The Sopranos Sessions

by Matt Zoller Seitz

  “Don’t you think that expression would come from the Adam and Eve story?” Tony replies, not having any of it, “when the snake tempted Eve to bite the apple?”

  “Hey, snakes were fuckin’ themselves long before Adam and Eve showed up, T,” Paulie replies.

  Tony doesn’t eat an apple or find himself missing a rib in the reptile house scene, and Gloria is neither Eve nor Satan, but this episode gently parallels the Genesis story on one level: it’s about pushing limits and going too far, until God brings the hammer down.43

  Chris, meanwhile, gifts his fiancée Adriana with the Lollipop Club, a bar seized to pay a gambling debt. She reopens it as a live music venue called The Crazy Horse,44 only to have to deal with holdover headaches, including the drug dealer Matush (Nick E. Tarabay), who used to sell in the bathroom of the old place and assumes he still has privileges until Furio evicts him, underlining the message with a kick to the testicoli. Matush keeps pushing his luck with encouragement from Jackie Jr., a friend of a friend who still seems to want to skip to the top of the organization without proving himself. Their first scene together is a drily hilarious commentary on Godfather fantasies: Jackie hears Matush’s hard-luck story and gives his blessing to deal drugs while feigning authority by resting his face on his hand in the same manner as Vito in the first film and Young Vito in the second. When Jackie goes to Chris to officially secure the permission he already granted, Chris shuts the younger man down and takes offense that he’d make such a request, considering that drug trafficking is a federal as well as state and local crime. Jackie tells Matush he can deal drugs in the vicinity of the club, another face-saving lie that lands Matush in the hospital. “They didn’t give a shit,” he hisses at Jackie through his smashed jaw, arm raised up by a pulley. “I don’t think they like you.”

  Tony doesn’t like him either. He admits that Jackie the younger has a certain charisma and feels protective of him because he’s Jackie the elder’s son, but he also can’t help being turned off by his arrogance. Tony has repeatedly said that he doesn’t want him getting involved in the gangster life because he promised Jackie Sr. he’d keep his boy out of it. But now he’s doubly adamant because Jackie’s dating Meadow, and Tony was recently reminded of the worst that can happen to the young girlfriends of mobsters.45 Tracee’s killer is the closest thing Jackie now has to a father figure. This subplot peaks with Jackie asking Ralphie if he can buy a gun “just in case,” and Ralphie gifting him with his own .38 snub revolver—marking him as the paternal antithesis of Tony, who is so invested in the young man’s survival and success that when he catches him in the casino, he orders him to leave immediately and “smarten up.”46

  The Jackie story in this episode parallels the troubles of AJ, who likewise can’t seem to stop indulging in grandly self-sabotaging behavior.47 He has even less self-awareness than Jackie: pressed to explain why he abetted a Verbum Dei swimming pool break-in/party/riot with several other students,48 he gives his parents the classic blank-faced-and-vaguely-constipated AJ expression while repeating, “I don’t know.” The subsequent meeting with school authorities is one of the sneaky high points of the season—a miniature referendum on the hypocrisy of the species. Just like the DiMeo outfit keeping a stripper-murdering cokehead on its payroll because he’s “a good earner,” the Verbum Dei headmaster and coach make it clear that AJ won’t suffer any penalty. The meeting opens with a reminder of the school’s “strict zero tolerance policy in cases of vandalism” requiring “immediate expulsion,” then proceeds to subcontract discipline to the parents, to Tony’s surprise and Carmela’s mounting outrage.49 AJ is given “a suspended sentence” as a reward for improving his grade point average to a C– (the lowest acceptable grade in most U.S. schools), and gets to keep participating in sports (directly contravening Tony’s decision to pull him off the football team) because of what the coach calls his “skill” and “leadership qualities . . . We feel that it would be against his best interests, and the team’s, to sever his relationship with the squad.”50

  Tony and Gloria’s relationship is pushing limits, too. He drives right to her place of business, gives her presents in broad daylight next to a major road, and whisks her away for trysts. It’s his deepest connection yet to a woman who’s not his wife: “I’ve never met anyone like you,” he says at the zoo after she explains her necklace. “I know why you lie, but you don’t have to,” Gloria tells him, in the scene where she asks him about the pistol he keeps in an ankle holster for “pickups in bad neighborhoods.”

  Both Tony and Gloria know this relationship isn’t smart. In sessions, both express a similarly intoxicated satisfaction, but evade or lie whenever Melfi seems to be on the verge of discovering their affair. Melfi asks about the voice she heard on the other end of the line when Gloria called her to cancel in “He Is Risen” and pushes for confirmation that she’s seeing someone, a line of inquiry that makes her patient uncomfortable. “I think it’s very unprofessional for you to confront me this way,” Gloria says. Melfi replies she’s keeping tabs because Gloria came in for treatment after attempting suicide after a breakup, but takes her word when it becomes clear that pressing further would upset her.

  It’s fascinating to watch Melfi skate twice along the edge of a realization she can’t quite have yet.51 She saw Tony and Gloria smiling at each other in her waiting room. She heard Tony’s voice, a regular presence for an hour a week, while on the phone with Gloria. She knows Tony is happy verging on goofy, and expressing all manner of “go with the flow”–type thoughts, but she doesn’t connect that language to Gloria—an openly devoted Buddhist—even after Tony paraphrases one of Gloria’s lines from the zoo.52 Here, as in her session with Gloria, Melfi pursues a line of thought right up to the precipice of identifying a lie, but stops short of confirmation.

  “Your thoughts have a kind of Eastern flavor to them,” she tells Tony.

  “Well, I’ve lived in Jersey my whole life,” Tony says.

  “I mean ‘Eastern’ in terms of Asian, like Buddhist, or Daoist . . . ”

  “Sun Tzu,” Tony says, a lie so transparent that even he can’t sell it. “I told you about him.”

  Melfi stares at him for a moment, then says, “We have to stop now.”

  “. . . TO SAVE US ALL FROM SATAN’S POWER”

  SEASON 3/EPISODE 10

  WRITTEN BY ROBIN GREEN & MITCHELL BURGESS

  DIRECTED BY JACK BENDER

  Ho Fuckin’ Ho

  “The boss of this Family told you you’re gonna be Santa Claus, you’re Santa Claus. So, shut the fuck up about it!” —Paulie

  A Christmas special for people who hate Christmas specials, “. . . To Save Us All From Satan’s Power” is classic Sopranos, though it’s comparatively light on violence and heavy on jokes, especially about heavy men. There’s talk about the American mythology of Christmas, including Paulie’s classic narrative on Santa and the elves, plus The Grinch Who Stole Christmas and It’s a Wonderful Life. But by the end, Christmas cheer sleeps with the fishes. Tony watches a bit of Life on the bedroom TV after thrashing the livery cab driver who beat up Janice and trapping him under a sleigh in a store window. “Jesus Christ, enough already!” he mutters, as George Bailey dashes through the snow. On what might be the only afternoon of the year when a roomful of goodfellas get to publicly pretend to be jolly good fellows and get away with it, two wiseguys play Santa at Satriale’s: Big Pussy via a 1995 flashback—probably wired for sound—and Bobby today, the replacement Saint Nick who warned everyone he had no aptitude for the gig and proves himself right. “Would it kill him to say ‘Ho ho ho?’” asks Paulie, watching Bacala boss the kids around like a gym coach and call out a kid named Gregorio for going through the gift line twice: “You were on my lap five minutes ago . . . Now you’re going on Santa’s list and you’re getting nothing!”

  “Fuck you, Santa!” Gregorio shouts. And the room cries: “Hhh-ohhhhhhhh!”

  Ultimately, though, Tony is the true Santa here—the Paulie Walnuts
version, giving toys to good kids and throwing the bad ones beatings. His holiday to-do list starts doubling as a naughty list when he realizes Janice is still in pain after a Russian cab driver roughed her up for stealing Svetlana’s leg. “JANICE’S RUSSIAN” he writes on his crinkled notepad, on the same page with “TRANSFER CANNOLIS,” a euphemism for laundering his money through different Russians. But he’s also a skeptic’s answer to George Bailey from It’s a Wonderful Life and Ebenezer Scrooge from A Christmas Carol, an everyman who sees Yuletide ghosts but realizes nothing about himself except that he hates seeing ghosts. If the two characters were real people, the episode argues, they’d assume the ghosts were byproducts of bad plum pudding, or that the little fellow claiming to be an angel was a hobo who’s not right in the head, and continue their accustomed sinning.

  The episode starts with a 1995 flashback to Tony and Jackie on the Asbury Park boardwalk, talking to Pussy about brokering a diplomatic meeting between Jackie and Junior, who just hijacked one of the boss’s trucks. We understand the show so well by this point that we’re not surprised when a slow zoom into crashing waves segues to memories of Tony’s old pal Pussy, the talking fish who ended up fish food, but it’s still surprising to see Pussy in all his fleshy, bad-backed glory, Jackie looking hale and hearty, and Tony with more hair.53 Tony, Paulie, and Silvio executed Pussy in “Funhouse,” and this is the first full reappearance of the character in a flashback, aside from the brief glimpse in a hallway mirror in “Proshai, Livushka”—one of many indicators that The Sopranos might believe in a world beyond the material. The rush of memories of Pussy, Gigi, and Jackie Sr., colleagues whose loss weighs on Tony,54 merges with the usual holiday pressures and brings him to the edge of another panic attack,55 his first in a while: “I’m feeling like I got ginger ale in my brain,” he tells Melfi. “Stressmas,” she says.

  But it’s more than Stressmas. It’s a potential moral reckoning brought about by revisiting a particular location where Tony dreamed of the fish-Pussy revealing his true self. Everybody’s in denial here, including Paulie, who insists that he would kill Pussy again if he could. Tony plays Melfi with his friend, asking him why he went to a psychic last year when he supposedly doesn’t “dwell on this shit,” and why he isn’t haunted by Pussy even though he sensed the ghosts of other men he’d killed at the psychic’s office. “That was different,” Paulie says, miffed. “Chrissie was shot. That was a paranormal event.”

  “Well, that was the difference between Puss and the others—him, you loved,” Tony says, pressing Paulie.

  “The world don’t run on love,” Paulie says, adding, “In the end, fuck Santa Claus.”

  In place of the traditional holiday fable of the cruel (or merely self-pitying) man who has a revelation and changes his ways, we get a story about a bunch of gangsters collectively trying to figure out when they should have realized that their old pal was a rat so they could have capped him and saved their future selves the trouble. Silvio dreams of a secret cheese thief56 at the Bada Bing and finds Pussy’s corpse in the strippers’ dressing room, neck snapped in a giant mousetrap. “Ever since we found that suit, I been dreaming about the fat rat bastard,” Silvio tells Tony, in the same basement where his boss interrogated two men who were later killed for informing.57 Silvio and Tony deduce that Pussy probably flipped on the day when he showed up late for a sit-down Sil set up between Jackie Sr. and Junior. Tony thinks Pussy might’ve worn a wire for the first time under his Santa suit not long after that. Maybe he walked into Satriale’s already wearing it. But who can say for sure?

  Here, as elsewhere, Tony has several potential moments of self-revelation, but every time he catches a big fish, he throws it right back. Charmaine Bucco, newly separated from Artie and looking pulchritudinous, stops pretending she doesn’t hate feeding gangsters in her place, and needles Tony and his boys by telling him a couple of FBI agents might be eating nearby; Tony doesn’t read the obvious indicators in this scene that she hates his guts and wants him to be as uncomfortable as possible. It requires a return trip, with a more blatant telling-off, for Tony to become offended enough to take his business elsewhere. Even then, he seems more miffed at Charmaine’s lack of fear than chastised by her disapproval of how he earns—and yet, this being The Sopranos, we can’t rule out that the truer, deeper reason why Tony fled was shame—not that he’d admit it.

  In the same episode where Tony openly discusses goomar gifts with Paulie and Silvio, and gives Carmela a $50,000 bracelet as unspoken compensation for the fact that he’s secretly gotten a new mistress,58 Tony explodes in rage at the sight of his daughter’s boyfriend getting a lap dance, works him over in the men’s room, and tells him “You hit rock bottom” twice—as if to force the kid to have the moment of clarity that has thus far eluded Tony. Here, as in the Jackie Jr. scenes in “The Telltale Moozadell”—and a lot of scenes where he’s dealt with an insubordinate Ralphie or aggrieved Richie—Tony seems less offended by the other man’s hypocrisy and moral turpitude than furious at the existence of the same sleazy, vicious, or self-destructive impulses in himself, if better suppressed. When Tony disciplines Jackie, it’s like he’s throwing his younger self a beating to flip him from naughty to nice. The bathroom attack is the closest the episode gets to a traditional Dickensian moral reckoning: Tony as leather-jacketed Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, putting a boot in the ass of young Tony.

  None of this registers because Tony understands his subconscious mainly as a trove of clues on how to run the business, augmented by a little Sun Tzu. Nevertheless, karmic payback comes on Christmas morning, when Meadow gives him the unexpected gift of a Big Mouth Billy Bass singing “Take Me To the River,” forcing him to smile sweetly and say thank you instead of throwing up or passing out, and to agree to keep the toy on his desk where he can see it every day of his life. Cut to waves crashing at Asbury Park. Santa Claus is fucked.

  “PINE BARRENS”

  SEASON 3/EPISODE 11

  STORY BY TIM VAN PATTEN & TERENCE WINTER, TELEPLAY BY TERENCE WINTER

  DIRECTED BY STEVE BUSCEMI

  Rasputin

  “I lost my shoe.” —Paulie

  “Pine Barrens,” aka “The One with the Russian,” is the episode that Sopranos fans use to recruit new viewers. It works as a self-contained short feature about a Mob boss losing control of his business and his personal life, even as it advances key season-spanning subplots without resolving them and teases upcoming twists without promising specifics. It delivers all of the distinguishing characteristics longtime viewers expect—suspense, violence, and undertones of melancholy and mystery—while mostly erring on the side of comedy, be it slapstick-goofy (Paulie and Chris squabbling in the woods) or emotionally raw (Gloria hitting Tony in the back of the neck with his dinner). It’s probably the best hour that great TV writer Terence Winter has scripted for any series. It’s one of very best things that Steve Buscemi, a still-largely-unsung hero of indie film directors, has put his name on. It features two of Tony Sirico and Michael Imperioli’s best comic performances, decadently satisfying entertainment that pulls the audience along from start to finish while leaving them with unexpected questions—like “What happened to the Russian?”

  Now is not the time to resolve the matter of the Russian—we’ll save that for the season finale recap—but it’s not spoiling anything to say he was topic number one after this episode debuted. Tony’s warnings to Paulie make it seem guaranteed they’ll meet again: “If this cocksucker crawls out from under a rock, he’s your problem, not mine. You deal with Slava,59 you take the heat, you pay the price.” Could there be war between the Russians and the Italians over the death (or wounding) of Valery (Vitali Baganov), the Rasputin of South Jersey, the vodka-swilling ex-commando,60 the roaring giant who washes his balls with ice water?

  Suffice to say that for a series that would pose such questions in dialogue, The Sopranos cares little about the particulars of what happened to the Russian, instead treating him like a force of nature turned loo
se in nature, presenting his fearsome power and wraithlike elusiveness as a test of Paulie and Chris’s resourcefulness.61 They utterly, haplessly fail, cursing themselves and everyone else the whole time. They fail before they’ve even gotten started. Look up “fail” in the dictionary and you should see Paulie and Chris in the snow, Chris bloody-headed and wrapped in the car floor mat, Paulie grimacing from the snow freezing his one shoeless foot, his typically immaculate salt-and-pepper hair poofed out like the wild mane of a German Expressionist dream figure. If these two were even a tiny bit less impulsive, confrontational, and self-defeating, they never would have ended up freezing in a van in the woods at night, eating half-frozen condiment packets and flinching at every snapped twig. The Russian is the punishment they deserve.

  Maybe more Paulie than Chris. It was Paulie who picked up Valery’s universal remote, then smashed it like the macho jerk he is rather than bend to the Russian’s bluster and replace it. It was Paulie who strangled Valery seemingly to death with that floor lamp, Paulie who insisted on burying his “corpse” deep in the South Jersey woods so they could spend the night in nearby Atlantic City instead of somewhere closer, and Paulie who continually lied to the boss about who made most of the mistakes. Of course it was a joint decision to have Valery dig his own grave with a shovel he could use as a club, so that’s on Chris, too. But mostly it was Paulie, the wing-haired, shoe-losing fool.