The Sopranos Sessions

by Matt Zoller Seitz

  Numbness is the means to comfort’s end. If you’re numb to morality, to empathy, you can do whatever you want and feel little or no guilt. Comfortable numbness pervades “Kennedy and Heidi.” It’s there in the scene at the hospital where Tony is told that Chris is dead but can’t muster the energy to feign shock or anger. It’s tempting to rationalize Tony’s non-response as a reaction to his physical trauma, but remember, he’s lucid after the accident—lucid enough to abort his first 911 call and murder Christopher21—and he later mentions (incredulously, and perhaps with a glimmer of deep guilt) that he escaped the wreck with no serious injuries. As the episode unfolds, Tony can’t even show a facsimile of authentic shock and grief; the best he can manage is paranoid touchiness about the fact that he’s not dead, and unsolicited anecdotal nuggets. At Chris’s wake, he tells the director of Cleaver about seeing the tree branch juxtaposed with Chris’s daughter’s car seat. His affable delivery is so inappropriate—along with the rest of his autopilot responses throughout the episode—that ironically, it could be interpreted as the behavior of a man in shock. Tony’s expression as he kills Chris is horrifying because it’s the face of a predator acting on instinct: inscrutable, mask-like, comfortably numb. (AJ had a similar close-up in “Walk Like a Man,” while watching the Jasons torture the debtor. It was the most animated AJ had seemed in some time—and the most disconnected from his own emotions.22)

  The Sopranos is Comfortably Numbland. Only a comfortably numb person could begin a condolence call to the survivor of a car wreck as Paulie does, by noting that the deceased had a lead foot. Carmela23 betrays her comfortable numbness by deflecting Paulie’s anger over the fact that she and Tony arrived late to his mother’s/aunt’s funeral. In that same scene, Tony betrays his numbness in a small way, by cutting off Paulie’s legitimate outrage over the Family’s non-attendance (“It’s a fundamental lack of respect and I’m never gonna fucking forget it.”) by reminding him that Tony’s the boss and a very busy man, and Paulie should be grateful that he showed up at all. Comfortable numbness enables men to kill again and again to protect money, property, and reputation. Comfortable numbness allows women like Carmela to live with deep knowledge of their husbands’ viciousness while reassuring themselves that a disinterest in details equals a lack of complicity. Carmela knows Adriana didn’t just “disappear,” but she chooses not to think about it because doing so would cause her discomfort.

  Surprisingly for an episode that spends half its time with Tony staying in a hotel and taking hallucinogens, the only actual dream sequence appears early on, as Tony imagines confessing his past killings to Dr. Melfi. (The dream turns out to be a useful rehearsal, as he later recreates most of his dialogue from it in less self-incriminating fashion.) But the entire episode has the air of a dream, or of Tony’s trip to Costa Mesa.

  Only this time, the imagery isn’t of Purgatory, but the hotter place. Tony thinks he’s going to Las Vegas to clean up Christopher’s unfinished business—and to party away from all the people who expect him to be grief-stricken—but he winds up in Hell instead. He and Chris’s stripper girlfriend Sonya (Sarah Shahi24) have sex, take peyote,25 then head down to the casino floor, where he’s transfixed by a cartoon devil’s head on a slot machine. (It’s a smiling devil, of course, because right now Tony’s enjoying his descent.) After breaking his long losing streak at the roulette table, Tony takes Sonya for a trip into the desert where the rising sun casts everything in a crimson glow. When the red sun flares at Tony for a second, it resembles the white Costa Mesa beacon, which seemed to signify Heaven.

  As he watches the sunrise in the Vegas desert, he is as full of joy as we’ve ever seen him.

  “I get it!” he shouts. “I GET IT!”

  But he doesn’t. Any righting of this universe’s moral scales will be incidental. Tony’s been living an expedient life for too long. If he was going to change, he would have done it. He’s been going down this road forever, with too many close calls to count. Each time, he hears some version of Heidi and Kennedy in his head, Kennedy saying, “Let’s go back,” and Heidi saying, “No.”

  Heidi is driving.

  “THE SECOND COMING”

  SEASON 7/EPISODE 7

  WRITTEN BY TERENCE WINTER

  DIRECTED BY TIM VAN PATTEN

  They Are the Bus

  “Where did I lose this kid? What did I do wrong?” —Tony

  “The Second Coming” offers an interpretation of Tony’s bellowing “I GET IT!” at the end of “Kennedy and Heidi” in one of his sessions with Melfi:

  Tony: All I can say is, I saw, for pretty certain, that this, everything we see and experience, is not all there is.

  Melfi: What else is there?

  Tony: Something else.

  [Melfi stares, nonverbally pushing for him to elaborate.]

  Tony: That’s as far as I’m gonna go with it. I don’t fucking know.

  Melfi: Alternate universes?

  Tony: You’re gonna be a fucking comedian now?

  Melfi: I’m not.

  [Tony pauses, nods.]

  Tony: Maybe. . . . This is gonna sound stupid, but I saw at one point that our mothers are the bus drivers. No—they are the bus. See, they’re the vehicle that gets us here. They drop us off and go on their way. They continue on their journey, and the problem is that we keep trying to get back on the bus. Instead of just letting it go.

  Melfi: That’s very insightful.

  Tony: Jesus, don’t act so surprised.

  [Long pause.]

  Tony: You know, you have these thoughts, and you almost grab it, and then, pffft.

  That’s Tony in a nutshell—always pushing toward some realization greater than what his relatives, colleagues, and friends can muster, but invariably coming up short. In Walker Percy’s novel The Moviegoer, the narrator touched on this dynamic. When he was on the battlefield in Korea in 1951, pinned to the ground and staring at a dung beetle crawling around in leaves, he likewise realized there was something else out there, something beyond what we can see. And then he forgot about it. He periodically remembers that he had that epiphany—every few pages of the novel’s first chapter, in fact, and many times thereafter—but then he gets drawn into what he calls the “everydayness” of life, the familiar, comforting, numbing routines, and he forgets again. Unlike Tony, he has a developed enough psychological vocabulary to phrase his sensations more precisely—and even feel a bit smug about it, his narration lording it over the businessmen and working stiffs who lack his sophistication, his sense that there’s Something Else Out There—but in the end, he and Tony are in the same predicament, the predicament we’re all in, whether or not we realize it or care to admit it. Changing one’s essential nature—one’s entire world view—is not easy, even when, like Tony, you’ve suffered (and inflicted) trauma on an unimaginable scale, and have immediate life-or-death reasons for making a major change.

  Tony tells Melfi that he knew he had a golden moment after Junior shot him, and that he let it slip away; the implication is that his Las Vegas trip was a half-assed attempt to create a new chance for epiphany. But is such a thing possible, for Tony or anyone else? Especially when it’s just so easy to dwell on old grudges and feuds—to keep stewing in the juices, like the steak Christopher was cooking in “Walk Like a Man,” long after the flame’s turned off?

  Phil is still after Tony about the ancient murder of his brother Billy; he makes a not-so-veiled reference to it when he says of Chris’s widow that grief takes longer the closer the dead person was to you. AJ botches a suicide attempt, then tries to justify it with sob stories from seasons past. Carmela finally unloads on Tony, not only for passing on “the Soprano Curse” to their son, but because she’s tired of hearing about his depression: “You have any idea what it’s like to spend day after day with somebody who is constantly complaining?”

  When talk of AJ’s near-fatal plunge into the Soprano family pool leads some of the other Family captains to acknowledge their own children’s shaky m
ental health, Paulie suggests it’s all the toxins these kids have been exposed to for their entire lives (in an episode where Tony’s guys are still dumping asbestos into the Meadowlands26). In this environment, it doesn’t matter when the initial exposure or tragedy was; it stays with you for years, maybe your whole life.

  AJ tries to kill himself—in the pool where Tony’s beloved ducks once represented his desire for a happy family—after too much time studying the W. B. Yeats poem that lends its title to the episode. Yeats’s bleak outlook on the future of civilization—“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”—applies to this whole season. The center of Tony’s world—the men he loved and trusted most—is coming undone. Bacala. Junior. Paulie. Hesh. Chris. Either humiliated or marginalized or dead at Tony’s hands. The episode after killing his surrogate son, Tony barely gets home in time to save his actual son’s life, in one of the more harrowing sequences the show’s ever done.

  And then there’s Phil. If you locked Phil and Paulie in a room together, whose air of entitlement and martyrdom would suffocate the other one first? But where Paulie’s too dumb and relatively low-ranking to cause much pain and suffering through his woe-is-me routine (save to the odd civilian like Minn Matrone or Jason Barone), Phil is just clever enough and far too powerful to be dismissed. His man Coco (Armen Garo) would never be confident enough to sexually harass Meadow, the daughter of a boss—even of Jersey—unless he knew Phil had his back. Back in “Stage 5,” Phil told Butchie he was done with compromises, and here he explains to Tony—who’s never done any significant prison time—that in the can, “compromise” meant, at best, getting a very pale imitation of what you wanted: grilled cheese on a radiator instead of manicotti, masturbating into a tissue instead of sex with a woman. Phil won’t compromise on the asbestos deal because he’s itching for a war with Tony—a war he’s willing to wage only because of his huge manpower advantage. (Witness the way he hides from Tony and Little Carmine in the little turret of his suburban castle; he’s a coward at heart.)

  But Tony’s reaction to AJ’s averted suicide mimics the dynamics of his post-shooting and post-Vegas reactions. He does what’s right by diving in to save his son. Then he reverts to macho type, berating AJ for his stupidity and weakness and perhaps resenting the vulnerability it made Tony feel. Then he turns nonjudgmental, purely empathetic. He cradles his weeping son and cries with him (maybe the most heartrending moment in the entire series, sharply acted by both James Gandolfini and Robert Iler). But then he reverts again, with both Melfi (admitting he despises AJ’s sensitivity, his weakness) and Carmela (pushing her into an argument that pivots on who’s genetically responsible for AJ’s depression; blame he shifts, later with Melfi, to Carmela for “coddling” AJ). Here Tony admits his depression, and his family history of it, more frankly than at any other point in the show. But he ultimately pulls back, staunches his bleeding feelings, and tries to soldier on, a gangster Gary Cooper.

  Melfi’s own therapist, the smug Dr. Kupferberg, tells her of a study suggesting not only that sociopaths can’t be helped by traditional “talk therapy,” but that it can make them worse by helping them sharpen their skills at lying and justifying their worst traits. As omniscient viewers of the TV show, we know that Kupferberg has a point, that Tony usually lies too much to get anything valuable out of Melfi, and that he frequently uses her to map out strategy. Most times, he’s scamming her, which is why he’s able to spot AJ’s lame excuse-making in that endless family session with Dr. Vogel (Michael Countryman).

  But Tony—who’s not even bothering to hide his newfound Livia-ness with multiple “Poor you!”s—does have the occasional moment of insight, as with his mothers-are-buses metaphor. Only someone with Livia for a parent would view motherhood that way, but the Family functions as a bus, too, one that everyone’s either afraid or incapable of staying off for long.

  Meadow reveals that she’s dating another son of a wiseguy (Patrick Parisi, whom Patsy had earlier acknowledged “can be a moody prick sometimes”) and has now given up on med school in favor of becoming a lawyer—two choices guaranteed to keep her involved in her father’s lifestyle in some way. (Meadow being Meadow, she lets the man in her life talk her into it.)

  Meadow had her chance to get off the bus for good, but instead she’s inching toward a lifetime bus pass. Carmela had two chances—first when Dr. Krakower’s second opinion told her to leave Tony, then when she actually threw him out—and both times she couldn’t do it. Vito drove home to his own death, so great was the pull of his old life. Adriana couldn’t leave Christopher and died because of him. Chris in turn couldn’t leave Tony, and now he’s gone to Hell for him.

  Getting back to Yeats, one of the lines that transfixes AJ is the notion that “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” On this show, “best” is a relative term, but there’s no lack of contenders for “worst.” And they’re all filled with their own destructive, passionate intensity, even if what made them passionate happened so long ago that—like the Israeli–Palestinian conflict that vexes AJ so—they can’t remember how the fire got started. But so long as those juices keep flowing, they’ll keep cooking.

  AJ’s depression was, in every sense, a wake-up call. His long-delayed “loss of innocence” about his father’s true nature, his father’s business, dovetails with his sudden overwhelming awareness of all the evil and stupidity in the world—thousands of years of religious and ethnic feuds, how the profit motive trumps ethics and results in toxins being sprayed on food. “Depressed?” Dr. Vogel asks him. “How can anybody not be, when everything is so fucked up?” AJ replies.

  His deep distress is mirrored by Tony’s own dawning sense that his entire universe is decaying beyond repair, that he’s helpless before realities he’s only begun to acknowledge. Better to withdraw, ease back in the passenger seat, let Heidi drive. You believe, even hope, that some revelation is at hand; then you remember Tony’s face as he pinched Christopher’s nose shut: a gaze as blank and pitiless as the sun. Maybe the center holds just fine.

  “THE BLUE COMET”

  SEASON 7/EPISODE 8

  WRITTEN BY DAVID CHASE AND MATTHEW WEINER

  DIRECTED BY ALAN TAYLOR

  Leadbelly

  “End times, huh? Ready for the rapture?” —Agent Harris

  So much for anticlimaxes.

  After teasing—or threatening?—a war with New York all the way back to the HUD-scam beef in season four, The Sopranos finally delivers it in spades with the superb, scary, thrilling “The Blue Comet.”

  It is, unsurprisingly, a rout for New York, with Phil’s guys murdering Bobby and putting Silvio into a seemingly permanent coma, while the only people Tony’s guys are able to take out are their own turncoat Burt Gervasi and, in a case of mistaken identity, Phil’s mistress and her Phil-lookalike father. It’s an orgy of Mafia mayhem best characterized by a line from Ray Liotta’s Goodfellas narration: real greaseball shit.

  Tony even loses his other closest advisor in a bloodless but painful bit of business: Dr. Melfi, having taken Elliot’s advice (and the study about talk therapy and sociopaths) to heart, fires him as a patient.

  His inner circle gone, Phil’s men still out looking for him, Tony ends the episode hiding out with what’s left of his army, clinging to the assault rifle Bobby gave him for his birthday, literally gone to the mattresses. It’s the worst spot we’ve ever seen him in, at the worst possible moment, with only one chapter of his story to go.

  Earlier, after Silvio is gravely wounded in the Bing parking lot, while Patsy flees into the woods, Phil’s button men cause an accident involving a motorcyclist, prompting the second of two “Run away! Run away!” reaction shots from a gawking crowd we’d assumed had gone inside for safety’s sake. This is a good, mean joke—in the spirit of that cutaway to the girls driving the car that caused the accident in “Kennedy and Heidi,” but with an undertone of audience criticism. The crowd outside the Bing runs like Tokyo extras fleeing G
odzilla, then comes back to watch again, their rubbernecking impulse made plain when a gangland hit is followed by a car wreck.

  Bobby Bacala’s death is a companion to that Bing joke. He gets shot in a model train shop while coveting a scale model of a defunct train car that titles the episode. The prized toy is a very busy little metaphor. On an obvious level, it stands for any nostalgic impulse the gangsters have ever demonstrated; the lionizing of the Good Old Days when gangsterism supposedly had rules; Tony’s criticizing the ongoing pussyfication of the American white man, and asking, “Whatever happened to Gary Cooper?” (For all his delusions, Paulie sees the past more clearly, remarking in a gravely distressed tone that he survived the New York gang wars of the ’70s by “the skin of my balls.”)

  Also, Bobby’s execution is intercut with a model train diving off a broken trestle bridge, which seems like a too-obvious Godfather borrowing (a murder intercut with something mundane) until you remember Phil’s contemptuous earlier statement implying that the Sopranos aren’t even a real family, but a pygmy clan that needs to be wiped out. They’re scale models of gangsters, and Phil intends to smash them like a toy train set. As he crushes them, it’s difficult to muster much sympathy for the vanquished because Chase has exposed their selfishness unmercifully. Thanks to the ever-more-conspicuously nasty behavior exhibited this season, often by characters we might otherwise be inclined to identify with (like Bobby becoming colder after making his bones), it’s hard to get too choked up over the destruction (and self-destruction) of Tony or the members of his blood and crime families. The series has underlined, italicized, and boldfaced the fact that they’re all killers or tacit enablers of killers. As we watch them go down, we might as well be watching a toy train derail.