The Sopranos Sessions

by Matt Zoller Seitz

  “SECOND OPINION”

  SEASON 3/EPISODE 7

  WRITTEN BY LAWRENCE KONNER

  DIRECTED BY TIM VAN PATTEN

  Blood Money

  “One thing you can never say: that you haven’t been told.” —Dr. Krakower

  “Second Opinion” sits at the middle of season three like the keystone of an arch. It follows a triptych of episodes so harrowing that some viewers felt brutalized, but the emphasis on talk here makes it feel like a midpoint reckoning—an opportunity to reflect on where Carmela is at this moment, morally and spiritually; where she’s been in the past; and what we’ve seen on our screens over two and a half seasons. It’s a chance for both Carmela and the viewer to take stock and decide whether to continue or bail.

  Its heart is a conversation between Carmela and therapist Dr. Krakower32 (Sully Boyar33), who cuts through all of Carmela’s self-justifications, and ours too. Carmela is forced to acknowledge her role as an “enabler” in her marriage to Tony, living off his “blood money” and trying to avoid details of how he makes it. Not coincidentally, this is also the episode where both Tony and Carmela have to deal with Angie, slain informant Pussy’s widow, who needs (or maybe just thinks she deserves) more money out of her secret arrangement with Tony—money that Carmela is convinced could be used to make a donation to Columbia, ensuring preferential treatment for Meadow. Carmela runs into Angie at the supermarket and invites her over for dinner, a passive-aggressive denial of the reality that they’re both aware of on some level. She listens as Angie describes her financial situation, and brings the message to Tony, probably from guilt over whatever unacknowledged bad thing happened to Pussy. By contrast, Tony storms over to Angie’s house, beats up her Cadillac with a baseball bat,34 and warns her never to bring up money to Carmela again. With this and other hard facts weighing on her, including undeniable evidence of Tony’s adultery, Carmela tells Krakower that she wants to help her husband because “he’s a good man, a good father.” And Krakower dismantles her. “You’re telling me he’s a depressed criminal, prone to anger, serially unfaithful,” he says. “Is that your definition of a good man?”

  The remainder of this lacerating scene finds Carmela repeatedly running headfirst into the brick wall of Krakower’s absolutism. He insists that the root of Carmela’s problems is that she’s married to a mobster, and she’ll never have a chance to “quell [her] feelings of guilt and shame” and be truly happy until she moves out of the house, takes the kids (“what’s left of them”) with her, and files for divorce. His responses to her statements go right up to the edge of contempt, particularly when Carmela says that her priest urged her to stay with Tony and try to make him a better man, and Krakower asks, “How’s that going?” When Krakower tells her he’s not going to take her money, Carmela walks right into the statement as if it’s a trap, speculating on the new financial arrangements she’d have to make with Tony until he cuts her off: “You’re not listening. I’m not charging you because I won’t take blood money. You can’t, either.”

  Consider the motivations of the woman who sent Carmela to Krakower. It’s more than a simple referral. Melfi doesn’t just want Tony to understand himself; she wants him to understand himself so that he can get better, and it seems more obvious to us, and perhaps to her, by the week (thanks in part to her conversations with her own therapist) that Melfi doesn’t think Tony can truly get better until he stops being a criminal. She’s not judging Tony or feeling superior to him when she tries to steer him toward admitting the core truth about himself. Rather, she’s treating his criminality as a health issue—the thing that’s standing in the way of him and a life that’s not just free from panic attacks, but murder.

  Again, Melfi also represents the viewer as well as herself in her scenes with Tony. All the subplots about her empathy and complicity attest to how hard it can be to keep one’s distance from a character as funny, charismatic, and chaotically exciting as Tony (there’s also a chemistry factor; when Elliot asks if she’s attracted to him sexually, her non-response, like her dreams, confirm that she is, at least a little). The show’s attraction–repulsion to violence, intimidation, and degradation is the flip side of scenes like the ones between Carmela and the two therapists in this episode.

  Maybe Carmela’s one session with Krakower feels less like therapy than an aggressive one-man intervention because Melfi sent her there hoping that Carmela would get the stark ultimatum that Melfi herself keeps avoiding—and that even Elliot can’t quite bring himself to issue, because, like Melfi, he believes that therapists shouldn’t just tell patients what they should do. Notice that Melfi’s first solo session with Carmela starts the exact same way as Tony’s first session, with Carmela in the waiting room contemplating Melfi’s art (“Country scenes”), including a replica of that famous shot of Tony framed between the legs of a statue of a woman with her arms bent above her head (“That statue is not my favorite.”), and Melfi very quickly leading the patient to think about her life in relation to criminality. Carmela wonders if her husband’s “mood swings” and silences are related to his mother’s recent death and complains about “living with that twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.” Melfi mentions Tony’s distress over the hypothetical “young man” (actually Tracee) who died in a “garbage compactor,” which leads Carmela to point out that Melfi inferred the compactor part. “What is it you believe?” Melfi asks, her calm voice and gaze confirming that she knows Tony changed the details of that “workplace accident.” After pointing out that “Tony reports to a strip club,” which Carmela must know is a candy store for a gangster with fidelity issues, and that she might know was the real site of the “workplace accident,” Carmela tells Melfi she’s worried that nothing she’s doing for Tony “can help him.” And she begins to cry.

  Melfi’s very next act is to refer her to Krakower: a therapist who tells Carmela, “Many people want to be excused in their current predicament for something that happened in childhood. That’s what psychiatry has become in America.” He’s describing absolution here—a therapeutic answer to confession, but without the incense, robes, and booth. Absolution of past sins, plus acts of penance and an unenforceable promise by the sinner to try and do better: Krakower doesn’t provide that kind of service. It seems inconceivable that Melfi sent Carmela to see him without anticipating how he’d react. In effect, Melfi picks a therapist for Carmela who will give her a second opinion about her life with Tony that’s identical to Melfi’s but a lot more blunt.

  For all her traditionalist belief in Freud’s “talking cure,” there is a secret, under-the-radar moralist in Melfi—somebody who believes in the social compact and wants everyone, including herself, to be better than they are, for everyone’s sake. A number of her sessions with Tony, including their first one, have pressed him not just to talk about his mother, but to recognize his criminality as a root cause, perhaps the root cause, of his depression. Tony rarely confronts either subject directly because doing so would force him to consider turning his life upside-down and becoming somebody new. Not only is the very idea terrifying to everyone, not just mobsters, it’s asking too much work of a man who’s lazy about everything except eating, killing, stealing, identifying and murdering informants, and getting laid.

  Plus, the social structure that enfolds these characters makes escape or reform almost impossible, short of turning state’s witness or running away to live in obscurity (and probably poverty) while worrying that the next person who knocks could be a tall Italian man with a black leather jacket and a ponytail. In both Tony’s world and the more civilized one he leeches off, there is an established order—a chain of command that no one is meant to buck, lest the whole system fall apart. “Second Opinion” illustrates the conundrums that occur when people try to break that chain.

  Angie Bonpensiero pleads her case to a more sympathetic figure in Carmela, and gets her car smashed by Tony as punishment. Christopher complains to Tony about all the hazing and other indignities he’s
suffering under Paulie (“I guess you could call that a dick.”), only to get threatened for squealing to the teacher. Uncle Junior, at Tony’s urging, gets another opinion on his cancer treatment, leading his surgeon, Dr. John Kennedy35 (Sam McMurray36), to petulantly dump Junior rather than deal with a patient who won’t blindly accept his suggestions. Tony intervenes in Angie’s, Christopher’s, and Junior’s storylines to reaffirm the status quo as he sees it: everyone needs to shut up and do what they’re supposed to, according to the rules as set out by the Mafia and modified by Tony Soprano. It’s understood that anyone who doesn’t like his verdicts could find themselves on the receiving end of a golf swing or backing up into a pond.37 The episode is bound together by scenes of characters questioning and ultimately accepting authority, be it Tony’s (forcing Kennedy to give Junior some personal attention) or Kennedy’s (notice how easily he pawns off Junior on Dr. Mehta by blessing him like a priest, disregarding Tony’s orders by finding a cleverer way to dump him). Carmela escapes Tony’s purview because she’s the only character on the show (besides the New York bosses and the FBI) who has the where-withal to stand up to him, at least sometimes. She also—in a remarkable scene in which Edie Falco is acting mostly with her back to the camera—wriggles out of having to face Krakower’s ultimatum by forcing Tony to give the full $50,000 donation sought by the “Morningside Heights gangsters” of Columbia University. It’s a financial answer to a spiritual problem, and a means of avoiding the real question.

  “HE IS RISEN”

  SEASON 3/EPISODE 8

  WRITTEN BY ROBIN GREEN & MITCHELL BURGESS AND TODD A. KESSLER

  DIRECTED BY ALLEN COULTER

  Early Retirement

  “Rules are rules, otherwise what? Fuckin’ anarchy.” —Ralphie

  “He Is Risen” feels like a transitional episode between whatever season three was and whatever it’s about to become. The bulk of its running time is dedicated to introducing new business, most notably Tony’s dalliance with Mercedes-Benz saleswoman and fellow Melfi patient Gloria Trillo (Annabella Sciorra38), and letting old business play out in an unhurried way—in particular Meadow’s accelerating affair with Jackie Jr. right when he’s giving up on college and refocusing on crime, and the strained relationship between Tony and the arrogant Ralphie following the latter’s murder of Tracee in “University.” Like Janice in her new guise as a born-again Christian, the season is reinventing itself on the fly.

  The title is a quote from Aaron Arkaway (Turk Pipkin), the fundamentalist narcoleptic that Janice brings to Thanksgiving dinner,39 but it ends up applying to the widely despised Ralphie. He’s been obsessed all season with having been passed over as captain of Junior’s old crew, and suddenly finds himself elevated to that position only because its previous occupant, Gigi Cestone, dies of heart disease during a bowel movement. “He’ll be a fuckin’ captain over my dead body,” Tony had declared, only to make him one over Gigi’s dead body. He bestows the title reluctantly, only because Ralphie’s the most qualified candidate in a poor crop,40 and notwithstanding their continuing bad blood.

  Gigi’s death is another example of The Sopranos’s skill at using anticlimax for different kind of surprise. We’ve been primed for several episodes now to expect the Tony–Ralphie rivalry to come to a violent head, perhaps with Ralphie engineering Gigi’s death so he can replace him, or Tony ordering Ralphie’s murder. “He Is Risen” initially leads us to think the situation will be resolved in this hour, escalating from Ralphie rebuffing Tony’s offer of a drink at the casino. There’s the intervention of Johnny Sack (who promised not to interfere in Tony’s business, but who needs the Esplanade project, a Newark construction job that’s a joint venture of the New York and New Jersey Families, to come off without a hitch); the melodrama over disinviting Ralphie and the Apriles to Thanksgiving dinner (probably the closest The Sopranos has come to acknowledging how sitcom-like it can be); and two separate scenes where Ralphie approaches Tony hat-in-hand, hoping for reconciliation and reciprocal apologies (for Tony thrashing him behind the Bing), as well as some acknowledgment that Tony genuinely respects him, only to be insulted. Ralphie is prevented from sitting during his first apology (“He let me stand there like a servant, scraping, bowing,” Ralphie tells Johnny) and is denied the honor of sharing a drink with Tony at the second meeting, where he learns he’s been promoted. Ralphie, ever-needy, tells Tony he needs to hear that the promotion was due to “merit,” even though it clearly wasn’t. Here, too, Tony thwarts his wishes. “If your opponent is of choleric temper, irritate him,” Tony tells Melfi, quoting Sun Tzu’s The Art of War.41

  Throughout, the Ralphie matter is mostly treated as a workplace issue, with ego and face-saving mattering more than anything else. The conversations employ even more euphemistic language for gangsterism than usual. Johnny urges Tony to “keep a happy shop,” while Tony describes the situation to Melfi as “a management problem” revolving around “a situation with an underling” who forced another employee (Tracee) to take “an early retirement.”

  But it’s that last thing that makes the infighting over a promotion feel different from Tony’s other “management problems.” Ultimately, his hatred of Ralphie is about his grief and guilt over Tracee, a woman almost his daughter’s age whom he kept at arm’s length and failed to protect. As if trying to remove his own personal disgust, Tony uses variations on the phrase “he disrespected the Bing,” making it purely a matter of protocol42—interesting how he associates that physical location, a glorified brothel, with his authority and his personality—but it’s clear to everyone that he’s treating this unauthorized killing as something different than the Mafia usual. “If anything were ever to happen to you . . .” Tony tells Meadow at Thanksgiving.

  We may also worry about Meadow’s safety during “He Is Risen,” an hour that starts with her at a college party taking ecstasy supplied by Jackie and getting drunk on tequila, and continues with a furtive but hardly secret escalation of their relationship, until Meadow steals Jackie’s car and accidentally wrecks it rather than let him bail to shoot another game of pool with his friend. “A Soprano and an Aprile,” coos Janice, still a romantic even after putting two bullets in Jackie’s uncle’s chest. Meadow escapes serious harm, but the prospect weighs heavily on Tony, and on us, because this season has been hell on women. The stories have clarified what a repressive and frightening environment this subculture can be, with traditional Roman Catholic beliefs becoming warped by gangster machismo and an insular, tribal mentality. (The outside world is no picnic, either: Tony offers to walk the recent rape survivor Melfi to her car after an evening session, and she confesses to Elliot that she was so grateful she nearly fell into his arms and cried.) Ralphie calls Tracee a “hooer” twice during a conversation with Johnny, and says, “It wasn’t my kid she was carrying,” confirming that the only value a woman like Tracee has to a guy like Ralphie is as a receptacle for seed or a bearer of children. Ralphie uses the term to deny that Tracee’s life had value. But Johnny uses the term as well, without a hint of shame or self-consciousness. Even Tony’s consigliere Silvio—a cold-blooded character we view with affection because he’s funny—tries to steer Tony toward the idea that there was nothing special or important about Tracee, despite his distaste for Ralphie, and that the real issue here, whether Tony likes it or not, is that he assaulted a made guy. This is the same Silvio who acts as a glorified pimp to the Bada Bing dancers, and who beat Tracee in plain view of Ralphie three days before she was killed.

  Jackie seems like the next-generation version of this mentality, sneaking a peek down Meadow’s shirt after she passes out, disapproving of her dating “a black guy,” and telling her he wants to ditch college and get into men’s fashion—though “not the faggy part of it,” whatever that means. Although Meadow survives this episode, her attraction to Jackie should set our teeth on edge. He’s a dumbass Hamlet who won’t take no for an answer. An image in this episode sums up his character: a long shot of Jackie peeling away fr
om a meeting with Meadow and blasting through a stop sign like it’s not even there.

  “THE TELLTALE MOOZADELL”

  SEASON 3/EPISODE 9

  WRITTEN BY MICHAEL IMPERIOLI

  DIRECTED BY DANIEL ATTIAS

  Each Child Is Special

  “I never met anybody like you.” —Tony

  The gorilla at the zoo in “The Telltale Moozadell” could be the Tony of primates. He’s huge, hairy, with bloodshot eyes, and prefers to be sedentary, but after only a few seconds of looking at him, you sense the intelligence in his face, and the coiled power that could snap you in half. Zoo visits are great places for filmmakers to find incidental associations and grandiose metaphors. The Sopranos finds its share in this sequence, which pictures Tony and his new goomar Gloria sharing an afternoon. The main concerns in this episode are animal and spiritual; religion loosely ties the frameworks together. Both zoo visitors are wearing the skins of animals: Tony has his classic black leather jacket, while Gloria is wearing a long-waisted leather jacket with a fur (or “fur”) lining. He notices she’s wearing a Buddhist amulet of protection, which sparks a conversation. Tony says his “wack job” sister is a Buddhist, and gently teases Gloria about whether it’s compatible with a job selling $150,000 cars. “The first noble truth is that life is suffering, but the Buddha preached joyful participation in the sorrows of the world,” Gloria tells him, not long before leading him into the reptile house, where they have sex in front of a glassed-in yellow python—a rare instance of The Sopranos laying it on a bit thick with the Biblical allusions. The script at least acknowledges this by having Tony allude to an earlier conversation where Paulie told him that snakes “reproduce spontaneously” because they “have both male and female sex organs . . . that’s why somebody you don’t trust, you call a snake. How can you trust a guy who can literally go fuck themselves?”