This is an enormous amount of information to convey in one hour, and while “Another Toothpick” manages it, it’s at the expense of the clarity and cleanliness of expression that marks the series at its best. That said, there are a number of striking scenes. The murder of Mustang Sally and his friend—followed by Bacala Sr. coughing himself into a fatal single-car accident during his getaway—further escalates the season’s graphic violence. Between that sequence and Tony’s racism being foregrounded with Noah and Wilmore, the episode—like the rest of the season thus far—seems to be rubbing our noses in the depraved behavior we’ve come to vicariously enjoy.
Less gruesome but nearly as disturbing: Artie’s drunken needling of Chris, his subsequent tearful confessions to his old friend Tony, and his mortifying dinner with Adriana; all of the scenes capturing Junior’s horror and anger at the prospect of his own decline (his room-trashing explosion of rage might be the first time we get a modern-day glimpse of the street hood who used to be Johnny Boy’s partner in crime); and Tony and Janice’s wine-sodden commiseration. The latter ends with Janice asking Tony what happened to Pussy, and Tony responding, “Witness protection.” By this point, the phrase seems like a euphemism for death itself, a void that swallows everyone up eventually.
Even by gangster film standards, this is a death-haunted series, featuring an unending string of funerals and memorial services (mostly for characters who died of natural causes); laments for the passing of old ways of life; intense discussions of spirituality, Hell, Heaven, sin and redemption, and observations of how indifferent people can be toward the pain of others. A genuinely empathetic character like Bobby Jr. stands out in this environment. The episode’s most moving grace note is his: Bobby arrives at Junior’s house to give him a ride to the funeral, admits that he’s hurt by Junior’s decision to stay home, then pivots to sympathy when he learns Junior has cancer, too. “I’m sorry,” Bobby says, forgetting all about his justifiable grievance. “I don’t know what to say.”
“I’ll say a prayer for your father,” Junior mutters, still trying to peer around Bobby’s hulking frame so that he can see the TV—an asshole even at his most vulnerable.
“My father. Now you,” Bobby says, seeing only the vulnerability. Then, turning to leave: “What the fuck is happening?”
“UNIVERSITY”
SEASON 3/EPISODE 6
STORY BY DAVID CHASE & TERENCE WINTER & TODD A. KESSLER AND ROBIN GREEN & MITCHELL BURGESS; TELEPLAY BY TERENCE WINTER AND SALVATORE J. STABILE
DIRECTED BY ALLEN COULTER
Work-Related Accident
“Why is other people’s pain a source of amusement?” —Caitlin
“University” is one of the most intricate and complex Sopranos episodes, as well one of the hardest to watch. It follows two other rough episodes, “Employee of the Month” and “Another Toothpick,” but outdoes both in violence, cruelty, and bleakness, stringing together humiliations and atrocities and climaxing with a twenty-year old single mother and stripper, Tracee (Ariel Kiley27) being beaten to death by the father of her never-to-be born child. This episode prompted television critics and cultural commentators, including one of the writers of this book, to ask if The Sopranos had stepped over the line separating anthropological frankness from pornographic obsession, particularly when it came to abuse of women,28 and was terrorizing the audience as well.
The battered feeling stemmed not just from the scenes involving mobsters and dancers, but their juxtaposition with the lives of the kind of people who subscribe to HBO and send their children to private colleges and would get Dr. Melfi’s madeleine reference in “Fortunate Son.”29 The latter are treated here as cleaned-up mirrors of what’s happening behind the scenes at the Bada Bing: hypocrites practicing their own forms of misogyny (and denying it) even as they speak in euphemisms and the language of self-help and psychoanalysis to justify their shabby treatment of young women and everyone else. The episode also takes a jaundiced view of a nation, perhaps even a species, that ignores people like Tracee when it isn’t busy literally or figuratively trying to fuck them. When Noah’s father, a high-powered Hollywood agent, tells Meadow that one of his clients is Dick Wolf, creator of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, he’s name-checking a show that would’ve done an episode with a plot just like this one, but with a final scene of Ralphie being arrested for murder and the club being shut down, even though real life is sadly closer to The Sopranos, the kind of show where a stripper can be murdered behind the club where she dances and everybody just goes back to work.
The episode quietly identifies two counterparts of Tracee’s on the college side: Meadow, whom Noah uses for sex, then dumps as soon as he realizes the relationship could prevent him from getting an A average; and Meadow’s roommate Caitlin Rucker (Ari Graynor30).
Tracee’s murder is merely the Everest in a range of abuse and neglect that also includes battery (Silvio beating Tracee), casual sexual degradation (Tracee in a rough three-way with a cop) and countless indignities, large and small, inflicted on young women, many of them abuse survivors who numb themselves with booze and drugs. Tracee’s tragic story unfolds in the Bada Bing, a Caligula-like spectacle of cruelty, sexual exploitation, and random violence. This is a place where women earn baseline income by gyrating indifferently around poles and pick up extra cash in the “VIP Room,” performing lap dances and sexual favors for high rollers and then kicking up a taste to Silvio, the owner and manager. The VIP room bouncer, George the bartender, further skims the women’s take by demanding fifty dollars plus a free blow job for admittance. Chief among the high rollers: Tony Soprano.
Judging from this up-close look, the Bing isn’t much different from the brothels depicted in “Nobody Knows Anything” and “Toodle-Fucking-Oo,” save for the presentational bells and whistles it adds to a business that amounts to sexual slavery, or at least indentured servitude. We’re told that the club paid for the $3,000 braces on Tracee’s teeth that make her look like a busty child, and judging from Silvio’s remarks as he brutalizes her outside of Ralphie’s apartment (while Ralphie laughs at her through a window), she’s paying it back on the installment plan by doing all the things a Bada Bing girl is expected to do. “Until you pay what you owe, that shaved twat of yours belongs to me,” Silvio warns her, using the language of a pimp as he beats her as punishment for missing three days’ work. It also seems likely that the club paid for the silicone implants on dancers who weren’t, to quote Silvio’s description of Tracee, “a thoroughbred”; such procedures cost a minimum of $4,000 in today’s money.31
Befitting an episode that references both Gladiator and Spartacus, “University” turns the Bing into an arena of flesh, with dancers rather than fighters providing amusement, and no possibility of a slave uprising. The only woman who dares to fight back ends ends up lying near a garbage-strewn sewer pipe, face pulped, skull smashed. “All we can do is choose how we die!” the Gladiator-obsessed Ralphie scream-quotes, but the final, sad irony of “University” is that Tracee was given no such choice, and in the end, she was just another problem to be disposed of. The final scene finds three more dancers casually discussing the fact that one of their coworkers went behind the club with Ralphie and disappeared, as if it were just another piece of workplace gossip. Which it is.
To say that The Sopranos takes a Darwinian view of social relationships would be putting it mildly. This is a world in which people celebrate their relative success in life by treating people lower on the social ladder as unfeeling servants. Meadow, after dropping in unannounced for mother-daughter bonding time—rightly assuming that Carmela’s insecurity about being phased out will make her a willing audience anyway—signals to Carmela for more apple juice at breakfast by raising her empty glass, then rolls her eyes and sighs when her mother makes her get it herself. Paulie rags on Vito and Bobby for looking like “before, and way before” in a weight loss ad. Ralphie insults Gigi, whom he thinks of as inferior despite Gigi’s superior rank, by suggesting his younger b
rother gave Tony a blow job, and smashes George’s eye with a lock on the end of a chain in a coked-up Gladiator reenactment. Rather than file a police report, George goes to the emergency room and returns to work with an eyepatch, still demanding fifty dollars and a blow job for VIP room access because everyone, even the bartender, outranks the dancers. Tony needles Meadow for giving him the cold shoulder, practically sneering in her face as retaliation for hurting his feelings, and because he’s her dad, she can’t do anything in return but talk back and roll her eyes. Even the hateful sadist Ralphie has a hard-luck story that nobody is interested in hearing: “I had to quit school in the eleventh grade, help my mother. I was supposed to be an architect.”
Meadow and Noah, meanwhile, are more appalled and inconvenienced by Caitlin’s distress than moved to action, and treat her less as a soul in crisis than a problem to be managed or ignored. They take her out on her birthday because they’re afraid she’ll have a nervous breakdown or attempt suicide (note Meadow palming an X-ACTO knife) and become an even bigger problem. Noah doesn’t hide his disinterest in being there, and tries to bail because he has an early class the next day. Caitlin glomming onto Noah after Meadow flees to New Jersey causes him to get a C– on a paper, prompting his success-obsessed father to file a restraining order against her. “Couldn’t you try talking to her?” Meadow asks him. “She thinks we’re her friends.”
“We have to set limits,” Noah says—nearly as chilling an innocuous sentence as Carmela’s “You don’t understand, I want you to write that recommendation” in “Full Leather Jacket.” Tony said more or less the same thing in the opening scene where he refused Tracee’s cake days before her murder.
Although Caitlin and Tracee differ diametrically, their narrative functions are similar: they’re the human problem others would rather avoid than confront, testing the limits of their empathy. Tracee is more deliberate and insistent in her grasping because she’s lived harder. Caitlin is a mentally fragile but financially comfortable kid from Bartlesville, Oklahoma, who’s overwhelmed by her first exposure to a big city, while Tracee is a lower-middle-class abuse victim who paid the abuse forward onto her own son. She’s reliant on mobsters old enough to be her father for affection, money, and insulation from the worst of life.
But where Tracee chases sympathy and sometimes dares to demand it, however stridently and naively, Caitlin’s biggest problem is feeling things too deeply and not knowing anyone else who shares her fury at the very idea of suffering. This isn’t just mental illness; her agony seems existential. Like a latter-day Holden Caulfield, she has a sponge-like ability to absorb injustice visited on others, even strangers, and feel it herself, in ways that seem performatively melodramatic but are nonetheless sincere. This is a young woman so insulated from the worst of life that she developed no emotional buffers between herself and experience. Now that she’s moved into the largest U.S. city, she is so horrified by the existence of certain types of pain that she crumbles emotionally while talking about them. She’s primally appalled by the Lindbergh baby’s death, which she just now learned about, and is so determined to treat Meadow as her best friend and most important confidante that when Meadow goes home for a couple of days to get away from her and doesn’t call, she assumes the worst: “I keep having this image of you in the hospital with your throat cut!” Caitlin watches Tod Browning’s 1930 horror film Freaks—which used actual sideshow performers, including people with deformities, in its main cast, and has been a popular “ironic” college midnight movie for decades—and is repulsed and startled, not by the content of the film, but by the reaction of the rest of the audience. “You’re supposed to sympathize with the freaks. This one guy had no legs. He just hopped around on his hands,” she says. “Why is other people’s pain a source of amusement?”
That her expressions of intense empathy strike us as comical, even ridiculous, says more about our own jaded numbness than the appropriateness of her reaction. Only upon our second or third viewing do we see through Caitlin’s eyes, and realize that she’s absolutely sincere (though obviously distressed) in every one of her reactions, not a brat as Meadow or Noah assumed. Just as we initially misread Caitlin’s horrified reaction to Freaks as disgust with the freaks themselves when it was an expression of sympathy, and her disregard for Meadow’s privacy as callousness when it was a projection of her fantasy of sisterly closeness, we mistakenly assume that her reaction to a half-naked homeless woman with newspaper pages in her crack comes from racism or class superiority when it’s about her anger at society for letting people fall so far. “How can you be so callous?” Caitlin asks Meadow and Noah, near tears not just at the spectacle on the street but also the others’ indifference to it.
Although Meadow isn’t as ice-cold to Caitlin as Noah, she’s never truly empathetic, and remains largely oblivious to her roommate’s suffering. She stings her own father by calling him “Mr. Sensitivity, who doesn’t have any problems of his own” soon after describing a young woman who’s having a breakdown purely in terms of the inconvenience she’s causing Meadow. She keeps Caitlin at arm’s length for the same reason Noah establishes “boundaries” and her father rebuffs Tracee: once you start looking at an annoying or difficult person as a human being who’s not as strong or as together as you are, you start feeling guilty for disliking them.
“You gotta snap out of this, Caitlin,” Meadow tells her, repeating a phrase her father uses whenever someone cries in his presence, and suggests that she needs to “talk to somebody” because her pill regimen is “not enough.” Meadow’s not motivated here by genuine interest in Caitlin’s well-being. Like Tony grumbling as he aborts a blow job, Meadow is mainly annoyed at being interrupted while trying to have sex.
“University” splinters rooting interest among many different characters and makes them alternately sympathetic and abhorrent, so that we never get too comfortable with our read on anyone. There are minor linking devices, mostly visual, such as the match cut from Ralphie entering Tracee while she fellates the cop to Caitlin rising up out of the frame from a kneeling position and gasping, “Oh, my God—it was so horrible.” But there’s nothing so exact that it reduces and oversimplifies the meaning of what we’re seeing.
Caitlin is a mirror of Tracee in some ways, but so is Meadow—particularly in scenes where we see the women relating to their boyfriends. Noah’s attitude toward both Caitlin and Meadow—both threats to his GPA—is a lot like Ralphie’s attitude toward Tracee: he uses her for sex when it’s convenient (it’s Meadow’s first time, apparently; Noah shows no inclination to put on a condom until she insists on it) and casually dumps her as soon as she threatens to impede his life. Ralphie seems to want to marry into the Aprile family, continue grooming Jackie Jr. as a mobster and surrogate son, and regain the respect he thinks he lost when Tony passed him over for promotion—and when Tracee gets in the way of all that, it’s the end of her, too. Both Ralphie and Noah fool their girlfriends into thinking they’re caring people, but in the end, Noah gives about as much of a damn about Meadow as Ralphie does about his goomar, casually putting down their relationship the same way Ralphie puts down Tracee, in one shot, like an unwanted thorough-bred. Noah takes an unscheduled weekend trip with an old school friend rather than subject himself to more Caitlin, while Ralphie spends three days with his pregnant girlfriend—long enough to give her hope—then ignores Tracee’s phone messages for three days and misleads her about marriage. One girl is removed with a court order, while the other simply disappears: both variations of Tony’s ominous phrase “witness protection.”
Almost every straight male in this episode, if not the show as a whole, views women other than their mothers, wives, and daughters on a sliding scale that ranges from bored condescension to homicide. Expediency rules every decision they make. When Caitlin announces she’s done with pills while self-medicating with vodka, Noah bolts to get a good night’s sleep instead of staying to help. Tony treats Tracee, in his words, “an employee,” with an edge of exas
peration that comes from feeling fatherly toward her, despite his better judgment. Thanks to the subtleties of James Gandolfini’s performance, we get the sense that Tony is deliberately suppressing decent impulses when dealing with Tracee. Later—perhaps disturbed by her confession that she abused her son and was abused herself, and thinking of his own experience with receiving and meting out child abuse, and his fear of passing on those Soprano genes—he warns her, “You need another kid like you need a fuckin’ hole in the head.”
By the end, that’s what she gets. When Tracee’s corpse is laid out under the guardrail, Tony expresses the only thing close to a human reaction among the crew, shaming Paulie for making it all about Ralphie’s insubordination. “That cocksucker was way out of line,” Paulie says.
“Twenty years old,” Tony says, “this girl.”
“That, too,” Paulie adds. But mere moments earlier, Tony beat down Ralphie while screaming at him for disrespecting the club, never saying a word about the human loss. When Melfi asks him why he’s so quiet in his joint therapy session with Carmela later, he changes the gender and profession of the deceased and says “he” died in “a work-related accident.”
The Kinks’ song “Living on a Thin Line” is threaded throughout like a Greek chorus. The lyrics’ evocation of an empire in decline evokes England specifically, but also Rome, by way of Ralphie’s Gladiator fixation; This Thing of Theirs, the Mafia, in decline since the appearance of Tony’s brother RICO; and the United States, a country whose original sin, building itself atop the boneyard of Native American genocide, is referenced via Ralphie’s joke about Custer’s last words. The song also underscores the ancient, cyclical nature of all the different kinds of cruelty we’ve witnessed, as well as individual and tribal indifference to it. The episode ends just where it began, on the stage, with silicon-breasted sirens barely writhing for an audience of men who barely seem to know what day it is. Different dancers, different verse, same song.
The Sopranos Sessions Page 19