The Sopranos S1&2
Only fifteen years behind the rest of the world, I have FINALLY started to watch The Sopranos! Unlike most shows which I missed when they were on, this isn't so much about my ineptness at popular culture. This is about, I know I joke about the Catholic thing, but half of my family is VERY Italian and so seeing that culturally familiar stuff contextualized with awful violence...is not unfair or out of line to show, but I wasn't sure how pleasant it would be to watch? and so I just never went out of my way to seek it out. But last week I went to the library and S1 was just on the shelf and I decided to give it a try, and AM I EVER GLAD I DID.
Chase, from a perspective so petty and absurd I’d know it was personal even if he weren’t admirably open about it, explores the way mental illness is both personal and social. I don’t quite mean nature and nurture, although Tony’s fucked-up childhood (and the chicken-egg question of how stable Livia herself was) is always in plain sight. I’m more interested in the experience of mental illness, both in terms of how having symptoms/diagnoses (whatever those may be) impact the rest of your life, including your relationships with the people to whom you’ve disclosed or been outed. Tony finds out his father suffered from the same mental health issues he does, because for all the loudmouthing, nobody actually shares the shit that might be helpful. Gossip occurs solely for the sake of tightening the web of community tighter and tighter. The usefulness, or even truth, of any information shared is incidental at best. The narrative, the first season especially, explodes this by just fucking talking about it.
This show is an incredibly realistic, responsible look at what the whole experience of Being In Therapy is like. For one, the sessions are truly realistic. But I also liked things like Tony’s initial bluster about how he wasn’t supposed to be there, they were making him come because they couldn’t figure out what the real problem was. QT. (Tony is also a dick who pushes a lot of boundaries and really has no idea how to set his own, ie the whole transference arc where he decides he’s in love with her. I got the feeling that this was the first experience in Tony’s life where he could let something be truly personal, rather than Playing His Role in the community first and foremost, and so he turned it into this all-consuming passion.) The way he casts around for conversational subjects that are anything other than what’s bothering him. His plateaus where he gripes to her about giving up on therapy; the way he's internalized so many of the myths about why peple who get therapy don't "need" it; the way he feels embarrassed and guilty saying something that reflects badly on the people in his life - Tony's a pretty open guy who mostly speaks before he thinks, at least in their sessions, and so I can't say I've said all those things, but I've thought them a lot. The medications aren’t all good for him (lithium, for depression?!)
And oh, yeah, the question of the meds, and of the whole issue of mental illness as chemical. Tony says a thing I’ve certainly thought for a very long time: ‘I wish it was something physical, so I could have it ripped the fuck out.’ But it’s not; like his culture and his past and his environment, his illness is a part of him. And because the existence of an illness, an innate abnormality, is something that they/we don’t so much see as a weakness, as nasty as that deserves to sound. There’s either Acceptable Excuse to be operating sub-optimally, or there’s Unforgivable Failure. The idea of ambiguity is anathema. (To be fair, I'm less sure if this is a cultural thing or if it's the kind of thing you internalize growing up in an environment where everyone's very invested in denial about mental health issues.) Tony projects a little bit onto AJ, though I mostly do believe he’s trying to be fair to the kid, when he gets aggravated at the school saying AJ (a) acted out in school because he has ADHD and (b) should be punished for acting out in school. Punishment is all about shaming and fault, and it’s either justice to do that to someone or it’s not. The idea that setting limits for kids can be developmentally helpful to coping with a permanent or temporary abnormality is just completely outside of his worldview.
And look, I don’t know how much of this is culturally specific and/or me projecting, but I did a lot of cringing in recognition about how everyone around him responds to his being in therapy. It's easier when it's the wise guys being judgmental, or Uncle Junior being old-school appalled and judgmental. But I found myself really pissed at Carmela. Carmela makes a big loud scene about it over, like, three requests from him not to do it, and then she goes and outs him to his awful mother, who turns around and crabs to everyone who will listen about how HIS getting therapy is an affront to HER, because she knows she was abusive and fucked him up.
Seriously, I did not have a good reaction to Carmela, you guys. And it's not Edie Falco, who's amazing, or her charaterization, which is rock-solid. It's me. I am the asshole fanboy who hates the bitch wife. But fuck it! She is so unbelievably insensitive to his problems; she’s (probably subconsciously) absolutely hostile to the idea of privacy. She harasses him for explanations when he’s trying not to have a panic attack in front of people (years after she found out about his diagnosis, mind); she outs him to his mother, and she damn well knows Livia is a manipulative asshole who will use it against him. Even the scene where Tony tells her he’s seeing a therapist and she harasses him about it, over numerous requests to knock it off. “’You’re in therapy? A THERAPIST? Did you tell her about your father?!’ THERAPY: YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG.”
Clearly I empathize with Tony on a lot of levels.
I think what I love the most about Tony, though, is the way the show subtly deconstructs a lot of affable charmer behaviors as being the subtle power plays that they are. Tony brings you coffee; he tells slightly off-color jokes with his wicked little-boy grin; he’s just comfortable enough with you to admit he feels like the sad clown. People fall for this type of boundary-pushing because it’s so subtle, but it is boundary-pushing. If you turn down Tony’s coffee, WHASSAMATTA, you don’t like coffee? Is it the place? The place is okay now, his buddy had a bad cup of coffee there once but that was before they got the new, uh, barista. But okay, you don’t want his coffee, he gets it, he did it wrong, he won’t bring ya no more coffee. Or you do take the coffee to be polite, and he asks you four times if you like that coffee he brought for you, aren't you glad he's so thoughtful? He's like, a sensitive guy. Maybe you laugh a little at the joke because you’re uncomfortable, and he makes a fuss about how he saw you smile and now he’s your co-conspirator in being not quite as uptight as you’re obviously pretending to be; maybe you don’t laugh and you show that you’re uncomfortable and negs ribs you about being uptight; or maybe you tell him that he crossed a line and then you’re the bad guy for making the poor big oaf FEEL BAD about a little joke. Because after all, he’s the sad clown, he admitted that he only jokes around because he hurts so much inside and it was really hard for him to tell you that so obviously you have no right reason to come up with your own interpretation of his behavior.
And I love it. I love it because he’s so damn dangerous because those statements aren’t dishonest. He really did think about which coffee place you’d like, and he hopes you’d like it. He thought the joke was cute, and he wanted to see you smile (and wasn’t consciously thinking about how smiling is a sign of submission; he really wants to think you’re happy). He really is a sad clown; every reminder of his transgressions reminds him of all the times he’s been hurt and wronged (and it’s happened a lot). This is Tony’s world, it’s the skill set by which he survives and keeps other people alive. But that doesn’t negate his overriding urge to control his image at the expense of your boundaries and security.
And again: this is what I grew up with, and I’m uncomfortably sure (a) Chase grew up around it too and (b) he’s extremely uncomfortable (and probably not particularly adept) with these games in a way that feels very familiar to me. I like to pretend that I’m jaded about how everyone plays everyone, but really I think a lot of my social cynicism comes from trying to learn how to be a person in this environment where people are constantly playing this game.
But even with that familiarity, or maybe because of it, I still can’t tell how much Tony is playing people. I don’t know if he was trying to turn Junior against Livia when he says that she used to bag on Ercule, or if he was really surprised and let it slip. I don’t know why he didn’t bother to tell Janice that she possibly saved his life, and at the very least saved him a lot of trouble, when she took Ritchie out of the picture. I can’t bring myself to think his apology to AJ for the “this is my male heir?!” outburst was anything other than sincere.
The show does a great job around the intersection of gendered parenting, mental illness, and childhood abuse. Italian women moved here from a society where they could, in fact, be a society, albeit one where they lacked many options. They had connections in the community, and labor outside of the home. With some exceptions, they were expected to give up the benefits of a wider community but retain all the responsibilities of being women in a culture built on the madonna/whore dichotomy. So there’s this whole population of women with a lot of strength and a lot of energy and a lot of wounded pride, with nowhere to direct it all but down.
I’m not sure I’d say I like Tony's sister Janice, necessarily, but the existence of a middle-aged plus-sized woman who’s not a very nice person as a well-drawn character is....well, I’d say I always support it, but it basically never happens so. The show doesn't sugarcoat her culturally appropriative response to growing up in a toxic home in a toxic culture, but I think the narrative is ultimately very sympathetic to her need to escape. Unlike Tony the male heir, or Barb the pretty princess,* Janice isn't cut out to join the business or be a trophy wife. She has no place, and within a few months of being around her family she pretty much ceases to value her life. Her relationship with horrible Ritchie is as relentlessly realistic as everything else in the show, and I liked that it wasn’t “she has to be a good person for us to care about this.” Like, she doesn’t get with him for good reasons; she thinks she’s consenting to the danger signs. But she still tells Carmela about the gun she lets Ritchie hold to her head during sex, which is done in a believable way on an in-story level and is a really smart encapsulation of that type of dynamic. But Janice is determined to prove she’s not his fool, and so when he finally hits her (and for telling him not to be a homophobic asshole to his son, no less), she kills him.
*[I almost wonder if Johnny really is Barb's biological father? She's much fairer and slimmer than the rest of the family, and Livia's relatively tolerable treatment of her outstrips what you'd expect of the baby (absent other factors, the son is ALWAYS the favorite regardless of birth order). But if Livia felt like she'd gotten one over on Johnny with Barb, then she'd be less inclined to try to assert herself over the little girl.]
The show does a much better job on gender issues than I think I was expecting? Because it’s about the mob, it’s about the old boys’ club. But the female characters are just as diverse and well-drawn as the men, and it passes the Bechdel test with surprising frequency. But what I really loved was how ruthless it was toward the whole masculinity project. A S1 episode pointedly contrasts Uncle Junior’s horror at anyone finding out he goes down on his girlfriend with the menfolk’s brutal rage at Meadow’s sexually abusive soccer coach. Any sexuality that’s not an exercise in the dominance of the white male phallus, you might as well be fanuk.
While that's about gender, it's also about an attitude toward appetite generally that I would imagine you see in a lot of cultural traditions, but which is very pronounced in Italian-American culture. An outsider, I'm realizing now, might've been surprised at the amount and crassness of the body policing that happens in families that are (justifiably) famous for pressing you to mangia, mangia! but they're part and parcel of the same thing. Food is a power play - you're not fat when you eat on MY say-so, but any evidence that you've chosen to eat on your own steam is damning. Just as sex is to be desired as a show of status and no more, food is about the mealtime demonstration of social standing (honored guest, submissive consumer, needed producer).
Livia is awful, just the kind of character I utterly loathe if not handled perfectly, but she’s handled perfectly, and I find the whole thing breathtaking. Livia and Junior start scheming to kill Tony well before Tony and Jun start clashing over the hole in leadership left by the boss. The excuses are that he put Livia in a home, that he’s getting psychiatry; really they’re pissed because they’re going to die and they try to take it out on him. It’s an incredibly sharp encapsulation of the cycle of abuse - feel powerless, try to stomp on someone else’s sense of self. Because Uncle Jun is a mobster, this can follow the terrible logic suggested by the maxim that the power to destroy is the ultimate control.
On a meta-level, I also did a little bit of cringing at the fascination the assimilated Italian-Americans have with the mafiosi. I mean, obviously, I’m watching it, and I’ve put off watching it for this long not because it didn’t appeal (it really did) but because I was worried about...idk, how I would react. Like it (as many of us secretly do to some extent) or don’t (as we all pretend to, and surprise ourselves with how intensely we mean it sometimes), La Casa Nostra is a big part of our ethnic identity, and comes from traditions that far predate Lucky Luciano. Folks in the mafia are the most overt and open about some of the cultural traditions that most of us experience to some degree. This happens in a really interesting way with Melfi, who kind of adopts Tony as her own shadow self, who acts out all the cultural stuff she's repressed in order to climb the professional ladder. And as she indulges, she spirals spectacularly, probably for the first time in her life. It's fascinating to watch.
This post is completely out of control and if you want to skip it and just talk to me about The Sopranos, this is completely okay with me.
This entry was originally posted at http://pocochina.dreamwidth.org/307317.html. Leave a comment here, or there using OpenID.
Chase, from a perspective so petty and absurd I’d know it was personal even if he weren’t admirably open about it, explores the way mental illness is both personal and social. I don’t quite mean nature and nurture, although Tony’s fucked-up childhood (and the chicken-egg question of how stable Livia herself was) is always in plain sight. I’m more interested in the experience of mental illness, both in terms of how having symptoms/diagnoses (whatever those may be) impact the rest of your life, including your relationships with the people to whom you’ve disclosed or been outed. Tony finds out his father suffered from the same mental health issues he does, because for all the loudmouthing, nobody actually shares the shit that might be helpful. Gossip occurs solely for the sake of tightening the web of community tighter and tighter. The usefulness, or even truth, of any information shared is incidental at best. The narrative, the first season especially, explodes this by just fucking talking about it.
This show is an incredibly realistic, responsible look at what the whole experience of Being In Therapy is like. For one, the sessions are truly realistic. But I also liked things like Tony’s initial bluster about how he wasn’t supposed to be there, they were making him come because they couldn’t figure out what the real problem was. QT. (Tony is also a dick who pushes a lot of boundaries and really has no idea how to set his own, ie the whole transference arc where he decides he’s in love with her. I got the feeling that this was the first experience in Tony’s life where he could let something be truly personal, rather than Playing His Role in the community first and foremost, and so he turned it into this all-consuming passion.) The way he casts around for conversational subjects that are anything other than what’s bothering him. His plateaus where he gripes to her about giving up on therapy; the way he's internalized so many of the myths about why peple who get therapy don't "need" it; the way he feels embarrassed and guilty saying something that reflects badly on the people in his life - Tony's a pretty open guy who mostly speaks before he thinks, at least in their sessions, and so I can't say I've said all those things, but I've thought them a lot. The medications aren’t all good for him (lithium, for depression?!)
And oh, yeah, the question of the meds, and of the whole issue of mental illness as chemical. Tony says a thing I’ve certainly thought for a very long time: ‘I wish it was something physical, so I could have it ripped the fuck out.’ But it’s not; like his culture and his past and his environment, his illness is a part of him. And because the existence of an illness, an innate abnormality, is something that they/we don’t so much see as a weakness, as nasty as that deserves to sound. There’s either Acceptable Excuse to be operating sub-optimally, or there’s Unforgivable Failure. The idea of ambiguity is anathema. (To be fair, I'm less sure if this is a cultural thing or if it's the kind of thing you internalize growing up in an environment where everyone's very invested in denial about mental health issues.) Tony projects a little bit onto AJ, though I mostly do believe he’s trying to be fair to the kid, when he gets aggravated at the school saying AJ (a) acted out in school because he has ADHD and (b) should be punished for acting out in school. Punishment is all about shaming and fault, and it’s either justice to do that to someone or it’s not. The idea that setting limits for kids can be developmentally helpful to coping with a permanent or temporary abnormality is just completely outside of his worldview.
And look, I don’t know how much of this is culturally specific and/or me projecting, but I did a lot of cringing in recognition about how everyone around him responds to his being in therapy. It's easier when it's the wise guys being judgmental, or Uncle Junior being old-school appalled and judgmental. But I found myself really pissed at Carmela. Carmela makes a big loud scene about it over, like, three requests from him not to do it, and then she goes and outs him to his awful mother, who turns around and crabs to everyone who will listen about how HIS getting therapy is an affront to HER, because she knows she was abusive and fucked him up.
Seriously, I did not have a good reaction to Carmela, you guys. And it's not Edie Falco, who's amazing, or her charaterization, which is rock-solid. It's me. I am the asshole fanboy who hates the bitch wife. But fuck it! She is so unbelievably insensitive to his problems; she’s (probably subconsciously) absolutely hostile to the idea of privacy. She harasses him for explanations when he’s trying not to have a panic attack in front of people (years after she found out about his diagnosis, mind); she outs him to his mother, and she damn well knows Livia is a manipulative asshole who will use it against him. Even the scene where Tony tells her he’s seeing a therapist and she harasses him about it, over numerous requests to knock it off. “’You’re in therapy? A THERAPIST? Did you tell her about your father?!’ THERAPY: YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG.”
Clearly I empathize with Tony on a lot of levels.
I think what I love the most about Tony, though, is the way the show subtly deconstructs a lot of affable charmer behaviors as being the subtle power plays that they are. Tony brings you coffee; he tells slightly off-color jokes with his wicked little-boy grin; he’s just comfortable enough with you to admit he feels like the sad clown. People fall for this type of boundary-pushing because it’s so subtle, but it is boundary-pushing. If you turn down Tony’s coffee, WHASSAMATTA, you don’t like coffee? Is it the place? The place is okay now, his buddy had a bad cup of coffee there once but that was before they got the new, uh, barista. But okay, you don’t want his coffee, he gets it, he did it wrong, he won’t bring ya no more coffee. Or you do take the coffee to be polite, and he asks you four times if you like that coffee he brought for you, aren't you glad he's so thoughtful? He's like, a sensitive guy. Maybe you laugh a little at the joke because you’re uncomfortable, and he makes a fuss about how he saw you smile and now he’s your co-conspirator in being not quite as uptight as you’re obviously pretending to be; maybe you don’t laugh and you show that you’re uncomfortable and negs ribs you about being uptight; or maybe you tell him that he crossed a line and then you’re the bad guy for making the poor big oaf FEEL BAD about a little joke. Because after all, he’s the sad clown, he admitted that he only jokes around because he hurts so much inside and it was really hard for him to tell you that so obviously you have no right reason to come up with your own interpretation of his behavior.
And I love it. I love it because he’s so damn dangerous because those statements aren’t dishonest. He really did think about which coffee place you’d like, and he hopes you’d like it. He thought the joke was cute, and he wanted to see you smile (and wasn’t consciously thinking about how smiling is a sign of submission; he really wants to think you’re happy). He really is a sad clown; every reminder of his transgressions reminds him of all the times he’s been hurt and wronged (and it’s happened a lot). This is Tony’s world, it’s the skill set by which he survives and keeps other people alive. But that doesn’t negate his overriding urge to control his image at the expense of your boundaries and security.
And again: this is what I grew up with, and I’m uncomfortably sure (a) Chase grew up around it too and (b) he’s extremely uncomfortable (and probably not particularly adept) with these games in a way that feels very familiar to me. I like to pretend that I’m jaded about how everyone plays everyone, but really I think a lot of my social cynicism comes from trying to learn how to be a person in this environment where people are constantly playing this game.
But even with that familiarity, or maybe because of it, I still can’t tell how much Tony is playing people. I don’t know if he was trying to turn Junior against Livia when he says that she used to bag on Ercule, or if he was really surprised and let it slip. I don’t know why he didn’t bother to tell Janice that she possibly saved his life, and at the very least saved him a lot of trouble, when she took Ritchie out of the picture. I can’t bring myself to think his apology to AJ for the “this is my male heir?!” outburst was anything other than sincere.
The show does a great job around the intersection of gendered parenting, mental illness, and childhood abuse. Italian women moved here from a society where they could, in fact, be a society, albeit one where they lacked many options. They had connections in the community, and labor outside of the home. With some exceptions, they were expected to give up the benefits of a wider community but retain all the responsibilities of being women in a culture built on the madonna/whore dichotomy. So there’s this whole population of women with a lot of strength and a lot of energy and a lot of wounded pride, with nowhere to direct it all but down.
I’m not sure I’d say I like Tony's sister Janice, necessarily, but the existence of a middle-aged plus-sized woman who’s not a very nice person as a well-drawn character is....well, I’d say I always support it, but it basically never happens so. The show doesn't sugarcoat her culturally appropriative response to growing up in a toxic home in a toxic culture, but I think the narrative is ultimately very sympathetic to her need to escape. Unlike Tony the male heir, or Barb the pretty princess,* Janice isn't cut out to join the business or be a trophy wife. She has no place, and within a few months of being around her family she pretty much ceases to value her life. Her relationship with horrible Ritchie is as relentlessly realistic as everything else in the show, and I liked that it wasn’t “she has to be a good person for us to care about this.” Like, she doesn’t get with him for good reasons; she thinks she’s consenting to the danger signs. But she still tells Carmela about the gun she lets Ritchie hold to her head during sex, which is done in a believable way on an in-story level and is a really smart encapsulation of that type of dynamic. But Janice is determined to prove she’s not his fool, and so when he finally hits her (and for telling him not to be a homophobic asshole to his son, no less), she kills him.
*[I almost wonder if Johnny really is Barb's biological father? She's much fairer and slimmer than the rest of the family, and Livia's relatively tolerable treatment of her outstrips what you'd expect of the baby (absent other factors, the son is ALWAYS the favorite regardless of birth order). But if Livia felt like she'd gotten one over on Johnny with Barb, then she'd be less inclined to try to assert herself over the little girl.]
The show does a much better job on gender issues than I think I was expecting? Because it’s about the mob, it’s about the old boys’ club. But the female characters are just as diverse and well-drawn as the men, and it passes the Bechdel test with surprising frequency. But what I really loved was how ruthless it was toward the whole masculinity project. A S1 episode pointedly contrasts Uncle Junior’s horror at anyone finding out he goes down on his girlfriend with the menfolk’s brutal rage at Meadow’s sexually abusive soccer coach. Any sexuality that’s not an exercise in the dominance of the white male phallus, you might as well be fanuk.
While that's about gender, it's also about an attitude toward appetite generally that I would imagine you see in a lot of cultural traditions, but which is very pronounced in Italian-American culture. An outsider, I'm realizing now, might've been surprised at the amount and crassness of the body policing that happens in families that are (justifiably) famous for pressing you to mangia, mangia! but they're part and parcel of the same thing. Food is a power play - you're not fat when you eat on MY say-so, but any evidence that you've chosen to eat on your own steam is damning. Just as sex is to be desired as a show of status and no more, food is about the mealtime demonstration of social standing (honored guest, submissive consumer, needed producer).
Livia is awful, just the kind of character I utterly loathe if not handled perfectly, but she’s handled perfectly, and I find the whole thing breathtaking. Livia and Junior start scheming to kill Tony well before Tony and Jun start clashing over the hole in leadership left by the boss. The excuses are that he put Livia in a home, that he’s getting psychiatry; really they’re pissed because they’re going to die and they try to take it out on him. It’s an incredibly sharp encapsulation of the cycle of abuse - feel powerless, try to stomp on someone else’s sense of self. Because Uncle Jun is a mobster, this can follow the terrible logic suggested by the maxim that the power to destroy is the ultimate control.
On a meta-level, I also did a little bit of cringing at the fascination the assimilated Italian-Americans have with the mafiosi. I mean, obviously, I’m watching it, and I’ve put off watching it for this long not because it didn’t appeal (it really did) but because I was worried about...idk, how I would react. Like it (as many of us secretly do to some extent) or don’t (as we all pretend to, and surprise ourselves with how intensely we mean it sometimes), La Casa Nostra is a big part of our ethnic identity, and comes from traditions that far predate Lucky Luciano. Folks in the mafia are the most overt and open about some of the cultural traditions that most of us experience to some degree. This happens in a really interesting way with Melfi, who kind of adopts Tony as her own shadow self, who acts out all the cultural stuff she's repressed in order to climb the professional ladder. And as she indulges, she spirals spectacularly, probably for the first time in her life. It's fascinating to watch.
This post is completely out of control and if you want to skip it and just talk to me about The Sopranos, this is completely okay with me.
This entry was originally posted at http://pocochina.dreamwidth.org/307317.html. Leave a comment here, or there using OpenID.