The Sopranos Sessions

by Matt Zoller Seitz

  Then again, if we take Tony at his word that he’s a “captain of industry” type, maybe he’s the one who deserves the most blame. Stooge 1 and Stooge 2 wouldn’t have gotten stranded if it weren’t for Tony ordering them to go handle the Valery situation. It was Tony who assigned Paulie to pick up the $5,000 Valery owed Silvio rather than insisting Sil take care of it himself, and he could’ve intervened personally at any point if he’d so chosen—which we would’ve bought because we’ve seen how Tony loves to get his hands dirty. But he chose to delegate because he was so involved in his own melodramas, balancing a demanding new girlfriend against the needs of his family and the lingering bad mojo of his previous goomar, Irina.62

  It’s the section with Paulie, Chris, and Valery that people remember most vividly from “Pine Barrens,” with good reason: from the minute Paulie opens up the trunk to reveal a living Russian, to the chaotic foot chase, to all the scenes of the woodland fools arguing and complaining, to the haunting cutaway of Paulie looking up through the window at the flock of birds flying out in a V-formation, these scenes are the comic heart of “Pine Barrens.” But this is ultimately an episode about Tony, with Paulie and Chris’s misadventures manifesting the chaos he’s causing in his professional and private lives. The common thread binding every part of this hour is his unwillingness or inability to resolve demanding problems that are right in front of his face.

  The episode opens with Gloria, just returned from Morocco,63 visiting The Stugots right when Irina calls, and getting so angry at him that she tosses his gift to her into the water unopened. Tony’s inability to admit what Gloria already knows (that it wasn’t a school administrator calling) escalates the situation. Throughout “Pine Barrens,” he does whatever he has to do to wriggle away from accountability and make it about him—the mentally, emotionally, and sometimes physically AWOL gangster-husband-father half-assing his way through life. He’s chronically late to meetings and family gatherings, appointments, and dates, disrupts them by taking phone calls, and leaves them early, often with an excuse so unconvincing that it’s an adjacent insult. He delegates inconvenient responsibilities to people unequipped to handle them, and takes offense whenever anyone has the temerity to observe that he’s not giving them a fraction of his full attention.

  The A-story of this episode is Tony losing control of his life even as he experiences the bliss of infatuation with his volcanic new girlfriend. The B-story is Jackie Jr. carrying on like a younger, handsomer, much dumber64 Tony, bailing on Meadow because she’s sick and doesn’t want to have sex or do ecstasy, then getting busted for being unfaithful. Every scene, including the ones with Valery, raises the question of just how badly people can screw up before being forced to fix things or suffering backlash from people they’ve hurt or inconvenienced. Tony is letting down everybody here, including the girlfriend that he tells Melfi is most responsible for his happiness. Tony’s loved ones deserve a full meal of him, but they make do with half-frozen relish.

  Gloria’s the first to defy Tony, demanding and receiving better treatment (briefly), getting dissed again, calling him an “inconsiderate prick” and telling him, “If I wanted to be treated like shit, I’d get fucking married,” then finally exploding in rage after he keeps her waiting three hours and throwing a slab of lukewarm London broil against the back of his neck as he’s leaving to pick up Bobby. “You been eatin’ steak?” Junior asks him right after, volunteering details of his suffering from chemotherapy but getting zero empathy. “You’re having coffee, right? My father has glaucoma,” Carmela says witheringly, when it becomes clear that Tony is angling to rush off from dinner rather than commiserate about her father’s health.

  Chris and especially Paulie feel the sting of Tony’s neglect here, practically begging him to come rescue them as day turns into night, only to be met with one exhortation after another to just handle it. “He’s living like a fuckin’ king, and now all I hear about is cocksucker Ralphie!” Paulie hisses between chattering teeth. Tony starts to get things right again toward the end, apologizing to Bobby and thanking him for taking care of Junior, and asking Paulie to decide whether to go look for the Russian or head home.65 But Paulie and Chris’s relief and gratitude is more a matter of feeling grateful to be back inside a warm car again, eating sandwiches, than collectively feeling bad about resenting the boss. The entire world is Tony’s wife, his goomar, his loyal but unappreciated servant.

  Where did Tony learn to treat people this way? We already know the answer, and Melfi does her best to steer him into confronting it during the closing therapy scene; still, he denies the obvious. She invites him to speculate on what Irina and Gloria have in common: “Depressive personality. Unstable. Impossible to please. Does that remind you of any other woman?”

  Tony pauses for a second, then shrugs.66

  “AMOUR FOU”

  SEASON 3/EPISODE 12

  STORY BY DAVID CHASE, TELEPLAY BY FRANK RENZULLI

  DIRECTED BY TIM VAN PATTEN

  A Mofo

  “I didn’t just meet you. I’ve known you my whole fucking life.” —Tony

  The same aria, “Sposa son disprezzata,” sung by Cecilia Bartoli, closes “Pine Barrens” and opens the next episode, “Amour Fou,” making the latter feel like part two of an unofficial two-parter, or maybe a looking-glass world.67 It at least plays like the punch line Melfi set up in “Pine Barrens”: “Sound like anyone you know?”

  The “anyone” is Livia, but it’s also Gloria, who spirals into confrontational anger here when she realizes Tony will never put her first, and breaches enough boundaries (including taking Carmela home from the Mercedes dealership, then calling her to pitch a new car) to drive Tony to break up with her. The subplot’s climax finds them battling it out in Gloria’s cabin until she comes at him with a corkscrew and the much larger Tony nearly strangles her to death before coming to his senses (after her repeated gasps of “Kill me”). Recall that Tony almost smothered his own mother at the end of season one, and that his own panic attacks feel like asphyxiation. Talk about primordial—strangulation is one of the oldest ways of killing someone, predating every means of murder, maybe even rocks and clubs. And as a dream image it’s charged with meaning: the subconscious often reaches for images of asphyxiation when dreamers are suppressing some important part of themselves, their needs aren’t being met, or their truth isn’t being seen and recognized. If Gloria hadn’t exclaimed, “Poor you!” in response to Tony’s self-pitying tirade, we could’ve inferred it from her language and behavior, which is born out of feeling abandoned, and wishing to destroy the abandoner by pushing him to destroy her first (“Suicide by cop,” per Melfi’s comparison in therapy).

  Another key storyline here is also driven by feelings of disrespect, belittlement, and marginalization: Jackie Jr., frustrated by his inability to rise quickly in the organization, throws a Hail Mary that will force the Family to recognize him as a rising star: he will replicate Tony and his father’s legendary robbery of the card game now run by Jackie’s wannabe stepfather, Ralphie. The plan goes awry once his buddies Dino, Carlo (Louis Crugnali), and Matush join in. When Sunshine the dealer tries to reclaim control of the moment by quoting Rudyard Kipling’s “If,” Carlo shoots him twice, killing him and setting off a close-quarters gun battle that leaves Furio wounded and Carlo dead. By the end, Jackie Jr. is a fugitive, and—according to Tony, the boss—his status as Ralphie’s unofficial ward means Ralphie must decide whether to pardon or condemn him.68 The two stories run along parallel tracks, excluding almost every other major character. This invites us to see the Gloria and Jackie scenes as reflecting (or at least commenting on) each other. Their action even peaks almost simultaneously, Gloria’s near-death followed immediately by Jackie botching the robbery and almost getting shot for his stupidity. Jackie’s stumbling rise and immediate fall, with Ralphie as his enabling father figure, has been this season’s counterpoint to stories about AJ screwing up and revealing a near-total lack of ambition, and his parents strug
gling to figure out how to cope with it.

  There’s a third story too, also paying off developments earlier in the season, about Carmela, and it leads her to accept, for now, the idea that she’s not getting out of this marriage anytime soon, so she might as well make the best of it. She worries that she’s pregnant again after spotting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, cries at a painting of a newborn child and then a dog food ad (the dog being the kind of instinctively loyal protector that Carmela imagines herself to be), then finds out she’s not pregnant after all, but has a meeting with Father Obosi (Isaach De Bankolè69), a priest recommended by Father Phil because he’s studying psychiatry. Carmela’s meeting with Obosi, moving from the confession booth to his office, continues a rich Sopranos tradition of characters taking a meeting that they expect and maybe hope will push them to make tough choices and set hard limits, only to realize that the authority figure is mainly there to help them take the easy way out, and preserve the status quo.

  Obosi advises her to try to live within the good parts of her life with Tony rather than leave him and reject the evil he represents, which is exactly what a Roman Catholic priest, even an African one studying psychiatry, would say to a woman at risk of ending a marriage that, however flawed, is still sacred in the eyes of God. “Oh, the Church has changed so much,” Carmela says, sounding relieved, having recalled Dr. Krakower warning her in “Second Opinion” that she can never be a good person while subsisting on blood money. “It’s a complex world,” Obosi replies warmly. This exchange is the logical endpoint of the scene where Carmela, Angie, and Rosalie discuss the lesson of Hillary Clinton (who stuck it out with a philandering husband and made something for herself). And it’s more or less the same scene as the one in “Fortunate Son” where AJ wasn’t punished for wrecking the school swimming pool, because the headmaster and coach wanted to win the football championship that year.

  The most powerful storyline, though, is Tony and Gloria’s, which starts spiraling from a peak of carnal and emotional excitement until it crashes on the floor of Gloria’s house with Tony’s hands around her throat. Gloria starts behaving like a character in one of those late-1980s/early 1990s films about agents of chaos. Basic Instinct, which plays during a pivotal scene in “Amour Fou,” was the top grosser in this run of movies, but there were many, many more, all adhering to a template that studio bosses and entertainment journalists called “Fill-in-the-blank from Hell.”70 Basic Instinct is sampled in the scene where Jackie and Dino watch Sharon Stone’s accused murderer Catherine Trammell rattle a roomful of male detectives by uncrossing her legs to reveal that she’s not wearing underwear. Misogynist as the image might be, it speaks to something, well, basic in the story of men and women, an idea that’s embedded in everything from film noir to blues songs: the woman as hypnotizing sexual force, causing men to act against their better judgment.71

  What elevates the Gloria scene beyond reductive stereotypes is the care taken to set her up as a fully dimensional human being (including the detail that she was seeing Melfi to deal with suicidal impulses and relationship-destroying tendencies). Gloria’s litany of entreaties to die or be killed connects her with Livia, and, more importantly, with the constructed Livia that’s taken up residence deep in Tony’s mind.

  When you look back over season three’s arc, and the series to date, you see cycles of repetition in Tony’s character development and his lack of development. He’s held back, even trapped, by his inability to confront his mother’s dominant role in his development, or deformity, as a person, but no matter how hard he tries to avoid the issue, it keeps erupting and nearly destroying him. You also see that Gloria, despite her flesh-and-blood realness as a woman, is also a quasi-mythological figure, representing aspects of Tony’s psyche that he refuses to resolve. Season one ended with Tony nearly killing Livia. Season two climaxed with a Livia-like figure, Janice, killing Richie, a Johnny Boy–like figure, which set the stage for Tony’s mixed feelings at Livia’s death early in this season, in an episode that was literally haunted by ghosts. And then, a few episodes away from the finale, here comes Gloria, appearing in the waiting room of a psychiatrist’s office, of all places, the result of Melfi’s accidental double-booking,72 that forces them to share space. Gloria and Tony have their first conversation while sitting on the bench where we first met Tony, framed between the legs of a sculpture of a woman who was later revealed to look eerily like the young Livia. Gloria doesn’t so much enter the story of The Sopranos as materialize within it, as if summoned by incantation (in season two, Tony calls Livia a strega, or witch). As long as Gloria stays within a carefully delineated psychic space—like Isabella before Tony started talking about her—their relationship works. But once she breaches the edges of that space and impacts his family, Tony realizes the relationship has to be severed, or Gloria destroyed. In the end, we see an anguished, denial-prone son kneeling on the floor of a woman’s bungalow, which could be a witch’s lair–like cabin, trying to crush the life out of her by invitation—Remember Livia’s wishes for others, including her son, and God, to take her now?—after she ignites his rage by saying, “Poor you!”

  Tony’s temper is often depicted as an uncontrollable force, which here leads him to grab a tiny woman by the neck and hurl her through the air—rarely has James Gandolfini’s bulk been this terrifying—but he’s able to arrest it this time, and retreat to think of a better solution. In this case, it involves sending a message tailor-made for a woman hoping Tony will toss her into a burning ring of fire.

  “My face is the last one you’ll see, not Tony’s,” threatens Patsy Parisi, the most milquetoast-looking guy in the crew. “We understand each other? It won’t be cinematic.”73

  In therapy, Melfi clarifies to Tony that when she compares Gloria and Irina to his mother, she’s not actually saying that he wanted to have sex with his mother—only that his desire to please these needy, self-destructive women derives from unresolved feelings and unmet needs that he hasn’t explicated, because he’s scared to face them. Nevertheless, she describes Tony’s relationship with Gloria as amour fou, or “foolish love.” Tony mispronounces it like “a mofo,” an abbreviation of one of profanity’s greatest hits: motherfucker.

  “ARMY OF ONE”

  SEASON 3/EPISODE 13

  WRITTEN BY DAVID CHASE & LAWRENCE KONNER

  DIRECTED BY JOHN PATTERSON

  The Garbage Business

  “How are we gonna save this kid?” —Tony

  Almost no one shows up at the funeral home to say goodbye to the late Jackie Aprile Jr. It’s two days before a Super Bowl pitting the hometown Giants against the Baltimore Ravens, and even the grief-stricken Rosalie understands that most of the wiseguys are out collecting bets. But the pitiful crowd at the funeral home, and the way that the reception at Vesuvio turns into a party where Ralphie tells dirty jokes and Junior sings old Italian love songs,74 suggests a painful truth Roe might not want to acknowledge: few people in her life cared about her son.

  If there’s a flaw with the closing arc of season three, it’s that Jackie generated as much enthusiasm among the Sopranos audience as he did among that crowd at Vesuvio. The season’s more compelling antagonists were Ralphie and Gloria, but the latter was written off in “Amour Fou,” and the former survives his beef with Tony, his punishment being that he has to order the hit on his girlfriend’s son. “Pine Barrens” convinced some fans that the season would build to a war between Tony’s crew and Slava’s, but the Russians aren’t even mentioned here; wherever Valery is, or isn’t, is a mystery the series has no interest in solving.

  The main work problem to be solved before the end is Jackie: a dumb kid with an overinflated sense of entitlement, good for a few jokes about his Scrabble abilities or his criminal ineptitude, but never a real villain in the mold of Junior, Livia, Richie, or Pussy. So devoting so much of “Army of One” to his murder and its aftermath can’t help but feel anticlimactic: the wake for a dead man no one but his mother, sister, and former gi
rlfriend will much miss.

  But if Jackie himself doesn’t seem enough to support a season-ending story arc, “Army of One” deftly uses his murder to illustrate the callus of lies and self-deception everyone in and around the Family has to build up to make it through the day, and what happens when someone like Tony or Meadow has to actually think about who they are and how they got here.

  After Vito shoots Jackie outside the housing project where he’s been hiding with Ray Ray75 and his daughter,76 Tony tries to appear mournful with Dr. Melfi—“In the end, I failed him. What the fuck you gonna do?”—who’s unmoved by his transparent dissembling, and perhaps suspicious of her patient’s role in this tragedy. Yet Jackie’s death coming at the same time that Verbum Dei finally expels AJ for cheating on a test (and peeing in the boiler room77) ultimately forces him to be more introspective than usual about his life and the impact it has on his children.

  Tony, like everyone else in his bigoted, self-preservational circle, quickly follows his crew’s tactic of blaming the murder on anonymous black drug dealers, but he knows the truth: Jackie doomed himself by trying to imitate behavior that launched Tony and Jackie Sr. in the Family. Approving the murder of his daughter’s boyfriend (even if he technically left it to Ralphie to make the final decision) doesn’t sit well with him, and when Melfi asks what he wants for his own children, his first impulse is to say of Meadow, “The important thing is, she get far away from me.” He immediately clarifies that he means moral, not geographical, distance, but the fact that he would state it in such stark and self-aware terms feels like a breakthrough—or as close as a sociopath like Tony can come to one.