This is the biggest spotlight on Christopher so far, but it’s a melancholy one because everything he wants in life (besides the beautiful Adriana) seems so distant. He wants to write his own version of Goodfellas but can’t even spell “managed,” and doesn’t realize screenwriting is work. (He thought the computer would do a lot of it for him.) Jimmy Altieri laughs at the idea that the Feds would care about Tony’s glorified errand boy, who admits to his uncle later in the hour, “the fuckin’ regularness of life is too fuckin’ hard for me or something.” If he’s not clinically depressed,56 he’s certainly not taking any joy in the outlaw lifestyle he dreamed of as a kid.
From its opening nightmare of the murdered Emil Kolar returning from the dead to ask about sausages—the first Sopranos dream not from Tony’s point of view—this episode is an outstanding showcase for Imperioli. The scene where Christopher confesses all his worst fears to Paulie is remarkable for how haunted and defeated he seems this early in the series, even as it illustrates the folly of trying to model your life on your favorite screen heroes.
“Legend” also happens to be the show’s best argument against the charge that it glamorizes real and reel gangsters. The closest Christopher gets to living up to his fantasies—when he pulls a gun on a baker who doesn’t show the appropriate level of fear—is a moment that’s doubly meta: not only is Christopher being thin-skinned and reckless like his favorite movie wiseguys, he shoots the poor baker in the foot, the same injury Imperioli’s character Spider suffered at the hands of Joe Pesci’s Tommy in Goodfellas.
The one counterargument neither Melfi nor the show bothers making is that Hollywood isn’t biased against Italian Americans, but toward excitement. There have also likely been more Irish American gangsters in movies and TV than in reality, more Mexican and Central and South American drug kingpins, and so on. But that’s what sells: the image of the brusque, tough outlaw who takes whatever he wants, in contrast to members of the “respectable” majority who have to be law abiding and considerate all the time. Not only does the general public find tales of crime and violence more interesting (at least in fiction) than representations of “regular” life,57 but members of some of the same ethnic groups that get stereotyped regularly may feel empowered when the stereotype is scary, thrilling, or just socially unacceptable. Negative images notwithstanding, it’s more fun to be seen as dangerous than dull.
It’s useful to compare Richard’s horror at his people being tarnished by a Tony Soprano with the way Jason’s Jewish therapist Sam Reis (Sam Coppola, no relation to the famous cinema family) boasts of having a relative who was a wheelman for gangster Louis “Lepke” Buchalter.58 “Those were some tough Jews,” Reis says wistfully. If the go-to media depiction of Italian Americans is a cigar-chewing mobster, then the archetypal Jewish American character is a quick-witted nebbish, probably a stand-up comic or somebody played by one. For Richard, Italian mobsters are a stain on his people’s legacy; seeing an Italian American actor play an educated white-collar professional like himself would surely brighten his day. But the existence of Jewish gangsters delights Reis because it proves that his people aren’t all neurotic wimps. The grass is always greener.
“BOCA”
SEASON 1/EPISODE 9
WRITTEN BY JASON CAHILL AND ROBIN GREEN & MITCHELL BURGESS
DIRECTED BY ANDY WOLK
The Devil He Knows
“I didn’t hurt nobody.” —Tony
In the grand scheme of Sopranos season one, the most important part of “Boca” takes place on a Jersey golf course, where Uncle Junior and Tony both say things they shouldn’t, and Junior begins to ponder having his nephew whacked. His murderous thoughts are sparked by Livia, who complains to Junior about “my son, the mental patient” while tending her husband’s burial plot in a graveyard overrun with “cemetery dogs.”
But the episode’s other major plotline is more striking: the transgressions of Meadow’s soccer coach Don Hauser (Kevin O’Rourke), who secretly slept with Meadow’s teammate Ally (Cara Jedell). This story shows how caring and morally upright Meadow can be when somebody she loves is in trouble. It also spotlights Artie Bucco, and treats his whiplash-inducing reactions to the scandal as a barometer of viewer reaction to The Sopranos, a show that sincerely warns of the spiritual consequences of the savagery it makes us crave.
Tony and Artie’s debate over the coach’s crime—and what it says about these longtime pals’ very different attitudes about lawbreaking—is gripping, and addresses a larger point about our main character and the philosophy he shares with so many other characters. We’ve all seen stories about two childhood friends, where one grows up to be a cop or a priest and the other a crook—it’s a staple of classic gangster films like Angels with Dirty Faces and modern crime thrillers like The Indian Runner—and The Sopranos could easily have done that with Artie. But this scenario is more original. Artie lives so close to Tony’s world that he can practically taste it, but he’s not a part of it, and he has Charmaine to pull him back toward the light when he’s tempted to lean on the devil he knows. The ongoing temptation of an ordinary guy is powerful precisely because it’s so small and yet so complicated.59
Already, Tony has made Artie offers he was wise to refuse but others that you couldn’t blame him for accepting. (Had he taken Tony’s cruise, the original Vesuvio would still be open.) It’s hard being around these wiseguys and their obscene wealth and power, especially if you’re a fundamentally decent person who struggles to stay afloat, and John Ventimiglia embodies Artie’s inner struggle. It helps that Tony and Artie are so cleanly differentiated. They’ve known each other since childhood. They’ve both been married since their twenties. They like the same food and share many of the same values. Artie is just as angry as Tony to see a man wearing a baseball cap in a nice restaurant, even if he would never respond as Tony does to this lack of decorum. But as much as he wants to hurt Coach Hauser for what he did to Ally or let Tony take care of it, in the end he lets Charmaine convince him to do the right thing. Again.
And in the process, Artie does something impressive: he convinces Tony to do the right thing, too. This is still relatively early in the series; even after “College,” Tony is presented more sympathetically than not. But we also know him as a man who’s unswerving in pursuit of his own self-interest—and, as Charmaine tells Artie, having Hauser tortured and killed would make the dads feel better but not help Ally, Meadow, or the other girls on that team. Yet this one time, Artie and Dr. Melfi are able to steer Tony off this path. That he has to get fall-down drunk as a result speaks to how ingrained violence is for him, and how much these events forced him to examine his values, if only briefly, and it’s poignant when he lies on the floor of his McMansion and tells Carmela that he didn’t hurt nobody.
Meanwhile, the Uncle Junior plot helps illustrate why Artie is wise to steer well clear of Family business. Tony is seeing a headshrinker. His uncle gives head. Both these actions are unacceptable in the world of organized crime, where to be sensitive or giving is to announce oneself as unmanly. Junior warns his girlfriend Bobbi Sanfillipo (Robyn Petersen) against letting anyone in the Mob know that he’s a willing and equal sexual partner, because “they think if you suck pussy, you’ll suck anything.” Bobbi rightly points out the insanity of this stance—he should be proud of his prowess, not ashamed—but the Mob doesn’t always operate logically. Bobbi tells one person too many, and the news eventually filters to Tony, leading to that hilariously petty golf game. Once again, all the trouble starts because Junior has to insult Tony about his high school football experience—deeply attacking Tony’s self-esteem—and you can see the bitter wheels turning in Tony’s mind as he decides to go full Livia and mock Junior. Gandolfini and Dominic Chianese are wonderful here, as Tony revels in finding different ways to reference his uncle’s activities while Junior slowly comes to a boil about it. As a result of those secrets being exposed, Junior (after harshly dumping Bobbi60) now ponders murdering his own nephew.
&n
bsp; This is not a culture Arthur Bucco should want any part of, is it?
“A HIT IS A HIT”
SEASON 1/EPISODE 10
WRITTEN BY JOE BOSSO AND FRANK RENZULLI
DIRECTED BY MATTHEW PENN
Mystery Box
“But I never really understood what he felt—to be used for somebody else’s amusement, like a fuckin’ dancing bear—’til I played golf with those guys.” —Tony
Even more than “The Legend of Tennessee Moltisanti,” “A Hit Is a Hit” is concerned with Italian American self-image, ties between organized crime and popular culture, and the desire of disreputable outsiders to “go legit” without losing their cultural particulars. The new wrinkle here is the intersection of Italian American and African American gangster fantasies as Christopher crosses paths with Massive Genius (Bokeem Woodbine61), aka Massive G, a hip-hop mogul in the vein of Sean Combs or Jay-Z who loves the Godfather films so much that he’ll even defend Part III (“It was misunderstood,” he tells Adriana, but doesn’t elaborate). One set of gangsters mistrusts the other, even though they’re symbiotically linked, with the Mob maintaining a long history in the music business, and hip-hop culture taking cues from films like The Godfather and Scarface. Their point of collision is the $400,000 that Massive Genius claims Hesh owes the survivors of a “distant but deceased quasi-cousin” who recorded for Hesh’s F-Note Records decades ago.
Christopher and Paulie are separately dismissive of Massive Genius’s gangster credentials, even though the guy boasts his own link to Hesh62 and owns a mansion and gun collection that puts Tony’s to shame. The Italians and their associates (including Hesh, a wealthy suburban Jew who owns a horse farm that faintly resembles a plantation) are closer to mainstream acceptance than African Americans like Massive Genius, who are on a different track in the United States, with different obstacles and rules—a fact that Massive Genius seems to have accepted and resolved to work around, despite plainly resenting it.
One of the more striking features of “Hit” is the way it puts a previously incidental aspect of Tony’s world—ingrained racism against black people—front and center, and examines it against aspects of American life other than crime. Like “Tennessee Moltisanti,” “A Hit Is a Hit” is more didactic than the show’s norm, with characters delivering speeches and trading accusations to underline the history and themes at play. This tends to work best in therapy scenes, where the entire point is to force the characters to talk through problems. But the script’s determination to bluntly probe the issues from conflicting points of view is still intriguing because it sets the episode apart from the preceding nine. At times it feels as if Spike Lee had stepped in to guest-write certain scenes—not necessarily bad, because it shows that, even this early, The Sopranos is already confounding viewer expectations.
“Hey, whose fuckin’ welfare check you gotta cash to get a burger around here?” Christopher shouts in a crowded takeout spot after taking Adriana to see Rent—a musical steeped in various forms of discrimination, including racism, homophobia and class-based snobbery. “Hairnet central,” he adds a few moments later, then says defensively, “What am I, Mark Fuhrman?”63 Christopher makes repeated racially tinged remarks as he and Adriana grab a post–Broadway show dinner. Both times, a black woman in the foreground turns around and glares at him, aghast, then returns her attention to the counter, more exasperated than furious; this obviously isn’t the first time she’s encountered such behavior. This is the context in which Massive Genius’s life unfolds, whether he’s negotiating deals with other rich men or ordering takeout burgers for his crew. In all of Massive Genius’s scenes, we see him pushing to be accepted as a legitimate businessman (though with a somewhat overcooked “dangerous” edge, as when he intones “I do so love a good firearm in my hand” while laser-sighting Christopher’s shoulder). His quest for legitimacy would mirror Tony’s and Hesh’s more closely if he weren’t black and thus unable to pass for raceless, as non-WASPS are often able to do. The episode is aware of this defining difference and airs it through dialogue rather than pretend Massive Genius is on a level playing field with the others.
Despite his evident disadvantage, Massive Genius isn’t afraid to push back when Hesh or the Italians try to out-alpha him. We see this in his very first scene as he confronts Christopher for his shabby behavior (“Your woman looks embarrassed.”), emboldening a black police officer to tell another black patron, dismissively, “He’s only bold because he’s semi–hooked up with the Tony Soprano crew.” This patron, Massive Genius’s right-hand man Orange J (Bryan Hicks), invites Christopher and Adriana to visit the boss’s crib, where “there’s business to be done.”
As it turns out, this “business” is only superficially about money; mostly it’s about commanding respect, establishing a racial-ethnic pecking order, and using machismo and business smarts to pressure Hesh, an accused exploiter, to write a check for what amounts to cultural reparations. Hesh turns the negotiation into an ouch contest, telling Massive Genius, “You’re talking to the wrong white man, my friend. My people were the white man’s nigger when yours were still painting their faces and chasing zebras.” (Hesh is white until someone who isn’t white calls him white.) Hesh shrugs off Massive Genius’s accusation that he stole from his relative, Little Jimmy, insisting, “Back then we were breaking all the rules,” but Orange J counters, “You mean raping and pillaging.” Massive Genius speculates that Hesh used Little Jimmy’s royalties to buy horses, and Silvio says Little Jimmy ended up penniless because “he bought horse”—that is, his downfall was his own fault for using heroin, even though the Mafia might have supplied it. All of these scenes have an edge that belies their talkiness: it’s as if the characters are engaged in an ongoing firefight with words.
“A Hit Is a Hit” also puts the biggest spotlight yet on Christopher and Adriana’s relationship. Their scenes speak not only to the good eye David Chase had in spotting Drea de Matteo’s potential in the pilot, but to Christopher64 being more complicated than he’s sometimes willing to admit. When the other wiseguys are celebrating the jackpot from the “Juan Valdez” murder with their girlfriends, Christopher just wants to go home to Adriana, and decides to invest his share of the money in her music-producing ambitions. His justification for her gifts in this area—“With how much you listen to the radio, you’d be good.”—is as hilarious in its naiveté as Adriana’s insistence that her ex-boyfriend Richie and his band Visiting Day (a whiny yet plausible Matchbox 20 wannabe) have what it takes to be big. But Adriana still comes out of the episode as more well-rounded and sympathetic than she entered it. She wants to be more than a mobster’s girlfriend—or to be mother to Christopher’s future children, spending all her time at the gym like Carmela “and her stretch marks.” But, like Christopher with his screenwriting ambitions, she has only an outsider’s dim understanding of how the music business actually works. Christopher’s insistence that Massive Genius is only supporting her because he wants to have sex with her reinforces her doubts about her own gifts, as well as her fear that the rest of the world sees her as eye candy, too.65
As darkly funny as it is to watch Christopher order the recovering addict Richie to “spike up” and keep recording his monotonous single (right before hitting him in the back with a guitar), the episode is livelier when it focuses on Tony’s side of things. Tony’s encounters tease out different aspects of the episode’s themes—like Massive Genius, Cusamano and his white-collar pals all love the Godfather films, and they’re positively giddy to be playing a round of golf with a local crime boss—but they hit Tony hard. This subplot, too, is ultimately about assimilation, social mobility, and America’s racial-ethnic totem pole. It dovetails with Massive Genius’s quest for legitimacy as well as Hesh’s nostalgia for the years when he made himself powerful.
The scenes between Tony and Cusamano’s friends, and between Tony and Melfi, touch on the different ways Italian Americans have leveraged the social construct of “whiteness” from the mi
d-twentieth century through the end of the millennium—when they feel they have to, or when it’s convenient. This is a subject rarely addressed on American television, in regard to any group: the internal jockeying for supremacy that mirrors the indignities a group suffers at the hands of the majority. We see how Italian Americans practice their own, intra-ethnic version of discrimination, by viewing some members of their tribe as more “white” than others, and thus more respectable; and how guys like Tony—whose ancestors hail from southern Italy, and often look less stereotypically “European” (white) in appearance than northerners—counter this soft bigotry by saying that their tormentors practice a neutered facsimile of Italiannness, like the coffee shops that vexed Paulie in “46 Long.”
But this, too, can become a trap, as Tony concedes when he tells Melfi that Carmela is pushing him to get outside of his usual circle and “meet new people . . . Guys like me, we’re brought up to think the a Meddigan’ are fuckin’ bores. The truth is that the average white man is no more boring than the millionth conversation over who shoulda won, Marciano or Ali.”
“So am I to understand that you don’t consider yourself white?” Melfi asks, underlining the idea at the heart of every other scene in this episode.
“I don’t mean ‘white’ like Caucasian,” Tony clarifies, then goes on to make the “respectable” Italians sound every bit as dull as he just said they weren’t: “I mean a white man, like our friend Cusamano. Now, he’s Italian, but he’s a Meddigan. It’s what my old man would’ve called a Wonder Bread wop. Y’know, eats his Sunday gravy out of a jar.” Tony says he has mixed emotions about courting those sorts of Italian Americans because of “the guys”—his crew; men who, in Junior’s words, would “be buried in their track suits.”
The Sopranos Sessions Page 7
