The Sopranos Sessions

by Matt Zoller Seitz

  “IRREGULAR AROUND THE MARGINS”

  SEASON 5/EPISODE 5

  WRITTEN BY ROBIN GREEN & MITCHELL BURGESS

  DIRECTED BY ALLEN COULTER

  Telephone

  “You know what? I might as well have fucked her. Thanks!” —Tony

  We know that Tony Soprano lacks impulse control. We saw that throughout the string of events that led to Carmela evicting him in “Whitecaps.” It was a bad idea to sleep with Ralphie’s mistress, to beat up Assemblyman Zellman, and to sleep with Svetlana, but he did all three because he wanted to and couldn’t stop himself.

  We also know that Tony Soprano is a man with a particular type, and that Adriana La Cerva fits that type in many ways: sexy, assertive, eager to demonstrate her independence, and untroubled by the world of organized crime. Yet somehow, he never attempted to sleep or even flirt with his nephew’s fiancée before the black comic events of “Irregular Around the Margins.”

  Maybe it’s because they never spent any time together without Christopher and/or Carmela as chaperones. When they’re alone in the Crazy Horse office, exchanging impressions of Christopher’s “constipated owl look,” Adriana confessing that she was scared of Tony when she met him, it’s as if he’s never really looked at her before—and realizing how many of his boxes she checks. But a bigger factor is Tony’s survival instinct. He tells Melfi, who has taken him back on a probationary basis, that having sex with Adriana or starting a serious relationship with her would be a disaster for them both, ruining his relationship with his heir apparent, encouraging Carmela to seek a more brutal divorce settlement, and making Ade an outcast among heretofore welcoming Mob wives.

  But we were there, so we know the real reason nothing happened in that charged air: Phil Leotardo’s well-timed knock, and possible reluctance on the part of Adriana, who later insists to Agent Sanseverino that she would never cheat on Christopher with Tony. Without that knock, though, you just know Tony would have made a move, consequences be damned, because it’s in his nature. No matter the danger, the man always gives into temptation.

  But as Tony and Christopher both observe repeatedly through the episode’s second half, perception has a nasty way of becoming reality in their business. After Tony and Adriana crash an SUV while looking to score cocaine, it doesn’t matter that they didn’t have sex, because the Mob has its own version of the Telephone Game that expands on what happened until speculation finally acquires a narrative, followed by humiliating, made-up details. Adriana sustaining “a severe blow to the head” becomes her giving Tony a blow job, and on and on until Uncle Junior is marveling, “Apparently, he came all over the sun visor!”

  Gossip run amok puts Tony and Chris on a collision course until Tony B steps in with a pair of solutions that combine his knowledge of Mob culture and health care: first he gets the smug emergency room doctor to explain to Christopher that Adriana’s injuries rule out her doing anything sexual with Tony at the time of the crash, then he arranges a very public dinner at Vesuvio where he, his mother, Christopher, Adriana, Tony, and Carmela all eat cordially while Vito and the other captains watch and come to pay homage. Christopher gets confirmation that Adriana was faithful, and he gets to save face with his colleagues.

  Unfortunately, everyone knows that dinner is strictly ceremonial. Carmela isn’t happy to be there, and even though she tells Tony earlier that she believes he wouldn’t sleep with Adriana, she still sprints upstairs again, Meadow-style, just to get away from this man who piles so much misery on her. Adriana defends Christopher to Sanseverino, but her face (both the bruises and the expression) tell a different story. Christopher is convinced that Tony and Adriana didn’t fool around at this particular moment, but he’ll never entirely be sure they’ve never done anything. And everyone will be right to be mistrustful and pained about the whole situation, because Adriana knows Christopher was capable of strangling her, just as Tony recognizes deep down how easily he could have slept with Adriana if circumstances had been even slightly different.

  Yet despite the darkness at the core of this foursome, “Irregular Around the Margins” is among The Sopranos’s most purely farcical episodes. The series doesn’t often attempt primarily comic installments, though there are great jokes in even the most serious hours (e.g., Christopher’s reaction to Ralphie’s wig in “Whoever Did This”). The episode applies the series’ core idea—“Recognizable family problems, but with Mafia-level stakes”—to the world of gossip and innuendo, letting the captains act like eighth graders passing notes while endangering Tony, Adriana, and Christopher. And since the jokes are often most potent when people are mad at each other, doing a whole episode where everyone is upset leaves greater room for comedy, like the bit of business where Carmela throws the pizza Tony brought as a peace offering onto the floor, followed by Tony scooping it back up before he leaves with his tail between his legs, or—after Tony B’s quick thinking gets Christopher off the warpath—the most pressing issue suddenly being the fact that Chris threw food at Vito. (Tony: “That’s got to be resolved.”)

  But the comedy comes from the same dysfunctional place as the drama: Tony Soprano’s inability to stop himself from trying to take what he wants, when he wants.

  “SENTIMENTAL EDUCATION”

  SEASON 5/EPISODE 6

  WRITTEN BY MATTHEW WEINER

  DIRECTED BY PETER BOGDANOVICH29

  Fish Out of Water

  “You need to show resolve—a firm purpose to change.” —Father Phil

  David Chase likes to say that, contrary to critical consensus, The Sopranos isn’t a show about how people don’t change, or can’t. In his view, personal change isn’t impossible—just rare and incredibly difficult, particularly in a culture that rewards inertia and selfishness like the Mafia. In the series, people don’t usually change, but only sometimes for lack of effort. For every wiseguy or Mob wife perfectly content with themselves, there’s usually someone questioning how they got to this point in life and whether it makes any sense to stay. They try to alter either themselves or their contexts, but usually the world around them not only has no interest in this transformation, but actively conspires against it. Wherever you try to go, here you still are.

  Rarely is that bleak but empathetic world view more elegantly or sadly articulated in the series than in “Sentimental Education,” an hour in which Carmela and Tony B go to tremendous effort to broaden their horizons and be something other than what Tony Soprano assumes of them, only to be slapped down by some combination of how the world views them and their habit of following their subculture’s rules.

  After years of enduring Tony’s serial adultery while refraining from reciprocating, Carmela finally has sex with another man. Mr. Wegler is using Carmela at least as much as she’s using him, treating his efforts to improve AJ’s college chances as currency in their burgeoning relationship, and he can be as stuck in his ways as Tony: despite knowing that Carmela didn’t enjoy Madame Bovary,30 he gives her a Modern Library first edition of it, suggesting if she tries it again, she might learn to love it as he does. But while he is far from a perfect catch, he’s different enough from Tony to make Carmela feel different, too. Mr. Wegler is her estranged husband’s diametric opposite: cultured, soft-spoken, and generous of spirit. Not only does he talk to Carmela after sex, their discussions of fine literature feel like ongoing intellectual foreplay. And he’s willing to see potential in AJ that we doubt exists. She glows when she’s around him, and as she thumbs through his copy of The Letters of Abelard and Heloise in the bathroom, she seems as carefree and immune from Tony’s nonsense as she has at any point since the separation.

  It’s a lovely emotional oasis for her. Too bad it’s doomed. Even before she and Wegler sleep together, Father Phil is already trying to box-block her. He’s at his coldest and most judgmental when she discusses the relationship in confession. He insists his objections have to do with the sanctity of her marriage to Tony and the Church’s aversion to spouses splitting, but he’s not a dis
interested party. They nearly had sex a few years back, when she and Tony were under the same roof. He seems less the strict priest than the jealous not-quite lover.

  Carmela the sincere Catholic feels guilt over what she’s done, but she also recognizes the change within her, telling Phil, “Something in me has been reawakened. And even if it never happens again with this man, just knowing that feeling of passion again, I don’t know if it’s ever going to go away. I’ll need it.” He scolds her and guilts her and tells her she needs to show the strength to change, when that’s exactly what she’s done in dating Wegler. If taking Carmela’s confession during “College” rather than sleeping with her was Phil’s finest moment of the series, this is his lowest, as he speaks for the part of Carmela’s world that has no interest in her being anything but the wife of Tony Soprano.

  And the worst thing is, Wegler thinks that way, too. Or, at least, he frames her every action as that of a Mob boss’s ruthless spouse who will do what she must to get what she wants.

  Wegler seems not so different from the men Carmela knows best when he agrees to, as he’ll colorfully describe it later, put the arm on his colleague Tom Fiske31 to boost AJ’s grade, because he knows it increases the likelihood of more sex. But where a wiseguy would enjoy the spoils of his sin, Wegler instead is consumed with guilt over it, and shoves the blame onto Carmela, accusing her of the basest form of manipulation, telling her, “You strong-armed me using the only weapon you have: your pussy.”

  He’s not wrong, based on what we know about Carmela’s relentless pursuit of her goals, particularly where the kids are concerned. But he’s still being unfair, in the knowing and deliberate manner of a wounded man. Carmela clearly enjoyed his company and conversation as well as the sex, and there were moments where we could envision their alternate reality as a real couple. Carmela might not have Wegler’s literary schooling, but she reads constantly and can hold her own in a conversation about books, often making blunt statements or asking simple but cutting questions that the academic Wegler wouldn’t have considered. Whatever conscious or unconscious agenda Carm may have had, her affection and respect seemed sincere; at worst, her emotions toward Wegler were “complicated.” Wegler’s formulation would seem crude and cruel coming from a wiseguy’s mouth, but it stings worse coming from the kind man of letters that Carmela saw as her vessel to a better life. It conveys there’s no way for her to trade up because so many straight men, regardless of social class, will describe women this way if they’re feeling rejected or used.32 Wegler’s pettiness strands her back in the emotional cesspool. When Hugh comes by later to do some repair work, Carmela sinks into despair at the realization that, “Whatever I say, whatever I do, because I was married to a man like Tony, my motives will always be called into question.”

  Whereas Carmela is hemmed in by other people’s expectations, Tony B’s problems come equally from how much he misses his old life as how much it misses him. He is achingly close to going straight: getting his massage certification, maintaining a relationship with prison pen pal Gwen (Alison Bartlett33), being picked out by his boss Mr. Kim (Henry Yuk) to be the front man for a massage therapy storefront business. All he claims to want is within his grasp, and he has the work ethic to get it. It wouldn’t be a glamorous life like his cousin’s, but it would keep him out of prison, or worse, and it would let him keep doing a thing he fell in love with while he was behind bars. It’s all right in front of him . . .

  . . . until, in an O. Henry–like twist, a drug dealer fleeing the cops throws a bag of cash right at Tony B, and suddenly he has the consequence-free means to live it up for a few days like the wiseguy he used to be. He buys everyone drinks at the Bing, outfits himself in a slick new suit and shoes, and spends hours blowing most of what he has left at the Executive Game.

  At any other time, this might be a memorable adventure he could look back on wistfully whenever he saw the suit hanging in his closet. But it comes right as the massage parlor is about to open, and Tony B is overwhelmed with the need to make it work, both for his own sake and to reward Kim’s faith in him. After a taste of Mob life, going straight feels suddenly very difficult, and the stress builds and builds until he releases it in a violent explosion against Kim that leaves his former employer bloodied and a koi from the parlor’s pond flopping around on the floor.34 There are three fish out of water in this scene: the koi, Kim, and Tony B. And a fourth in the episode as a whole: Carmela, who had a brief but blissful stay in the tweedy world of letters.

  Tony Soprano is barely in this episode—physically, at least. He pops up a few times to argue with AJ and with Carmela over AJ’s education, but mostly he casts a shadow over both of the hour’s main characters, representing the past that Carmela can’t escape, and that Tony B realizes he doesn’t want to escape. In the closing scene, the two Tonys dine at Vesuvio, and Tony B belatedly agrees to run the used-airbag scam Tony had arranged for him. “It’s hard doing business with strangers,” says a delighted Tony.

  “IN CAMELOT”

  SEASON 5/EPISODE 7

  WRITTEN BY TERENCE WINTER

  DIRECTED BY STEVE BUSCEMI

  Happy Birthday, Mister President

  “She made my father give my dog away.” —Tony

  In the opening scene of “In Camelot,” Tony and Janice make peace over the argument they had when Junior went missing during “Where’s Johnny,” and the siblings reminisce about the past. Tony’s beloved childhood dog Tippy comes up, and Janice is stunned to realize that even as a middle-aged man, Tony still believes that Tippy went to the country to live out the rest of his days after developing worms, when clearly he was put to sleep.

  The truth about Tippy will prove more complicated, as Tony learns over the course of the hour that Livia hated the dog, so Johnny Boy gave it to his mistress Fran Felstein. But Tony’s shock at the mere suggestion that Tippy was euthanized, when Janice and we know what a cynic he is about life and death,35 is one of many blind spots that will be revealed in “In Camelot.” We see the ways that Tony, Christopher, and Junior have learned to ignore fundamental aspects of their lives in order to function, and how painful it can be when the blinders are taken off.

  Much of the episode revolves around Tony bumping into Fran (Polly Bergen36) while visiting his father’s grave after an aunt’s funeral. Tony remembers her as “the lady from Bamberger’s, from the fur department,” and it’s clear that Johnny Boy’s affair with her was no more a secret than most of the mistresses in Tony’s era are. Rather than being ashamed, Tony, who’s had many goomars of his own, is excited to spend time in the company of a woman who knew his father so well, and held a prominent place in his own youthful imagination.

  But as Tony gets to know Fran, and attempts to do right by her by making Hesh and Phil Leotardo37 pay the cut of the race track Johnny Boy left her, he’s also forced to face some truths he’s avoided about his own past. Dr. Melfi’s questions about Fran keep confronting him with realizations he’d rather suppress. It’s not just that Tippy wound up living with Fran because Livia didn’t want the dog around, or that Fran conjures mixed associations when she dons Tony’s JFK captain’s hat to imitate Marilyn Monroe’s performance of “Happy Birthday.” All the layers of Tony’s discomfort combine in Fran’s dance, a peerless example (by Bergen) of an actor selling the joke without seeming to be in on it, as well as a peak performance moment by James Gandolfini. It’s clear that this combined evocation of the Camelot-era ’60s and unwanted glimpse of his father’s love life does turn Tony on, and that even beginning to admit this makes him so distressed that he falls into a stupefied daze.

  In therapy, he denies being attracted to Fran, saying she’s old enough to be his mother, which leads Melfi to hit him with a pricelessly smug expression. Tony, mortified, insists he never wanted to do that to his mom. As he’s done so many times, he’s misunderstanding the Oedipus complex again, seemingly on purpose; refusing to fully understand it allows him to avoid confronting what it means for his relationshi
ps with women. Melfi later gets him to recall how Johnny Boy was absent the night Livia38 miscarried a post-Barbara pregnancy because he was catting around with Fran. For so long, Tony has viewed Livia as the alpha and the omega of all the misery in his life, lamenting all she did to Johnny Boy, and to him, never examining the effect his father’s behavior had on mother and son. Melfi tries her hardest to get Tony to look at the full picture of his childhood and recognize that, even if Livia was a monster, she didn’t become that in a vacuum—that she had help from the abusive and unfaithful man she lived with. But he can’t accept that, because to acknowledge that Johnny Boy was a neglectful and destructive husband and father would require Tony (whose behavior is so similar) to admit that he is, too—and that this aspect of Soprano family history is repeating itself.

  He’s right on the precipice of taking Melfi’s advice to forgive Livia and move forward, but within seconds, he’s back to blaming his mother for everything. He can’t admit that Livia wasn’t the source of all his pain, just as he can’t acknowledge how small and shabby Fran’s life seems, given the legend he’d built around her in his mind. The episode ends with Tony at the Bing, regaling Artie, Sil, and Tony B with exaggerated stories about Fran’s affair with JFK: he has to make her seem more important than she was so Johnny Boy’s affair with her seems like a thing Johnny couldn’t resist: What was he gonna do? This was a woman so amazing, the president wanted her all to himself!