The Sopranos Sessions

by Matt Zoller Seitz

  This is one of the key differences between seasons one and two of The Sopranos: where the first focused on internal Mob-world action—what gangsters and their families and affiliates do to each other while battling for power—this one is more interested in the world beyond the Mob, in particular “civilians” who get a taste of gangster business practices and are ruined by them. While Artie Bucco’s attraction to the Mob was core to several season one episodes, and we’ve occasionally seen regular citizens being traumatized by Mob-ordered crimes (such as the carjacking in “Commendatori”), Davey is the first such character whose story dominates most of an hour—including the subplot about Meadow and her musical theater partner, Davey’s son Eric (John Hensley41), whose truck Dad confiscates as his first payment to Tony’s gang. As such, “The Happy Wanderer”42 is the first Sopranos episode that feels as if it’s also a public service announcement.

  Some of the characters in this episode don’t need it. Elliot, who’s constantly pushing Melfi to stay away from Tony, is one of them. There are a couple more at the poker game, including Sinatra and Dr. Fried (Lewis J. Stadlen43), both of whom cash out when Richie barges in, bringing a whiff of impending violence, and hassles Davey for his seven grand. Artie seems to have gotten the message, too, at least for the moment: when Davey comes to him for help, he begs off, especially upon learning that it’s Tony Soprano that he owes. The very next scene is Davey stealing his son’s truck back.

  This is a key episode because it shows us the Mob world as the rest of the world (including anti-defamation activists) saw it: as a financial as well as moral black hole that swallows up everyone who gets too close.44 It meshes with season two’s strategy of coming at now-familiar characters and situations from different angles. But it’s also a partial rebuke to viewers who, like Melfi, know that guys like Tony are destructive and self-justifying but still find their criminal adventures intoxicating.

  There is still a sense—a vestige of religious moralism, maybe—that low-level criminals “deserve it” when more vicious criminals bankrupt, terrorize, or kill them, because they “chose” to get involved in that world. “The Happy Wanderer” is of two minds on the matter. While it’s true that that none of this would’ve happened if Davey didn’t have a gambling problem, he’s clearly established as an addict, different from Christopher only in the details. Tony’s enabling this devastating meltdown might’ve been the spark for some of the viewer backlash that we witnessed firsthand at the Star-Ledger during the second half of this season. After readers had been delighted by all the scenes in year one of gangsters plotting to rob and kill each other, all of a sudden lots of them were complaining that Tony and the show had become too nasty and unlikable.

  Not that Tony’s having a lot of fun at the moment, either. Aside from fleeting pleasures like taking over the Executive Game,45 or watching Silvio explode at poor Matt Bevilaqua for the egregious sin of sweeping up cheese from the floor while Sil is on a losing streak,46 he’s enjoying life a lot less than his happy-wanderer pal Davey, lamenting to Melfi early on, “I got the world by the balls and I can’t stop feeling like a fuckin’ loser.”

  Some of this is merely the headache of being boss. Richie continues to be a thorn in his side, particularly in light of Davey already owing Richie for losses in a previous game,47 once again stirring up Richie’s aggrieved belief that Tony is withholding what is Richie’s. When the father-in-law of Tony’s little sister Barbara dies, the funeral not only forces Tony to be in the same room with his hated mother (who puts on a big show of tears, despite barely knowing the deceased) but lets Janice glimpse her brother dressing down her boyfriend in public.48 On the ride home to Livia’s old house, she’s more her mother than ever, fanning the flames of Richie’s resentment toward Tony the same way Livia did with Junior in season one, but with the intimacy of lovers—cementing the notion that Janice and Richie are becoming a next-generation Livia and Johnny Boy.

  Tony’s dark mood isn’t helped by the family secret Junior unwittingly reveals while negotiating the rights to the Executive Game: he and Johnny had another brother, Eckley (short for Ercoli), who was “strong as a fucking bull, handsome like George Raft,” but developmentally disabled and institutionalized. Tony’s not sure what upsets him more: that he had an uncle his parents never told him about, or that Eckley’s disability, whatever it was, is another sign of something rotten in the Soprano genes.

  Even Dr. Melfi’s sensitivity toward Patient X seems at an ebb in this one, as she responds to this woe-is-me ramble by asking, “Now that you found out that you have a retarded family member, do you feel better about coming here? Is it permissible now? Is it enough of a sad tragedy that you can join the rest of the douchebags?”

  Tony’s not like the rest of the douchebags, though. He is predator, not prey, there to pounce on someone like Davey the moment the opportunity presents itself. And he’s surrounded himself with people who think the same. Earlier, Meadow gets competitive about her performance spot in the school’s cabaret night, feeling like a solo will be better for her college admissions than the duet she’s assigned with Eric Scatino. When Eric bolts at the last second to protest the wreckage Meadow’s father has made of his life, Meadow winds up rewarded with the exact thing she wanted, singing “My Heart Will Go On” from Titanic. Carmela, who knows enough of what’s been going on between Tony and Davey to connect the dots, responds to this development by marveling, “That’s a lucky break.”

  “D-GIRL”

  SEASON 2/EPISODE 7

  WRITTEN BY TODD A. KESSLER

  DIRECTED BY ALLEN COULTER

  God the Father

  “Even if God is dead, you’re still gonna kiss his ass.” —Tony

  This is a story about loyalty to one’s father and the anxiety that accrues when you consider rejecting him. Dramatically speaking, Tony Soprano is at the periphery of “D-Girl,” but by the end you realize that he was the center of this universe the whole time, even when offscreen. He’s not the godfather of the DiMeo Family, officially, but he’s the closest thing to a fearsome Old Testament God-the-Father a lot of the other characters have. The final montage, set at the party following AJ’s confirmation and backed by Emma Shaplin singing the title track from the trance opera album Carmine Meo, cuts (and sometimes dissolves) between three men who love, resent, and are terrified of Tony: AJ, Big Pussy, and Chris. By the end, all three appear unable to break from, or even oppose, Tony. We see his biological son standing with his family for a group photograph, after his parents catch him smoking pot in the garage, and mere days after scratching up his mother’s car in a dumb accident; Pussy, bullied by Agent Lipari into wearing a wire to the confirmation party, sobbing in an upstairs bathroom after telling AJ what a great guy his dad is, and ignoring Tony’s requests for him to join the portrait; and Tony’s “like a son to me” cousin Chris, who spent much of the episode flitting around the edges of a Hollywood film shoot, sitting on the front stoop outside the gathering, thinking about Tony’s menacing ultimatum to choose movies or him, then finally standing up and walking back inside.

  AJ dabbles in newfound philosophy and tells his family God is dead and there’s no point to anything. He’s rejecting an abstract, symbolic, patriarchal authority because the one that raised him isn’t going anywhere and will smack him if he mouths off too many times. “He’s telling me he’s got no purpose,” Tony tells Melfi. “I told him it cost about 150 grand to bring him up so far, so if he’s got no purpose, I want a fuckin’ refund.” Tony’s unofficial surrogate son, Christopher, has a restless heart. He comes close to breaking into filmmaking, thanks to a connection with actor-director Jon Favreau49 through his cousin Gregory (Dominic Fumusa50), who’s engaged to Amy Safir (Alicia Witt51), Favreau’s vice president of development. But even after Chris plays up his mobster status to impress the Hollywood tourists and enjoys a brief fling with Amy, he ends up feeling humiliated, used by both Amy and her boss. Favreau even steals an anecdote that Chris specifically asked him not to repea
t and works it into the script for a star vehicle in which he’d play real-life gangster “Crazy” Joe Gallo.52

  Like “The Happy Wanderer,” “D-Girl” largely lacks the violence some gangster movie fans seem to require, unless you count Pussy grappling on the floor with Angie, Chris manhandling Favreau, and the cruelty (described but not shown) in Chris’s story about a transgender woman disfigured in an acid attack by a homo-phobic wiseguy. The theme of men struggling with their loyalty to father figures strings the subplots together effectively, and there are a handful of exceptional scenes—Tony and Melfi’s therapy session is particularly strong, focusing on how Tony’s repudiation of his own mother might’ve stoked AJ’s fascination with oblivion (“In your family, even motherhood is up for debate”)—but the episode remains patchy. The showbiz portions53 are especially dicey, and not just because inside-baseball showbiz satire was plentiful on HBO and elsewhere in 2000 (and still is). Specific industry portrayals are astute: Amy’s tendency to compare everything in life to art typifies certain movie and TV people, and Favreau’s character captures the “nice guy” persona of filmmakers who play sensitive and deferential so convincingly that outsiders fail to notice their self-interest and manipulation.

  But we never get a clear sense of what’s driving Amy. Her sudden decision to seduce Christopher could be an act of rebellion against her boring lawyer fiancé or the result of a privileged woman’s obsession with macho criminal alphas (similar to Melfi’s obsession with Tony, or at least Elliot’s description of it). But mostly she’s a rough draft, though enlivened by Witt’s nonjudgmental, deadpan performance. Chris’ plaintive “I really liked you” only works if you think of Amy as a human female stand-in for the siren song of Hollywood forever pulling him away from Tony and the Mob life.

  Still, there are many resonant images, including the anguished Pussy hugging AJ tight, distorting the transmission to eavesdropping Lipari; and Pussy on the bedroom floor with Angie, his tank top bloodstained where he shaved his chest to attach a wire. And the dialogue is exceptional throughout: for a minor episode, “D-Girl” offers lines quoted by fans to this day, including Carmela’s “What kind of animal smokes marijuana at his own confirmation?”; and Melfi’s “Sounds to me like Anthony Jr. may have stumbled onto existentialism,” and Tony’s reply, “Fuckin’ Internet.”

  “FULL LEATHER JACKET”

  SEASON 2/EPISODE 8

  WRITTEN BY ROBIN GREEN & MITCHELL BURGESS

  DIRECTED BY ALLEN COULTER

  The Last of the Arugula Rabe

  “Jean, you are a wonderful friend!” —Carmela

  “Full Leather Jacket” ends with an act of violence so senseless and sad that it’s understandable people remember it as “the one where Christopher gets shot.” But it’s strong and understated in its own right: a tightly structured riff on rebellion and its consequences, anchored to a close-up look at the dynamics of the Soprano marriage when it’s in sync. Husband and wife exhibit mirrored behaviors that show their confident, nuanced rulership over their own worlds. The highlight is the kitchen conversation between Tony and Carmela about their dinner guest, Richie Aprile. “I want to compliment you on your behavior out there,” she tells him, handing him a butcher knife. “Hey, I want him where I can see him,” Tony says. “That’s what we mean when we say family,” Carmela says, kissing him on the cheek before he sinks the blade into the roast. This, more than any prior scene, best illustrates what Steven Van Zandt meant in describing The Sopranos as The Gangster Honeymooners.54

  Tony and Carmela spend a lot of energy quashing rebellions here. Richie refuses to build a wheelchair ramp for Beansie Gaeta, and freely shows his core loyalty to Junior (and vice-versa; when Tony expresses reservations about Richie’s plan to sell 10,000 stolen DVDs without a sign-off from New York, the old man, who’s spent a season and a half pouting over not being feared enough himself, says, “Fuck ‘em”). But he seems to realize the direct approach isn’t working and plays nice, delivering a tripe and tomatoes to Carmela and giving Tony a leather jacket that he took off Rocco DiMeo, the toughest guy in Essex county.55 Richie hasn’t been watching The Sopranos for twenty-one episodes like we have, so he doesn’t really grasp what an ungrateful sod Tony is when it comes to this sort of thing. Richie’s a sour, petty, arrogant, volatile hoodlum, but he’s working overtime to signal peace, given his personal limitations and his affinity for Junior, and he credibly justifies his transgressions (as when he claims he pulled the construction crew56 from Beansie’s house to work on his future mother-in-law Livia’s house). A line in the jacket scene partly explains his stubbornness over the ramp: “Beansie Gaeta would still be selling nickel bags on Jefferson Avenue if it wasn’t for Jackie,” he says, casting Tony’s understandable display of dominance as disloyalty to Tony’s late mentor/Richie’s late brother.

  As in “D-Girl,” Tony is more a supporting character than a lead,57 projecting power and inspiring fear and a craving for recognition, while secondary characters step into the foreground to win his approval. Tony is the sunbeam that all the cats want to sleep in, including Sean Gismonte and Matt Bevilaqua (now going by Drinkwater, a rough English translation of Bevilaqua), beefy nimrods who bounce between authority figures who might validate their nonexistent potential versus laughing at them (as during Furio’s shakedown in their apartment) or yelling at them (as Tony does when Sean stupidly mentions business in the Bing restroom). If they hadn’t shot Chris so impulsively, Richie, likewise craving respect, might’ve been a mentor. Matt and Sean’s story also tenuously bridges the Richie and Christopher–Adriana subplots. The duo’s snap decision to whack Chris, who just helped make them a lot of money cracking safes, comes after Richie trashes Chris in their presence, partly because Chris dared to hit Ade without marrying her first. “If there’s anything you can do for me, let me know,” he tells them.

  This episode contains more examples of women in a patriarchal subculture twisting themselves into knots to excuse or explain domestic violence by their partners. The men resort to force whenever control over their mate is threatened, and coldly describe it as a fact of life that’s not up for debate, governed by the same protocol that explains how much money to kick up to a superior and the circumstances under which a made man can be killed. Richie’s first conversation with Chris in “Toodle-Fucking-Oo” contains a warning not to raise a hand to Adriana until they’re married. Chris’s fumbling proposal is partly an apology for having mistreated Adriana, in ways both obvious (physical and verbal abuse) and secretive (the fling with Amy in “D-Girl”), and partly a way to jump-start a respectable life for himself.58 Ade’s mother Liz (Patty McCormack) recognizes Christopher as a threat, worries that he stole the ring, and warns Adriana that she can’t seek shelter in her house if she marries him. Matt and Sean praise Adriana to Chris in blatantly sexual terms, and he takes it as a compliment.

  This is one of the great Carmela episodes, illustrating how at peace she (usually) is with the moral compromises required to maintain her level of comfort. The polite way she turns the screws on anyone who dares to say no to her is perhaps more chilling than some of the show’s physical brutality, because it shows how force can be exercised by people who’ve never raised a fist or pointed a gun. Carmela is fighting a two-front war here, against her daughter, who wants to go to school on the other side of the country, and her neighbor Jean Cusamano and her twin sister Joan (both played by Saundra Santiago59). Both are guilty of refusing to knuckle under and do what she wants. Meadow wants to move as far away as possible, a desire Carmela tries to short-circuit, first by trashing a letter from Berkeley warning of an incomplete admissions package, then by pressing the Cusamano twins for a letter of recommendation to Georgetown.

  Carmela proceeds with naked self-interest—not with Tony’s profanity-spewing rage, but calmly, cheerfully, with a smile on her face, or at least in her eyes. The line “I don’t think you understand: I want you to write that letter” is as chilling a moment as the show has given us, climaxing a
scene in which a woman stops by another woman’s office with only a ricotta pie and a manila envelope. When Jean says Joan wrote the recommendation after all, Carmela says, “That’s wonderful! Do you have a copy?”—making sure Joan didn’t lie. The best bit of body language in this scene belongs to Santiago: when Carmela exclaims “Jean, you are wonderful!” and stands to embrace her, Jean recoils as if she’s about to be enveloped by a python. And she is.

  “FROM WHERE TO ETERNITY”

  SEASON 2/EPISODE 9

  WRITTEN BY MICHAEL IMPERIOLI

  DIRECTED BY HENRY J. BRONCHTEIN

  The Admiral Piper

  “That was a dream. Forget about it.” —Tony

  Spirituality has always hovered at the edges of The Sopranos, but it infuses every frame of “From Where to Eternity,” the first episode written by a regular series actor, Michael Imperioli. His character spends the whole hour in the ICU, sleeping, being operated on, and engaging in delirious, often surreal conversations. The latter revolve around a dream Chris had when he was clinically dead for sixty seconds. He passed through a tunnel of white light and went to “our Hell,” an Irish pub called the Admiral Piper “where it’s St. Patrick’s Day every day, forever.” He saw Mikey Palmice and Brendan Filone there “playing dice with two Roman soldiers and a bunch of the Irish guys . . . the Irish, they were winning every roll”; his father, who kept being killed in exactly the same way again and again; and a bouncer who warned Chris that he was going to Hell, too, “when my time comes.” Oh, and Mikey said to tell Tony and Paulie: “Three o’clock.”