The Sopranos Sessions

by Matt Zoller Seitz

  Like many episodes from seasons six and seven, “Chasing It” follows thematically parallel narratives, and occasionally lets its plotlines converge, even collide, so that the stories seem to face and examine each other. The most obvious example is the scene where Tony, who cops to a long history of playing surrogate daddy, goes to Marie’s house and confronts Vito Jr. only a tad less brutally than Phil did. When the man and the boy sit across from each other, it’s like visiting hour at a prison, only we don’t know which is the prisoner. When Tony urges Vito to step up and be the man of the house because nobody else will, he could be addressing himself as a boy—maybe even paraphrasing Livia, the dark shape lingering in the back of his mind, telling him what to do and say even when he’s thinks he’s not listening. Note that when Tony berates others, he seems to be talking about himself in code. His attack on Carmela accuses her of evading the facts of her own corruption—her willingness to compromise for convenience and profit, expressed in the construction of a shoddy house that could kill its inhabitants. Carmela later counters with a similar image, of Tony as a cartoon character blithely wandering through life oblivious to the piano dangling from a rope above his head. There’s a difference, though: Tony is inarticulately accusing Carmela of complicity in corruption—a corruption he embodies. Carmela, on the other hand, seems to be warning him of physical rather than moral punishment: a value-neutral statement along the lines of, “You go in the water, you get wet.”

  What’s Tony rebelling against when he fouls his nest? Probably none of the positive things in his life: a strong, if volatile, marriage to a woman who truly loves him, and who bore him two children who look up to their dad even as they see through him; the security of knowing that he rose higher in his profession (organized crime) than anyone could have predicted, and that he’s amassed a fortune that allows him to drop $3.2 million on a yacht (according to Hesh) and bribe a building inspector so that his wife’s probable-death trap home can launch her real estate career. But more than ever, he seems ill at ease around people who used to make him feel comfortable. When in groups, he still seems alone, and when he talks, even if he’s in direct conversation, it’s like he’s talking to himself. Even the uncharacteristically (if deliberate) loose camerawork emphasizes this sense of volatility. Tony seems like a spiritual cousin of Eugene and Vito—guys who wanted out and got taken out; guys who unearthed their true selves too late, unbalancing their world and ensuring their demise. The Sopranos seems to be disintegrating as we watch it, like Junior’s mind.

  There’s so much more to discuss here: Tony’s anti-Semitic baiting of Hesh (more nest-fouling); Dr. Melfi’s insistence that Tony attend sessions regularly, then ending the scene by standing up (she’s the only character besides Carmela who seems unafraid of standing up to him); the abrupt death during her sleep of Hesh’s girlfriend Renata, and Tony’s astoundingly cold response (dropping off a sack full of cash to pay off his debt, and leaving as quickly as possible); the canny use, when AJ proposes to Blanca, of the main theme from 1978’s The Deer Hunter, a movie about how men express emotion by not expressing it, referenced in a scene where a man defies gender stereotype and speaks from his heart. AJ’s heart gets stepped on later when Blanca abruptly breaks off the engagement with minimal explanation (“All’s I know is I just don’t feel it.”), but that’s another story.

  Do the characters themselves feel freer to not worry about consequences because they know the show is ending soon? Are they all, like Tony and poor Vito Jr., so fed up with the state of their lives that they’ll do anything to break the monotony? Or are they all, as usual, just not thinking about how their actions ripple out far beyond the moment when they first occur?

  It is, as Christopher notes at one point, “like a pebble in a lake—even the fish feel it.”

  “WALK LIKE A MAN”

  SEASON 7/EPISODE 5

  WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY TERENCE WINTER

  Hellfighters

  “Chris, you’re in the Mafia!” —JT

  Early in “Walk Like a Man,” Tony tries giving Christopher advice on grilling meat as Chris and Kelli host a backyard barbecue, noting that you can pull certain cuts off the flame and they’ll keep cooking, thanks to the heat of the juices inside.

  Later, when Tony orders a deeply depressed AJ to accept a party invitation from “the Jasons” (the sons18 of Patsy Parisi and Carlo Gervasi, both of them Rutgers students and bottom-rung Family associates), the media room TV is playing The Hellfighters, a 1968 movie where John Wayne plays a firefighter who specializes in putting out fires on oil rigs—which might conceivably burn forever, depending on the size of the deposit below—by drilling deep into the earth and extinguishing the blaze with a well-placed explosive charge.

  In the barbecue scene, Christopher stews in the juices of a very old beef, feeling ever-growing resentment toward Tony, Paulie, and all the other mentors who pulled him into this life that offers nothing but misery. Hellfighters, meanwhile, presents a macho metaphor for the more sensitive, feminized work done by Dr. Melfi and her colleagues, who dig into the heart of patients’ histories and personalities to root out the sources of lifelong trauma—or at least, that’s what Melfi’s sessions with Tony ought to be. Unfortunately, Tony’s right to say that Melfi has spent much of the past six seasons treating symptoms rather than probing root causes—though, to be fair, she might have dug deeper by now had Tony seemed more open to the idea. Tony refuses to work to put out his own fire, nor does he want AJ to put out his own, opting to toss him out of the frying pan of his own depression and into the low-simmering flame offered by the Jasons.

  No one gets better, because no one is willing to do the dangerous work necessary to make that happen.

  “Walk Like a Man” is another Sopranos parallel narrative, following Tony’s biological and emotional sons to show the psychological toll of being related, by blood or by bond, to the Family in general and Tony in particular. AJ and Chris have both inherited unfortunate traits from their fathers: Tony’s depression and Dickie’s substance abuse. (Tony naturally goes about in pity for himself about the former and has no interest in hearing about the latter.) Both deal with their problems in their own ways—AJ by curling up into a weepy little ball whenever he thinks of Blanca, Chris by avoiding the Bing19—but Tony has no patience for coping mechanisms that don’t live up to the episode’s title. Chris may have a handle on his problem, but he didn’t take the Gary Cooper approach, and Tony dislikes him for it.

  (As he was when Janice’s anger management therapy was briefly working, Tony’s also jealous to see someone getting better when he never does. Witness his frustration when Chris calls him about Paulie trashing his lawn and verbally closes off any avenue Tony might have to yell at him.)

  Tony may have a point about the face-to-face nature of their business, but he’s also the one who guilted Chris into drinking some of the Vipers’ wine in “The Ride.” And, certainly, there are better ways for AJ to get over Blanca than watching bad James Franco movies, but what does Tony expect when AJ’s been pampered his entire life? He and Carmela (who’s privately happy about the break up because of “the culture divide” between her son and his one-time fiancée) are not equipped to meet AJ’s needs—and, worse, don’t fully understand this.

  Chris has his problems with spelling and grammar, but he’s not stupid. He can see that Bacala has taken his place in the inner circle (at the barbecue, Tony and Bobby discuss business—over two cold ones, versus Chris’s alcohol-free beer, which Tony mocks), and he knows that his problems with Paulie (who begins stealing from the hardware store owned by Christopher’s new father-in-law) wouldn’t be nearly as bad if the two could go out for steak and a shot.

  So he goes off the wagon again and sees the other wiseguys for what they really are: a pack of cackling animals who take pleasure in other people’s misery. Having failed to find comfort among one clan, he turns to another, visiting former sponsor and frequent punching bag JT, seeking absolution for his many sins, which
the Emmy-winning scribe has no interest in hearing about. JT doesn’t just deny Christopher the empathy he seeks; he rebuffs him, supposedly because he’s got a script deadline, but really because he doesn’t want to get too close to a made guy hell-bent on sharing incriminating information.

  Christopher wants an authentic connection: reassurance that he can finally tell the truth about who he is and what he’d done without being manipulated or punished or sold out, only to have JT tell him, simply but brutally, “You’re in the Mafia!”—meaning that there is no way of staying sober, or feeling better, because of the business he chose. This is what Melfi keeps trying to help Tony see. It’s what Dr. Krakower said to Carmela. It’s the most honest thing anyone’s ever said to Christopher. He shoots the messenger.

  This world that’s destroying his surrogate son is the same that Tony gladly pushes his biological son into, knowing full well that the Jasons are in the Family business. AJ needs real and lasting help, but Tony just wants the crying jags to end right this second, so he sends the boy to hang out with thugs who keep a vial of acid handy in case they should run across a debtor in need of torturing. (If Jackie Jr. had been a hair smarter, he’d be one of these guys.)

  On a level of pure craft, “Walk Like a Man”—the directorial debut of longtime Sopranos writer Terence Winter20—is a marvel, not just because of the amount of information it contains, but also because of how it toys with audience expectations. So many potential “endings” for the show are teased out and then either defused or complicated, that at times it seems as if David Chase had ordered some intern to compile a master list from every article that speculated on the show’s ending, then distributed it to the writers so they’d know what not to do. Could a Christopher–Paulie feud—which includes Chris shoving Little Paulie out a window and a vengeful Paulie tearing up Christopher and Kelli’s lawn with his car—still bring down the Family? Maybe, but the peacemaking scene at the Bing seems to put a period to that. Might Tony or Christopher get in a jam and squeal to the Feds? It could still happen, but while Tony’s gambling continues, and Christopher’s stupidity leaves him with a conspicuous killing to deny, the only crooks who get ratted out are Ahmed and Muhammed, two Bing regulars of Middle Eastern descent whose names Tony gives to Agent Harris and his counterterrorism colleagues. Both the Chris–Paulie feud and Christopher’s repeated attempts to unburden his guilt by confessing his role in Adriana’s death—notice how each time he alludes to the event, he uses more specific, incriminating language?—seem less about “How do we end the story?” than “How do we force these characters to acknowledge the moral and psychological realities of their lives?”

  More than some episodes, “Walk Like a Man” often indicates that The Sopranos’s true interest isn’t gangsterism, but psychotherapy, and psychology’s determination to unpack, define, and fix the roots of human unhappiness despite evidence that it’s not possible to do such a thing, because people are just too complicated, and therapy’s methods too reductive (despite their insistence on respecting the mysteries of the personality). There are at least five sequences in the hour that depict therapy or something like it. None are comforting. There’s Christopher’s group therapy confession; there’s Chris’s subsequent, coded one-on-one in the stairwell, where he recasts his fiancée’s murder as a dispute over a bad employee he happened to be sleeping with; and of course, there’s Chris’ final visit to JT. Then there’s Tony’s scene with Melfi and AJ’s interlude with his own shrink; both prove equally useless in the short run but might eventually amount to something if therapists and patients would pledge to dig deeper.

  Equally intriguing is Winter’s examination of the destructive effect of macho culture, which is passed down the generations (witness the two Jasons) through a combination of nature and nurture. Building on the last episode’s amazing use of the Deer Hunter theme, Winter teases out the Cult of Macho not just through numbing images of violence and sexual conquest, but through seemingly incidental touches that linger because of their metaphoric aptness. The old codes, defined in “Chasing It” when surrogate fathers Tony and Phil berated Vito Jr., are repeatedly likened to hazing. The Jasons torturing their customer in the woods has overtones of an initiation rite (for AJ). Tony himself invokes fraternities to Carmela as a justification for sending AJ to a party where he can drink and cavort with hookers even though he’s not of legal age. The low end of hazing is represented in the party scenes with the Jasons: all male entitlement and apelike swagger. Previous episodes plumbed hazing’s devilish depths: Tony being pulled into the life via his first murder, then punishing Bobby by forcing him into his own first hit.

  Then there’s the related matter of fathers and sons. Tony vocally obsesses over the idea that both criminality and depression are genetic, even as he rejects (to Christopher) the notion that alcoholism is an inherited disease like Alzheimer’s. (If Chris’ dad and Tony’s hero, Dickie Moltisanti, was nothing but a junkie—as Chris says at the barbecue—then what does that make Tony? Nothing but an overeating, boozing, coke-snorting, stripper-banging fraud?) Tony tries to save his own son, who he fears will follow him into Mob life, by commanding him to attend a party at the Bing, a Mob-run flesh pit where, as Christopher notes, booze and sex are everywhere and half the strippers are cokeheads. Tony evinces a similar push-pull attitude toward Christopher. As Chris points out, Tony’s the kind of guy who will pour a recovering alcoholic a drink and then judge him for taking it.

  These codes are intertwined with straight male identity. Even men who have never gotten within a thousand miles of a fistfight or a brothel have entertained urges like the ones that are the Sopranos mobsters’ stock-in-trade. Yet these impulses—and the industries devoted to satiating them—coexist with banal rituals of domestic life, wage slavery, and consumerist reflex. The episode’s penultimate scene finds Tony and AJ—both hungover and trying not to act too guilty—joining the women of the house, Carmela and Meadow, for a family dinner around the kitchen table.

  To walk like a man in this world, it seems, is to burn so slowly, you won’t notice it until your soul has turned black.

  “KENNEDY AND HEIDI”

  SEASON 7/EPISODE 6

  WRITTEN BY MATTHEW WEINER AND DAVID CHASE

  DIRECTED BY ALAN TAYLOR

  Comfort’s End

  “I haven’t been able to tell anybody this, but I’m fuckin’ relieved.” —Tony

  The most significant scene in the entire run of The Sopranos thus far occurs in “Kennedy and Heidi.” It isn’t the bloody car wreck or its disturbing aftermath. It isn’t Tony’s Las Vegas trip (in any sense of the word “trip”). It isn’t Tony’s two therapy scenes, or any of the scenes of mourning (or not mourning). It isn’t even a scene, really. It’s a five-second cutaway to the two title characters—the teenage girls in the car Christopher swerved to avoid.

  “Maybe you should go back, Heidi!” says Kennedy.

  Heidi’s reply: “Kennedy, I’m on my learner’s permit after dark!”

  We all know David Chase’s view of human nature is bleak. The Sopranos is set in a universe where good and evil have renamed themselves principle and instinct. Animals are not known for their inclination to act on principle. Nearly every significant scene enacts the same basic struggle, pitting the self-preservation instinct against the influence of what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature.” These angels have glass jaws.

  That cutaway to the girls in the car makes Chase’s central, recurring point more bluntly than seven seasons’ worth of beatdowns, strangulations, and shootings, because the girls seem so “ordinary”—just a couple of students driving on the highway late at night, maybe thinking that when they get back home they might sneak a couple of glasses of wine and watch some TV. The difference between Heidi and Kennedy and Tony and Christopher is one of degree, not kind. The girls have a chance to do the right thing but don’t. The exact reason for their decision not to help—by driving back to the scene or calling the cops—doesn’t matter
in the end. What’s important, for Chase’s purposes, is that they are presented with a moral test and they not only fail it, they don’t seem terribly aware that it was a test. Tony Soprano and Christopher Moltisanti have failed too many moral tests to count.

  Besides mirroring Tony and Chris at various stages of their lives, Kennedy and Heidi also represent the two identities inside so many Sopranos characters—especially Tony, whose deeply submerged decent self (the guy who dotes on his kids, banters with his wife, and idealizes young mothers and innocent animals) rarely emerges from his toxic cesspool of a personality. There have always been two Tonys. Kennedy is the voice in Tony’s head that says, “Do the right thing.” To which Heidi replies, “Fuck that.”

  Tony’s murder of Christopher isn’t about Tony’s murder of Christopher: it’s about the human impulse toward cold self-protection, illustrated with Macbeth-like viciousness both in the cutaway to Heidi refusing to go back, and then as Tony silences his compromised junkie of a surrogate son. (Tony starts to dial 911 but stops himself, punching all three digits only after Chris is safely dead.) Everyone is a threat to him now: garbage to be disposed of, just like the asbestos that one of Tony’s guys spends most of the hour trying to unload. Asbestos, of course, is hard to eliminate completely, and Chris’s presence in Tony’s life seems destined to linger, even just as evidence of how little humanity Tony has left.

  Just before the crash, during that long, beautiful, sad moment where Tony looks over at Christopher—perhaps realizing that he’s high, or maybe fearing he could turn rat—Chris’s stereo is playing Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb.” That’s the second time in two episodes that the writers have invoked that song (Tony quoted the lyrics at the start of “Walk Like a Man,” coming down the stairs to find his depressed son sprawled out before the television). The most important word in the title isn’t “numb,” but “comfortably.”