The Sopranos Sessions

by Matt Zoller Seitz

  No explanation. Some dream.

  But what makes this episode so sneakily strong is that it might not have been a dream. The episode never confirms or refutes Chris’s interpretation of what he saw; we’re left to decide. We could write off the characters’ ruminations and snap decisions as community-wide panic attack sparked by violence, and treat their grapplings with sin and doubt as comical. But there’s so much uncanniness here—from Paulie’s girlfriend’s60 account of her own significant encounter with three o’clock, to the moment when the supposed quack psychic correctly names Paulie’s first homicide, to the shot of a Jesus statue looming over Paulie leaving church after blasting his priest for running a useless spiritual protection racket—that the viewer may leave feeling unmoored, and perhaps convinced that Chris really did see the other side. Either way, the vision of the Admiral Piper explodes within the episode like a tiny-scaled Biblical miracle, shocking other characters into reexamining their lives, or at least considering it.61

  Tony is in bunker mode throughout much of this episode, doubling down on every belief and characteristic that others criticize or question, playing devil’s advocate in any conversation pertaining to the wages of sin, and coming off like the Devil himself in the scene where he and Pussy terrorize a beaten and broken Matt Bevilaqua (sulfurous cigar smoke pouring from Tony’s mouth and wreathing his head throughout), then riddle his torso with bullets until he slumps in his chair like Christ crucified.62 In therapy, Tony launches into one of his longest tirades, responding to Melfi’s pressure to identify the immediate cause of his unhappiness (his crimes/his sins) with deflective rationalizations, from the notion that “We’re soldiers. Soldiers don’t go to Hell,” to the Italian American Mob’s century-old status as a preserver of old-world culture and a bulwark against exploitation by native-born WASPs. “The J. P. Morgans, they were crooks and killers, too,” Tony says, leaning forward in his chair, “but that was a ‘business,’ right?”

  “That might all be true,” says Melfi, fuming, “but what do poor Italian immigrants have to do with you? And what happens every morning you step out of bed?”63

  Even Melfi, who’s at the fringe of the criminal world and understands it only through news stories and Tony’s anecdotes, seems to be spiraling downward. We learn in her session with Elliot that she’s been taking Ativan for depression and drinking alone, psychic fallout from deciding to take back Tony. And now she’s ashamed of herself for twisting the morality knife at a moment when Tony’s afraid of losing a young man who’s like a son to him. Her job, she says, “is not to judge, but to treat. Now, I’ve judged. I took a position, goddamnit, and now I’m scared.”

  For the first time since “College,” and mere days after scaring a woman into writing a recommendation to Georgetown, Carmela is frightened for her mortal soul, and for Chris’s. When Chris survives surgery, Carmela credits her prayers in an empty hospital room. She admitted that she and her family64 “[chose] this life in full awareness of the consequences of our sins” and asked God to spare Chris and “deliver him from blindness and grant him vision, and through this vision, may he see your love and gain the strength to carry on in service to your mercy.”65 “You have to look at this experience as an opportunity to repent,” she tells Chris once he regains consciousness. Her spiritual crisis is driven not just by Chris’s ordeal but by Gabriella Dante delivering the news that a married gangster they both know fathered a child with his goomar, a Brazilian dancer. This leads Carmela to confront Tony about his continued cheating (“I can smell the CK One on your shirts”)66 and demand he get a vasectomy. “I had her tested for AIDS,” Tony says, exactly the wrong thing to say. He grouses later that their own faith decrees that it’s unnatural to prevent nature from taking its course (every sperm is sacred, as Monty Python sang) and besides, he’s not cheating anymore.67 Carmela’s tenuous connection of Tony’s infidelity and the overall sinfulness of This Thing of Theirs is symbolized by her fear of her gangster husband creating a child neither of them wants, but that they might have to live with for the rest of their lives: sin made sentient, consequences with a pulse.68

  Woven throughout the episode’s soundtrack is the Otis Redding hit “Lover’s Prayer.” It’s used three times:69 during the opening, underscoring Chris’ surgery, and in the closing scene, after Carmela reconciles with Tony. Redding’s classic is a straightforward torch song, with the singer in a defensive (kneeling) position, asking his lover to think well of him, forgive him, and stay with him through good times and bad, as Carmela does when she forgives Tony, and as Tony pledges to do in return. But in this context the lyrics take on a spiritual dimension, too. The last two lines return the song’s meanings to earth, specifically to the bedroom, and seem tailor-made for the episode’s closing scene: “My final prayer/You’ll take this ring/and bear my seed.”

  “BUST OUT”

  SEASON 2/EPISODE 10

  WRITTEN BY FRANK RENZULLI AND ROBIN GREEN & MITCHELL BURGESS

  DIRECTED BY JOHN PATTERSON

  The Scorpion

  “Well, I knew you had this business here, Davey.” —Tony

  Tony is a swirl of emotions throughout “Bust Out,” one of the series’ finest episodes to date. He is variously plagued by guilt over murdering Matt Bevilaqua (and also confused over why he feels guilt for this murder and not all the others), panic-stricken at the thought of going to prison for life because a witness saw him and Pussy near the crime scene, and smugly cruel as he systematically dismantles Davey Scatino’s business and life. “I don’t fuckin’ deserve this,” he insists to Melfi about the possible murder charge, even as the Davey story that gives the episode its title illustrates that Tony Soprano absolutely fuckin’ deserves this, and a whole lot more.

  The bust-out of Ramsey Sports and Outdoors—where Tony makes Davey use the store’s credit to buy merchandise his guys will sell on the street, leaving Davey to face angry suppliers he can’t pay—is another process-oriented look at Family moneymaking. Its ordinariness alone is depressing. The liquidation of Davey’s store is conveyed in a single brief tracking shot of a truck being loaded up with merch, capped by guys pasting a “For Lease” sign across the doors. In some ways, it’s scarier than the many murders the Family has committed: this bleeding of the store and the Scatino family proceeds in broad daylight and could happen to almost anyone. Davey’s wife Christine (Marisa Redanty) thinks the family will get through her husband’s latest meltdown because the store is registered in her name, while her contractor brother Vic Musto (Joe Penny70) thinks he can devise a payment plan. But like Davey himself, they have no idea what kind of man they’re dealing with, and how coldly he can take everything away because—like the scorpion in the familiar parable he cites to Davey—it’s in his nature.

  Tony’s arrogance, obliviousness, and monstrousness fill nearly every scene, except for the opening at the fairgrounds where he hears Richie’s complaint about his share of the Family’s sanitation business and feels guilty over the Bevilaqua hit (flashing to the young dolt’s death after hearing a little boy call for his mother, just as Matt did when Tony and Pussy drew their guns), dodging the emotions by slipping into ballbusting mode. He also threatens a disabled man into accepting a cash gift he doesn’t want (to assuage his own guilt over being unable to control Richie, maybe71) and blatantly denies responsibility (to Melfi) for the murder we saw him commit, then walks out of therapy prematurely because he’s so happy to be free. And when the witness recants, Tony fights back happy tears in the same bathroom where, unbeknownst to him, the wife he keeps taking for granted kissed Davey Scatino’s brother-in-law. (Vic, a nice-guy beef-slab in mourning, distances himself instantly, and stays away forever after learning that Tony ruined Davey.)

  As always, potentially cathartic realizations swim around in Tony’s subconscious without surfacing long enough for him to identify and learn from them. Bevilaqua’s murder probably nags at him because he’s worried about the long-term prospects of his blood son AJ, a walking punch line,
and his surrogate son Chris, who almost died on the operating table last week after being shot by, essentially, a couple of AJs with sidearms. Bad fathering72 is a persistent dread of Tony’s, though he shows little interest in improving. The outer limit of his imaginative empathy for AJ is a pizza and a six-pack of Coke. He’s been negging the kid for weeks, even insulting him as a genetic mistake not fit to be his heir. When he decides to go the extra mile (which for Tony is the extra half-meter) and spontaneously take the boy fishing, AJ rebuffs him—not to be mean, but because he’s a teenage boy who promised to go to the mall with friends. Tony tells Carmela he forgot about his son’s swim meet because he was dealing with other things (the bust-out, though he doesn’t say so), but this might be a case of forgetting an event accidentally-on-purpose, as petty revenge. He nearly admits as much to Carm. “What are you, six years old?” she asks.

  Yes, he is. Everyone’s a hostage to Tony’s need to dominate. Watch how his mood goes from generous to menacing when Beansie says, “Fuck you, Tony,” and how Tony smiles again when Beansie takes the money. If Carmela were an ordinary bored suburban housewife, her crush on Vic could’ve turned into a case of “what’s good for the gander is good for the goose,” with her serially unfaithful husband never the wiser.73 But Tony’s too famous for being deadly; and so Carmela takes off her apron and primps in the oven door, only to welcome Vic’s assistant. Tony’s movement through the world leaves wreckage in its wake, an image literalized in the final shot of the Stugots capsizing a rowboat after Tony gives AJ the helm. Those waves are the Soprano legacy.

  “HOUSE ARREST”

  SEASON 2/EPISODE 11

  WRITTEN BY TERENCE WINTER

  DIRECTED BY TIM VAN PATTEN

  Alexithymia

  “Whatsamatter, you still in mourning over the coming of managed care?” —Tony

  When we first met Tony Soprano, he wasn’t the boss of New Jersey, but he was still highly ranked enough that he shouldn’t have been getting his hands dirty as often, or as publicly, as we’ve grown used to by now. A captain shouldn’t have tried to run over a deadbeat in a busy office park, and the head of this Family definitely shouldn’t be killing Matt Bevilaqua himself. Some of Tony’s literally hands-on attitude stems from the practical reality of making a TV drama about a gang boss. A Tony Soprano who delegates danger would be more responsible but far less exciting. Besides, Tony loves this stuff. The chance to inflict pain on other human beings, to brazenly take what he wants, to be utterly uncaged, are his best reasons to get out of bed.

  Still, after his near-bust for the Bevilaqua hit, Tony finally attempts to follow the advice of his lawyer, Neil Mink (David Margulies74), to “insulate yourself from these shenanigans.” He lets Silvio handle Family business while reporting to his front job at Barone Sanitation for the first time in years. It’s the smart play. The safe play.

  And Tony hates every second of it.75

  Garbage is the business that brings him income, health benefits, and taxable income to pacify the IRS, but it is not the business Tony Soprano has chosen, and the longer he spends trying to lock himself away from the trash his crew pulls without him, the worse he feels. The continued insubordination of Richie “Manson Lamps” Aprile—who’s still being egged on by Janice (or, as she’s calling herself now that she’s dressing and acting like a Mob wife, “Jan”)—helps induce another panic attack at the Garden State Carting Association Couples Invitational, in a daringly sustained piece of subjective filmmaking. The rash that appears on Tony’s arm is an objective correlative for the “itch” he’s been ordered not to scratch. “The things I take pleasure in, I can’t do,” he tells Melfi. She compares Tony to a shark, and suggests people like him suffer from alexithymia,76 needing constant motion and activity not only to entertain themselves, but as distraction from thinking about the “abhorrent” things they do. Tony, proving her point, changes the subject to Richie, who’s literally playing house with Janice.

  Dr. Melfi is one of Tony’s two mirrors in this episode. She’s been spiraling out of control herself, thanks to the stress of treating a gang boss, crossing boundaries with him, and drinking to excess. Tony’s panic attack finds its Melfi equivalent during dinner with her son Jason (Will McCormack) when she makes a scene while demanding another patron put out her cigarette.77 Elliot again presses Melfi to end Tony’s therapy—he’s as relentless on this point as Melfi is with steering Tony to talk about Livia and his criminality—but Melfi denies her own shrink’s reading as hotly as Tony denies basic truths about himself. Elliot’s suggestion that she try Luvox—a drug for obsessive-compulsive disorder—annoys her until she realizes, with help from Elliot, that she is indeed “obsessed” with Tony. (Tony correctly deduces that his therapist is “on drugs,” but she rolls right past the accusation.)

  The second Tony mirror in this episode is Junior, whose inability to control his own life is illustrated by the starkest facts of his existence: the legal sentence confining him to his house, the monitoring bracelet, his gnawing loneliness (in retrospect, he regrets dumping Bobbie from “Boca”), and most of all his age, which makes him more vulnerable than he wants to admit. The sight of Junior standing at the sink from night until morning with his hand stuck in the garbage disposal is as inappropriately hilarious as it is sad. Richie and Janice chortle and tease, but this is agony for him. He only reaches a state of near-peace when he tells Catherine Romano (Mary Louise Wilson), the neighbor who’s sweet on him, about his constraints, and their origin in “certain legal difficulties.” An hour packed with impatience, frustration, and ennui glides to an unexpectedly placid, meditative finish, with consecutive scenes of Catherine massaging the sleeping Junior’s feet and taking his glasses off (she puts his CPAP mask on for him) while Diagnosis Murder plays on TV, and Tony and his crew mingling with FBI agents outside Satriale’s.

  Junior has, for the moment, accepted his house arrest. Tony flatly rejects his own unofficial version, going back to the pork store to hang with the crew and talk business, and it’s by far the most relaxed and happy he’s been all hour. Both men should take the advice of the closing Johnny Thunders song, “You Can’t Put Your Arms around a Memory.”78

  “THE KNIGHT IN WHITE SATIN ARMOR”

  SEASON 2/EPISODE 12

  WRITTEN BY ROBIN GREEN & MITCHELL BURGESS

  DIRECTED BY ALLEN COULTER

  Pine Cones

  “Gotta wonder where she is in all of this, my little niece.” —Uncle Junior

  The most famous moment of season two of The Sopranos happens here, and it’s so unexpected that it takes a while to realize the writers spent almost twelve episodes setting it up.

  Richie Aprile calmly continues his dinner after punching his fiancée Janice in the face; we cut to Janice, bloody-mouthed, wielding the same gun Richie holds to her head during sex. Forget the writing for a minute; the filmmaking itself is startling. Look at the timing of those two shots and the dozen or so shots leading up to it. We see Janice leave the kitchen, stunned and betrayed, but she seems to return much quicker than it would actually take to retrieve Richie’s gun—a cheat that deprives you of the time required to anticipate the shooting. And when Janice is revealed, the shot isn’t from Richie’s viewpoint, who’s still paying attention to his plate: it’s for our benefit, to shock and delight us. We may wonder briefly if the gun is even loaded. (“I thought you were a feminist,” Carmela says earlier, upon learning of their fetish. “Usually we take the clip out,” Janice says. The most important word in that sentence is “usually.”) But the scene answers this question, too, with abrupt speed. “The fuck outta here,” Richie says, leaning back in his chair, “I’m in no mood for your—”

  BLAM. One shot in the chest.

  And a second as Richie struggles to rise from the kitchen floor. BLAM.

  And the Manson lamps go dark.

  Richie’s death is one of the great televised examples of how a seemingly anticlimactic turn of events can be much more satisfying than whatever you expected. But
careful study of the preceding eleven episodes confirms this wasn’t an arbitrary twist designed to outguess the plot-guessers in the audience, but one that had been meticulously constructed to lead to a single, inevitable outcome.79

  The first two episodes of season two are dominated by the return of Janice Soprano, aka Parvati Wasatch, aka the future not–Mrs. Aprile. She takes on both the narrative role and many of the personality traits of her mother so easily that we think of her as a comic irritant at best, a potential adversary at worst. Although she never asks explicitly for her brother’s death—which would’ve made her transformation into the New Livia official—she spends a lot of time playing North Jersey Lady Macbeth, stoking Richie’s resentment purposefully or accidentally (as in the sex scene, which is aborted because her pillow talk reminds Richie of his subordinate status). We keep thinking Richie and Tony are going to have it out at some point, perhaps after Janice eggs them on (or Junior, who dances around Richie all season before coming to his senses here), and that Richie, because he’s not the star of the show, will become Tony’s latest victim.