This month, I became a bit more like most people I know: I watched the
entire series of The Sopranos. At the
very end of the final series, Dr Melfi realises that after years of one-to-one
sessions, she has done nothing more than enable Tony, that his sociopathic
personality is beyond therapy. And so, after
eighty-six hours of watching him shark his way through seven years of his life,
we realise that Tony is little more than a two-dimensional thug whose main
motivation is instant gratification (food, alcohol, sex, gambling, consumer
goods) and keeping his family relatively happy. As David Thomson suggests, in
his largely negative assessment of the show, it’s a far cry from the complexity
of Michael Corleone.
But perhaps Thomson
is missing the point. Of course, Tony is shallow: he is chiefly defined by what
he owns and the money he makes and the simple code of omerta he follows. The
packets of money that his cronies give him help finance Tony’s high-rolling lifestyle,
help make him attractive to a string of much younger women, help him buy
favours from various associates, help him purchase the tokens that keep his
wife tolerant of his behaviour and his son and daughter relatively quiescent.
It’s a simple world
in which people can be easily bought, including Tony’s main enabler, his wife
Carmela. She prioritises her immediate family over the Christian principles
with which she was raised even though she has sharp pangs of guilt about the
source of the money she has used to furnish their enormous house and to finance
their children’s educations. Despite her
misgivings, like the other mob wives, she plays the role of the attentive,
pampered housewife who doesn’t get ‘mixed up’ in her husband’s ‘business’
despite the violent deaths of friends of the family and the money and guns she
finds hidden in the house. When she
temporarily separates from Tony, the issue that causes the rupture is Tony’s
womanising, not the thuggery and racketeering that finances her lifestyle and
which no one wishes to talk about.
It’s painful to
watch her return to Tony in exchange for his assistance in helping her buy a
plot of land to start her career as an estate agent, but it is also grimly
inevitable as she is just as shallow and self-serving as Tony. Their son AJ ends up doing much the same
thing. He is about to join the army, after
expressing his doubts about the corrupted ways of the world, but then accepts Tony’s
counter offer of a position as executive producer on a film financed by mob
connection Little Carmine. These are sharp reminders of the various compromises
we make, and how we allow malpractice and corruption to thrive when it doesn’t
impinge negatively on (or even improves) our own lives. This is why tyrants can
thrive where ‘good’ people live.
For all its bloodletting, The Sopranos is essentially
a jet-black comedy, a satire saturated in the cynicism of its times in which nothing
ever really changes. By the end, Tony has become a major target for the
Brooklyn family and several of his closest henchmen are dead but Meadow is due
to marry (the traditional end to a comedy) and his wife and children are still with
him, sitting around the table, about to eat yet another hearty meal in an
Italian restaurant. The final black-out
leaves the ending to the viewer’s imagination but the scene in which AJ’s
friends, the sons of two of Tony’s associates, punish another boy for his
failure to re-pay a debt by burning off his toes is perhaps the most fitting
conclusion – the cycle of cruelty and selfishness continues.
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