The Sopranos Sessions

by Matt Zoller Seitz

  The self-reflexive aspect of “Stage 5” even shows up in the storyline about Johnny Sack’s cancer—particularly when Johnny gets a second opinion from his orderly, Warren Feldman (Sydney Pollack10 in a brilliant one-off supporting turn). Feldman’s an incarcerated oncologist convicted of killing his cheating wife, her aunt who just happened to be there, and a mailman with bad timing. (“At that point, I had to fully commit.”) Yet both Johnny and the episode seem clear in their conviction that just because the oncologist is a killer doesn’t mean he doesn’t have medical knowledge worth imparting. As Johnny’s brother-in-law Anthony Infante (Lou Martini Jr.) notes, the blood on O. J. Simpson’s hands doesn’t make him any less of a great running back.

  This is a self-justifying observation used by gangsters and those who write TV shows about them, but there’s a strong hint of self-awareness to it, less an apology than a kind of coded self-excoriation. (For all the talk of Feldman’s wisdom, he turns out to be wrong; Johnny actually dies more quickly than anyone foresaw.) This whole subplot is of a piece with Tony worrying that Chris only sees him as a bullying fiancée-banger, and Phil worrying that he muffed some of the most important choices of his life. Is The Sopranos judging itself as harshly as the harshest critics judged The Sopranos?

  Maybe, but maybe not—and in any event, the Sopranos and The Sopranos both settle in a charitable place. “Whatever else happens, you made a movie, Christopher,” Tony says, in a rare, tender moment between them.11 “Nobody could take that away. Hundred years from now, we’re dead and gone, people’ll be watching this fucking thing.”

  “REMEMBER WHEN”

  SEASON 7/EPISODE 3

  WRITTEN BY TERENCE WINTER

  DIRECTED BY PHIL ABRAHAM12

  Take Me Home, Country Road

  “‘Remember when’ is the lowest form of conversation.” —Tony

  “Is this what life is like at our age?” asks Carmela Soprano, as Tony prepares to flee New Jersey while the FBI excavates the site of his first murder.

  “The tomatoes are just coming in,” Tony replies, a tad wistfully.

  It’s an odd thing to say, but it feels right. The tomatoes in his backyard are just one entry on a long list of things that he’s never properly appreciated and maybe never will. The malaise that hangs over Tony like Pig-Pen’s dirt cloud in Peanuts isn’t a matter of fretting over the persistent unanswered question of whether he’ll go out dead or in jail. It seems more unconscious—an incidental affliction, rooted in the curse of living in a perpetual state of disharmony with your own life. During Tony’s eight years of therapy with Dr. Melfi, he’s learned enough about himself to realize and admit that his life was fucked up from the start, and that he fucked it up worse with each passing year; yet he’s never shown the insight necessary to seize that knowledge and break it open, much less change his circumstances. A bullet in the torso got the message across, but it didn’t take. He’s back to being beat-‘em-up, bed-’em-down Tony, except more of an automaton, a bad boy reverting to type without reveling in it.

  When Tony and Paulie go down south and hang with Beansie in Miami, Tony agitates to visit a motel and massage parlor they once enjoyed to get steaks, only to discover that it’s has been replaced by a depressingly respectable hotel that only offers sandwich wraps after eleven. It’s a smaller-scale letdown than the episode’s parallel narrative of Uncle Junior in a group home for the criminally insane, where he goes from being a tin-pot dictator running a secret Poker Nation to a medicated institutional yes-man (joining in a sing-along of “Take Me Home, Country Road,” for Christ’s sake); it’s a forced capitulation to a bland new world. In Miami, Tony gripes to Paulie about Johnny Sack’s holier-than-thou attitude toward marital fidelity, and takes a young blond up to his room, but after he’s spent himself inside her, he rolls over and makes chitchat, and you wonder: is it an alpha-male rutting urge he’s satisfying, or does he just miss talking to Carmela?

  Tony utters the episode’s title (and this chapter’s epigraph) when he grows disgusted by Paulie’s nonstop glory-days yammering at dinner with Beansie and their lady friends, and leaves the table in disgust. Funny, though: three episodes in, it seems the final stretch of The Sopranos is about failing to remember and fully comprehend past choices, and having to face the consequences. If season six was about the difficulty, even impossibility, of altering one’s life (much less one’s nature, as if they aren’t the same thing) then seven is about the past catching up with you, inflicting inconvenience and sometimes grave damage; how neither would be such a serious threat if you hadn’t made the wrong choice; and (a corollary) how the consequences of a past bad choice wouldn’t be so troublesome if they caught up to a changed person.

  To face the past is to face one’s essential nature, and ask how much one has grown or changed, or will change, and the extent to which one even can. Nobody likes to look in a mirror, except maybe a sociopathic narcissist like Paulie, who seems to think everything that ever happened to him is pure anecdote magic. Tony’s flirting with preemptively whacking Paulie fuels a suspenseful sequence on a rented boat—a psychic return to Big Pussy’s execution, without the aid of a flashback—but is it plausible? Paulie’s a petty thug, not a novice meathead; even if he had been established as a diarrhea-mouthed dummy who dropped incriminating statements left and right, he surely would have been whacked by his own guys long ago, perhaps by Tony, who should have noticed this tendency earlier. Or maybe, like the state of his own physique, he’s simply getting worse in his old age.

  But like Paulie, we digress. The point is, bills that Tony thought he’d skipped out on keep coming due. When the cops in the premiere busted him for the gun he dropped while fleeing Johnny Sack’s house,13 the look of dumb astonishment on his face made clear he’d barely given that piece a second thought. In “Remember When,” he runs from his cherry-pop killing, the 1982 murder of Newark bookie Willie Overall. Paulie reassures him that there couldn’t be much left, but as Tony rightly observes, bones and teeth are all they need. True, Tony appears to have wriggled out of the gun charge, and he escapes responsibility for the 1982 killing as well, thanks to the incarcerated Larry Boy Barese pinning it on Jackie Aprile. Either he’s the luckiest Mob boss who ever lived or just another TV character, living in a blood-and-guts crime story that just happens to be structured like a sitcom: Everybody Fears Tony.

  No murder or even gun charges for now. Instead, it seems Tony and everyone else are destined to suffer a fate worse than jail or even death: being forced to confront who they really are.

  In “Soprano Home Movies,” it was Bacala who had to abandon the pretense that he could be a made man without getting blood on his hands. In “Stage Five,” Tony saw how much Christopher resented him, while Phil and Johnny Sack questioned how they had lived their lives. Here, Junior and Paulie—Tony’s biological uncle and his unofficial one—come to terms with their devolution into sad old men.

  Characters have been telling old stories all season, often about the resentment that grows between fathers and sons, or between mentors and protégés. Here, Junior recalls the day his father (Tony’s grandfather) made him walk home eleven miles for turning down a 25-cent tip from a rich woman. Carter Chong (Ken Leung14), his behind-bars Bacala, loses his temper recounting the time his father dismissed a 96 score on a third grade spelling test because it wasn’t a 100. Paulie notes that Johnny Boy gave Tony the Willie Overall hit when Tony was twenty-four, but Tony quickly and forcefully says that he was twenty-two.

  It’s those details they don’t forget. Earlier in that conversation, Tony suggests that Johnny Boy never believed in him. Paulie counters that Johnny trusted him with the hit, after all, but Tony clearly resents that Johnny didn’t believe he could become anything but a thug, condemning him to this life.

  Tony’s always been one to dwell on the past, but spending so much time with blabbermouth Paulie takes away his taste for it. Still, he at least has a present to hold on to. Junior and, to a lesser extent, Paulie, don’t.
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br />   Junior tries to recreate the past in the hospital, enlisting Carter to help him run a funhouse mirror version of the Executive Game, with the patients playing for buttons and non-diet sodas. But he’s not as strong as he once was, and faced with the threat of being transferred to a less cushy facility, he consents to a new drug regimen that leaves him a blurry, sleepy shell of himself.

  Carter, bitter at the perceived betrayal by another father figure—and perhaps having read One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest too many times—gives Junior a beatdown, leaving the official boss of New Jersey sitting in a wheelchair, cast on his arm, a blank, depressed look on his face, and a cat from pet therapy as his only companion.15

  Midway through their fugitive vacation, Tony and Paulie are shown a black-and-white photo of Paulie in his ’60s heyday, flexing a bicep for the camera. What we realize instantly is that Paulie is trying to preserve that image all these decades later. He still pounds the dumbbells, even though the skin sags around his muscles. He still wears the same hairdo, even though the hair is gray and thin. He lives alone, has no real friends, is the least-productive, least-respected captain in the Family, and he Can’t. Stop. Talking. The only real difference is the amount of TV he watches; in the ’60s, he didn’t know who Barney Fife was, while today he cackles hysterically at a Three’s Company rerun.

  Paulie’s just self-aware enough to know that Tony’s displeased with him. He has a flashback to Pussy’s oceanic murder as he and Tony cast off in their fishing boat, is terrified throughout the voyage, and later has a dream (a very literal one by Sopranos standards) where he confronts Pussy the rat to ask, “When my time comes, tell me: Will I stand up?”

  Paulie hasn’t had to make that choice yet. None of the major surviving characters have. Right now, Paulie’s punishment is simply having to be Paulie Walnuts, just as Tony’s punishment is to be the boss of a decaying empire, and having to work with guys like Paulie.

  The one characteristic that unites all the characters is a willingness to speak the language of self-knowledge without stepping outside of themselves and standing far enough from their own egos to gain perspective. Nobody on the series seems to have a conception of life outside of his or her own head, or a sense of history that goes beyond self-justifying factoid or self-pitying anecdote: Chris proclaiming that Lauren Bacall starred in The Haves and Have-Nots; Tony repeatedly whining, “Whatever happened to Gary Cooper?”; the hotel attendant who responds to Tony’s questions about what happened to the old, sleazy, fun place by repeating, blankly, “I don’t know.”16 One rarely gets the sense that Chase’s characters understand that the world existed before they were born and will continue to exist after they’re dead and buried (perhaps in a Newark basement). When The Sopranos is depicting Mob life or suburban life or the fine points of psychoanalysis, it’s a compelling black comedy; but when it’s showing us the distance between a character’s self-image and the reality others see, it’s a documentary.

  “CHASING IT”

  SEASON 7/EPISODE 4

  WRITTEN BY MATTHEW WEINER

  DIRECTED BY TIM VAN PATTEN

  A Pebble in a Lake

  “Listen to me, OK? This is the gravy.” —Tony

  “What are you chasing?” Dr. Melfi asks Tony Soprano, whose compulsive gambling is destroying his life. “Money, or a high from winning?” The episode’s title, “Chasing It,” seems to promise an answer, but it’s another evasion. Tony pointedly doesn’t reply to Melfi in his session, but seems to respond later, when he apologizes to Carmela for belittling her adventures in real estate. She notes the illogic of Tony’s betting ever-larger sums of money hoping to win his way out of debt, and he replies, “You start chasing it, and every time you get your hands around it, you fall further backward.”

  This is what Tony Soprano talks about when he talks about happiness. Not happy-wanderer happiness, but a deeper satisfaction that endures even during grim times. Six-plus seasons into The Sopranos, Tony never seems to feel deep happiness for longer than a few moments—maybe when he’s taking pride in the accomplishments of loved ones or enjoying the company of old friends he can trust (for the moment). But even then Gandolfini’s melancholy performance suggests that there’s something gnawing at Tony, an unease more profound than the physical fear of ending up dead or in jail.

  Since the shooting, Tony’s unease has become palpable. He radiates unhappiness and instability in his everyday life and no longer seems able (or willing) to hide it. He says whatever’s running through his head—impulsively proposing a politically impossible tactic, openly copping to his gambling debts in front of subordinates, and otherwise inspiring furtive “The fuck’s up with Tony?” glances everywhere he goes. He’s behaving like a man who isn’t happy being a Mob boss, or a mobster period, and wants out. Because he knows he can’t get out, he expresses that wish unconsciously, by doing and saying things that destabilize the life he’s always known.17

  This is why Tony’s all-consuming (and previously unremarked-upon) gambling addiction works, mostly, as something more than a standard network TV, crisis-of-the-week improv. When a character is convincingly drawn, the details of his self-destructive compulsion don’t matter; what’s important is that it makes sense given what we know about the character, and that it arrives at a critical juncture in the storyline. Both criteria have been satisfied here—and if it wasn’t gambling, it would be something else. Tony has a lot of different nests—his marriage, his identity as a father, his relationship with his crew, his associates (including Hesh Rabkin, Tony’s chief creditor), and his fellow bosses (notably Phil Leotardo, who officially takes the New York throne at a party where he’s serenaded by none other than Nancy Sinatra)—and he seems determined to foul every one of them.

  Late in the episode, there’s a significant hard cut between two scenes—one of Tony’s ugliest (and ultimately most pathetic) confrontations with Carmela, and a pivotal moment in the episode’s B-plot, in which Vito Spatafore Jr. (Brandon Hannan), the goth-posing, profoundly troubled son of a slain gay mobster, responds to bullying in the boys’ locker room at school by defecating in the shower. The Tony–Carmela scene builds on an earlier, more subdued confrontation, in which Carmela celebrates the successful sale of her first home—semi-successful, anyway, as she winds up unloading it on Cousin Brian and his pregnant wife—and Tony suggests betting most of the profits on a Jets game that he insists is a “sure thing.” The second round finds a bathrobe-clad Tony sweepingly accusing Carm of ruthlessness and hypocrisy, which she’s already heard many times and has clearly decided not to think about (just as Tony had decided, until fairly recently, not to obsess over the various sins he committed to amass the Soprano fortune). “The fact is, you’re a shitty businesswoman who built a piece of shit house that’s gonna cave in and kill that fucking unborn baby any day!” Tony bellows. “And now you can’t sleep!” Carmela throws a vase at him and goes upstairs; in wide shot, Tony lumbers off into the background, leaving the vase shards untouched on the foyer floor.

  We then cut to Vito Jr. being teased with homophobic slurs in the school showers. His mix of fuck-you indifference, goth affectation, and doughy sensitivity reads as way too sensitive for the macho zoo of high school. With his already innate alienation inflamed by his dad’s being killed not for what he did, but for who he was, and the continued defamation of his dad’s memory by the same thugs who rooted for his demise, he responds by facing his tormentors, squeezing out a deposit, and mashing it beneath his bare foot. It’s social terrorism—a visual and olfactory assault that clears the room. It could only have been committed by a human being who cannot understand, much less articulate, the source of his unhappiness, but who has decided that if he cannot master or destroy his environment, he’ll deface it.

  It’s the act of a young man who hates himself and everyone else so much that he just wants out, and doesn’t particularly care how. Of course, the kid didn’t anticipate getting rousted from his bed in the middle of the night by Idaho youth-camp goons—a
scene that ranks as one of the most disturbing in the entire series, despite its absence of bloodshed, for the way that it syncs up with the previous episode’s account of how Tony’s dad Johnny Boy ordered Tony to perform his first hit back in 1982. In both instances—Johnny Boy forcing his son into a venal, violent lifestyle he might have transcended if left alone, and Vito Jr. being hauled off (on his mother’s orders, and Tony’s suggestion) to a brainwashing camp designed to force him to be the kind of person everyone around him would prefer—we’re seeing a potentially free and unique soul brutalized by life and then reprogrammed into adopting, and potentially exemplifying, the mentality of his tormentors. (Marie Spatafore suggested a similar course of action a few episodes back, advising her gay husband to consider conversion therapy.)

  After the shower outrage, we see Tony react to news of Vito Jr.’s action by deciding to pay the boy’s mother, Marie, the $100,000 in relocation money she begged for in the episode’s opening scene—money he failed to convince newly installed New York Mob boss Phil Leotardo that he should pay, because he’s related to Marie and responsible for her husband’s murder. Tony somehow assembles the money, then gambles it away—an act that destabilizes his home and professional lives. In both Vito Jr. and Tony stories, men liquidate assets, so to speak, to rebel against a life that’s suffocating them, a life that forces them to embody lies. Tony is more self-aware, intelligent, and empathetic than almost anyone around him, including his wife and children, but favors his sadistic and violent streak, for survival’s sake. Vito Jr. is rebelling, in his halting and inept way, against the macho straight mentality that contributed to his father’s “disappearance,” and the various institutions, from organized crime to the schools, that blandly continue its work.