The Sopranos Sessions

by Matt Zoller Seitz

  64 Those problems extended to The Sopranos writers themselves, who intended Tony B to stick around for the remainder of the series, only to realize they painted themselves into a corner, and that Tony B had to die after killing Billy.

  65 And steps in rotten eggs, because eggs so often signal death on this show.

  66 Hugh’s old pal Ignatz, who has designed the spec house, is played by Bob Shaw, the series’ longtime production designer.

  67 Another of the show’s innumerable cameos by future stars: Dano would become an indie film sensation in such features as There Will Be Blood, Meek’s Cutoff, and Love & Mercy.

  Season Six

  “MEMBERS ONLY”

  SEASON 6/EPISODE 1

  WRITTEN BY TERENCE WINTER

  DIRECTED BY TIM VAN PATTEN

  The Noose

  “I don’t care how close you are. In the end, friends are going to let you down. Family; they’re the only ones you can count on.” —Tony

  Talk about starting with a bang.

  “Members Only” breaks from The Sopranos’s traditional slow-building intro by jam-packing two hours of plot into sixty minutes and capping the episode with one of its most startling violent acts: defanged, housebound, senile Uncle Junior shoots Tony in the torso at close range. It’s vintage Sopranos, expected yet somehow surprising, and twisted and pathetic rather than superficially exciting. You always figured Tony might get shot again, but not like this. It’s downright humiliating, especially when director Tim Van Patten cuts to a God’s-eye-view shot of fat, bloody Tony lying on the kitchen floor, laboring to hoist his bathroom-scale-certified 280 pounds high enough to grab the wall phone and call 911.

  Heading into what was billed as the final season (but would later be split into two that aired across two years, even if HBO insisted on referring to both as “season six” for contractual purposes), the show’s new-school version of classical filmmaking craft is at an all-time high. Every camera move, shot, cut, and line is charged with a sense of purpose. Van Patten and Winter weave symbolic images and lines into the narrative—elements that confirm the season’s preoccupation with score settling, moral accountability, the need to confront one’s own mortality, and the realization that joining the Mob is a lifetime commitment to evil—without being flashy about it.

  “The bonefish are back in season,” Tony tells Carmela while indulging their marriage-building habit of dining in fancy restaurants. The season’s opening music montage—set to a dance club remix of William S. Burroughs reading fragments of his poem “Seven Souls,” which describes a “director” who “directs the film of your life from conception to death”—shows a bit of a Carmela dream in which she hangs out in the bare wood skeleton of the spec house she’s building on Tony’s dime, and smokes a cigarette with the ghost of Adriana. It’s significant that Tony and Carmela would externalize the idea of a new beginning for their dysfunctional marriage by building a new house. It’s also significant that this house would be contaminated, in Carmela’s dream, by the appearance of a woman who was “disappeared” for daring to go against the Family; and that Carmela would later run afoul of a building inspector because Carmela’s supervisor dad cut costs with substandard material and assumed (wrongly) that Tony’s government connections would get him a pass.

  Not for nothing is the episode’s organizing image a noose. Chase and company seem to be tightening the rope around every character’s neck, forcing them to consider how their crime-funded personal adventures might end. Eugene Pontecorvo tries to leave Mob life and start over in Florida with his wife and kids; upon being told his blood oath will never permit that, he hangs himself in his garage. Van Patten’s camera lingers in wide shot on Eugene’s body as it dangles like the phone receiver Tony can’t grab. As in Macbeth, the finale of Deadwood, and Steven Spielberg’s Munich, the blood from bloody murder leaves a moral as well as physical stain. (The sight of Eugene trying to wipe a blood drop from his cheek after a hit is very “Out, damned spot!”—the result of the sort of act that yokes him to the organization forever.)

  You can view Tony’s shooting as near-death, but also as a chance for rebirth. People who survive this level of trauma sometimes go on to remake their lives. The overhead shot of Tony on the floor of Junior’s kitchen is redolent not just of birth (or rebirth) but of the Hanged Man in the Tarot Card deck: a serene-looking figure suspended upside down from the Living World tree. “This is the card of ultimate surrender,” a Tarot guide summarizes, “of being suspended in time and of martyrdom and sacrifice to the greater good. This is the archetype to meditate on to help break old patterns of behavior and bad habits that restrict you.” But where can Tony escape to? His responsibilities leave him even less maneuvering room than Eugene.

  As Tony once told Dr. Melfi, there are only two outcomes for guys like him: “Dead, or in the can.” For now, everyone will fixate on the bullet he just caught, but this possibility of jail time looms, too. Judging from the sudden death of snitch Ray Curto1 and the revelation that Eugene was a pigeon as well, there are as many rats in this Family as straight-up gangsters.

  That the premiere devotes so much time to the life and death of Eugene, whose outdated wardrobe provides the episode with its title, only adds to the disorientation that kicks off with “Seven Souls” and the Adriana dream.2

  If the audience knew Eugene at all, it was as the tall and skinny guy always seen with Vito in one of the show’s easier running sight gags,3 or perhaps they confused him with Cousin Brian a time or three. Now suddenly he’s at the center of the action, trying desperately to let both Tony and his FBI handlers let him move his family to Florida in a bid to pull his son out of drug addiction, and we’re expected to care about his hopes and dreams in a single hour?

  Amazingly, this deepest of bench plays works, because the story’s not really about Eugene. Yes, all the details are specific to his heretofore unseen life, including the miraculous news of an inheritance, and Robert Funaro effectively sells Eugene’s despair at being trapped. But this story could have been about anybody from a regular to a guest star. It’s about how hard it is for anyone in this life to get out alive, a lesson driven home not only by Eugene dangling from the end of a rope for what feels like hours, but by the agonizing cliffhanger, which leaves Tony on the brink of death partly because he forgot to charge his cell phone.

  The past catches up to Tony throughout. Junior’s dementia has him convinced that Little Pussy Malanga—the man responsible for Tony and Junior’s feud in the pilot, when Tony conspired to prevent Junior from whacking Little Pussy at Vesuvio—is back and out for revenge. When he mistakes Tony for Malanga in the final scene, it’s like the Alzheimer’s is giving Junior a chance to rewrite history, wiping out Malanga and his nephew with one bullet.

  Before the shooting, Junior’s an obvious candidate for Green Grove, but Tony’s still so damaged over what happened when he sent Livia there that he’s completely turned around on the subject. Far from insisting it’s “a retirement community,” now he’s saying the opposite to Melfi and opposing his sisters’ attempt to move Junior. By refusing to do the thing that got him shot at in the first season, he sets events in motion to get shot at again. That, folks, is irony so pure even AJ might be able to recognize it.

  Tony’s centrality to the series’ narrative and themes cloaks him in a kind of plot armor that takes some of the sting out of the cliffhanger, despite Van Patten and Winter’s skillful staging. But the fact that the season gets to such a huge moment of violence so early is an ominous sign of just how close we are to the end.

  As Carmela puts it during her dream, “I’m worried, Ade.”

  Adriana’s ghost assures her, “Everybody’s worried.”

  “No,” Carmela elaborates, “I am worried all the time.”

  And with good reason.

  “JOIN THE CLUB”

  SEASON 6/EPISODE 2

  WRITTEN BY DAVID CHASE

  DIRECTED BY DAVID NUTTER

  Heating Systems
>
  “I mean, who am I? Where am I going?” —Tony

  Once again zigging where the audience expects him to zag, David Chase follows up on Tony’s grisly shooting with . . . another Tony? This one isn’t boss of the Jersey Mob, but a precision optics salesman who speaks with James Gandolfini’s everyday accent. He has a wife who is not Carmela (or at least is not voiced by Edie Falco when we hear her on the phone) and a pair of younger kids. And when, during a business trip to Costa Mesa, California, he has an opportunity to sleep with a fellow traveling salesperson, he loses his nerve, suggesting, “I could even be some other guy tonight and get away with the whole shebang. But no, I blow it.”

  Once again, we are somehow in the realm of two Tonys. Three, really: our man, who is eventually shown barely clinging to life in the ICU; the optics salesman who shares his name; and Kevin Finnerty, a heating salesman who apparently resembles both Tonys and inadvertently swaps briefcases and identities with this alterna-Tony.

  The Tony we know appears at the eleven minute mark, pulling out his breathing tubes and repeating the salesman Tony’s line about wondering who he is and where he’s going.4 Eleven minutes is an eternity in TV storytelling, particularly in the aftermath of such a messy cliffhanger, and it’s easy to imagine the “less yakkin’, more whackin’” contingent grumbling, “Of all the times to do another dream sequence. . . .”

  But is that what this is? The Costa Mesa scenes are laden with symbolism, but they play out more coherently than anything in “Funhouse” or “The Test Dream.”

  What if this is not a dream? What if it’s Purgatory?

  Here Tony’s stuck in Orange County,5 with no way to leave (Purgatory). On one end of town is a shining beacon (Heaven), on the other, a raging forest fire (Hell). Over and over, he stops to assess the worth of his life. Then, having lost his own wallet and all the ID and credit cards needed to prove who he is, he steals the identity (sin) of Kevin Finnerty—a heating salesman who lives in one of the hottest states of the union (Arizona)—checks into another hotel, and falls down a red staircase, at which point he learns he has Alzheimer’s (eternal damnation). While Carmela’s busy in the real world telling him he’s not going to Hell, Tony’s in Purgatory, debating whether to tell his wife this is exactly the fate he has coming to him.

  Granted, it may be splitting hairs to argue that this is a Purgatorial vision rather than a dream. Religious scenarios and dreams employ similar visual language; both bring us back to moral choice, and push us to ask big (often rhetorical) questions. When the Costa Mesa television asks, “Are sin, disease, and death real?,” it flashes an implied answer, a yellow crucifix. (Translation: they are, so watch yourself.)

  This is not a new approach for The Sopranos. In “Funhouse,” a food-poisoned Tony understood the toxic truth about Pussy but couldn’t digest it. Likewise, it hardly seems an accident that Tony sustained injuries to the pancreas, which neutralizes acid, and the gallbladder, which creates bile (he always had anger management issues). Nor does it seem accidental that the risk of sepsis is described as “an infection in the blood,” since lots of other things are “in the blood” of a family, including Alzheimer’s and a propensity for depression or violence (those “putrid” Soprano genes). Also worth noting: a bar patron, making small talk with salesman Tony, name-checks a specific type of car, the Infinity (without end); the bartender jokes, “Around here, it’s dead,” and pronounces “Finnerty” so that it sounds like, “finity” (finite, or limited). Of all the characters to rebuke Finnerty, Chase picks men of God—monks!—and has them be enraged over Finnerty’s installation of a defective heating system. Tony has two job options: heating systems (Hell) or precision optics (clarity of vision).

  But where Tony’s subconscious mind would throw all these symbols into some nonsensical, ever-changing narrative (now Big Pussy’s a fish, now Gloria Trillo’s a TV reporter interviewing Annette Bening, who is both herself and Finn’s mom), what we see in Costa Mesa is both more straightforward and more portentous. It feels like Tony is being judged for his terrible choices, and directed to ponder the loss of identity that landed him in an ICU bed. First he’s transformed into a more innocuous and meek version of himself, then forced to become Finnerty in order to obtain food and shelter, then told by a Costa Mesa doctor that he’ll soon be losing himself altogether due to the Alzheimer’s.

  When asked for his name by the doctor, Tony/Finnerty laments, “What does it matter? I’m not going to know myself soon.”

  This is not merely a medical crisis but a moral and spiritual one. We can attribute these visions to trauma (and perhaps drugs). But it seems wiser to assume that the series, which periodically intimated the existence of other planes of being—remember Pussy in the mirror at Livia’s funeral?—is tipping its hand here, and flat-out telling us that it believes in things the senses can’t verify.

  As both parallel and stylistic counterweight to the Costa Mesa scenes, everything happening in the reality we know better is slightly off—and significantly unvarnished—compared to the show’s usual look and feel. Carmela goes without makeup. Silvio, temporarily in charge, conducts business out of the hospital waiting room (dealing both with fallout from Eugene Pontecorvo’s suicide6 and the captains’ attempts to fill the power vacuum). AJ refers to his father by his full name and talks of murdering Junior,7 Meadow shows more spine than she ever has in standing up to Tony’s imperious surgeon Dr. Plepler (Ron Leibman), and the two siblings have a blunt conversation about how embarrassing they find this situation, and their family in general. This is the The Sopranos, stripped of artifice, every character an open wound just like the hole the surgeons left in Tony’s stomach to help him heal.

  This leads to two jaw-dropping bits of acting from Edie Falco. In the first, Carmela considers the latest report from the doctors and breaks down sobbing in a hospital corridor, as raw as we’ve seen her outside of “Whitecaps.”8 In the second, she plays Tom Petty’s “American Girl,” which she recalls as a recurring theme during a memorable trip from early in their relationship, hoping that the familiar song might help her reach her husband, wherever he is. Over the course of three and a half minutes—in a monologue beautifully designed to rise, fall, and crescendo right along with Petty and the Heartbreakers—her thoughts range from that trip and their carefree early days together, to the lust they used to feel for one another, to regret over her remark in the pilot about Tony going to Hell.

  “That was a horrible thing to say,” she confesses. “It’s a sin, and I will be judged for it. You’re a good father. You care about your friends. Yes, it’s been rough between us. I don’t know, our hearts get so hardened against each other, I don’t know why. But you are not going to Hell. You’re coming back here. I love you.”

  Our last glimpse of Tony, or Finnerty, or whoever he is now, finds him sitting in his hotel room, staring out at the beacon and debating whether to call his wife and give her the news about his condition. Moby’s “When It’s Cold I’d Like to Die” plays on the soundtrack. Like Carmela and all his loved ones back in the real world, Tony wants so badly to reach across time, space, and the barrier between here and there to communicate with them once more. But he can’t do it, and hangs up the phone. This world isn’t done with him yet.

  “MAYHAM”

  SEASON 6/EPISODE 3

  WRITTEN BY MATTHEW WEINER

  DIRECTED BY JACK BENDER

  Complicit

  “Please, let me take that from you. Looks like it weighs a ton.” —Tony B

  “Mayham” is, as the malapropism-inflected title suggests, an episode in which many wild things happen, including a bloody heist run by Paulie Walnuts, asthmatic Silvio cracking under the pressure of being the top guy, Vito plotting a coup,9 and the continuing adventures of Tony/Finnerty in Costa Mesa. Yet the hour’s most important scene is perhaps its most down to earth and familiar: Carmela visiting Dr. Melfi to talk through her feelings about Tony’s condition and the state of their marriage. Poring over her conflicted feeli
ngs toward Tony, Carmela admits that from the very start of their relationship, she knew he was a criminal. But she chose not to think about it. “I don’t know if I loved him in spite of it, or because of it,” she says.

  Throughout the show’s long run, fans were periodically forced to ask themselves that question—but rarely for long. These early season six episodes feel different, and not just because of the focus on previously marginal characters like Vito and Eugene and the long interludes in Costa Mesa. There’s a sense of both the characters and the series reckoning with the morality of their actions, Carmela included.

  She tells Melfi that over the decades, she’d confessed her fears of a compromised life to friends and advisors. And she admits that Tony’s shooting, a local media event, has forced her now-adult children to “face all these years of façadeing.” Then she executes a typical about-face and suggests that Tony’s gangsterism is a speck on the world’s moral radar. Her admissions of guilt, she tells Melfi, are “bullshit, because there are far bigger crooks than my husband.” Melfi keeps mostly silent during, but she does manage to interject what might prove to be the most damning three-syllable word in the show’s history: “Complicit.”

  Complicit in what, exactly? Not just Tony’s life of crime, but also a generalized (and, Chase suggests, very American) tendency to put self-interest ahead of everything and everyone else. To look out for Number One. Except for Melfi, whose Talmudic scrutiny of her patients’ rationalizations makes her Chase’s true dramatic surrogate, every major Sopranos character is supremely selfish, even when they present themselves as compassionate.