Silvio, reluctantly stepping into the boss’s shoes, warns his wife not to ask self-interested questions about the future; but still she asks, and Sil listens. Bobby Bacala presses him to rule on how to distribute Junior’s former proceeds, then arrives at Sil’s house the next morning as he’s being loaded into an ambulance following a respiratory attack, whining, “I didn’t hear from you!” Slimmed-down Vito unsubtly bends Larry Boy Barese’s ear about Vito being Tony’s obvious successor, and collaborates with Paulie Walnuts, his partner in a robbery of Colombian drug dealers, to avoid giving Tony’s Mob-mandated kick-up to Carmela. When Tony unexpectedly awakes from the coma, they cobble a bag of cash and hand it to Carm, making a big show of their generosity.
For that matter, Tony’s exit from Costa Mesa is spurred on in part by the sound of Paulie’s selfish drone, as the silver-haired capo blathers on about himself until Tony goes into cardiac arrest. Afterward, when the big boss is awake but barely functioning, Chris stops by to tell Tony he expects him to invest in Chris’s first venture as a movie producer, a digital horror flick about an eviscerated mobster who reassembles himself and kills his killers with a meat cleaver.10 Grotesquely invoking the memory of Adriana—whom Christopher himself gave up as a snitch—he says, “You owe me this.”
The Keystone Kops antics of Silvio and company in Tony’s absence—which includes Paulie taking a shot to the groin, a paranoid Vito anxiously gnawing on carrot sticks, and Sil being forced to conduct business while he’s trying to go to the bathroom and read the Star-Ledger—illustrate how desperately these guys need Tony. But they also serve as a welcome respite from the strangeness of the Costa Mesa scenes, and occasionally bleed into them, as in the surreal bit where salesman Tony hears Paulie’s voice droning through the walls.
The longer Tony stays in Costa Mesa, the more real his Kevin Finnerty identity seems. The monks from “Join the Club” sue him for his shoddy work on their heating system, in a twist recalling North by Northwest so thoroughly that one wonders if there’s a Kevin Finnerty at all—or, as Tony asks the hotel bartender, “Is it possible I am Kevin Finnerty?” If we’re thinking of Finnerty as salesman Tony’s evil doppelgänger—when Tony asks if he really looks that much like Finnerty, one of the monks says, “To a certain extent, all Caucasians look alike”—then perhaps this meek, law-abiding version of Tony is starting to comprehend that the real him is a man who’s done far worse than Finnerty has done to the monks.
An invitation to a Finnerty family reunion that he finds in his borrowed briefcase provides an opportunity to confront his counterpart, but the man who greets him outside the Inn at the Oaks has a different if very familiar face: it’s Tony B, or at least a man played by Steve Buscemi, smiling and polite as he nudges Tony toward his final destination.
“Your family’s inside,” Tony B insists. “They’re here to welcome you. You’re going home.”
He almost goes in. It seems so easy, so welcoming, to simply move on and leave behind all his concerns from the life of either Tony Soprano. But he doesn’t. Earlier, Paulie’s complaining voice from the real world nearly killed him; here, Meadow’s voice appears over the sound of salesman’s Tony’s much younger daughter, both girls pleading for their daddy to come home.
The sounds of Carmela’s voice and “American Girl” weren’t enough, but Meadow (who, as Carmela points out to Melfi, didn’t choose this life in the way Carmela did) and the clear threat posed by the portal to the Inn (containing another silhouetted woman who, like in the nightmare from “Calling All Cars,” evokes Livia) are enough to finally shock Tony—our Tony, who has a thick accent, a long line of mistresses, and even longer line of thugs and killers who work for him—back to life.
Supposedly the dead know just one thing: that it’s better to be alive. But the episode’s closing scene suggests otherwise. As Carmela tends to her dazed, barely communicative husband, he doesn’t look like a man who’s happy to be here.
“THE FLESHY PART OF THE THIGH”
SEASON 6/EPISODE 4
WRITTEN BY DIANE FROLOV & ANDREW SCHNEIDER
DIRECTED BY ALAN TAYLOR
Kung Fu
“Supposed to be dead. Now I’m alive. I’m the luckiest guy in the whole world. Listen, after this, from now on, every day is a gift.” —Tony
As Tony exits the hospital, he hears church bells and chirping birds, notices children going home from school, and feels the sun on his face. He grabs Janice’s arm and insists that he is a changed man who will no longer take this life for granted. Janice, relieved that her little brother has survived this ordeal, indulges him for half a second, then goes to get her car, treating this epiphany as a speed bump on the road to Tony being Tony again. Given what we know about this family, is she wrong?
Janice is the ideal audience for Tony’s newfound wisdom. Her life has been a never-ending pantomime of metamorphosis: she’s been the yoga-loving hippie Parvati, an imperious Mob bride-to-be, a born-again Christian folk singer, Ralphie’s sexually adventurous mistress, and Bobby’s doting wife. She changes her name, her wardrobe, even her manner of speech, but remains an insufferable narcissist. And she knows herself more deeply than she would ever admit to Tony or anyone else. That’s why she’s so quick to shrug off this improved version of her brother, despite his seeming sincerity.
Which Soprano is right?
First, let’s ponder the cynical Janice view: Tony thinks he wants to change, but is already much more himself than he recognizes. He’s slowly recovering from an incident that should have killed him. He’s talking a good game, chatting up the visiting evangelicals and the friendly scientist down the hall, telling a nurse he doesn’t feel like his old self. And yet he’s sneaking out of the hospital for stogie breaks, getting chesty with Phil Leotardo and basically ruining the life of the Barone family so he can protect his own interests by keeping his no-work job after one of Phil’s guys buys the company. When he forgives the paramedic for picking his pocket (assuming the guy really did it), it feels like a pose he’s trying on.
Everyone has a selfish agenda, it seems. Tony’s being friendly to Janice’s narcoleptic ex, Aaron, a man he once threw food at during a Thanksgiving dinner, because he’s looking to acquire a Get Out of Purgatory Free card. The manager of rap star Da Lux (Lord Jamar) is happy his client got shot because it’ll boost record sales (and his cut). Hesh’s daughter is fond of born-again Christians, but only because they support Israel. The health insurance rep smiles and flirts with Tony, but she just wants him off the company books.
And here’s Paulie Walnuts, who receives the kind of information that should fundamentally alter his sense of self—that the dying nun he thought was his aunt is really his biological mother, and Nucci the aunt who took him in to protect her sister’s reputation—and responds with the same woe-is-me, the-world-owes-me-ice-cream-cake attitude he displays in the best of circumstances. He blames his own mother for the crime of raising him, and Jason Barone (Chris Diamantopoulos) for the bigger sin of having a biological mother who loves him more than she loves life itself. (The $4,000 a month shakedown he inflicts on Jason equals the cost of keeping Nucci in Green Grove.)
About the only person who’s not blatantly looking out for number one is Bell Labs retiree John Schwinn (Hal Holbrook11), so of course he suffers a fate worse than death: a man who loves to talk (and is good at it) robbed of the ability to speak.
And now, evidence for the optimist’s view of the capacity of Tony and the people around him to experience real, enduring change:
1. The repeated invocation of the Ojibwe saying, mysteriously posted on Tony’s hospital room bulletin board: “Sometimes I go about in pity for myself, and all the while, a great wind carries me across the sky.” It suggests that Tony, like most people, is so preoccupied with his own selfish concerns that he fails to take a larger view of life, to see himself as one atom in what Deadwood creator David Milch once called “the larger human organism.” The “great pity” part gently mocks Tony’s (and our) fixat
ion on the visible part of life—the first-person aspect that we experience as individuals—while insisting there are larger forces at play, like destiny, fate, God, or some other mystical noun.
2. The second, third, and fourth episodes of this season contain more allusions to morality, spirituality, and eternal rewards than any three previous consecutive Sopranos hours. Besides Carmela’s hospital bed apology and Tony’s adventures in Coma Land, we’ve seen numerous appearances by characters who represent some version of a holy man expressing a vision of life that goes beyond self-interest. Tony’s Coma Land ramblings put him face to face with monks whose lives he’d literally made more hellish via a defective heating system. Among other theological ambassadors, “The Fleshy Part of the Thigh” features Aaron’s born-again evangelist friend, Pastor Bob (Rob Devaney), who was once addicted to cocaine and strippers; Paulie’s biological mother (“How could you be a bad girl?” Paulie cries. “You’re a nun!”); a cameo by a clean-shaven Father Phil; and a televised glimpse of David Carradine as Caine, the hero of Kung Fu, arguably the only network action series that doubled as a spiritual journey (Caine was a monk).12
3. Right after Tony’s brush with eternity, Pastor Bob sells him on evangelical Christianity as a way to relate to Christ directly, without the intercession of liturgy. Pastor Bob is sincere, and the show treats his message with respect. But note that his word choice appeals to Tony’s practical side; Bob is a theological salesman offering a prospective customer a better deal, a chance to get his guidance from the source.
4. Even John Schwinn comes across as one more holy man. In a memorable hospital room scene with Da Lux and his posse,13 Schwinn regales Tony with Zen-inflected monologues. Among other things, he says that two boxers fighting on TV aren’t really opponents, and aren’t truly separate—that they’re all part of the same continuum. The perception of individuality, of distinctness and apart-ness, is an illusion, he says: “The shape is only in our own consciousness.”
5. Dinosaurs, dinosaurs, dinosaurs. Carmela14 gives Tony a book about dinosaurs. Pastor Bob tells Tony (in a scene that undercuts his earlier salesmanship) that scientists are wrong, that dinosaurs walked among humans. Perhaps Tony, the twentieth-century gangster, is a kind of dinosaur, a species doomed to extinction by predators (other criminals, the FBI) and by failing to evolve and adapt. But according to the most recent science available as of this writing, dinosaurs didn’t die out entirely; the survivors of the extinction event evolved into birds.15 Is it possible that Tony could evolve into another kind of person, recognizably Tony despite being repentant and law-abiding, just as birds retained certain characteristics of their dinosaur ancestors?
6. The post-coma Tony seems more inclined to forgive and negotiate than hold grudges and fight for every scrap. After demanding $2,000 in cash from the paramedic he accused of ripping him off during a “wallet biopsy,” he declines the cash with a wave of his hand. Later, he accepts Phil Leotardo’s generally unfavorable terms of continued waste management employment with a sigh and a handshake. As Janice predicts, this state of affairs could be temporary, but it’s still startling to witness.
He seems more aware of the world beyond his fevered mind. The combination of near-death experience and nonstop (if unasked-for) spiritual counseling appears to have made him subliminally aware of Schwinn’s continuum. Both the dialogue and the filmmaking support this reading. Leaving the hospital, Tony basks in natural sound that he once would have ignored as background noise. Then, in the magnificent finale, Tony sits in his backyard listening to the wind in the trees, and the camera tracks from left to right over the treeline, echoing a camera move in the Coma World sequence that ended “Mayham.” A crane-down reveals that the treeline isn’t the one in Tony’s backyard, but on the Passaic River, where Paulie Walnuts is about to enforce the terms of Tony’s employment by beating down Jason Barone. The editing and camerawork collapse Tony’s world and Paulie’s, confirming they aren’t separate. The left-to-right treeline pan is repeated a second time, gliding over the trees in Tony’s backyard. Then it’s repeated a third time, panning the treeline over Paulie as he exits the frame in the episode’s final shot.
7. Put that Ojibwe saying into Sopranos language, and what does it say? “Poor you.”
“MR. & MRS. JOHN SACRIMONI REQUEST . . .”
SEASON 6/EPISODE 5
WRITTEN BY TERENCE WINTER
DIRECTED BY STEVE BUSCEMI
Jackals
“If they can make him cry and if he’s that weak, what the fuck else can they make him do?” —Phil
Usually when this many Sopranos characters dress up to get together as appear in “Mr. & Mrs. John Sacrimoni Request . . .,” it’s for a funeral. This time, in theory, it’s for the wedding of Johnny Sack’s daughter Allegra (Caitlin Van Zandt). But by the episode’s end, it feels like a funeral for one boss, a reminder of how close another boss recently came to dying, and the moment when a third, wannabe boss is marked for death. John loses face with his men by crying while his federal escorts cuff him in front of the guests, the still-recuperating Tony fears he looks too weak after he faints on the way into the wedding, and fellow wiseguys spot Vito at a leather bar where he’s gone to exorcise the feelings from a day when he was deep in heterosexual cosplay.
Vito has to play the straight family man more intensely than usual, amid a relentlessly heteronormative celebration of romance. He ponders his wife’s ring while Allegra and her new husband say their vows, can’t stop himself from complimenting Finn again (“And look at this young dentist, all handsome in his Calvin Klein”), and eventually feels so miserable at the lie he’s living that he insists on leaving the wedding early so he can slip away from home to let his true self out.16 The scene at the bar unfortunately winds up evoking a different Al Pacino movie, the cartoonishly homophobic 1980 thriller Cruising, with the image of Vito in leather gear designed to make him look silly after the rest of this season had so effectively made him a darkly complex figure.
But the episode compensates for that with the haunting use of “The Three Bells” by The Browns as Vito pulls up to the motel where he hides out while waiting to see how far the news of his “crime” will spread—a song that’s also heard briefly in the previous episode’s scene where Jason Barone gets educated in exactly what kind of business his father was in. It tells of the life of Jimmy Brown (no relation to The Browns) in three verses covering three major events in his life: birth, marriage, and death. The description of “a hidden valley” resonates with the memory of Tony wandering in Coma Land, as well as with the desire to escape expressed in the stories of Eugene Pontecorvo and poor Vito. The classic Eisenhower-era arrangement with its marzipan harmonizing is a musical time machine, immersing listeners not in actual 1950s America, but in white, middle-class America’s sentimental self-image of that time and place. It’s a dip in the reflecting pool that the country made for itself. The cycles of one man’s life play out as nonjudgmental recitation of facts, each accompanied by a ringing bell17 and a congregation’s prayers to a God who may or may not be listening but seems like a decent chap. This is the idyllic American life that Jason Barone probably lived while shielded from the realities that are about to beat his ass on the dock. And it’s the life Vito pretends to live but will never be able to truly appreciate. His façade starts crumbling here because the wedding reminded him that he has yet to find a valley he can call his own.
The episode references the famous Godfather wedding sequence several times, most notably in repeating the idea that a Mafia don has to grant favors on the day of his daughter’s wedding,18 but the feigned displays of strength showcased here are sad facsimiles of Vito Corleone’s.19 The stressed-out Johnny has to jump through legal hoops and spend a fortune (including repaying the U.S. Marshals for the costs of his one-day furlough) not only to give Allegra her special day, but to have what could be his last night out with both his family and his Family. But while Johnny is more powerful and polished than his Garden State counterpart,
he shares Tony’s temper and inability to let go of petty grudges, and Rusty Millio has become to him what Ralphie once was to Tony: an aggravation he wants to expunge. It’s not a particularly smart move; as acting boss, and one easily swayed by events like Johnny’s crying jag, Phil is the bigger threat, and it indebts him to Tony, while also arousing the suspicion that he’s breaking his promise to the U.S. Marshals to not discuss business. Without those unsubtle confabs with Tony, the marshals might not have perp-walked him in front of the wedding party. Instead, he’s mortified, and after lecturing Ginny and his girls20 about staying strong in front of friends and Family, he breaks down, taking Allegra and Ginny with him, and leaves Phil and wiseguys from both Families questioning his manhood and viability as boss.
Johnny’s instantly reduced status isn’t lost on Tony, who was already worried that his own guys think he’s fragile. He collapses briefly from being stuck under the hot sun while negotiating the wedding security line, and conflates that incident and Johnny’s with Melfi:21 “They think you’re weak, they see an opportunity. They’re my friends, a lot of them, but they’re also fucking jackals.” Melfi, in a rare departure for her (perhaps feeling more protective of Patient X after his grievous injury), offers him some direct counsel on how to be a better Mob boss, telling him to “act as if” he’s more confident and physically capable than he is. To do this, he tries the old prison-yard trick of finding a physically impressive opponent—his muscular new driver, Perry Annunziata (Louis Gross), who was once “first runner-up, Mr. Teenage Bloomfield”—to thrash in front of witnesses in Satriale’s back office. Perry makes an easy target not only because he’s an overgrown kid with biceps but no street smarts, but because he’s the only guy hot-headed enough to fight back briefly, making Tony’s victory seem more impressive. Tony lays a beatdown on him for an invented reason, then acts as if long enough to make it to the bathroom, where he pays the price for taxing his injured body by retching into the toilet.
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