As usual, Tony is bound so tightly by all the rationalizations and repressions necessary simply to function as a member of the Family that he tries to shrug off the story as no big deal—“What, your father never cut off anybody’s pinkie?” he jokes with Melfi—but even he can see the link between Mr. Satriale’s mutilation, Livia being aroused by the meat Johnny has brought home from work, and what in hindsight was his very first panic attack. Melfi compares the linkage to the madeleines from Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past—“This sounds very gay,” Tony complains—before explaining that Tony’s knowing the root cause of the panic attacks will make him less susceptible to them. The diagnosis is a huge turning point in the Tony–Melfi relationship. Before, he went to her because he labored under an omnipresent threat to his life and livelihood that only she could help fix; that problem mostly managed, doctor and patient have more latitude to explore his many other problems—and, as we’ve seen (say, leading up to “Funhouse”), for Tony to solicit help with work problems she should want no part of.
Tony was the son of a wiseguy who learned to ignore the terrible way his father put food on the table, and we’ve seen its psychological toll. Much of “Fortunate Son” illustrates how that same cost is being exacted on the next generation.
It’s striking how much young Tony (Mark Damiano II) looks like AJ, and the resemblance carries through to the episode’s final shot, where AJ suffers a panic attack of his own while his football coach appoints him defensive captain. Where Tony was always being groomed by Johnny to join the Family, he’s never wanted that life for his own son. His namesake is spoiled and adrift. AJ’s plans for his future change so rapidly that he can’t even remember them all. And a visit to Columbia to see Meadow leaves him so intimidated by the very idea of college that he no longer wants to enroll anywhere. Football seems more like something he’s doing to win Tony’s approval—when he recovers a fumble in the game, the action slows down so Tony’s cheers make him seem more animal than man—rather than a triumph of personal significance to AJ. The coach promoting him shouldn’t be nearly as traumatizing as the finger/meat incident was for Tony, but AJ may feel locked into something he doesn’t want, even if he still has no clue what he does want.
In contrast to AJ, the episode’s other namesake, Jackie Jr., knows very much what he wants: to follow in his father’s footsteps. Like AJ, he’s keenly aware of his academic limitations, privately dismissing the desires of his mother Rosalie10 (Sharon Angela) that he become a doctor. Christopher refers to him as “the hair apparent,” but he’s just a dumb, scared kid (when the two rob a college benefit concert together, Jackie pees his pants) whose godfather Tony is adamant that he won’t be joining the uppercase Family.
Tony’s two surrogate sons team up, despite their wildly different Mob standing, because Christopher is desperate for the cash to pay Paulie’s weekly nut. The episode opens with Chrissie finally achieving his dream of becoming a made man. He worries at first that he might be taken out at the event, like Joe Pesci in Goodfellas, and when Adriana assures him that he watches too many movies, the episode winks at her, and us, by cutting immediately to Christopher all suited up in a parking lot, with a recreation of the famous Goodfellas push-in shot introducing the adult Henry Hill. This will be the last time in the episode Christopher’s life resembles the kinds of movies that first made him want to join the Family. At the ceremony where he and Eugene Pontecorvo (Robert Funaro11) are made,12 Chris takes a distracting bird on the windowsill for a bad omen. Paulie, now his direct supervisor, gifts him with a sports book, but insists on $6,000 a week, no matter how well or poorly business is going. Chris tries putting on airs—when Jackie Jr. and his buddy Dino (Andrew Davoli) get into a fight at Chris’s favorite hangout, he warns them, “Don’t disrespect the pizza parlor!” then quietly tells new underling Benny Fazio (Max Casella13) that he can’t be seen in a place like this anymore—but has a lot to learn about his new role, particularly when he has a bad run at the sports book and comes up short paying Paulie. Everyone tells him that the promotion will make his life better, but instead it seems to weigh him down with more rules and responsibilities—all unshakable because, as Tony warns Chris and Eugene at the ceremony, “once you enter this Family, there’s no getting out.”
“This being made ain’t working out the way I thought it would,” he complains to Paulie.
Chris, like Tony, AJ, and Jackie, has grown up in this life, and been exposed to so much of its ugliness. He should be used to it by now. But, like the others, he’s continually surprised by the depths of it all, where your brain turning itself off and your body collapsing seems less like a mental aberration than a sensible response.
“EMPLOYEE OF THE MONTH”
SEASON 3/EPISODE 4
WRITTEN BY ROBIN GREEN & MITCHELL BURGESS
DIRECTED BY JOHN PATTERSON
Attack Dog
“No.” —Dr. Melfi
The first ride-or-die episode of The Sopranos since “Funhouse,” “Employee of the Month” inflicts catastrophic trauma on Dr. Jennifer Melfi, the major character least compromised by the show’s criminal activity, then presents her with an opportunity to use Tony’s dark powers to exact revenge, gives her time to think it over, and has her decide with a single word: “No.” That lone spoken syllable, followed by the show’s first-ever cut to black,14 is one of the most powerful moments in the series to date, because “no” is the word that the man who raped Melfi in her office parking garage wouldn’t accept, and that other men in her life, including her husband and son, consistently fail to respect.
The use of rape to “raise the stakes” on TV shows, or simply to jolt audiences out of any complacency, has rightly been criticized, thanks to so many subsequent dramas like Game of Thrones, Sons of Anarchy, Westworld, Mad Men, Downton Abbey, and True Blood employing it with wildly varying degrees of sensitivity. But sexual assault has been a staple of TV drama since at least the 1970s, when a newfound delight in brutality started to spill over from theatrical features to the small screen, and it became common during the 1980s—most notoriously on daytime and nighttime soaps, cop and crime shows, and legal procedurals. Among the most notorious instances was a two-part episode of the NBC series Hunter in which the show’s female lead, Detective Dee Dee McCall (Stepfanie Kramer), got raped by a diplomat. The story ended with her partner Hunter (Fred Dreyer) killing the rapist in his own apartment.15 The episode was praised for presenting the attack in a brutal but non-titillating manner, although a police officer committing vigilante violence left a sour aftertaste for some. The Sopranos, ever opposing the ingrained habits of traditional TV, leads us to think it’s going to pull a Hunter here, and even carefully sets up intervention by Tony as desirable and seemingly inevitable. Melfi’s attacker, Jesus Rossi (Mario Polit), is caught quickly but released on a technicality, and the police are made to seem indifferent or incompetent. Melfi’s son and ex-husband rage against the attacker and express a desire to personally murder him but are clearly incapable of doing so, as confirmed in a cut from Richard’s clenched fists (inadequate to the act he wishes he could commit) to a shot of a stump being split by a powerful blow from Tony’s axe (a precise and confident display of force that’s more in line with what “needs” to be done). The fact that Rossi is out in the world again, his mugshot hanging on the wall of a sandwich shop Melfi frequents, is so galling that it seems to validate the despair of Melfi’s son Jason: “You know the whole world is a fucking sewer! It’s nothing but a fucking sewer!” How will we viewers get satisfaction? The answer is, we won’t—not right now, anyway; although the fact that the rapist is still out there would appear to promise some kind of traditional TV resolution further down the line.16
The awfulness of Melfi’s predicament is amplified by the useless or toxic men in this episode who have to make themselves focus on her needs, and who are too easily distracted by their own feelings of emasculation (or in the mobsters’ case, a craving for “respect”). Melfi had just taken Richard b
ack, but the reconciliation is dashed as he keeps turning the attack into yet another referendum on the image of the Italian American people, and both he and Jason seem as angered by recognition of their own helplessness as they are by the attack itself.
So Richard is back briefly, and then gone again, as a result of the rape, while Tony is on the verge of being dumped by Melfi as a patient—“Richard was right,” she vents to Elliot. “I’ve been charmed by a sociopath. Why didn’t I listen?”—then gets a second chance17 because he ironically makes her feel safer than Richard ever did.
On the Mob side of things,18 Ralphie disregards Tony’s orders not to draw Jackie Jr. into the thug life, and takes him along on a debt collection call that he deliberately escalates so that he can give Jackie what he craves (a chance to prove himself, like the robbery with Christopher in “Fortunate Son”) and bond the fatherless young man more tightly to Ralphie. Ralphie’s taunts include threatening to rape the target’s wife. He promises that Jackie will “fuck your wife till she moans,” terms that imply consensuality, or at least a woman ultimately deciding mid-rape that she “likes it,” as Susan George did in Sam Peckinpah’s 1971 thriller Straw Dogs. Meanwhile, Janice gets beaten up by Russian mobsters for stealing Svetlana’s prosthetic leg, but her brother doesn’t take action: he doesn’t want to provoke a war, and he sees the beating as fitting punishment for her greedy shenanigans.19
Tony’s non-response to his sister’s beating should make us wonder: Is this really the behavior of a loyal Rottweiler who would attack bad people on command, as Melfi’s mind seems to believe? It’s hard to say. In any event, for a Mob boss who prides himself on his ability to intuitively sense violence, Tony seems oblivious to the possibility that Melfi’s wounds were inflicted by something other than a car wreck.
It’s surprising to realize how brief the attack is on-screen: about ninety seconds, from Melfi passing her soon-to-be-assailant on the stairwell to the shot of an ER nurse sampling DNA from one of her fingernails. But the staging is so ugly and frightening, dedicated entirely to communicating Melfi’s terror, that when you’re watching it for the first time, it feels as if it goes on forever, like the sequence in Straw Dogs where George is beaten, raped, and sodomized, which lasts almost eight minutes; or the rape scene in Gaspar Noé’s 2003 film Irreversible, which lasts nine, almost one-tenth of the movie’s total running time.
This scene’s impact is a matter of judicious writing and filmmaking:20 you get enough of the act to absorb its heinousness and keep it in your mind as the episode heads toward its surprising ending, but not so much that it feels as if The Sopranos is rubbing your nose in Melfi’s suffering (unusual restraint for a show that often presents violence as exceptionally brutal slapstick comedy).
Melfi’s dream, which is worked out with an intricacy befitting a professional therapist’s subconscious, arrives at the same conclusion, and it’s only Melfi’s self-psychoanalysis, coupled with her deep sense of ethics, that enables her to make the correct choice. Her dream presents Tony Soprano as a source of power (the electricity warnings on the box) and as a literal dispenser (thus the soda machine that accepts macaroni pieces, not legal currency) of lethal violence (the Rottweiler that Melfi initially perceives as the threat to her safety—remember all the times Tony has barked or snarled at her in therapy). But the dream also presents Tony as a nontraditional kind of protector, versus a police officer or security guard (the dog again—a breed that Melfi tells Elliot was “used by the Roman army to guard the camps”; the Mafia took root in the United States partly because Italian immigrants needed security and justice but felt they could not trust the police).
Melfi’s subsequent session with Elliot zeroes in on her ethical responsibility not to “use” a patient to solve her own problems. Such a scenario would be disturbing enough if Tony were merely an insurance agent and Melfi were pressing him for a better quote on term life. But it would cross the line into Biblical obscenity were she to deliberately push Tony’s buttons (as she does physically when operating the soda “dispenser” in her dream) and turn him into a living manifestation of what Elliot calls “the forbidden part of [her] psyche: murderous rage.”21
There’s something else happening here: a more generalized warning by Melfi’s subconscious that continuing to probe Tony’s psyche could cause her further harm. She already had to go on the lam from her own practice at the end of season one, and has occasionally feared for her safety because of Tony’s tantrums, but this dream seems to contain more dire warnings that she doesn’t recognize because she’s understandably thinking only of her present trauma. That warning on the side of the transformer(!) box cautions people “High Voltage: Call NJGE before Digging,” and Melfi correctly deduces that Tony is the “dangerous” person that she “dig[s]” with. There’s a similar, redundant warning in the dream along these lines: she tries to get a soda can to drop from the machine, and when it doesn’t, she reaches up inside to force it out, and her arm gets stuck. These and other elements make it seem as if Melfi’s subconscious is warning her about more here than the ethics of using a mobster to punish her rapist. Elliot is annoyingly relentless in pressuring Melfi to get rid of Tony, but he only wants what he believes is best for her—and he nearly succeeds by convincing her to move him along to behavior modification therapy. Yet she reverses when she sees how hurt Tony is by the prospect of rejection. She could walk away from this soda machine and save herself, if she could only make herself let go of that can.
Though The Sopranos helped jump-start modern TV drama’s fascination with seriality, it was more often a collection of short stories featuring the same characters, and “Employee of the Month” in particular feels like an ugly tale with a beginning, a middle, and a definitive end—just not the one most in the audience wanted. Jennifer Melfi, a woman whose world is in contact with Tony’s, but who still considers hers separate from his, has a clear chance to break every professional oath she’s ever taken to do no harm, to violate all the written and unwritten rules of living in a modern society, and sic some Mob justice on Jesus Rossi. All she has to do, when Tony sees her obvious emotional stress and asks if she has something she wants to talk about, is to say yes—to choose, like her patient and the rest of his Family, what is selfish and easy over what she knows is right. Just say yes, and Rossi ceases to exist.
She says no.
“ANOTHER TOOTHPICK”
SEASON 3/EPISODE 5
WRITTEN BY TERENCE WINTER
DIRECTED BY JACK BENDER
Witness Protection
“We’re trying to get to root causes.” —Dr. Melfi
Remembered mainly for its gory scene of the retired, terminally ill hitman Bobby Bacala Sr. (Burt Young) killing his golf club–swinging brute of a godson and an innocent witness while coughing up pints of blood, this is an overstuffed grab bag of an episode, featuring numerous stories tied together, as on so many Sopranos episodes, by fear of physical decline and death, as well as anxiety over whether decisions were correct in hindsight. Most prove to be interconnected, not just by theme but in how their events have knock-on effects. In the end, “Another Toothpick” feels more like a housekeeping episode—though one that happens to be built around a main story (Bacala Sr.’s assignment to kill Bryan Tarantina’s Mustang Sally) involving two completely new characters.
Said housekeeping involves:
• Mustang Sally’s crime and punishment, the latter ordered by Gigi Cestone (in his first real leadership test since Tony promoted him instead of Ralphie to run the old Aprile crew) and approved by Tony;
• Bacala Jr.’s strained relationship with his boss Uncle Junior, whom he assumes is just being insensitive about his father’s terminal lung cancer until he finds out that Junior has been keeping his own cancer diagnosis a secret;
• Ralphie’s continued insubordination, which expresses itself in flagrantly disrespectful “jokes”22 aimed at Gigi, Tony, and Vito, the brother of the man Sally rendered comatose;
• The an
nouncement of a project spearheaded by Assemblyman Zellman (Peter Riegert,23 introduced as a guest at Livia’s viewing in “Proshai, Livushka”) to transform Port Newark into a standard-issue waterfront yuppie haven, with condos and yacht slips where shipping docks once were;
• Artie Bucco’s pathetic meltdown after his crush Adriana quits her hostess job at Nuovo Vesuvio, and the midlife crisis that engulfs him as a result (he even starts wearing an earring) and causes Charmaine to ask for a divorce;
• The unsteady Soprano marriage, which takes another hit after they attend their first therapy session together and Carmela accuses Dr. Melfi of taking Tony’s side;
• Tony’s relationship with Meadow, already damaged by his earlier racism toward her mixed-race boyfriend, and not helped here by his “I told you so” attitude after a black man steals her new bike;
• Meadow taking the bugged lamp back to her dorm room, unwittingly foiling the FBI’s surveillance plot in a hilarious anticlimax24; and
• Tony’s resentment of an incorruptible patrolman named Wilmore (Charles S. Dutton25), who pulls him over for speeding after his couples’ therapy session with Carmela, declines his offers of a bribe, then gets busted down and robbed of overtime pay as a result of Tony’s phone calls to Zellman, and has to take a second job as a cashier at a fountain store.26
That last subplot intertwines with the Meadow–Tony scene: Tony, clearly feeling some regret at Wilmore getting busted, at first tries to give him $400—which Wilmore rebuffs—then snarls “Fuck him” when Zellman offers to get him reassigned. (A person with principles can have everything else taken from them, but they’ll always have the security of knowing they did the right thing.)
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