Diss Fing of Ours

James Gandolfini was the last victim of Tony Soprano. In the pilot of The Sopranos, which aired a little more than twenty-five years ago, the titular mob boss was a heavyset but active and playful man. By the last season, he was obese and exhausted — as, of course, was Gandolfini.

Method acting? To some extent. But to some extent it also had to be the consequences of the performance. The stress of the role inspired long, mysterious absences from the set and a dependence on drugs and booze. Of course, I’m sure that other mental health issues were involved. But the weight of Gandolfini’s job must have played a part. “You’ve got no fucking idea what it’s like to be number one,” Tony tells his second-in-command Silvio Dante: 

Every decision you make affects every facet of every other fucking thing. It’s too much to deal with almost. And in the end you’re completely alone with it all.

But Gandolfini had also brought Soprano to life — indeed, to something as close to agelessness as popular culture can withstand. The Sopranos is as beloved today as it was twenty years ago.

The appeal of the show — like the appeal of anything memorably good — is multi-faceted. It is extremely funny — and, somehow, funny without compromising its dramatic qualities. The intervention staged over Tony’s dimwitted nephew Christopher’s drug addiction serves its purpose in terms of character development while also being hilarious — from Silvio’s studiously petty complaint about Christopher being found with his head in the toilet bowl (“disgusting”) to the old school gangster Paulie Walnuts’ facial expression when Christopher’s girlfriend mentions the addict’s impotence. The humour emerges naturally from the characters rather than depending on too much blatant farce.

It has a nostalgic appeal. One of the main themes is the decline of the mafia — mirroring the decline of American community. In one of the late scenes, Butchie, a New York rival of Tony Soprano’s, is talking on his phone as he bumbles down the street. At the end of a heated conversation, he puts the phone down and sees that he has drifted out of Little Italy and into Chinatown — poignantly evoking the decline of the neighbourhood and the disorientation of modern life.

The creators could not have foreseen it, but the show also feels nostalgic because it is so pre-Internet. The Internet existed, of course, but it barely intruded on the plot (now, mafiosos prostitute women online and make millions from Internet sports gambling). Tony Soprano looks more disgusted when he sees his son chatting online than when he hears about one of his soldiers beating a woman to death. (“I come home and he’s sitting on the computer in his fucking underwear, wasting his time in some chit chat room, going back and forth with some other fucking jerk-off, giggling like a little schoolgirl.” Tony Soprano would not have had much time for Twitter.)

Everything on the show is intensely physical — the violence, the sex and, of course, the gabagool, provolone and vinegar pepper sandwiches. It is also extremely social. Few conversations happen on the phone, never mind over text or instant messaging. It appeals to us, then, in our atomised and online age, where so much experience is mediated through a screen. The ridiculousness of this, given the barbarities of the show, does not make it less true.

The appeal of The Sopranos is contradictory as well as multi-faceted. There’s vicarious fun in seeing Tony and his goons hang out all day at the strip club and the pork store, cracking jokes and sharing stories, even when we know that the seething mistrust between them could erupt in bloodshed at any time. There’s a righteous thrill in seeing Soprano curb stomp a mobster who harassed his daughter, even when we know he has betrayed and endangered his family more than anyone. 

There are surface-level thrills, but also moral depths. It has been reported that the creator, David Chase, was annoyed by how much viewers liked Tony despite the character being obviously evil. This is kind of ridiculous, if true. How can people like someone who kills men who double cross him, sleeps with beautiful women and spends all day eating fine Italian food? How indeed.

But the moral, even moralistic, elements are there. An important scene is when Soprano’s hypocritical wife Carmella visits a psychiatrist. She expects to be enabled in her rationalising of her lifestyle (“I thought psychiatrists weren’t meant to be judgemental”). “Many patients want to be excused for their current predicament because of events that occurred in their childhood,” sneers the psychiatrist — echoing David Chase’s real opinions. “Take only the children, what’s left of them, and go,” he says. “One thing you can never say is that you haven’t been told.”

The show lays out all of the influences on evil: the childhood trauma, the bad examples, the economic incentives. But the characters almost always have a choice — to do what is right or to seek pleasure and protect their livelihoods. For all that the portrayal of Catholic life in the show is hardly flattering, there is something very Catholic to that.

Tony dies in the final scene. Sorry — there’s no room for controversy there. Yes, the screen cuts to black just before a shot is fired. But the logic of the show is directed precisely, even elegantly towards his death. He has lost almost all his closest allies. New York is being run by Butchie, who hates him and whose life he has threatened. His killing of his rival mob boss Phil Leotardo led to Phil’s head being crushed in front of his family — an insult that would make Tony’s death before his loved ones seem natural. He is about to be indicted — where he could pose a risk to his fellow mobsters. He’s as dead as deli meat.

Except he isn’t, of course, because The Sopranos lives on — entertaining and appalling, as human life has always been and will always be.