate when he visits her at Green Grove. He blames the Prozac and even floats the idea of “flushing” it to “see if the changes are real” because it “might be working a little overtime . . . a side effect.”
“You know, not all impotence is the result of the medication,” Melfi says; a few minutes later she points out that depression itself might also be a factor, and that if he still gets morning wood, the problem isn’t the pills.
“You saying there’s something wrong with me?” Tony says, flashing a scaled-down version of the predatory sneer we see on his face when he’s inflicting violence. It’s revealing that his fight-or-flight response would be triggered by such an innocuous comment; maybe it’s because the implication, even before Melfi starts to elaborate on it, is that Tony might have to actually change, even a little bit, if he wants to get it up again.
Carmela’s actions mirror Tony’s in some ways. She’s only slightly more willing than Tony to do the hard, tedious work of repairing relationships. Look at the way she behaves toward Tony not long after her confessional epiphany with Father Phil. She wants to have sex with him, probably to put that energy to productive use instead of bouncing it off the priest’s vestments; but she has no idea that her husband’s not doing any better with his mistress in this regard, and interprets his impotence as a sign that he’s getting partner-type satisfactions from Melfi, sexual or not.46 She tells Father Phil—in a smartly directed scene that includes a wide shot in which the cross literally comes between them—that she used to view Tony’s girlfriends and mistresses as “a form of masturbation,” satisfying a carnal appetite that, unlike Carmela’s, seemed boundless. “I couldn’t give him what he needed all the time. . . . But this psychiatrist, she’s not just a goomar. For the first time, I feel like he’s really cheating and I’m the one who’s thirsty.”
Carmela is right to call Tony out for ducking out on their anniversary to talk business with New York underboss Johnny Sack (Vincent Curatola47), and her observations of how Tony neglects her for work and treats her as “someone you’ve just chosen to procreate with” are undeniably correct. But rather than push him toward the church, or trying to be a better person herself, Carmela tries to get his attention by spending his money on new furniture. Goodbye, brief guilt about enjoying the fruits of Tony’s business, though at least she finally admits to Tony that she was jealous of Melfi’s ability to help him, saying, “I wanna be that woman in your life.”
Tony understandably develops fast qualms about the Frankenstein’s monster he’s created by making Uncle Junior the fake boss. The gambit was brilliant in theory but runs into the complicated realities of human beings, from Junior’s pride to Livia’s continued attempts to strike back at her son for putting her in a nursing home/retirement community.48 At the moment, it’s other members of the Family who are suffering—a buddy of captain Jimmy Altieri (Joe Badalucco Jr.) with the poker game, Tony’s mentor Hesh (Jerry Adler49) having to pay Junior back taxes—and Tony is able to manipulate the Hesh situation into a scenario everyone can live with.
But you don’t have to have watched the rest of the series to suspect that Junior’s reign won’t be peaceful for nearly as long as Octavian’s—and that’s even without our first significant appearance by the FBI, who take surveillance photos of everyone at Junior’s coronation dinner. Junior has spent most of his life in the shadow of younger men—first his kid brother, then Jackie, now his nephew—resenting the lack of validation and respect he feels entitled to despite leaving people cold most of the time. After all these years, he has finally attained his birthright, but many of his business decisions seem punitive or nonsensical, generating so much chaos that Tony barely maintains the status quo by going behind Junior’s back or hitting his uncle with shameless, transparent flattery—manipulations easily counteracted by Livia, whose hold over Junior is so powerful that she doesn’t even need to draw attention to it.
“DOWN NECK”
SEASON 1/EPISODE 7
WRITTEN BY ROBIN GREEN & MITCHELL BURGESS
DIRECTED BY LORRAINE SENNA FERRARA
White Rabbit
“My son is doomed, right?” —Tony
“Down Neck” is in some ways even more focused than “College,” equally concerned with the handed-down values and codes that people honor or violate, but more preoccupied with biology and lineage. It revolves around AJ’s precarious school situation after his suspension for stealing Communion wine, the memories the incident stirs up in Tony, and the possibility that AJ might be doomed to replicate the mistakes and miseries of his father. “I got in a little trouble when I was a kid,” Tony told Meadow during their road trip to Maine; this is the episode where we get a taste of what he was alluding to.
“Down Neck” doesn’t have an iconic moment like Tony strangling Febby or Carmela’s confession, but it draws enormous power from showing the way Tony grew up, how the experience helped make him the adult he is now, and why he fears he may be making AJ into the same kind of man his parents made him. Father Hagy (Anthony Fusco) tells Tony and Carmela that attention deficit disorder is “an aggregate of symptoms” that may include inattention, impulsivity, and hyperactivity. “All he needs is a whack upside the head,” Tony says, expressing the Old World mentality toward raising boys that helped make him the insecure, easily aggrieved, violent bully that he is today. “You’d hit somebody who’s sick?” Carmela presses him. “You’d hit somebody with polio?” No, Tony says, but only because modern American society has deemed it unacceptable “to do a tarantell’ on the kids every once in awhile.”
His own father had a different attitude: “The belt was his favorite child development tool.” His mother, apparently, was even more chaotic in her expressions of rage; an especially terrifying moment, shrugged off by Tony as “opera,” finds a domestically stressed-out Livia accusing her young son of “driving me crazy” and threatening to stick a serving fork in his eye. With Melfi, Tony worries that the propensity for lawlessness and violence is “in the blood—it’s hereditary,” even though she reassures him “it’s not a destiny written in stone. People have choices.”
James Gandolfini is spectacular in the therapy scenes, as Tony vacillates between sharp clarity on his upbringing and willful ignorance about how truly dysfunctional it was. There’s a powerful sense of Tony internalizing his father’s toxic masculinity and exhibiting his own version of it; when Melfi asks how he felt after seeing his father beat a man for the first time, he says, “I didn’t want him to do it to me,” but then adds, “I was just glad he wasn’t a fag.” Asked if he’s “concerned” that AJ is going to find out what he really does for a living, Tony retreats into deflections and rationalizations, and Gandolfini’s expressions grow more resentful and petulant.
“What about chemical companies dumping all of that shit into the rivers, and they get all of these deformed babies popping up all over the place?”50 he says, avoiding eye contact as he rants. In earlier episodes, Gandolfini had such a handle on the role that he could seem to be acting with the back of his neck. Here he does a lot of acting with his eyelids, as the moments where he hides his expressive eyes provide the best window into Tony’s troubled soul. When Tony tells Melfi, “He was a good guy, my father—he knew how to have a good time,” Gandolfini glances down at his right pants leg as he’s brushing lint from it rather than making eye contact.
Lorraine Bracco wonderfully expresses Melfi’s reactions to these alarming details. Near the end, when Tony insists that he was “proud to be Johnny Soprano’s boy,” he looks Melfi right in the face, jabbing a finger at her, then at himself when she asks if his own son is proud of him: “Yeah, probably—and I’m glad! Glad if he’s proud of me!” The good doctor tries hard to maintain her usual clinical distance, but simply can’t once she appreciates all the ugliness Tony experienced while being led to believe he had a typical childhood. Her friendly curiosity while prodding and challenging her patient—like an old friend asking questions over coffee—makes you believe that Tony set aside at least some of his defense mechanisms.
The dialogue in past and present sequences links the choices (or predispositions?) of the grandparents, the father, and the son. “It’s a crime to suspend that child from school with all the money you give them!” Livia declares during a family dinner, demonstrating the “money talks” attitude typical of so many Sopranos characters—and Americans. Young Livia tells young Tony that his father was arrested even though “he didn’t do anything. They just pick on the Italians!” In the present, Tony asks the school authorities if they’re testing Anthony’s classmates, “the ones that aren’t named ‘Soprano’?” Junior says, “I bet that gym teacher shit a brick when your little friend puked on his boots, huh, Anthony?” making light of the situation that has Tony and Carmela so distressed, and making his grandson giggle. “Wanna encourage him, Uncle Jun?” Tony says, irritated. “Hey, whatever happened to ‘boys will be boys’?” grins Junior, who’s first seen in the flashbacks (played by Rocco Sisto) picking up Johnny Boy Soprano (Joseph Siravo) to go beat up a deadbeat debtor (Steve Santosusso). In a nifty bit of present/past mirroring, this scene echoes the very first act of violence in the series, down to the wide shots of a Sopranos paterfamilias chasing his quarry on foot and thrashing him in plain view of witnesses while a blood relative shadows him in a shiny new car.
The flashbacks bring new energy to the therapy scenes, partly because this is the first time since the pilot that The Sopranos has cut away from Tony and Melfi’s discussions to show us Tony’s recollections. Gandolfini and Bracco are strong enough actors that Chase might have gotten away with expressing these memories as a string of theatrical monologues. But there are virtues to showing instead of telling, in scenes that create a parallel Sopranos universe with juicy roles for actors we’re meeting for the first time.
Laila Robins brings the younger Livia to horrifying life in a way that evokes but doesn’t impersonate Nancy Marchand. Less effective is Siravo as Johnny Boy. He theoretically has the easier job, since he doesn’t have to live up to an indelible present-day performance, but he comes in on the broader end of the Sopranos’s acting spectrum. Siravo does capture the wildly destructive energy and preening entitlement characteristic of so many of these neighborhood gangsters: you can believe Johnny would have been beloved by old-timers like Paulie Walnuts who sentimentalize alpha males that do as they damn well please, way out of proportion to their criminal skills. Civilians sometimes idolize them, too: the punch line of the flashbacks is seeing the same guy Johnny beat up leaning out of his window in casts to cheer him on.
It’s fun to look at these scenes through the lens of the 1960s-era TV shows made before and after, including a great one by Chase’s protégé Matthew Weiner, a writer-producer who joined The Sopranos in season five and went on to create Mad Men. Back in 1999, Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” was already a clichéd choice to introduce a ’60s flashback—especially given Tony’s current pill regimen. But the story of the toxic Johnny–Livia marriage, and the specific Jersey-ness of the flashbacks (including news coverage of the 1967 riots elsewhere in Newark deployed as background, and as a comment on how white Americans were mostly unaffected by civil rights struggles), render “Down Neck” uniquely Sopranos, even if a music cue or two now seems too familiar.51 The show’s conflation of the familial and the professional continues in the ’60s scenes: Tony is nearly as upset by remembering how his father favored his sister as he is with recalling his arrest at the amusement park for violating the terms of his parole. “He was using my sister Janice as a front,” Tony explains to Melfi. “All the guys brought their daughters so when they did their business, it looked sweet and innocent.”
The past and present stories also tie together neatly by having AJ inadvertently spill the beans to his grandmother about his dad being in therapy. Grandson and grandmother make a great comic combination here: AJ is so oblivious—whether from ADD, Sopranos genes, his questionable upbringing, or some combination—that he not only doesn’t realize what he’s telling Livia but is invulnerable to her usual emotional manipulations. Once Livia decides that Tony goes to a psychiatrist mainly to complain about her, she starts up the waterworks and loud self-pity, but AJ couldn’t be less interested. Watching this malevolent old woman try to get inside this kid’s thick head is like watching a master surgeon use a scalpel on a garbage can.
Of course, we’ve seen how dangerous Livia can be, even in the confined, monitored spaces of Green Grove, when she counsels Junior. We see it again here when Tony insinuates that his mother prevented his father from starting “a new book” and a supper club in Reno with an associate, reminding her that she said she’d rather smother her own kids with a pillow than watch Johnny take them away. “Well, if it bothers you, maybe you better talk to a psychiatrist,” Livia says coldly. “That’s what people do when they’re looking for somebody to blame for their life, isn’t it?”
“THE LEGEND OF TENNESSEE MOLTISANTI”
SEASON 1/EPISODE 8
WRITTEN BY FRANK RENZULLI AND DAVID CHASE
DIRECTED BY TIM VAN PATTEN
Spring Cleaning
“Where’s my arc?” —Christopher
As quickly as The Sopranos became a hit for HBO in the early months of ’99, it also became controversial among some Italian Americans—many like Dr. Melfi’s ex-husband, Richard La Penna52—who were tired of seeing movies and TV portray them as gangsters. As TV critics for Tony Soprano’s favorite newspaper, a major daily in a state with a robust and proud Italian American population, this book’s authors heard early and often from citizens who resented the popularity of the show and accused it of once again casting a shadow over their people. Yet we also heard from Italian Americans who loved the series, and felt as much pride in having Tony as their pop cultural avatar as Tony does in this episode having Frank Sinatra as his.53 This dichotomy of reaction to The Sopranos would soon become as much part of the show’s fabric as Tony’s dreams, as characters became stand-ins for anti-defamation protesters, and as the show engaged detractors head on.
These first-season episodes, though, were made in a vacuum—all written and produced months before any of them aired. Even if David Chase couldn’t predict the audience’s size, he and Frank Renzulli knew the reactions stories like this tended to generate from their fellow Italian Americans, and this installment at least partly tries to outflank the issue.
Reports of pending Federal indictments54 for DiMeo Family members are all anyone can talk about in this episode, whether they’re in the Mob or not. For seasoned wiseguys like Tony and Big Pussy, it’s nerve-racking, but it’s also the cost of doing business, and they focus on the practical:55 hiding or destroying evidence, preventing the FBI from trashing too much of the house, or warnin
g Dr. Melfi that some upcoming appointments may be missed due to “vacation.”
For Melfi’s loved ones, who are alarmed to learn that she’s treating one of the mobsters from recent news reports, it’s another opportunity to debate the enduring popularity of Mob stories, and the alleged harm they do to Italian Americans’ image. The conversation waxes didactic, as Melfi’s son Jason points out that the whole concept of Italian American anti-defamation was started by Mob boss Joseph Colombo (who did, indeed, found the Italian American Civil Rights League), while Richard argues that the number of Italian American criminals in pop culture is disproportionate to the number of Italian Americans actually involved in organized crime.
Amusingly, Richard has a kindred spirit of sorts in his wife’s “Patient X,” who responds to the FBI raid on his home by lecturing his kids about all the great Italian Americans (like Antonio Meucci) who had nothing to do with organized crime. Tony is in typical denial about many things—including the idea that spaghetti could have been invented in China, not Italy—but here, that tendency is presented as part of his larger desire (emphasized in “Down Neck,” too) to keep his kids as far from the Family business as possible.
But where Richard is alarmed by the indictments because of the shadow they cast on law-abiding Italians, and Tony isn’t happy because it endangers his business and freedom, the episode’s title character is upset mainly because he’s being ignored. As Christopher reminds Adriana, he loves movies, and seems to have joined the Family as much out of a desire to emulate his cinematic heroes as to be closer to his uncle. He’s so young, cocky, and stupid that he doesn’t even realize that he’s better off not being named in the indictments or the newspaper, to the point where he becomes envious of his dead friend Brendan for being referred to as a “soldier” on local TV news.
The Sopranos Sessions Page 6
