The Sopranos Sessions

by Matt Zoller Seitz

  “This shit with your brother, it’s been building since I got out,” Richie tells Janice, while recalling the jacket. Richie’s first free act was to mete out unauthorized punishment against a Soprano associate, and he only became more of a peevish, hateful wild card from there. Most of the Tony–Richie material in Richie’s final episode is about the disposition of garbage routes and their profits, the biggest dispute yet because so much money is at stake (and because Jackie Aprile Jr., played by Jason Cerbone, has entered the picture now, and is constantly reminding Richie of his brother’s legacy and his obligation to live up to it). Richie thinks he’s not getting his fair share of the hauling business. He was already continuously pissed off by Tony’s refusal to grant him his due respect, and now he’s anxious over paying for a new house and renovating and decorating it to Janice’s satisfaction. This is the episode where Junior, who’s been toying with a Richie alliance all season, weighs the power struggle, decides he has to side with Tony,80 and warns him that he’s going to end up “lying in the street in a pool of [his] own blood.” This episode is so sure we’re expecting a standard gangster-movie exit for Richie that it ends the barroom conversation between him and capo Albert Barese81 (Richard Maldone) with what sounds like a tommy gun: a paint mixer, audio from the next scene with Carmela and Vic in the paint store.

  This episode could’ve climaxed in other ways: Tony killing Richie; Richie accidentally killing Janice during sex; Pussy, suddenly a junior G-man, killing Richie preemptively to get back into Tony’s graces; or a wedding, followed by Tony realizing he can’t kill Richie because he’s family now as well as Family. All these outcomes would’ve seemed justified considering all the seeds the writers had planted. But none would’ve been as startling, and retrospectively satisfying, as the one we got. The title comes from a phrase Irina uses while making Tony feel bad for dumping her, but it ultimately describes Janice, who tries on a white satin bridal gown during the fitting scene and rides unwittingly to her brother’s rescue, right after Richie starts speaking openly about killing him.

  Her shooting Richie also weirdly inverts season one’s ending, which found the real Livia plotting to murder her son. Although Nancy Marchand didn’t have much screen time in season two due to her health, we still learned information that complicated our sense of her as a purely malevolent person. She’s still not nice and never will be, but we understand her better and feel sorry for her sometimes, especially when she talks about her brood’s childhoods and seems sorry (as sorry as Livia can be) about failing them, nestling her acknowledgment of inadequacy within protestations that she did the best she could. She tells other characters, particularly Janice, that she had dark thoughts back then, and that her marriage to Johnny Boy was stressful and frightening; from what we’ve seen and heard of that period (including Tony’s reports of the old man abusing him), it’s a virtual certainty that Johnny Boy hit Livia. That electrifying moment when Janice shoots Richie represents the cathartic self-defense that Livia never made in the 1960s.

  It is also an (incidental) display of protectiveness for Tony that the actual Livia could never muster. “Babies are like animals, they’re no different from dogs,” Livia tells Tony, after seeming to levitate downstairs the morning after Richie’s murder. “Somebody has to teach ‘em right from wrong!”

  It’s mother and son’s first real interaction of the season, and though they briefly share a scene in the finale, this unknowingly turns out to be our farewell to the relationship, prior to Nancy Marchand’s death two months after the airdate. It’s a corker, with Tony witnessing the gamut of Livia’s emotions as she blames Janice for what she thinks is Richie leaving her, refuses to accept any blame for how her kids turned out, tries to guilt Tony over his rising fortunes versus her own, then feigns senility again by acting hurt that he won’t kiss her. Exasperated, Tony storms out of the house, only to trip and fall on the way to the car. He has accidentally recreated the moment he described to Dr. Melfi in the series’ second episode—the only happy childhood memory he could conjure of Livia, of the two of them laughing at Johnny Boy when he took a similar tumble—and though Livia tries to wrestle her cackles back into crocodile tears, she can’t help showing her true face to her son. This is who she is. As he screamed at the nurses when stroke victim Livia was being wheeled away from him in the season one finale, she’s smiling, and he’s the only one who can see it.

  As irritated and exhausted as Tony is after disposing of Richie’s body82—sarcasm dripping from his great phrase “pine cones all around” when Janice all but begs him to lie about Richie’s final resting place—he radiates relief, even gratitude, as Janice’s Seattle-bound bus turns the corner. His survival even briefly repairs the rift in the Soprano marriage, on increasingly shaky ground thanks to Tony’s compulsive cheating, Irina’s suicide attempt,83 and Carmela’s thwarted fixation on Vic (when Gabriella reveals the real reason for Vic’s reticence, it ties together the Carmela and Pussy storyline: they’re both hostages to circumstance). The episode’s final scene is a reconciliation under duress. Tony sits on the couch next his wife, tells her Janice has returned to Seattle and Richie is “gone,” and makes their mostly unspoken understanding explicit: “Carmela, after eighteen years of marriage, don’t make me make you an accessory after the fact.”

  Within two minutes they’re talking about Tony’s responsibilities during Carmela’s planned trip to Rome. Then she leaves him on the couch, alone but alive. The closing music is the Eurythmics’ “I Saved the World Today.” Vishnu may have come late, but her timing was perfect.

  “FUNHOUSE”

  SEASON 2/EPISODE 13

  WRITTEN BY DAVID CHASE AND TODD A. KESSLER

  DIRECTED BY JOHN PATTERSON

  Temple of Knowledge

  “Isn’t Pussy your friend?” —Dr. Melfi

  The influence of David Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks was all over The Sopranos from the start, and as years passed, David Chase often talked about the show, always fondly. The affinity was never as obvious as it is in “Funhouse.” The episode understands that the most daring thing about Twin Peaks wasn’t the way it mashed up different genres, its seesawing between satire, slapstick, melodrama, and horror, or even its surreal or expressionist imagery and sound design; it was the way that the show treated dreams, fantasies, intuition, and the uncanny as legitimate sources of information about our everyday world. The show’s hero, Special Agent Dale Cooper, analyzed his own dreams for clues on how to solve Laura Palmer’s murder, and even tried to deduce the identity of a person identified only as “J” in Laura’s diary by having a deputy toss rocks at a row of bottles. The storytelling was rooted more deeply in the collected works of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung than in any established method for writing a series.

  The Sopranos one-upped even Lynch/Frost by devoting most of the first half of its season two finale to Tony uncovering the identity of a rat in his organization by decoding a series of food-poisoning-induced dreams. The original run of Twin Peaks never went this far. Not only do we get a solid twenty minutes of dream material, interrupted by brief scenes of Tony waking up long enough to belch, vomit, fart, shit, moan, curse, and argue with people; we also never see him discuss the dreams in detail with anyone else, not even Melfi, his dream sherpa. That means it’s Tony who’s doing the work of interpretation in “Funhouse.” This is an indicator of real growth, even though it’s not necessarily the kind Melfi wants (it seems to confirm her accusation that he’s only sticking with therapy so he can become a better gangster).

  “It’s not my fuckin’ head,” says Tony, right before the dreams begin. “It’s my stomach.” Read as: I’m not going to figure this out intellectually, I’m going to go with my gut. Tony’s actual guts—his digestive organs—are going to work through, process, digest the matter of the informant. Pussy is the toxin in the Mob’s body politic that caused this allergic reaction. The organization’s health will only be restored after he’s been puked up or shat out.

  It ta
kes a while for Tony to figure out what we’ve known ever since “Do Not Resuscitate.” Seven distinct sections of dreamspace are represented on screen, if you count Tony’s conversation with Silvio and seeing himself whack Paulie through the binoculars as separate. And every time the episode plunges us into one of the dreams, their content and meanings are a bit plainer. It’s as if Tony’s subconscious keeps explaining things, Tony doesn’t quite get it, and his subconscious tries again, in simpler language, until it finally abandons ambiguity and has the fish just flat-out tell him what he needs to know.

  1. We see Tony meeting his guys on the boardwalk (plus Philly Parisi,84 killed for being a blabbermouth), waiting for an unspecified “they” to show up. Tony tells them he’s been diagnosed with terminal cancer (his life is in danger) by a doctor (like Melfi, the psychiatrist, who teaches him how to read himself, like the “open book” mentioned in the Stones song playing at the Indian restaurant). Pussy is the only one who never speaks or makes eye contact with Tony. Rather than wait for the inevitable, Tony decides to douse himself in gasoline and get it over with. Before he accepts the lit Zippo from Paulie, Tony asks, “Where’s Pussy?” who by this point has disappeared from the dream.

  2. We see Tony walking on the boardwalk again, this time in front of a real-life Asbury Park attraction called the Temple of Knowledge (although the name of the establishment is not visible on-screen85). Silvio glides into view, as if via conveyor belt, and tells Tony, walking in place as if on a treadmill, a variation of the same thing that he said in the season premiere, paraphrasing The Godfather Part III: “Our true enemy has yet to reveal himself.”86

  3. Then comes a segment where Tony peers through sightseeing binoculars and sees himself playing cards in an empty train station with Paulie, whom he suddenly shoots dead. The black “binocular” frame around the image evokes the type of surveillance that Tony knows the FBI has been running on his operation. The shooting has the sting of an out-of-nowhere betrayal, though it’s hard to say for sure the “Tony” playing cards in the train station is a stand-in for the traitorous Pussy (a “known quantity” suddenly turning on a colleague) or for actual Tony, who may have to kill a trusted member of his inner circle. Could be both.

  4. The next time we enter dreamspace, with Tony and Melfi in therapy, we don’t know it’s a dream until we realize Melfi is acting strangely. Then we hear her voice coming out of the mouth of Annalisa from “Commendatori.” She tells Tony he’s the greatest threat to himself, a self-destructive force. Finally Tony asks, “You gonna make me eat something now?” (i.e., force Tony to take in something he doesn’t want: in this case, pussy/the truth about Pussy), and Annalisa/Melfi replies, “If you keep this up.”

  5. Then we see Tony on the boardwalk in a tiny red car (like a clown car) with Adriana and Christopher; Pussy is supposed to be in the back seat. Furio, the new guy, replaces him, as he would presumably replace Pussy in the organization.

  6. Tony appears in Melfi’s waiting room with puffy eyes, wild hair, a dirty tank top, and a raging hard-on. Melfi invites him in for a conversation that leads him to admit that he’s got “pussy on the brain.” They discuss the two ways to interpret that word, followed by Tony fucking pussy/Pussy. This is the only dream in which Tony says he knows he’s having a dream: it’s a lucid dream, controllable to some degree. So when he “fucks pussy,” it’s by choice. He’s also in coitus, or union, with the one person who’s done the most to help him understand his subconscious—Melfi, who could be interpreted as standing in for that same subconscious. Tony and his subconscious have been playing “Will they or won’t they?” since the pilot, and here they consummate the relationship. In a close-up of the dreaming Tony, he’s smiling for the first time since he gave Carmela the fur coat.

  7. Finally, we arrive at that astonishing moment when Tony finds himself on the boardwalk confronted by a row of fish on ice, and one of them opens its mouth and speaks with Pussy’s voice. The slumbering Tony probably knows what this all means even before the conversation begins, because the symbolism of the tableau is laden with so many gangland associations: Pussy is a small fish being used by the FBI to land a bigger fish, and now that he’s been marked a traitor, he has to get iced and “sleep with the fishes.” But just in case Tony doesn’t get it, his subconscious has the Pussy fish tell him, “Ya know I been workin’ with the government, right, Tone?”

  The material surrounding the dreams is pregnant with associations, too. The chain of dream sequences starts with Tony at a dinner meeting with Pussy and their partner in the phone card scheme, dining at the Indian restaurant he later thinks served him bad vindaloo. Scored to the opening section of The Rolling Stones’ “Thru and Thru,” the scene kicks off with a whole fish—as big as the ones that will show up on ice in the dream—being carried out of the kitchen, bypassing Tony en route to the table behind them. Then Tony and Pussy go to Vesuvio and have a second meal that includes mussels. Although Artie Bucco understandably obfuscates to save face, it’s clear Tony and Pussy (who reports some mild diarrhea) got the food poisoning from his mussels, not the Indian joint.

  What all this means for Tony’s waking life is that he was absolutely convinced that the source of his distress lay outside of his circle, when in fact it was inside the whole time. He figures out that Artie’s mussels sickened him before Artie is willing to accept responsibility. Turns out it wasn’t the Indians (i.e., the outsiders) who laid him low, but an Italian: one of his own. By the time Tony and Silvio pay Pussy a house call and Tony finds wiretap gear in his bedroom, he already knows the truth. The confirmation is a formality. His subconscious has been warning him for a long time that Pussy was a traitor: he probably knew when Pussy looked into his eyes near the end of “Guy Walks into a Psychiatrist’s Office.” It just took a while for him to admit it to himself. And he couldn’t have done without his distressed bowels, his rumbling subconscious, and the tools he got from Melfi.87

  Pussy’s execution is the melancholy counterpart to Richie’s shocking death in “The Knight in White Satin Armor.” In a sequence about half as long as the dreams that brought them there, Pussy’s three closest associates take him out on the water and do everything they can to delay the moment when they’ll have to kill him. All four know what’s coming—the best Pussy can ask for is not to be shot in the face, and also to be allowed to sit before they kill him (he’s granted the first request)—and all seem as nauseated by it as Tony was by the mussels. Beforehand, they share a drink, and Pussy tries to enjoy his final moments by spinning a tale of sexual bliss with the Puerto Rican acupuncturist who was part of his FBI cover story. Tony, irritated both with how long this is taking and the depth of his old friend’s betrayal, won’t even let Pussy have this moment, wiping the smile off his face by asking, “Did she even really exist?” It’s up to him to fire the first shot when Paulie, Silvio, and Pussy himself all seem eager to drag things out. Then it’s into the sea.

  It was reasonable for us to assume, based on how pre-Sopranos TV dramas and gangster films handled things, that Richie would die in this season finale at Tony’s hands, while Pussy would be dealt with earlier, or perhaps be kept around through season three to provide ongoing jeopardy. Instead we got a sensational detonation in the penultimate chapter followed by a surreal ramping-down in the finale. Both Richie and Pussy’s deaths, indelible as they are, have an aspect of strategic anticlimax, or at least misdirection, that differentiated The Sopranos from all other contemporary TV dramas.

  The relaxed denouement of “Funhouse” covers Livia’s arrest for possession of airline tickets Tony got in the Scatino bust-out (which he impulsively gives her just to get her away from him); a Melfi therapy session in which Pussy is never discussed, even in coded fashion; and a closing montage focusing on Meadow’s graduation,88 scored to the rest of “Thru and Thru,” concluding with series of dissolves from Tony smoking a cigar to the ocean where Pussy’s remains are being eaten by smaller fish.

  “You know that we do take away,” K
eith Richards sings the first time the song is used in “Funhouse,” in the Indian restaurant. The song returns at the end and continues through the credits. The Sopranos never tells us why this song, in this episode, and if Chase’s comments about music are any indication, he might’ve just included it because he liked how it sounded. But in context of the plot, it’s powerfully resonant. The “open book” mentioned in the lyrics is a phone directory that can be used to reach out to someone (listed under “services”) who can get you whatever you need, anytime, day or night—somebody who adores you and wants what’s best for you no matter what occurs; a lover/protector whose motivations are selfless and pure, and will stick by you “thru and thru.” Tony’s subconscious played that role in “Funhouse.”

  It’s the mother he never had.

  * * *

  1 “An American Family,” Vanity Fair, April 4, 2007.

  2 If this is victory, it’s sure to be fleeting. Thanks to the ubiquity of electronic devices and streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, Shudder, and Filmstruck, movies and TV are starting to blur together anyway, in a vast sea of “content.” And increasing numbers of artistically ambitious film-makers, such as Ezra Edelman (O.J.: Made in America) and Errol Morris (Wormwood) were riding the blur, releasing long-form works to theaters and television platforms simultaneously, which lets them qualify for Oscars and well as Emmys and get two distinct batches of reviews.

  3 One notable example: NBC’s Homicide: Life on the Streets, which gave its brilliant and eloquent detective Frank Pembleton (Andre Braugher) a catastrophic stroke at the end of season four to shake up the series and challenge the actor. Frank’s rehabilitation was supposed to last a long time, but audiences complained that they didn’t like seeing Frank struggle, so the writers had him recover with unrealistic speed.