D: Afterward.7
A: Do you think Livia would’ve been a character for the whole run of it if she had held on, or do you think at a certain point you might’ve written her out anyway?
D: We might’ve written her out anyway, because you don’t want the guy to be too close to his mother and be accused of being obsessive about her, or of [the show] being too close to White Heat.
A: In season three, you have stories about Ralphie, Gloria, and Jackie as different foils for Tony at different points. Who do you think is the most important of the three to that particular season?
D: It’s hard to say. I mean, Jackie was definitely not. Not at all. They had different functions. I guess I’d have to say Ralphie, although Gloria was very important.
A: What would the season three story have been with Livia?
D: “Tony has to be nice to his mother.”
A: In the Livia funeral episode, there are two bits that people like to talk about.8 One bit is someone opening up the cabinet with a mirror on it and you see Big Pussy’s reflection for a moment. His ghost popped up a few other times over the course of the series, but that’s a really brief, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment. Why did you feel Pussy might make an appearance there?
D: I don’t know. Maybe he was there to greet the dead? Something like that. Nobody really notices, right?
A: They don’t.
MATT: That’s a particularly interesting spectral visitation. It’s not from the POV of one of the characters. Nobody in that scene is positioned in a way that they can see it. But that’s a very death-haunted episode, generally.
D: Yes, it is.
D: Yes. “The woods are lovely, dark, and deep.”
M: Meadow talks to him about his poetry assignment and is trying to help him discover his own answers, but he keeps saying, “Just tell me the answer.” At the time, we had no idea what was to come on the show, but watching this episode again I thought, “Oh, this feels like David Chase and the writers already getting frustrated with the audience.”
D: [Laughing] Right, right.
M: Were you getting frustrated at that point at all?
D: Yes.
M: With what?
D: When people misinterpret something—look, it’s there to be interpreted, and you the artist may not even know what you’re doing, but somebody else may see it because it’s coming from your unconscious, or your subconscious. What’s irritating is either when they complain about it, or they act arrogant about it, like they know better than you in some way—although I just said that maybe they do.
Since the internet, or maybe before that, there’s a certain kind of propriety people have about TV. Like they’re in the writer’s room. They actually seem to sometimes fantasize that they are in the writer’s room.
A: If viewers ascribe an intention to you that wasn’t really your intention, does it bother you?
D: Are we talking about the last scene of the show?
A: Yes. About people saying, “The last scene must mean this,” but it’s not what you intended.
D: It’s a tough thing, because I think it’s good that people interpret it. If they interpret it wrongly, they’re not stupid—unless it’s really stupid! [Laughs] And you think to yourself, “Why did I bother writing this scene if that’s what you take from it? It’s so far from what it meant.” Or, “Have you never watched the show before?” That’s another one you can say to yourself.
But theoretically, for the most part, I like it when people debate the show.
You know what it is, I think? When people are arguing with each other, I get angry because they’re not arguing with me, they’re arguing with each other! But when they argue, I get defensive. So I’m confused in that regard.
M: Do you want to jump in and be Marshall McLuhan in that scene from Annie Hall?9
D: No.
M: You’ve never even attempted to?
D: Well, I shout things at them in the privacy of my house. [Laughs] I use bad language!
M: Is there part of you that is just uncomfortable with interpretation generally, or the idea of “What did the artist mean? What is he trying to say?”
D: No. I have a liberal arts English degree, so I was brought up thinking that’s what it was all about, and I had to learn that sometimes, or oftentimes, art just is. It’s not attempting at anything. It’s not providing answers. But I had to grow up a little bit before I got to that.
M: At the risk of implicating myself and Alan in this, when you read the sorts of pieces we as TV critics write about a show like this, are you more likely to find yourself going, “Huh, that’s interesting,” or “Guys, you’re completely missing the point of this?”
D: The question you should be asking me is, “Which do you like better? The negative reviews or the positive ones? Which do you go for first?”
M: All right, David. I withdraw my question and substitute yours: Which do you go for first?
D: Negative.
M: Why?
D: Because it’ll get me charged up! Why do you like to pick fights? Why do you have an argument with your wife? This is not only me, but it’s friends of mine in the business and people you know! We scan those things for negative reviews so we get pissed off!
A: But when you find someone reaching and they completely miss it, that doesn’t bother you as much?
D: No.
A: Well, this season has the two most famous “unresolved” plotlines in the show: the rapist and the Russian. You intended neither of them to be any kind of continuing thing?
D: No.
A: So when you started hearing people saying, “When is Melfi going to tell Tony about the rape? When is the Russian going to come back?” what was your response?
D: “People, aren’t we all trying to escape network television? What do you want from me?” You know, “Is that what you really want?”
A: Is there anything you could’ve done with “Employee of the Month” to more clearly spell out, “This is it right here, don’t expect any more”?
D: No. And that goes to the point you make when you say you have to learn how to watch a show. As the writer, you think to yourself, “God, can’t you bring something to the table? Can’t you know that that ‘no’ meant ‘no’ in that case?” Or, “We don’t know for sure, of course, but can’t you see that probably means ‘no’?” A definite “no?” By the way the acting was done, the timing, everything? You think to yourself, “Can’t you bring something to this table? Why does everything have to be laid out for you?”
M: If the question of whether the rapist will ever be caught is not the point of the storyline, then what is? What is your interest in that storyline, if it’s not about crime and punishment?
D: There are people who don’t make deals with the devil. We have a few characters like that. Most everybody on the show made a deal with the devil.
Of course, Melfi had made a bigger deal with the devil, still.
M: You mean, in continuing to have Tony as a patient?
D: Yeah. “Technically,” that’s what she says to him in the first episode. I asked a shrink in my neighborhood, “What would you do if you had a Mob boss in there and he’d be telling you things and violence is involved? Would you treat him?” He said, “Yeah, I’d treat him, but if I knew physical harm had taken place, I’d go to the police.” The look on his face and everything was very cagey, and I thought it was an interesting viewpoint, or an interesting place to be in your head, that people could get hurt and you’re a doctor and you’re still more loyal to self-justification or narcissistic concerns. I thought that was an interesting thing for Melfi.
M: In talking to mental health professionals in the context of writing the show, did you ever talk about this idea of the mental health professional as someone hoping to correct or solve the patient’s behavior so as to prevent that kind of thing from happening in the future? And was that ever offered as justification for treating a probable criminal like Tony?
D: We got this
award and went to this ceremony in the Waldorf-Astoria. About eight shrinks talked on a dais about it, and some of them glanced at that reading. They said, theoretically, of course, there’s the hope that therapy would make a better person of Tony, or make him more content with himself or whatever. But not much.
A: At any point in season three, did you ever ask, “Would Melfi still have Tony as a patient at this point?”
D: Yeah. If you had to hide in a motel for a while to practice therapy, why would you ever go back to that situation?
A: Did you ever come close sooner than in that next-to-last episode to terminating the relationship for good?
D: Yes, but I can’t tell you when. I know a couple of times it came up. We talked about how, as an intelligent woman, she’s putting herself in too much danger and compromising her morals, her safety, everything, by continuing to hang out with this guy.
It was similar to my feelings about Carmela: How long is this woman going to be made a fool of? That was the reason for cutting it off.
M: At several points in the run of the show, I’d think, “Oh, this’ll be the season where Melfi cuts him loose,” or “This’ll be the season where Carmela divorces him.” But you never did either of those things—until the end, with Melfi.
D: Well, there was a season where he hardly saw Melfi at all, so I guess I thought we did do it in her case. With Carmela, I didn’t want to break them up. Just emotionally, I didn’t want to see it. And I felt, given that she’s an Italian American girl, this and that, and she’s a mobster’s wife, it would be very hard for her to do that. So we fought about that for quite a while.
A: Did Edie, Jim, and Lorraine, as three of your more prominent actors, give you pushback on story ideas?
D: Edie, no. Lorraine, some. Jim, all the time.
A: What in particular did he tend to object to?
D: Brutality, I think.
A: Did he say why?
D: Because it was so dissonant with his own values. I could say, “Well, Jim was a big guy, an angry guy, and he was concerned about that. He didn’t want to be taken for a bully or a thug, even before the show.” It was for the obvious reasons: he didn’t like what the characters were doing and he didn’t want to portray that.
A: So what would you tell him?
D: We’d go around and around, I’d say this and he’d say that. It depended on the case. In the end, he’d always do it.
M: I watched a documentary about Jim. It included a part about just him acting. Working on the set, working with the lines, the blocking and so forth. There were snippets of behind-the-scenes footage of him getting frustrated, like if he felt like a scene wasn’t working for him, if he didn’t think he could play it or it just wasn’t right. You’d actually see him snap and go like, “Goddammit! This doesn’t work!”
D: He did that a lot.
A: The confrontation between Tony and Gloria, when they’re in her house and he picks her up—
D: That was a scene Jim objected to. That was an all-day sucker, to get him to do that.
M: Why didn’t he want to do it?
D: He just didn’t want to do that. And we don’t know what it’s like to have to pick up a woman and throw her. I mean, I hope you don’t know. He didn’t want to be seen that way, thought of that way—he probably didn’t want to experience it, because he has to go there to do it. It has to be believable, and he actually has to be doing it. He didn’t want to be thought of as a beast, you know?
A: One of the oddities of this season is that Robert Funaro is credited as a cast regular in every episode he’s in, which did not happen in later seasons, even though he was more prominent in later seasons than that. Was there some Eugene Pontecorvo story you’d planned that got cut?
D: Eugene was going to play Ralphie.
A: Really?
D: Yeah, that was Jim’s suggestion. He’d worked with [Funaro] as a young actor, and then we tried it and began to realize it wasn’t going to work, so before we started shooting, we replaced him.
A: Had Joey Pants ever come in for anything before?
D: No, he hadn’t . . . I knew Joey Pants socially, and he’d come in to read for me on other things. We were also getting down our list of Italians! My impression of Joey Pants was always that he was a feature actor, and he wouldn’t be interested in doing this. I’d never seen him do—he’d done a TV movie or two, I think.
A: We’ve talked about Richie versus Ralphie. Richie gets a prominent introduction. Ralphie just walks into Tony’s kitchen in the middle of the Livia funeral episode as if he’s always been there, and then he winds up being hugely prominent. Do you think that was in part because you thought, “People will recognize Joey Pants, we don’t have to do a lot of work here?”
D: I’m working on a script now where I think the same thing: every time you introduce a new character, you don’t have to play “The Star-Spangled Banner.” It’s just, here’s another person in this universe.
A: It’s a more violent season, graphically, overall than the previous two, especially the three-episode run of “Employee of the Month,” “Another Toothpick” and “University.” At the same time, the mobsters are more overtly racist than before. It’s not just dealing with Noah Tennenbaum, it’s also the Charles Dutton cop. There’s an increased amount of racial epithets and commentary. And there’s the bit where Carmela goes to see Dr. Krakower and he’s blunter than Melfi has ever been in telling her to get away from this life. You talked before about the number of times over the years you just tried to scream at the audience, “These are evil people, this is a show about evil.” Did you feel you were trying that a little more consciously or unconsciously that year?
D: Did I say it was a show about evil?
A: Not necessarily—you talked about evil. I don’t know if you used those exact words, but you talked about these characters as making deals with the devil.
M: You did use that phrase, and I’m not talking about using it at the exclusion of others, but certainly one of the topics of the show is evil.
D: Yes, and a deal with the devil, for sure. Cheap compromises.
It might’ve been subconsciously there, when I think about the Krakower thing. But I wasn’t looking to be didactic. I had entered, knowingly or willingly or not, into a dialogue with the audience. I’d say something, and they’d say something back, but I always tried to distance myself from that as much as possible so that I wasn’t concerned with what they thought. I think, by and large, I was pretty successful.
A: What would you say the overall, most important story of season three wound up being?
D: The Ralphie story. [When Ralphie killed Tracee], we were right at the boiling point with some of the audience. People were saying, “How can they kill that girl?” and I said publicly, “It’s funny, nobody complains when they kill a guy.” And I really saw it that way. There was a lot of criticism from feminists who complained about the fact that they killed this girl. But they watched the show every week when men were being killed. That just didn’t compute for me. Do I need to say, “They’re all human beings?”
M: I remember there were a lot of complaints during season three, because I heard them, about violence against women. That was the season not only with Tracee dying in “University,” but with Dr. Melfi’s rape in “Employee of the Month.” And also, related images like Silvio manhandling Tracee by the car in “University.”
A: And Ralphie laughing while he’s doing it.
M: I don’t think we’d ever seen Silvio commit violence before. There was this sense that the characters were . . .
D: Uncaged.
M: Yeah. They were animals toward women, they were brutal. It was as big a shock to the system as hearing the unbridled racism in the back half of season one.
D: I’m only saying, the only thing I ever read about it at that time was feminist complaints about the death of Tracee. I never heard anything about Silvio or any of that stuff. It’s interesting that they all got clotted in that one seas
on, though. Melfi’s rape, that was the same season?
A: She’s raped in episode four, Tracee dies in episode six. And in between, Burt Young coughs himself to death. It was a happy stretch of the show. [Laughs]
M: It was. I remember having conversations with people at the Star-Ledger about the level of violence on the show.
D: Really?
M: Yes, and the blunt sexual humiliation and violence, the stuff with Tracee, the rape. There was one writer Alan and I both knew who said, “I can’t watch the show anymore, it’s become pornography.” Everybody’s breaking point is different with regard to that.
D: But here’s what I don’t understand: If Melfi’s rape had not happened in tandem with Tracee . . . how would it have been outré to do a story about rape? Because it was so graphic?
A: I think, to a degree, people were protective of Dr. Melfi. Like, she’s this “strong woman” in the context of the show, and here, she’s brought terribly low.
D: Oh, I see.
M: Here’s what I was trying to get at with these violence questions: Was there ever any frustration on your part, or the part of the other writers, that the audience loved these gangsters so much?
D: Yes.
M: Was there any element in this stuff we’re talking about—violence against women, racism, escalating levels of brutality, the sadism of characters like Ralphie—where this was your response to these viewers? Like, “You can’t like these guys! Goddammit, what’s wrong with you?”
D: Yes.
M: So you were trying to answer the question, “What do we have to do to make you people not like these guys?”
D: Yeah—to make you see what this show is about. It’s about people who’ve made a deal with the devil, starting with the head guy. It’s about evil. I was surprised by how hard it was get people to see that.
I mean, you only have me to trust about this, but I can tell you, there would’ve been a limit as to how far we’d have gone to make sure people got that.
M: In “University,” the show parallels the tragedy of Tracee and her death at the hands of Ralphie with Meadow and Noah. What was the thinking of intertwining those two stories?
The Sopranos Sessions Page 52