tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24720210957912591782024-03-03T19:25:28.729-05:00The Bada Bing Next DoorA long, strange journey toward a retrospectively inevitable cut to blackKeith Uhlichhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09366621160453356504noreply@blogger.comBlogger20125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2472021095791259178.post-7148363380141349102007-06-14T09:02:00.002-04:002007-06-14T09:03:33.907-04:00Sopranos Mondays: Season 6, Ep. 21, "Made in America"By <a href="http://www.blogger.com/profile/16921028537989131859">Matt Zoller Seitz</a><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgT0x9DAsX5nCCp3HhEvEknirV4vBciys4tkFAMhSjv3eIyleTrm6e_3LHmtJRiD6TVe1l-09cnYNd3BJ2uZ_xuGSvNLvjUPA8EOb-a0pt0R0_8xdasKxTjtDvn5K5SPNSb-Fk0v2H4dYk/s1600-h/madeinamerica.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgT0x9DAsX5nCCp3HhEvEknirV4vBciys4tkFAMhSjv3eIyleTrm6e_3LHmtJRiD6TVe1l-09cnYNd3BJ2uZ_xuGSvNLvjUPA8EOb-a0pt0R0_8xdasKxTjtDvn5K5SPNSb-Fk0v2H4dYk/s400/madeinamerica.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5074679996579353442" /></a>"It's my nature."<span class="fullpost"><br /><br />That's the punchline of the the fable "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scorpion_and_the_Frog">The Scorpion and the Frog</a>," a fable repeated in numerous pop culture works, including <span style="font-style:italic;">The Sopranos</span>, which referenced it in Season Two. About 10 minutes into "Made in America," the final episode of the final season of David Chase's drama, that phrase wriggled into my head and stayed there. It's key to appreciating the final episode, and key to understanding Chase's attitude toward people; they are what they are, they rarely change, and when they do, they stay changed for as long as it takes to realize that they were more comfortable with their old selves, at which point they revert; and once they're taken out of the picture, by illness or incarceration or death, the world keeps turning without them. <br /><br />Which is a roundabout way of saying, what the hell did people expect from David Chase? Closure? Satisfaction? Answers? A moral?<br /><br />It was the perfect ending. No ending at all. Write your own goddamn ending.<br /><br />Tony goes to a restaurant to meet his family for dinner, after an episode showing you that after all the bloody machinations of the past six episodes, life had begun to return to something like "normal," whatever that means for this sordid bunch of self-deluded materialistic suburbanites with blood on their hands; he sits down in a booth and flips through the jukebox trying to pick a song (a great self-referential joke for a show that prides itself on picking exactly the right song for a scene). He chooses Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'" (the refrain "Don't stop" expressing the feelings of <span style="font-style:italic;">Sopranos</span> fans so perfectly that I fear it'll be the go-to headline for stories about the finale); when Steve Perry sings, "Just a small town girl," the little bell on the restaurant's front door rings and Carmela enters and sits with Tony. They exchange chitchat -- most of the episode, which was both written and directed by Chase, is chit-chat heavy, with some halfhearted exposition sandwiched in. "What looks good tonight?" Carmela asks. "I don't know," Tony replies. He tells her Carlo flipped, that he's going to testify; Carmela's grave expression indicates that this could be the beginning of the end for their family as well as Da Family. <br /><br />The bell rings again, Tony looks up, and a middle-aged white guy in a Members Only Jacket (so named in the final credits, and another nice extra-textual gag) enters the restaurant and peels off screen right toward the bar, revealing AJ coming in right behind him. AJ sits with them. More chit-chat. Tony makes eye contact with the Members Only guy, who seems to be staring at him a bit too intently; is he an assassin, sent to kill Tony and maybe his family as well, or is he just someone who recognized Tony from TV and newspaper stories? We don't know; the guy eventually gets up from his stool and goes into the bathroom. Is he pulling a Michael Corleone? Is there a gun taped to the back of a toilet tank? We don't know. Moments later, two young black males enter the restaurant. Tony was almost killed by a couple of young black men in Season One; are they assassins, or just a couple of friends going out for dinner? We don't know.<br /><br />Meadow is the last Soprano family member to arrive at the restaurant. The scene cuts between Tony, Carmela and AJ inside and Meadow outside, desperately trying to parallel park. The final episodes of the final episode of <span style="font-style:italic;">The Sopranos</span>, and David Chase is spending a solid minute on Meadow's poor parking skills. Who does he think he is? Doesn't he know we want to know that everyone died or that everyone was all right, or that Tony eventually flipped or didn't, or that the Sopranos went into witness protection or didn't, or that Tony ripped the skin off his face, exposing circuitry, and proceeded to reveal to his family that all this time, he was a cyborg sent from the future to save humanity from extinction? And yet the tension is unbearable. So often on <span style="font-style:italic;">The Sopranos</span>, when a character or characters spend a lot of screen time shooting the breeze or fixating on some mundane bit of business, the non-drama is followed by a beat-down or a bullet in the brain; your attention starts to wander and then WHAM. We expect the same dynamic this time; but Meadow successfully parks the car. She walks across the street. We think she might get hit by a car; she does not. Cut to the inside of the restaurant; Tony looks up at the sound of the bell ringing; cut to black. <br /><br />The sound cuts out, too. <br /><br />The credits roll. <br /><br />There is no music. <br /><br />What happens next? We don't know. We'll never know.<br /><br /><center>_______________</center><br /><br />"What the hell?"<br /><br />The above sentence is the opening of a brief conversation I had with my sister-in-law. She called at 10:15 eastern time. She and my brother had just finished watching the final episode of <span style="font-style:italic;">The Sopranos</span>. They wanted to talk about it. I hadn't watched it yet. I cut her off. "Don't tell me anything," I said. "I want to watch it myself." I'd wanted to watch it in real time, but my three-year-old son refused to go to bed by nine. I hung up and headed upstairs and pulled up the episode on my digital video recorder. Keith Uhlich, my managing editor, called, and even though I tried to cut him off instantly, he still managed to squeeze out, "I think David Chase just pissed off millions of people." <br /><br />If so, they were millions of people who weren't watching <span style="font-style:italic;">The Sopranos</span>, but another show that they hoped would turn into what they wanted <span style="font-style:italic;">The Sopranos</span> to be. They kept hoping that this time, the scorpion won't sting them. He always did. <br /><br />Here, yet again, Chase did exactly what I expect him to do: the unexpected. No gangster story has ever ended like this. The lack of resolution -- the absolute and deliberate failure, or more accurately, refusal, to end this thing -- was exactly right. It felt more violent, more disturbing, more unfair than even the most savage murders Chase has depicted over the course of six seasons, because the victim was us. He ended the series by whacking the viewer. <br /><br />This ending was so consistent with everything that came before -- consistent with the show's themes, its style, its cruel sense of humor, its belief in the utter finality of death as the only real ending, the sense that life goes on anyway, even without the incredibly important person known as You -- that it was the greatest <span style="font-style:italic;">Sopranos</span> ending ever. As I've said over and over in these posts and in <span style="font-style:italic;">Star-Ledger</span> coverage of Seasons One through Three, Chase would rather frustrate, baffle or disappoint than deliver what audiences expect. This finale was the ultimate example of that principle. It was the film breaking five minutes before the end of a gripping movie, or having a novel ripped ripped from your hands before you were done with the last chapter. <br /><br />Phil Leotardo was shot in the head at that gas station in mid-sentence; he didn't even live long enough to see the wheel of his daughter's SUV roll over his skull. Life went on without him.<br /><br />Good luck naming a season of <span style="font-style:italic;">The Sopranos</span> that ended with the simultaneous rising of action to a delirious peak and the tying up of loose ends. Season One probably came the closest to attaining that kind of classical narrative shape, and that season doubtless ended as it did because Chase figured he was doing a one-off that wouldn't get picked up for another go-round. Left to his own devices -- as he was from Season Two onward -- he established that he'd rather insinuate, tease and then frustrate. Starting with Season Two, every season has packed a lot of plot (and a fair amount of violence) into the second-to-last episode, left the final episode as a denouement -- a protracted down-shifting -- and left a lot of subplots, many of them seemingly major, unresolved. We never found out what happened to the Russian from "Pine Barrens." Tracee's murder at the hands of Ralphie Cifaretto was apparently never discovered by law enforcement, and justice was done obliquely, by Tony, months later, in a different context, and it's doubtful that it occurred to him that he was avenging Tracee. <br /><br />This is considered bad drama because it's like life. <br /><br />"Made in America" was the ultimate season ender; if you thought previous season enders were unsatisfying, well, you hadn't seen anything yet. <br /><br />We were always frogs offering a scorpion a ride across the river. And this scorpion never promised not to sting us.<br /> <br /><span style="font-style:italic;">The Sopranos</span> eschews tidy resolutions, and seems (or perhaps I should say "seemed") to delight in providing closure on small matters while denying it in big ones. In "Made in America," Meadow's wedding was discussed, but only in the abstract. We heard that Carlo flipped but we never saw it and never got any indication of why, or whether any evidence he might provide would prove damning enough to bring down the family. We heard twice that subpoenas were being handed out, but despite Tony's depressed reactions, we never learned if they would lead anywhere; there were indications that the gun charge might finally bring Tony down, but there was no closure on that, either. Tony visited Sil in the hospital, but we never learned if he lived or died. We heard Meadow had to go to the doctor to change her birth control pills. Did she have a pregnancy scare? Did she switch medicine to be extra-certain that she didn't have a child by the son of a known gangster, thus perpetuating the family legacy? Unlikely, since she told her dad she went into law after seeing his treatment at the hands of cops and FBI agents -- but we don't know. Tony's boys brought a cat from the safehouse back to the Bing; it kept staring at a picture of the murdered Christopher for hours on end. When the picture was moved, the cat moved with it, and kept staring. What does this mean? We don't know.<br /><br />Tony's lawyer sat there whacking that bottle of ketchup over and over until Tony grabbed it out of his hands and tried to do it himself, and the ketchup still didn't come out. <br /><br />The pilot episode started with Tony telling Dr. Melfi that he feared he'd come into the business (and by implication, America) at the end; that the best was over. The creeping sense of numbness and despair, the sense that the best (whatever that means) is over, and the concurrent sense that nothing that happens to us is as important as important to history, or even to our friends and relatives, as we'd like think, that when we're gone we'll probably be forgotten like 99.99999% of the human race, is encoded in every line and scene of this finale. Almost nobody gives a damn about your life but you, and according to Chase, there's a good chance you don't give as much of a damn as you think, because if did, you would have already changed yourself to match your idealized image. Uncle Junior doesn't remember anything about his long, colorful, nasty life, including the shooting of his own nephew; he might not even recognize his nephew. The widowed Janice seeks refuge in a house that used to belong to Johnny Sacrimoni. It's surrounded by McHomes; Tony informs her that when Johnny built the house, the area was all cornfields. We learn that the key to finding Phil is locating a gas station with a pay phone in front of it; a gas station attendant explains that few gas stations have pay phones anymore. One of the Little Italy scenes begins with a shot of a double-decker tour bus zipping through the neighborhood, and we hear an announcer telling the tourists that Little Italy used to be a huge, thriving neighborhood, but now it's been reduced to a handful of restaurants and stores; the scene ends with a shot of the street teeming with Asians. "Fuckin' A, I'm disappointed," Phil exclaims at one point. To quote another episode title, "Join the Club."<br /><br />Tony looks up at the sound of the door opening. Cut to black. Roll credits. The story continues. You're not around to see it. <br /><br />Throughout its run, <span style="font-style:italic;">The Sopranos</span> has insisted, in dialogue and imagery, that there is a life beyond what we can see, a world beyond the familiar. Chase could never show us that world outright because no artist has that power. But for eight years, he did the next best thing, which was show us a fiction that wasn't quite like any of the fictions that influenced it -- a fiction that prompted contemplation of our own world, however small or large it might be. And in the final moments of the final hour of the final season, he gave us an ending we did not anticipate -- an ending unlike any he's ever staged, but not the least bit out-of-character for <span style="font-style:italic;">The Sopranos</span>. <br /><br />Appreciate it.<center>______________________</center><br />Sopranos<i> recaps run every Monday at </i><a href="http://www.mattzollerseitz.blogspot.com">The House Next Door</a><i>. For more articles about the series, see </i>The Sopranos<i> in the sidebar at right.</i></span>Keith Uhlichhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09366621160453356504noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2472021095791259178.post-50020061965445548952007-06-14T09:02:00.001-04:002007-06-14T09:02:31.611-04:00Sopranos Mondays: Season 6, Ep. 20, "The Blue Comet"<a href="http://www.blogger.com/profile/16921028537989131859">By Matt Zoller Seitz</a><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAO8zkCKKdHkgr5fl_25aT7qsCZjaHa4F33EJp3I_AmEQZ_PtCq07p2flK8zdJcwySSj0K6-kt1JzMLos0qu7BYWbcotchTk1vA8JYWRgGjt_lAlMUG4SXl9JcIZgstKkghyphenhyphenZGjQyL0oQ/s1600-h/bluecomet1.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAO8zkCKKdHkgr5fl_25aT7qsCZjaHa4F33EJp3I_AmEQZ_PtCq07p2flK8zdJcwySSj0K6-kt1JzMLos0qu7BYWbcotchTk1vA8JYWRgGjt_lAlMUG4SXl9JcIZgstKkghyphenhyphenZGjQyL0oQ/s400/bluecomet1.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5072305523153463186" /></a>David Chase is the king of the double-reversal.<span class="fullpost"> He trains viewers to expect something other than the obvious -- an out-of-left-field development, even an anticlimax or a baffling digression; then, when he decides to do what you'd expect a gangster melodrama to do, you're not only surprised by the events themselves, you're surprised Chase went there. The penultimate episode of <span style="font-style:italic;">The Sopranos</span>, "The Blue Comet," was the most atypically typical whack-fest the show has served up in quite some time, maybe since the final leg of Season One. It was the sort of hour that fair-weather fans of the series keep craving even though Chase has consistently refused to give it to them. It was an orgy of Mafia mayhem best characterized by a line from Ray Liotta's <span style="font-style:italic;">Goodfellas</span> narration: real greaseball shit. By the end of it, Tony had sent his wife and kids into hiding and was last seen in in wartime mode, holed up in a house with his boys, clutching the AR-15 rifle that Bobby had given him and awaiting the inevitable assault. So much for the theory that <span style="font-style:italic;">The Sopranos</span> would go out with one long moan. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGuT0bd9tqH4PogIqUQ_bt35nz22JXdqqrPy7qr9U0mGqldfhuPJTmVgBCc1N4oRHk9qkfFFntjrBoGweqhCWttPc2entkDUHEhMc0ia1XTBTjLGk_xJIyZlwoT8QuQH0YAvHTUw4dRRc/s1600-h/bluecomet4.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGuT0bd9tqH4PogIqUQ_bt35nz22JXdqqrPy7qr9U0mGqldfhuPJTmVgBCc1N4oRHk9qkfFFntjrBoGweqhCWttPc2entkDUHEhMc0ia1XTBTjLGk_xJIyZlwoT8QuQH0YAvHTUw4dRRc/s200/bluecomet4.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5072321113884747698" /></a>The episode starts with Silvio taking the initiative and garroting Burt Gervasi for "playing both sides of the fence" and trying to steer Silvio and others to join the Lupertazzi Family. The latter family's acting boss, Phil Leotardo, declares war on the Soprano family; Tony gets tipped off by Agent Harris ("wheels have been set in motion") and Tony OK's pre-emptive strikes, starting at the top (a mirror of Leotardo's plan to destroy the Soprano family by killing its top three members, Tony, Silvio and Bobby). But Tony's plan to bring some hired guns from Italy to kill Phil goes horribly awry; Tony subcontracts the planning of the hit to Paulie, who in turn asks Corky Caporale and Patsy Parisi to explain the details to the killers; the trigger-man kills an innocent senior citizen who vaguely resembles Phil and takes out his daughter in the process. (Now we know why Tony hates delegating; it only creates more problems.) Silvio gets shot and gravely wounded in a hit outside the Bada-Bing (though Steve Van Zandt's acting was so off in the tracking shot revealing his bloodied body that it was hard to tell if Silvio was dead, unconscious, playing possum, or remembering his senior prom). Silvio's fellow passenger, Patsy Parisi, escapes and is last seen fleeing the scene. Backing out of the Bing's parking lot, Phil's button-men cause an accident involving a motorcyclist, prompting the second of two "Run away! Run away!" reaction shots from the gawking crowd, a crowd we assumed had gone inside for safety's sake. This was a good, mean joke -- in the spirit of that cutaway to the girls driving the car that caused the accident in "Kennedy and Heidi," but with an undertone of audience criticism. The crowd outside the Bing runs away from the hit like Tokyo extras fleeing Godzilla, then comes back to watch again, their rubbernecking impulse made plain when a gangland hit is followed by an actual car accident. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3wQM2EzXaEhsofwcZpaCnBio1-5zJriOZYoPfe1e8u_YKHZHLOnm9_RDvMwGVxlB4U-QESgrbd7j9oRWNv8Pww-rM_eKm0xkGm3TzSWc1rBwDQ2wXT6tpLrWdwn7dxGa05jLDl50KyFg/s1600-h/bluecomet3.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3wQM2EzXaEhsofwcZpaCnBio1-5zJriOZYoPfe1e8u_YKHZHLOnm9_RDvMwGVxlB4U-QESgrbd7j9oRWNv8Pww-rM_eKm0xkGm3TzSWc1rBwDQ2wXT6tpLrWdwn7dxGa05jLDl50KyFg/s200/bluecomet3.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5072300240343689074" /></a>Bobby Bacala's death is a companion to that Bing joke. He gets shot in a model train shop while coveting a scale model of a defunct passenger car that gave the episode its title. The prized toy was a very busy little metaphor. On an obvious level, it stood for any nostalgic impulse the gangsters have ever demonstrated; the lionizing of The Good Old Days when gangsterism supposedly had rules; Tony's criticizing the ongoing pussyfication of the American white man, and asking, "Whatever happened to Gary Cooper?" (For all his delusions, Paulie sees the past more clearly, remarking in a gravely distressed tone that he survived the New York gang wars of the 70s by "the skin of my balls.") <br /><br />Bobby's execution was intercut with a model train jumping the tracks, which seemed like a too-obvious <span style="font-style:italic;">Godfather</span> borrowing (a murder intercut with something mundane) until you remembered Phil's contemptuous statement earlier in the episode implying that the Sopranos weren't even a real family, but a pygmy clan that needed to be wiped out. They're not gangsters, they're scale models of gangsters. Phil intends to smash them like a toy train set. As he smashes them, it will be difficult to muster much sympathy for the vanquished because Chase has exposed their selfishness unmercifully, like a prosecutor building an airtight case. Thanks to the ever-more-conspicuously nasty behavior exhibited this season, often by characters we might otherwise be inclined to identify with (like Bobby Bacala, who killed for the first time on Tony's orders), it's hard to get to choked up over the destruction (and self-destruction) of Tony or the members of his blood family and crime family. The series has underlined, italicized and boldfaced the fact that they're all killers or tacit enablers of killers. As we watch them go down, we might as well be watching a model train jump the tracks. <br /><br />Lastly, Orson Welles once called <span style="font-style:italic;">Citizen Kane</span> "the greatest electric train set any boy ever had.” The train shop scene is a jokey admission that filmmakers are overgrown kids playing God with life-sized toys. As the series chugs along toward its final destination, Chase is staging one collision after another. We shudder in revulsion, then go online and try to guess what he'll smash next. Bacala's death (a virtual boss sprawled out atop a pile of model trains) ties in with the sight of those rubberneckers at the Bing recoiling from horror, then going back for more, all the while drawing no apparent distinction between a gangland hit and a car accident. They're drawn to pain like flies to shit. It's as if Chase is simultaneously celebrating and condemning his own ability to mesmerize viewers with violence -- saying, in effect, "Yeah, I know it's compelling -- I enjoy making it as much as you enjoy watching it," and "Jesus, what's wrong with you people? Why do you keep coming back for more?"<center>__________________</center> <br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinDivwVQ60zXDdHsjThUiX-FNbBxX-ms-2JsF817C5AKSkgQjm4pTIdiODkOlBbtU49Di6eM07l_0Q4-IN-_WOnfSvQxBG2yoEg9RgOEz1bKECr4rskwIR7ik085JA6HGgoIqAiyKjCmo/s1600-h/stagefive.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinDivwVQ60zXDdHsjThUiX-FNbBxX-ms-2JsF817C5AKSkgQjm4pTIdiODkOlBbtU49Di6eM07l_0Q4-IN-_WOnfSvQxBG2yoEg9RgOEz1bKECr4rskwIR7ik085JA6HGgoIqAiyKjCmo/s200/stagefive.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5072321560561346498" /></a>It's not your imagination; in Season Six, the show has, in fact, gotten progressively grimmer, its characters more pathetically life-sized. Chase has made it tough to mourn his principal characters for any reason besides their stillborn human potential. It's as if he's conducting a perverse social experiment, trying to see how much loathsome behavior he can show without driving us off. The episode's bits of meta-commentary -- on violence as entertainment and suffering as spectacle, and on the morality of those who watch -- gain context in the scene where Melfi decides she's had enough of Tony's charismatic intransigence and kicks him out. Melfi's decision comes after two weeks' worth of pressure from her own shrink, Dr. Kupferberg, who kept bringing up a study indicating that criminals don't make real progress in therapy, they just learn how to manipulate their therapists. <br /><br />The (theoretically final) Melfi-Tony scene might be the most explicit acknowledgment of Tony's brutishness since he pinched Christopher's nostrils shut in "Kennedy and Heidi." As he talks to Melfi about his son's botched suicide and subsequent treatment, and his daughter's decision to give up medicine for pre-law, he isn't saying anything he hasn't said before; we should be, if not moved, than at least sympathetic. But because we're seeing Tony through Melfi's eyes, it looks like crocodile tears. Melfi wonders, and we're supposed to wonder, if this burly killer with a soft spot for pets and children really feels anything at all, or if his emotionalism is just a form of overcompensation, a means of lying to himself and the world about his cauterized human potential. (When AJ broke down and started to weep, Tony dragged him across the floor and berated him for his weakness.) If Tony is Chase's surrogate, Melfi is (or is supposed to be) ours. She's saying she feels deceived and manipulated, that she's had it, that this relationship isn't really going anywhere, and for the sake of her mental health and personal honor, it has to end. I understand her position, and I'll be standing alongside her next Sunday night, after one last hour of rubbernecking.<center>______________________</center><br />Sopranos<i> recaps run every Monday at </i><a href="http://www.mattzollerseitz.blogspot.com">The House Next Door</a><i>. For more articles about the series, see </i>The Sopranos<i> in the sidebar at right.</i></span>Keith Uhlichhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09366621160453356504noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2472021095791259178.post-50490775978068099092007-06-14T09:01:00.001-04:002007-06-14T09:01:43.469-04:00Sopranos Mondays: Season 6, Ep. 19, "The Second Coming"By <a href="http://www2.blogger.com/profile/16921028537989131859">Matt Zoller Seitz</a><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlHifk8TIwzhYBKjaewAFnXQCwBTLKSLFq-SQj-oa4qg9L7Tt3QSFbBIJ3VzON2XMupmrQaCiVxjeF2vx0rWTKfgtbOjWfi61swFpRvoBA2aFo64H1LTFhVDrYqe5Qh1yJqIgG-9e8vMw/s1600-h/secondcoming2.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlHifk8TIwzhYBKjaewAFnXQCwBTLKSLFq-SQj-oa4qg9L7Tt3QSFbBIJ3VzON2XMupmrQaCiVxjeF2vx0rWTKfgtbOjWfi61swFpRvoBA2aFo64H1LTFhVDrYqe5Qh1yJqIgG-9e8vMw/s400/secondcoming2.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5067147571726185570" /></a>After last week's <span style="font-style:italic;">Sopranos</span> episode, "<a href="http://mattzollerseitz.blogspot.com/2007/05/sopranos-mondays-season-six-ep-18-heidi.html">Kennedy and Heidi</a>," viewer discussion centered on Tony's climactic, "I get it!", bellowed twice to the sun on a desert ridge during a peyote trip.<span class="fullpost"> People wondered what, exactly, did Tony "get"? Was it the fact that his thieving, whoring, murderous life was the number one contributing factor to his unhappiness -- the fuel that kept his inherited tendency toward depression burning like an oil well fire? Or, <a href="http://blog.nj.com/alltv/2007/05/sopranos_rewind_kennedy_and_he.html">as my friend Alan Sepinwall suggested</a>, did Tony "get" the fact that ethics, religion and every other means of judging behavior was an abstraction that has no weight beyond what you choose to give it? The first realization might have led Tony to confess his sins to Melfi -- this mostly non-religious gangster tale's closest equivalent to clergy -- and maybe end up in witness protection, selling out Da Family as an alternative to destroying what's left of his soul. The second realization could have pushed Tony -- who spent much of "Kennedy and Heidi" denying his guilt over murdering his surrogate son, the potential rat Christopher -- to finally embrace his inner monster, give Dr. Melfi the heave-ho and start whacking people without misgivings. <br /><br />The problem with this either-or argument is that it's either-or, and <span style="font-style:italic;">The Sopranos</span> is not, and never has been, an either-or kind of show. Like most TV series -- and more like life than movies -- it's a series of situations that repeat themselves with the details changed. <a href="http://mattzollerseitz.blogspot.com/2007/04/sopranos-mondays-season-6-ep-13-soprano.html">I argued in another post</a> that <span style="font-style:italic;">The Sopranos</span>' freshest element is how it ties TV's open-ended "life goes on and on" format to a consistently pessimistic, often wickedly honest vision of human nature. It shows characters winning or losing big, suffering and transcending this or that situation, and moving a few baby steps closer to a series of realizations that could change the the substance of their lives -- then backing off at the last second (often without realizing how close they came, much less that they're backing off), and returning to some version of the status quo. Both "I get it, I'm a criminal and that's bad," vs. "I get it, I'm a criminal and I like it" are realizations that would be not only reductive, but inconsistent with the view of human nature Chase and company have built over six seasons -- a view that's either cynical or realistic, depending on your faith in humankind's ability to assess their strengths and weaknesses, redefine themselves and not revert. <br /><br />It wouldn't surprise me if Chase served up a conclusion somewhere between those two poles -- a ambiguous or at least elusive and frustrating ending, one consistent with the acerbic and often infuriating universe he's built up since 1999: Tony comes close to a life-changing realization, maybe closer than he's ever gotten, but still can't push himself over the line into true epiphany, and ends up backsliding into the grim routine of his life. Given Tony's unusual (for a gangster) level of self-awareness, that would be a tragedy of a type never seen in the gangster story -- a genre which, to quote Tony, usually ends with the protagonist dead or in the can. <br /><br />Tony doesn't have the language to describe as such, but he's a seeker, looking for something beyond what he already knows. <a href="http://mattzollerseitz.blogspot.com/2007/04/sopranos-mondays-season-6-ep-16-chasing.html">The title of episode 16, "Chasing It,"</a> suggested as much, and the screenwriter of "The Second Coming," Terence Winter, put a slightly finer point on it during one of this week's Tony-Melfi therapy scenes. The exchange between patient and therapist -- about Tony's peyote trip last week, and what he did or didn't "get" -- was revealing enough that I'm quoting it here at length:<br /><br /><strong>Tony</strong>: All I can say is, I saw, for pretty certain, that this, everything we see and experience, is not all there is."<br /><strong>Melfi</strong>: What else is there?"<br /><strong>Tony</strong>: Something else.<br /><i>Melfi stares, nonverbally pushing for him to elaborate.</i><br /><strong>Tony</strong>: That's as far as I'm gonna go with it. I don't fucking know. <br /><strong>Melfi</strong>:Alternate universes?<br /><strong>Tony</strong>: You're gonna be a fucking comedian now?<br /><strong>Melfi</strong>: I'm not.<br /><i>Tony pauses, nods.</i><br /><strong>Tony</strong>: Maybe...This is gonna sound stupid, but I saw at one point that our mothers are the bus drivers. They are the bus. They are the vehicle that gets us here. They drop us off and go on their way. They continue on their journey, and the problem is, we keep trying to get back on the bus. Instead of just letting it go. <br /><strong>Melfi</strong>: That's very insightful.<br /><strong>Tony</strong>: Jesus, don't act so surprised.<br /><i>Long pause</i>.<br /><strong>Tony</strong>: You know, you have these thoughts, and you almost grab it, and then, pffft.<center>__________________</center><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxfhNN69hGB8x3axNC7CytluTiJc1kvreHNuJLyFaQuvMRPQjqLRWckCO0VsgGTR4wrOXMfD-vxy6sWC6CDISyxNQvyIOkALx9XYBwB9uKcZwX3Hltajb-OtsLSgaBwBLjlZCiESPkun4/s1600-h/secondcoming1.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxfhNN69hGB8x3axNC7CytluTiJc1kvreHNuJLyFaQuvMRPQjqLRWckCO0VsgGTR4wrOXMfD-vxy6sWC6CDISyxNQvyIOkALx9XYBwB9uKcZwX3Hltajb-OtsLSgaBwBLjlZCiESPkun4/s200/secondcoming1.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5067149182338921586" /></a>That's Tony in a nutshell -- always pushing toward some realization greater than what his relatives, colleagues and friends can muster, but invariably coming up short. In Walker Percy's <i>The Moviegoer</i>, the narrator talks about a similar dynamic. When he was on the battlefield in Korea in 1951, pinned to the ground and staring at a dung beetle crawling around in leaves, he had a similar realization -- that there was something else out there, something beyond what we can see. And then he forgot about it. He periodically remembers that he had that epiphany -- every few pages of the novel's first chapter, in fact, and many times thereafter -- but then he gets drawn into what he calls the "everydayness" of life, the familiar and comforting and numbing routines, and he forgets again. Unlike Tony, he has a developed enough psychological vocabulary to put his sensations into more precise words--and even feel a bit smug about it, his narration lording it over the businessmen and working stiffs who lack his sophistication, his sense that there's Something Else Out There--but in the end, he and Tony are in the same predicament, the predicament we're all in, whether we realize it or not, whether we care to admit it or not. Changing one's essential nature -- one's entire world view -- is not easy, even when, like Tony, you've suffered (and inflicted) trauma on an unimaginable scale, and have immediate life-or-death reasons for needing to make a major change. <br /><br />Tony tells Melfi that he knew he had a golden moment after Junior shot him, and that he let it slip away; the implication is that his Las Vegas trip was a half-assed attempt to create a new chance for epiphany. But is such a thing possible, for Tony or anyone else?<br /><br />The evidence does not bode well. Tony's son AJ plunged into the abyss and tried to drown himself by putting a plastic bag over his head, tying a concrete block to his ankle and hurling himself into the swimming pool. His father saved him, purely by a fluke of timing. But Tony's reaction to the near-tragedy mimics the dynamics of his post-shooting and post-Vegas trip reactions. He does what's right (dives in and saves AJ). Then he reverts to macho type, berating AJ for his stupidity and weakness and perhaps resenting the vulnerability it made Tony feel. Then he turns nonjudgmental, purely empathetic. He cradles his weeping son and cries with him (maybe the most heartrending moment in the entire series, sharply acted by both James Gandolfini and Robert Iler). But then he reverts again, with both Melfi (admitting he despises AJ's sensitivity, his weakness) and Carmela (pushing her into an argument that pivots on who's genetically responsible for AJ's depression; later, in a session with Melfi, Tony shifts blame to Carmela for "coddling" AJ). In this episode, Tony admits his depression, and his family history of depression, more frankly than at any other point in the show's run. But he ultimately pulls back, stifles his bleeding emotions and tries to soldier on and be a gangster Gary Cooper. (There are even seeds of a Melfi self-reckoning: her shrink, Dr. Kupferberg, tells her of a study indicating that sociopaths in talk therapy don't get better, they actually tend to revert to bad behavior more quickly -- and perhaps learn better methods of scamming via therapy. Melfi keeps a poker face, but her subsequent session with Tony finds her subtly pushing him to acknowledge that there might be another reason why AJ is in despair -- that maybe it's not just an inherited tendency toward depression; maybe Tony's criminality might have just a little bit to do with it. But how far down this road is Melfi willing, or able, to go?)<br /><br />From the episode's opening moments, there's a sense of long-deferred bills coming due, long-denied facts asserting themselves, dreams being disturbed, reality asserting itself. In "The Second Coming" -- a poem that's proving integral to this final run of episodes -- William Butler Yeats warns that, <br /><blockquote><i>Things fall apart<br /> The centre cannot hold<br /> Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,<br /> The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere<br /> The ceremony of innocence is drowned.</i></blockquote>This isn't just a more eloquent restatement of Tony's pet phrase, "Everything turns to shit." It's a description of an existential predicament that has ensnared both Tony and AJ. (And as the esteemed Mr. Sepinwall points out in his <a href="http://blog.nj.com/alltv/2007/05/sopranos_rewind_the_second_com.html"><i>Star-Ledger</i> recap</a>, this is the second time the show has quote Yeats' most famous poem: "In season five's 'Cold Cuts,' Melfi used the famous 'Things fall apart' line with Tony.") <br /><br />There's a sense that terrible knowledge -- knowledge of toxic truth held at bay with rationalizations and outright lies -- is intruding on the characters' waking dream states, their privileged, outwardly carefree existences. The episode's first two shots show a mountain of asbestos moldering near the marshlands of North Jersey, a stone's throw from a big city skyline (Jersey City?). Then director Tim Van Patten cuts to a tracking shot that reveals a sleeping Tony, followed by a shot of AJ sleeping. Then AJ awakes, puts on rap music to drown out his depression, and in so doing, wakes up his father. Just as the asbestos is bound to contaminate the blood of North Jersey residents, gangsterism will poison the plush lifestyle it enables -- a lifestyle the criminals and their spouses and children hoped they could keep separate. Everyone will inhale a bit of poison. A tiff over asbestos dumping and construction spills into Tony's private life, leading to the crude sexual harassment of Meadow in a Little Italy restaurant, and Tony's vengeance against the perpetrator --a pistol-whipping plus an indoor curb job -- only makes things worse. More contamination: at family therapy with AJ and Carmela, Tony spots a bloody tooth in the cuff of his slacks. And early in the episode, the Bobby Bacala visits a construction site and refuses to shake the hand of his business contact because it's been touching asbestos, seemingly oblivious to the fact that it's going right into his lungs. <br /><br />All these gags are variations on the same theme: Paulie ripping up Christopher's manicured lawn and the like. The gangsters think because they love their spouses and kids that they're good people, and the other guy is corrupt. They ask sympathy and understanding from others but give little themselves. Tony cites his hospital bonding moment with Phil to make a human connection, but he's really exploiting that sacrosanct moment to get a better deal. Phil returns the favor, telling Tony about his own epiphanies in the joint, making grilled cheese sandwiches on a radiator and jerking off into a tissue. Phil, like Tony, might have had a come-to-Jesus moment in intensive care, but he snapped out of it quickly and resumed looking out for Number One (and indulging in his own version of Tony's angry daddy score-settling -- the homophobic hit job on Vito). Everybody wants a fair deal on their own terms. They admonish colleagues and subordinates not to mix business and personal matters, then do exactly that, and view the inevitable unpleasant outcome as an affront. They shit where they eat and wonder why the food tastes funny.<br /><br />AJ's depression was, in every sense, a wake-up call; here again we see <span style="font-style:italic;">The Sopranos</span> indulging a parallel structure. AJ's long-delayed "loss of innocence" about his father's true nature, his father's business, dovetails with his sudden overwhelming awareness of all the evil and stupidity in the world -- the religious and ethnic feuds going on for thousands of years, the way that the profit motive trumps ethics and results in toxins being sprayed on food. "Depressed?" AJ's shrink asks him. "How can anybody not be, when everything is so fucked up?" AJ replies. AJ's deep distress is mirrored by Tony's own dawning sense that his entire universe is decaying, that there's no way to repair it, that he's helpless before realities he's only begun to acknowledge. Better to withdraw, ease back in the passenger seat, let Heidi drive. You believe, even hope, that some revelation is at hand; then you remember Tony's predatory, blank look as he pinched Christopher's nose shut and made him drown in his own blood: a gaze as blank and pitiless as the sun. Maybe the center holds just fine.<center>______________________</center><br />Sopranos<i> recaps run every Monday at </i><a href="http://www.mattzollerseitz.blogspot.com">The House Next Door</a><i>. For more articles about the series, see </i>The Sopranos<i> in the sidebar at right.</i></span>Keith Uhlichhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09366621160453356504noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2472021095791259178.post-11046017084662229192007-06-14T09:00:00.001-04:002007-06-14T09:04:32.703-04:00Sopranos Mondays: Season 6, Ep. 18, "Kennedy and Heidi"By <a href="http://www2.blogger.com/profile/16921028537989131859">Matt Zoller Seitz</a><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqfSMFkbVROOD2WdWUt5XcGF4-ETXAi6C7s9nikVHdeaWIHBXjwgdme-xR1WVpF949W2eLmzXDHSuvV5-GeKG5KmHWC2GlpRl_C9kRXzMVXGTWBdH8EFKBt50-T4EQQDcr5pscLcmYxfSt/s1600-h/sopranosep83_01.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqfSMFkbVROOD2WdWUt5XcGF4-ETXAi6C7s9nikVHdeaWIHBXjwgdme-xR1WVpF949W2eLmzXDHSuvV5-GeKG5KmHWC2GlpRl_C9kRXzMVXGTWBdH8EFKBt50-T4EQQDcr5pscLcmYxfSt/s400/sopranosep83_01.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5064485160952426610" /></a>The most significant scene in the entire run of <span style="font-style:italic;">The Sopranos</span> occurred in last night's episode, "Kennedy and Heidi."<span class="fullpost"> It wasn't the bloody car wreck or its disturbing aftermath. It wasn't Tony's trip (in any sense of the word "trip"). It wasn't either of Tony's two therapy scenes, and it wasn't any of the scenes of mourning (or not mourning). It wasn't even a scene really. It was a five-second cutaway to the two title characters, Heidi and Kennedy -- the teenage girls in the car Chris Moltisanti swerved to avoid. <br /><br />"Maybe we should go back, Heidi," says Kennedy.<br />Heidi's reply: "Kennedy, I'm on my learner's permit after dark." <br /><br />We all know David Chase's view of human nature is profoundly cynical. <span style="font-style:italic;">The Sopranos</span> 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 significant scene enacts the same basic struggle, pitting the instinct toward self-preservation against the influence what Abraham Lincoln called "The better angels of our nature." The angels have glass jaws.<br /><br />That cutaway to the girls in the car made Chase's central, recurring point more bluntly than six season's worth of beatdowns, strangulations and shootings, because the girls seemed so "ordinary" -- just a couple of students driving on the highway late at night, maybe thinking that when they got back home they might sneak a couple of glasses of wine and watch some TV (<span style="font-style:italic;">Six Feet Under</span>, maybe). The difference between Heidi and Kennedy and Tony and Christopher is one of degree, not kind. The young women had a chance to do the right thing but didn'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 were presented with a moral test and they not only failed it, they didn't seem terribly aware that it was a test. Tony Soprano and Christopher Moltisanti have failed too many moral tests to count. <br /><br />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 true self (the guy who dotes on his kids, banters with his wife and idealizes young mothers and innocent animals) rarely breaks the surface of his toxic cesspool of a personality. There have always been two Tonys, and in case we hadn't figured that out, Chase gave Tony a cousin named Tony Blundetto, a convicted gangster who'd gone straight, and introduced him in an episode titled "Two Tonys," and then, near the end of the season, had Tony B. impulsively revert to his gangster self and go on a rampage. Kennedy is the voice in Tony's head that says, "Do the right thing." To which Heidi replies, "Fuck that."<center>___________________</center> <br />As I sit here writing this in the wee hours of May 14 -- and grinding my teeth over a computer problem that made it impossible to post episode screenshots -- I am already dreading morning-after discussions that focus on whether Chris, who spontaneously killed his screenwriter and AA mate JT at the end of last week's "Walk Like a Man," had already turned state's witness when we saw him at the Staten Island Ferry meeting.<br /><br />True, there were a lot of clues suggesting as much, from Chris' nervous glancing around during the talk with Phil to his incessant fiddling with the radio while driving with Tony to the fact that he was wearing a goddamn <span style="font-style:italic;">Cleaver</span> hat. (As Sars pointed out to me, Chris is not a hat man.) And I'm sure that in the last three hours of <span style="font-style:italic;">The Sopranos</span>, Tony and various associates of Tony's will discuss the matter, obliquely or directly, with each other and perhaps with representatives of law enforcement; Tony already brought it up this week in the "dream" therapy session, telling Melfi that he has killed friends and relatives but that you get used to it, and that he was relieved to be presented with an opportunity to kill Chris cleanly and quietly because Chris fit the description of a guy who might turn state's witness and he was tired of waking up every morning wondering if this would be the day that Chris flipped. (I don't recall any indication that Tony or anyone else in the crew knows about JT's murder.) <br /><br />In the end, the question of whether Chris flipped or was just acting strangely because he was coked up is not central to the show's concerns. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the show ended without definitively answering the question of whether Chris flipped or not, because I have a strong feeling that it's the ultimate example of a <span style="font-style:italic;">Sopranos</span> specialty: a characterization catalyst posing as a big plot twist. <br /><br />The disappearing "Pine Barrens" Russian has never reappeared because he was just the catalyst for a bleak comedy revealing how helpless and whiny Paulie and Christopher could be when denied creature comforts and a home-turf advantage. Ralphie's murder of his pregnant girlfriend -- the stripper and single mom, Tracee -- was never "resolved" in the law enforcement sense (i.e., in scenes where cops snoop and gangsters cover for each other); it was the catalyst for a nearly two-season arc that saw Tony trying to punish, or at least control, Ralphie while concurrently demonstrating his deeply buried capacity for tenderness by doting on the racehorse Pie-O-My. Tony snapped after Ralphie killed the horse (an innocent animal) in a fire for insurance money, fought Ralphie and killed him, then dismembered the body (with help from Christopher) and made the pieces disappear, just as Tony's mob family must have made Tracee's pieces disappear months earlier. The show never came out and said that Tony snapped because on some subconscious level, he associated the horse with Tracee (whom he described to Silvio in "University" as "a thoroughbred"), and belatedly did what he'd wanted and needed to do on the night that Ralphie killed Tracee, for an outwardly different set of reasons. <span style="font-style:italic;">The Sopranos</span> never spelled this out because if it did, it wouldn't be <span style="font-style:italic;">The Sopranos</span>. <br /><br />Tony's murder of Christopher isn't about Tony's murder of Christopher: it's about the human impulse towards cold self-protection, illustrated with <i>Macbeth</i>-like viciousness in the scene where Tony silences his potential rat of a surrogate son, and in the cut-away to Kennedy telling Heidi they should go back and Heidi saying they can't because she'll get in trouble. (Tony starts to dial 911 but stops himself, punching all three digits only after Chris is safely dead.)<center>___________________</center><br />During that long, beautiful, sad moment in the car where Tony looked over at Christopher -- perhaps realizing that Christopher was high, or maybe fearing he was a rat; who knows what he was thinking, the show won't tell us, and like I said, it doesn't matter -- Chris' 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." <br /><br />Numbness is the means by which comfort is attained; if you're numb to morality, to empathy, you can do whatever you want and feel little or no guilt. Comfortable numbness pervaded "Kennedy and Heidi." It was there in the scene at the hospital where Tony is told that Chris is dead but can't muster the energy to feign shock or anger. It's tempting to rationalize Tony's non-response as a reaction his physical trauma, but remember, he's lucid after the accident -- lucid enough to abort his initial 911 call and kill his surrogate son -- and he later mentions (incredulously, and perhaps with a glimmer of deep guilt) that he escaped the wreck with no serious injuries (except for some damage to his knee -- the same knee he damaged while playing baseball in college). As the episode unfolds, Tony can't even muster a facsimile of authentic shock and grief; the best he can manage is paranoid touchiness about the fact that he's not dead, and occasional Tourette's-like anecdotal nuggets. At Chris' wake, he told the director of <span style="font-style:italic;">Cleaver</span> about seeing the tree branch juxtaposed with Chris' daughter's car seat. His affable delivery was so inappropriate -- along with the rest of his autopilot responses throughout the episode -- that ironically, it could be interpreted as the behavior of a man in shock. Tony's expression as he kills Chris is horrifying because it's the face of a predator acting on instinct. It's frightening because it's inscrutable, mask-like, blank: comfortably numb. (AJ had a similar close-up in "Walk Like a Man," in the scene where he and the two Jasons pour acid on a debtor's toe. It was the most animated AJ had seemed in some time -- and the most disconnected from his own emotions.) <br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">The Sopranos</span> is Comfortably Numbland. Only a comfortably numb person could begin a condolence call on the survivor of a car wreck as Paulie does, by noting that the deceased had a lead foot. Carmela betrays her comfortable numbness by deflecting Paulie's anger over the fact that she and Tony arrived late to his mother's/aunt's funeral. In that same scene, Tony betrays his CN-ness in a small way, by cutting off Paulie's legitimate outrage over Da Family's non-attendance ("It's a fundamental lack of respect and I'm never gonna fucking forget it") by reminding him that Tony's the boss and a very busy man, and Paulie should be grateful that he showed up. Comfortable numbness enables men to kill again and again to protect money, property and reputation. Comfortable numbness allows women like Carmela to live with deep knowledge of their husbands' viciousness while reassuring themselves that a disinterest in details equals a lack of complicity. Carmela knows Adriana didn't just "disappear," but she chooses not to think about it because thinking about it would make her uncomfortable. <br /><br />The Time-Warner cable summary of this episode promised, "Tony has a revelation." That sounds like a joke, and that's how it will probably play out. Regular readers of these post-<i>Sopranos</i> columns know that a part of me wants to see Tony and the rest of his criminal gang suffer tangible earthly punishment for their viciousness. There are suggestions that Chase, in his typically roundabout way, might have been heading in this direction -- that the series would confound our expectations in the most spectacular fashion yet by having Tony realize the error of his ways, probably with help from Melfi, and try to save his own soul by confessing not to law enforcement, but to his therapist, who would be well within her rights to report a man who has killed people and is bound to do it again.<br /><br />But the more I think about it, the more convinced I am that these intimations of impending moral reversal will remain just that. If Tony brings down the family, he'll do it without realizing why he did it. He'll do it by amping up the same behavior we've seen throughout Season Six: the self-destructive, "Take me out of the game, coach" impulses, manifested in his heedless gambling and his willingness to hang personal dirty laundry out to dry in front of employees who should view him as strong and in control. If justice is finally done to Tony and his circle as a result of Tony's actions, it won't be intentional. Tony's flirted with a moral awakening many times without embracing it. (In this very same episode, he had a dream -- a revelatory dream -- in which he confessed his numb viciousness to Melfi, but when he got the chance to make the dream real, he couched the same statements in euphemisms.) Tony can't have a moral awakening. He's been too comfortable and too numb for too long. His family and "Family" are numb, too. There must have been three or four dozen verbal expressions of condolence in last night's episode, and none of them seemed truly felt. <br /><br />It's no accident that this episode contained so many echoes of previous <span style="font-style:italic;">Sopranos </span>dream sequences, including the Season One dream about the ducks (obliquely references in images of asbestos being dumped into marshlands, an image suggesting how Tony's business pollutes his domestic fantasies) to the image of Chris' wife nursing their orphaned baby daughter (reminiscent of Tony's breast-feeding dream from Season One) and the extended purgatory dream that occurred in the second and third episodes of Season Six. In the latter dream, Tony impersonated Kevin Finnerty, a solar heating salesman who, as far as we could tell, was a self-interested bastard; then he fell down some stairs and was incidentally diagnosed with Alzheimers', declined to tell his wife back home, or to return home at all (an interesting touch in light of Tony's Vegas trip, during which he contacted his family zero times). Then he found himself standing outside of a palatial woodland home on the night of a party where the other Tony, Tony B., served as gatekeeper. He was informed that his family was in there -- including a fleetingly-glimpsed Livia figure -- but he could not enter unless he dropped the briefcase, a symbol of his professional identity (Finnerty the heating salesman, Tony Soprano the gangster). At Chris' wake, there's a moment where Tony exchanges a silent nod of acknowledgment with Daniel Baldwin, who played a character in Cleaver who was so much like a worst-case-scenario version of Tony that Tony was actually hurt by it. The classic shot-reverse shot exchange has a mirror's symmetry: Tony denies that he is the man depicted in <span style="font-style:italic;">Cleaver</span>, but in some fundamental sense, he is. Dreamworld Tony and Kevin Finnerty are the same guy, too. <br /><br />There's a sense in which Tony's trip to Vegas seems a coded attempt to replay his tour of Coma Land in the waking world, with the peyote trip substituting for the actual out-of-body-experience he had after Junior shot him. Tony's subconscious presented him with a series of complexly interwoven but fairly clear instructions on how to change his life and be happy, as well as a warning of the consequences if he did not; after he awakened from the coma, he went through an uncharacteristically gentle period, then reverted more or less to type. In "Kennedy and Heidi," he goes to Vegas to revisit a critical juncture in his development as an adult human being (his dream detailing the two competing Tonys and the stakes in their struggle) and maybe get it right this time. He goes to Vegas hoping to see the light. <br /><br />And he does see the light twice in the episode, literally -- first by looking up at the lamp on the ceiling of his hotel bathroom, then by watching the sunset with Christopher's former stripper girlfriend and erupting with joy at the sight of a solar flare that resembled the helicopter searchlights/operating table lamp from his coma experience. "I get it!" he shouts. "I get it!" <br /><br />But he doesn't. Any righting of this universe's moral scales will be incidental. Tony's been living an expedient life for too long. If he was going to change, he would have done it. He's been going down this road forever. He's had too many close calls to count. Each time, he hears some version of Heidi and Kennedy in his head, Kennedy saying, "Let's go back," and Heidi saying, "No." <br /><br />Heidi is driving.<center>______________________</center><br /><i>For a review of Episode 19, "The Second Coming," click <a href="http://mattzollerseitz.blogspot.com/2007/05/sopranos-mondays-season-6-ep-18-second.html">here</a>. </i>Sopranos<i> recaps run every Monday at </i><a href="http://www.mattzollerseitz.blogspot.com">The House Next Door</a><i>. For more articles about the series, see </i>The Sopranos<i> in the sidebar at right.</i></span>Keith Uhlichhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09366621160453356504noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2472021095791259178.post-18677784711572652552007-06-14T08:58:00.003-04:002007-06-14T09:04:18.182-04:00Sopranos Mondays: Season 6, Ep. 17, "Walk Like a Man"By <a href="http://www2.blogger.com/profile/16921028537989131859">Matt Zoller Seitz</a><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3jfpQGas6wxe_ha5y9IfBetuQSDw0JZVibab3Vw_PS8X_HRam2OGYev32wWCi5lOIYYW9RYkS-bCxYdh4EdQceEN8k5R1BE4vpG5RQyOYjaSR6mqSNd6orjL_-bUiMN0ffh7gFEldmh_k/s1600-h/vlcsnap-7914316.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3jfpQGas6wxe_ha5y9IfBetuQSDw0JZVibab3Vw_PS8X_HRam2OGYev32wWCi5lOIYYW9RYkS-bCxYdh4EdQceEN8k5R1BE4vpG5RQyOYjaSR6mqSNd6orjL_-bUiMN0ffh7gFEldmh_k/s400/vlcsnap-7914316.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5062005899670744978" /></a>Written and directed by Terence Winter, "Walk Like a Man" came close to being all things to all <span style="font-style:italic;">Sopranos</span> viewers.<span class="fullpost"> For the "less yakkin', more whackin'" segment of the audience, it offered tits and blood aplenty, and it zipped through its densely packed narrative with a breathless sureness reminiscent of the show's more conspicuously plot-driven first season (which makes sense, considering that there are only four episodes left; the show might as well circle around to where it started). But beneath its surface pleasures (and surface nastiness) was one of the most complicated structures of any single <span style="font-style:italic;">Sopranos</span> episode -- so dense, in fact, that I felt obligated to watch it twice before writing this, and had intended to watch it a third time until the 24-hours-in-a-day rule kicked in until it became clear that if I didn't write something soon, I'd have to title the column "<span style="font-style:italic;">Sopranos</span> Tuesday." So I won't attempt to be as comprehensive here as in previous posts; if I gloss over anything, hopefully we'll get to it in the comments section.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEdGThYwG1N0LZwtQwWl1vxYI1vAU7XT1ECAJKNvtqv7emtIuw1DikEKVgw77iwO6liQosy_N2ULOH3aksbhxRHtneAMHSLVqddCZzltmc2rSsIB3Qy9G4Xe4yXR-syTK3Dvfa2Y21dld4/s1600-h/vlcsnap-7916826.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEdGThYwG1N0LZwtQwWl1vxYI1vAU7XT1ECAJKNvtqv7emtIuw1DikEKVgw77iwO6liQosy_N2ULOH3aksbhxRHtneAMHSLVqddCZzltmc2rSsIB3Qy9G4Xe4yXR-syTK3Dvfa2Y21dld4/s200/vlcsnap-7916826.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5062006032814731170" /></a>I figure the best way to move through this thing is layer by layer, starting at the level of What Happened. Tony earned goodwill from the feds who dine at Satriale's by giving them information on the two Muslim guys, Ahmed and Muhammad, who used to hang at the Bada-Bing but now seem to have gone fundamentalist -- or so Tony claimed; he's not the most culturally sensitive mobster in the neighborhood. "Tell me they're not gonna blow up the chemical plant or some shit," says Christopher, who then responds to Tony's request for a contact number. Whether this will culminate in a terrorism-related final stretch or just a commendation (or "5-K") letter in Tony's file as a possible sentencing buffer is anyone's guess. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMJ27u8zEkO6ZWcRKeD0z3ZQbrDSOeh2WUdwbjGS_stFmNK5weDX4ICHx1MmaEptdfWgehsdQOyVIl-rot7x9KeRNRcAmPjWAqXDYy4otj2ILtYR23tRU3LuwErt9TDgsa72JIITJ90ulI/s1600-h/vlcsnap-7914964.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMJ27u8zEkO6ZWcRKeD0z3ZQbrDSOeh2WUdwbjGS_stFmNK5weDX4ICHx1MmaEptdfWgehsdQOyVIl-rot7x9KeRNRcAmPjWAqXDYy4otj2ILtYR23tRU3LuwErt9TDgsa72JIITJ90ulI/s200/vlcsnap-7914964.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5062006170253684658" /></a>Tony also belatedly responds to Dr. Melfi's request to be a more diligent patient by declaring that he plans to quit therapy because it's bullshit that isn't doing him any measurable good -- but he ends up sticking around to seek counsel on his son AJ's depression. AJ has spiraled into the lower depths of despair, blankly watching TV all day, making suicidal remarks to sister Meadow and not-quite-stalking his ex-fiancee, Blanca; he goes to therapy -- with a shrink so impassive that he seemed to have been animated by Chuck Jones; when he stared blankly at AJ, I half-expected to hear a lone piano key go, "plink!" -- but seems to have pretty much the same reaction to the experience as Tony in super-grump mode, namely, thinking it's useless at best, a scam job at worst. Tony's own version of therapy consists of urging AJ to attend a party with the two Jasons, the Rutgers-enrolled, gambling-rich, petty mobster sons of a couple of made guys, one of whom is Patsy Parisi. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaR0U2VmMa50eaV-xEKrpmvtWFJ3c3Dzicreqh2w_2VoEZ2DA4xUiBCN1SzoffaeWd9XQQ1KYtqlWAAoDt482kAfO0fdpFTZd2mcHCgE1oySuDz9u0SwCvu6yYJiIY-KUagyEDhGBpn34x/s1600-h/vlcsnap-7916726.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaR0U2VmMa50eaV-xEKrpmvtWFJ3c3Dzicreqh2w_2VoEZ2DA4xUiBCN1SzoffaeWd9XQQ1KYtqlWAAoDt482kAfO0fdpFTZd2mcHCgE1oySuDz9u0SwCvu6yYJiIY-KUagyEDhGBpn34x/s200/vlcsnap-7916726.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5062006535325904850" /></a>Patsy's bragging on his boy's ambition spurs Tony to confess to Melfi that he fears that AJ's life is doomed to be shit because depression, and perhaps criminality itself, flow through Tony's veins. AJ does start hanging out with the Jasons, and the experience doesn't so much pull him out of his depression as distract him with intoxicants and power-tripping. Inadvertently fullfilling Tony's own prophecy to Melfi, the Jasons use AJ as muscle-by-implication, keeping him around to sweat clients that haven't paid up, then inviting AJ along as they punish one debtor by kidnapping him from a party, dragging him into the woods and pouring acid on his toe. (AJ's closeup in this scene ranks among Iler's strongest acting moments. It's terrifying yet oddly blank, as if a switch has been flipped inside AJ even though AJ doesn't know it yet.) <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVwWN60Ctv4-1I47akQeJfITqku2fIky2O-wkdWL4NKqZe13zNSz1FSZvb3-jA_Yx6vzXMZGzab_cASNxkJSHbIYVC6Bl0Fp8S9uSpiudMdZ97rPF17zKdsljrV61Dqv7KLct0TxhYzkyu/s1600-h/vlcsnap-7915786.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVwWN60Ctv4-1I47akQeJfITqku2fIky2O-wkdWL4NKqZe13zNSz1FSZvb3-jA_Yx6vzXMZGzab_cASNxkJSHbIYVC6Bl0Fp8S9uSpiudMdZ97rPF17zKdsljrV61Dqv7KLct0TxhYzkyu/s200/vlcsnap-7915786.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5062006762959171554" /></a>Meanwhile, Christopher's father-in-law, who's doing a brisk business in stolen construction tools courtesy of Paulie, gets ripped off by a couple of Paulie's boys. Christopher's complaints over Paulie's rudeness sparks a feud between the men, who were already accustomed to pissing in each other's Wheaties. A switch seems to get flipped inside Christopher as well. He's increasingly sensitive about the fact that his dedicated sobriety has put him at odds with his line of work. His insistence on walking the line, coupled with Bobby Bacala's increasing closeness to Tony (indicated in a backyard barbecue at the Moltisantis' house where Tony blows off Christopher so he can keep conferring with Bobby), makes him feel shut out. Early in the episode, Chistopher gets his balls busted by Paulie for refusing to drink with him at the Bada-Bing, and for declining an invitation to take a ride and get some prime rib. All this leads Christopher to lash out against the most obvious source of his discomfort, Paulie -- an embittered colleague who never got over the fact that Chris rose faster in the family than he did. <br /><br />The episode culminates in a series of brutish and tragically absurd acts: Christopher busting up a card game and laying into one of the tool thieves; Paulie taking revenge by doing donuts all over the Moltisantis' landscaped suburban lawn; and ultimately, Christopher visiting Paulie at the Bing to make peace, impulsively deciding to make the bond official by drinking with him, getting drunk and talking in slurry Hallmark terms about being a dad and embarassing himself in front of all the macho men of the Bing, then stalking off and seeking counsel from his AA buddy JT (Tim Daly), the writer of <span style="font-style:italic;">Cleaver</span>. Christopher tries to unburden himself of his agony over the dark secrets of Da Family -- in particular, his participation in the death of his fiancee, a mob stoolie. <br /><br />JT doesn't just deny Christopher the empathy he seeks; he rebuffs him, supposedly because he's got a deadline to deliver a <span style="font-style:italic;">Law and Order</span> script, but really because he doesn't want to get too close to a guy who's in the mob and seems hell-bent on filling his head with incriminating information. "You're in the Mafia," JT tells him bluntly -- maybe the most banal yet vicious cutdown since the moment in the film version of <span style="font-style:italic;">Glengarry Glen Ross</span> when Kevin Spacey's smug office manager twists the knife in down-and-out salesman Shelly Levene (Jack Lemmon) by telling him that the leads Shelly tried so hard to close were never going to buy anything: "They just...like talking...to salesmen." On his way out, Christopher pulls his gun and ventilates JT's forehead. <center>________________</center><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHY-oI5Iu7IzZShjBwPy6oLCgrnuAIFrgy13lOi7t_GBSHR5merYOhxmq69Qs1SvGU-WrMlSTo0MTj53Y1bEOcXMcVoKoQxsF8zkkxVFWf17UF7fYovVeUTGq1dh8iA145kIO1lpp47PvT/s1600-h/vlcsnap-7917350.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHY-oI5Iu7IzZShjBwPy6oLCgrnuAIFrgy13lOi7t_GBSHR5merYOhxmq69Qs1SvGU-WrMlSTo0MTj53Y1bEOcXMcVoKoQxsF8zkkxVFWf17UF7fYovVeUTGq1dh8iA145kIO1lpp47PvT/s200/vlcsnap-7917350.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5062006969117601778" /></a>And now's as good a time as any to switch over to some drive-by analysis. On a level of pure craft, this episode was a marvel, not just because of the amount of information it contained, but also because of how it toyed with audience expectations. So many potential "endings" for the show were teased out and then either defused or complicated that at times it seemed as if series creator David Chase had ordered some intern to dig up every article every written that speculated on how the show would wrap up, then compile a master list and distribute it to the writers so they'd know what not to do. Could a Christopher-Paulie feud still bring down the family? Maybe, but the peacemaking scene at the Bing seemed 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 in this episode left him with a conspicuous killing to deny, I don't think Chase will go in this direction -- and that if he does, he'll avoid the obvious route. Both the Chris-Paulie feud and Christopher's repeated attempts to confess his role in Adriana's death and relieve himself of his overwhelming guilt -- notice how each time he alluded to the event, he used more specific, incriminating language -- seemed less about "How do we end the show?" than "How do we force these characters to acknowledge the reality of their lives"? (My former <span style="font-style:italic;">Star-Ledger</span> colleague <a href="http://blog.nj.com/alltv/2007/04/sopranos_rewind_remember_when.html#more">Alan Sepinwall</a> has suggested that Chase's idea of ultimate punishment is forcing someone to look in mirror and see the truth.) <br /><br />I've theorized at various points that Christopher would be the one who ultimately sold out the family, because his compulsion to sell screenplays and produce movies indicated an overwhelming desire to tell stories -- a sick twist on "Write what you know." I thought maybe it would turn out that the entire series has been filtered through Christopher's perspective. But that's probably too neat for Chase, and really, at this late stage, there's no point trying to anticipate where things are going, because Chase just isn't going to go there. The episode's closing image represents Chase's M.O. in one shot: Christopher heads for his front door after re-planting a tree uprooted during Paulie's rampage, and as he walks up the steps in a static wide shot, we keep staring at that tree, thinking it's going to fall over. And it doesn't. What's brilliant about the shot is the fact that Chase has been outsmarting us for so many years -- with climaxes and anticlimaxes -- that when Winter cuts to the wide shot, we feel certain the tree won't fall. Then we expect it to fall anyway, because Chase wouldn't normally do something like that, and doing it would violate our expectations. Then he doesn't do it, which means that he's violated our expectations by satisfying them. David Chase's CAT scans aren't photographs. They're drawings by M.C. Escher. <br /><br />The "What's next?" game is fun, but what's more interesting -- to <span style="font-style:italic;">Sopranos</span>-ologists, and perhaps to Chase as well -- are the reflections, doublings and tangential echoes created by juxtaposing plotlines: not what happens, necessarily, but what it tells us about the characters, and what the events tell the characters about themselves. For instance, I don't believe that Christopher killed JT to prevent him from revealing the secrets Christopher drunkenly confessed about the family. (The death of a screenwriter he employed would draw so much attention that it would cancel the zip-your-lip aspect of the murder.) I don't think JT's killing was about anything but Christopher's realization that -- like the late Eugene and Vito, and like Tony -- he's trapped in this life and can't get out without destroying the organization, himself, his blood family or some combination. He's rooted to Da Family even though, emotionally, he's uprooted himself many times. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPk30RDY-Xiwdr3I-3sWRTYa7qXJnYKqcoiL4T-OuaLq-_uG_mZ-0X60dOX28A_K8OaVIXjD1P0mZa-qJwAOZ2M8HCEl-X4xVqGlk2QrsuvRwpj0os0KapsdUQqho6toevg5gGm54VqY3S/s1600-h/vlcsnap-7915064.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPk30RDY-Xiwdr3I-3sWRTYa7qXJnYKqcoiL4T-OuaLq-_uG_mZ-0X60dOX28A_K8OaVIXjD1P0mZa-qJwAOZ2M8HCEl-X4xVqGlk2QrsuvRwpj0os0KapsdUQqho6toevg5gGm54VqY3S/s200/vlcsnap-7915064.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5062006299102703554" /></a>More than some episodes, "Walk Like a Man" often indicated that <span style="font-style:italic;">The Sopranos</span>' 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 "Walk Like a Man" that depict therapy or something like it. None are comforting. There's Christopher's group therapy confession; there Chris' subsequent, coded one-on-one in the stairwell, where he recasts his fiancee's murder as a dispute over a bad employee he happened to be sleeping with (a characterization that's true, as Obi-Wan Kenobi once bullshat Luke Skywalker, from a certain point of view); and of course, there's Chris' final visit to JT, where he seeks an authentic connection, and a 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 be rebuffed (thus the killing round: JT told him a truth he didn't want to hear, and Chrissy literally shot the messenger). Then there's Tony's scene with Melfi and AJ's interlude with his own shrink: both prove equally useless in the short run, though the respective relationships might eventually amount to something if both therapist and patient pledged to dig deeper. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGpVU93rHORMeFXWJ3BFxnhv_GT2HsJciJ9c1RDuATmlgKfmSWcBjLPVWJhvRQbDeuzVSmUJi-XtIab8Ad8JRhZ7M_Fm_ZvBbc0DxxUT7PFjlJWR9HgSUNZm8czbGwsHcTCWVIj7f23kb3/s1600-h/vlcsnap-7916132.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGpVU93rHORMeFXWJ3BFxnhv_GT2HsJciJ9c1RDuATmlgKfmSWcBjLPVWJhvRQbDeuzVSmUJi-XtIab8Ad8JRhZ7M_Fm_ZvBbc0DxxUT7PFjlJWR9HgSUNZm8czbGwsHcTCWVIj7f23kb3/s200/vlcsnap-7916132.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5062007329894854658" /></a>Speaking of digging: the scene in the TV room between Tony and AJ contained one of the best uses of a film clip in the show's history, from the 1968 movie The <span style="font-style:italic;">Hellfighters</span>. That's a drama in which Wayne plays Chance Buckman, a fictionalized version of real life firefighter Red Adair, who was also the basis for Bruce Willis' character in <span style="font-style:italic;">Armageddon</span>. Adair's specialty was putting out fires on oil rigs -- fires that 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. That's 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 trying 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. (If you're inclined toward a Roman Catholic reading, the Wayne film's title seems rather on-the-nose.)<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMhqRrEO1T6hMt-D1HMOrlb8G-Bh_BNOt8lqGt1LfPgodQIDozgr__Am5QNhezHAXGsGDF515wWMBlRLG_T6nIngIQ2gwMU3Wv3hsu5HXIrPkvQu1fv6GEcWlU_JsfJWevI4VDp1jI5ceJ/s1600-h/vlcsnap-7919021.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMhqRrEO1T6hMt-D1HMOrlb8G-Bh_BNOt8lqGt1LfPgodQIDozgr__Am5QNhezHAXGsGDF515wWMBlRLG_T6nIngIQ2gwMU3Wv3hsu5HXIrPkvQu1fv6GEcWlU_JsfJWevI4VDp1jI5ceJ/s200/vlcsnap-7919021.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5062007574707990546" /></a>Equally intriguing is Winter's examination of the destructive effect of macho culture, which is passed along through the generations (witness the two Jasons) through a combination of nature and nurture. Building on last episode's amazing use of the theme to <span style="font-style:italic;">The Deer Hunter</span> in the scene where AJ proposes to Blanca, Winter teases out the Cult of Macho -- not just through numbing images of violence and whoring, but through seemingly incidental touches that linger in the mind because of their metaphoric aptness. The old codes, defined in last episode's scenes where would-be surrogate fathers Tony and Phil berated Vito's disturbed goth son, are repeatedly likened to hazing. The scene where the Two Jasons torture their client 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 Two Jasons: all male entitlement and apelike swagger. The devilish depths are represented by Tony's recalling how his dad pulled him into the life by making him do a hit back in 1982 (a murder only recently uncovered by the authorities), yet punishing Bobby for humiliating him in a drunken brawl by forcing Bobby to do a hit (his first). The hit draws Bobby even deeper into Da Family and tightens Tony's control over his destiny.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirCdXM4QnX3tibZvnkyaNagHHe48eiM55bVOhYZ3T8DCtsU8RquvBcC2eGgcOE9cejEBNrFnOmRcAT-L2Mx3IfofHvBoDSQM2fzcmSBL9pOPb_rhGZfHc8WrrCUx1sm5hAAxYJ3WMzjIRk/s1600-h/vlcsnap-7918714.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirCdXM4QnX3tibZvnkyaNagHHe48eiM55bVOhYZ3T8DCtsU8RquvBcC2eGgcOE9cejEBNrFnOmRcAT-L2Mx3IfofHvBoDSQM2fzcmSBL9pOPb_rhGZfHc8WrrCUx1sm5hAAxYJ3WMzjIRk/s200/vlcsnap-7918714.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5062007772276486178" /></a>Then there 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 a condition, an inherited disease like, well, Alzheimers'. (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 Sin Central, the Bing, a mob-run fleshpit 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 with one hand, and with the other, judge him for taking it. <br /><br />These codes are intertwined with straight male identity. Even men who have never gotten within a thousand miles of a fistfight or a whorehouse have entertained urges like the ones that are the <span style="font-style:italic;">Sopranos</span> mobsters' stock-in-trade. Yet these impulses -- and the industries devoted to satiating them -- coexist with banal rituals of family life, wage slavery and consumerist reflex. The episode's penultimate scene finds Tony and AJ -- both hung-over and trying not to act too guilty -- joining the women of the house, Carmela and Meadow, for a family dinner around the kitchen table.<center>_____________________</center><br />Sopranos<i> recaps run every Monday at </i><a href="http://www.mattzollerseitz.blogspot.com">The House Next Door</a><i>. For more articles about the series, see </i>The Sopranos<i> in the sidebar at right.</i></span>Keith Uhlichhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09366621160453356504noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2472021095791259178.post-27182400351081367092007-06-14T08:58:00.001-04:002007-06-14T08:58:19.943-04:00Sopranos Mondays: Season 6, Ep. 16, "Chasing It"By <a href="http://www2.blogger.com/profile/16921028537989131859">Matt Zoller Seitz</a><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhey8s4ZN5P-E5PXfCobWtxPxyViC0q_Wxa2YfBc3QJQP6BQYm8vq4NqXAZ26XkGMw0FMIWP8t_IsSPFXMZo-ZH-ueseOSE1JnmxyJ0D7CCR7A91JfjqmiVf1lTsrs-E_AKwf6c7CKs9-uG/s1600-h/vlcsnap-1537499.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhey8s4ZN5P-E5PXfCobWtxPxyViC0q_Wxa2YfBc3QJQP6BQYm8vq4NqXAZ26XkGMw0FMIWP8t_IsSPFXMZo-ZH-ueseOSE1JnmxyJ0D7CCR7A91JfjqmiVf1lTsrs-E_AKwf6c7CKs9-uG/s200/vlcsnap-1537499.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5059122228779356882" /></a>"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, "<a href="http://www.hbo.com/sopranos/episode/season6/episode81.shtml">Chasing It</a>," seems to promise an answer, but it's another form of evasion. Tony pointedly doesn't reply to Melfi in his session. He 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 backwards." <span class="fullpost"> <br /><br />This is what Tony Soprano talks about when he talks about happiness. I don't mean happiness in the la-dee-da, skipping-through-the-daisies sense. I mean a deeper sense of happiness that, when identified and consciously cultivated, endures even during grim times: a sense of being centered, of having a pretty good idea of who you are and feeling reasonably sure that your life is working with you rather than against you. Six seasons into <span style="font-style:italic;">The Sopranos</span>, I've never gotten a sense that Tony feels deep happiness for longer than a few moments at a time -- when he's taking pride in the accomplishments of loved ones or enjoying the company of old friends he can trust (for the moment), maybe; 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. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1kIfkhmvV3bEzNCWw41WGKRoqnc6vcgfbd1oRltAu0f8T-pwRI346d7x8j8cn2d8rzjBWSu7xnAfkuJ7Hmky7hX10EtHz3AgYTKQynih9lbPIMKFqfpv4IvRDHNsExrfsafbey1o5Ac1C/s1600-h/vlcsnap-1538290.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1kIfkhmvV3bEzNCWw41WGKRoqnc6vcgfbd1oRltAu0f8T-pwRI346d7x8j8cn2d8rzjBWSu7xnAfkuJ7Hmky7hX10EtHz3AgYTKQynih9lbPIMKFqfpv4IvRDHNsExrfsafbey1o5Ac1C/s200/vlcsnap-1538290.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5059125041982935778" /></a>Since his shooting at the hands of his demented Uncle Junior, Tony's unease has become palpable. He radiates misery 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 (as Eugene and Vito found out the hard way) he expresses that wish unconsciously, by doing and saying things that destabilize the life he's always known. <br /><br />This is why I can accept Tony's all-consuming and seemingly out-of-nowhere gambling addiction as something more than a typical network TV crisis-of-the-week improv. When a character is convincingly drawn, the details of his self-destructive compulsion don't matter that much; what's important is that it makes sense given what we know about the character, and arrives at a critical juncture in the storyline. I think 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, the late Johnny Sack's replacement) -- and he seems determined to foul every one of them.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFUqCRf1kmRiCljqGm9lXH0WWW5kmqHNNtmZSiWkZ1ieg5C_jdbcPetnG2junFHMCy8pi96QAaVD1aE-5LvsUhdfSWcydtQG3QFmeNLPPWmWCamiJLp0vWaUTO6xnGzPK-xKYbU919R3_y/s1600-h/vlcsnap-1543490.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFUqCRf1kmRiCljqGm9lXH0WWW5kmqHNNtmZSiWkZ1ieg5C_jdbcPetnG2junFHMCy8pi96QAaVD1aE-5LvsUhdfSWcydtQG3QFmeNLPPWmWCamiJLp0vWaUTO6xnGzPK-xKYbU919R3_y/s200/vlcsnap-1543490.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5059126343358026482" /></a>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, Jr., the goth-posing, profoundly troubled son of slain gay mobster Vito Spatafore, 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, and Tony suggests spending $200,000 of the $600,000 sale betting on a Jets game that he insists is a "sure thing"; the follow-up finds a bathrobe-clad Tony berating Carm with sweeping accusations of ruthlessness and hypocrisy that 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 major and minor sins he committed in order 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. <br /><br />In the very next scene, Vito, Jr. -- whose mix of "Fuck You" indifference, goth affectation and doughy sensitivity reads as closeted gay, or at the very least, way too sensitive for the macho zoo of high school; whose already innate feelings of alienation were surely inflamed by the murder of his dad, who was murdered 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 -- responds to teasing in the shower 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. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgG_W8sBVLOUT7sHYg28mvXxyW6mx2ZbLR2275tCxStP38gv8kVht96bQ0BCDMyrqvKCFeQD5Hm94AeOuLjBthsRJcuIQQTPwweH-11B1nQczztCQ_dKFvNqboyGjtLYFh9047cjIQl_d7m/s1600-h/vlcsnap-1537833.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgG_W8sBVLOUT7sHYg28mvXxyW6mx2ZbLR2275tCxStP38gv8kVht96bQ0BCDMyrqvKCFeQD5Hm94AeOuLjBthsRJcuIQQTPwweH-11B1nQczztCQ_dKFvNqboyGjtLYFh9047cjIQl_d7m/s200/vlcsnap-1537833.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5059291888577483570" /></a>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 he gets out. 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 <a href="http://mattzollerseitz.blogspot.com/2007/04/sopranos-mondays-season-6-ep-15.html">last week's account of how Tony's dad Johnny Boy ordered Tony to perform his first hit back in 1982</a>. 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 at 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 brainwashed into adopting, and potentially exemplifying, the mentality of his tormentors.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdnaxPiAxPLCrBHn2Niugr5bV7rZNGNDq2a7ip-rA1vN9748M8rjnnXGjHz2ZWxFMICDF_p9-Zk5XKzQtUAfTYEcdVoOEOdjB-EdEmp7ixZO4Sj4xY7QL_MuekxtGRURxz7T76ehiChfQW/s1600-h/vlcsnap-1542143.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdnaxPiAxPLCrBHn2Niugr5bV7rZNGNDq2a7ip-rA1vN9748M8rjnnXGjHz2ZWxFMICDF_p9-Zk5XKzQtUAfTYEcdVoOEOdjB-EdEmp7ixZO4Sj4xY7QL_MuekxtGRURxz7T76ehiChfQW/s200/vlcsnap-1542143.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5059291532095197986" /></a>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 for Marie, then gambles it away -- an act that makes both his home life and his professional life more unstable. In both the "A" and "B" stories -- Vito, Jr. and Tony -- 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.) <br /><br />As I've noted in previous <span style="font-style:italic;">Sopranos</span> recaps, Season Six is heavy on parallel narratives, a la Season One's "College" and Season Three's "University." Written by <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1980806/">Matthew Weiner</a> and directed by <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0887700/">Tim Van Patten</a>, "Chasing It" was temperamentally quite like those two signature installments, and in a few scenes, it went further and let the plotlines converge, even collide, so that the "A" and "B" stories seemed to be facing each other and examining 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 had done earlier. When the man and the boy sit across from each other, it's like visiting hour at a prison, only we don't know who's in jail and who's visiting. 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 words spoken by his mother, Livia, the dark shape that lingers in the back of his mind, telling him what to do and say even when he's thinks he's not listening. (It's notable 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 cave in and 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: in his inarticulate way, Tony is 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.")<center>___________________</center> <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUp73xMYi1QCqR5EyhpEdQ6oCE0bWgGBC60GJ-YavWdKdCqhEKbUFTPamFj0Yz_EwxrjyPQIyn1cONWJ530pmlGDdn6xaSahGsDVd9AwEO8GaPT_nA0_TE_dZ8HAGFPYVFDwiM9vHLRQWp/s1600-h/vlcsnap-1540192.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUp73xMYi1QCqR5EyhpEdQ6oCE0bWgGBC60GJ-YavWdKdCqhEKbUFTPamFj0Yz_EwxrjyPQIyn1cONWJ530pmlGDdn6xaSahGsDVd9AwEO8GaPT_nA0_TE_dZ8HAGFPYVFDwiM9vHLRQWp/s200/vlcsnap-1540192.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5059290527072850690" /></a>When Tony fouls his nest, what's he rebelling against, exactly? 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-deathtrap home can jump-start her real estate career. But more than ever, he seems ill at ease around people who used to make him feel comfortable. When he's surrounded by people, he still seems alone, and when he talks, even if he's in direct conversation, he seems to be talking to himself. He 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. <span style="font-style:italic;">The Sopranos</span> seems to be disintegrating as we watch it. That sense of volatility is indicated in uncharacteristically (and I think purposefully) loose camerawork. Did my eye deceive me, or was this week's episode -- comprised mostly in nervous, hand-held, zoomed-in closeups and medium shots, except for the scenes in Melfi's office, which were nailed to the floor, befitting an oasis of stability --the first episode to be shot on high definition video rather than 35mm film? Whatever the means, the intent was clear, and the result suited the story. The show's characteristic brown-and-gold-and-green palette looked flatter, more washed out and sickly.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdJt8oZuJfGsT0hcZw-zhedzkAbQqLgTt7HuJCYjmULiLSfEwNpnb0whP7fWiMRFmQSCpSfDIQ12jzrcyVcj30SrM72etUQp6tx9fPYpRjsEov7UreVgpk9pjMB3EnBZ9-Oowq1Uo9s8ek/s1600-h/vlcsnap-1541754.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdJt8oZuJfGsT0hcZw-zhedzkAbQqLgTt7HuJCYjmULiLSfEwNpnb0whP7fWiMRFmQSCpSfDIQ12jzrcyVcj30SrM72etUQp6tx9fPYpRjsEov7UreVgpk9pjMB3EnBZ9-Oowq1Uo9s8ek/s200/vlcsnap-1541754.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5059290819130626834" /></a>There's so much more to talk about 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 death of Hesh's companion (a possible foreshadowing of Carmela's fate?); Tony's astoundingly cold treatment of Hesh right afterward (dropping off a sack full of cash to pay off his debt, and leaving as quickly as possible); the canny use, in the scene where A.J. proposes, of the main theme from <span style="font-style:italic;">The Deer Hunter</span>, a movie about how men express emotion by not expressing it, referenced in scene where a man defies gender stereotype and speaks from his heart. His heart gets stepped on later, but that's another story.<center>______________________</center><br />Sopranos<i> recaps run every Monday at </i><a href="http://www.mattzollerseitz.blogspot.com">The House Next Door</a><i>. For more articles about the series, see </i>The Sopranos<i> in the sidebar at right.</i></span>Keith Uhlichhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09366621160453356504noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2472021095791259178.post-42869121601536415302007-06-14T08:57:00.001-04:002007-06-14T08:57:24.108-04:00Sopranos Mondays: Season 6, Ep. 15, "Remember When"By <a href="http://www2.blogger.com/profile/16921028537989131859">Matt Zoller Seitz</a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcRwhTbWpnQ8lFvEO753KnnwRXdbH_MFqOiCY9yT_wejzrQo66GE9Z_UACwRQ4CgLuauJz0t8drrq_npjB4Ya1JRXMzPi2nQBqHJcK36wEnPCb42m9jhz6IYVHe2tAivsFg71p4e3soXBK/s1600-h/P4220040.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcRwhTbWpnQ8lFvEO753KnnwRXdbH_MFqOiCY9yT_wejzrQo66GE9Z_UACwRQ4CgLuauJz0t8drrq_npjB4Ya1JRXMzPi2nQBqHJcK36wEnPCb42m9jhz6IYVHe2tAivsFg71p4e3soXBK/s400/P4220040.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5056474780653333490" /></a>"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. <br /><br />"The tomatoes are just coming in," Tony replies, a tad wistfully.<span class="fullpost"> <br /><br />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 <span style="font-style:italic;">Peanuts</span> isn't a matter of fretting over the persistent unanswered question, "How will I 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. Tony's going about in pity for himself (with good reason) while a great wind carries him across the sky. He's a bit smarter and more self-aware than most of the crooks he competes with or bosses around, but on <span style="font-style:italic;">The Sopranos</span>, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. 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 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 act to change his circumstances (a virtual impossibility anyway, considering how tightly he's chained to a life of privilege -- and a wife and kids and relatives and employees that cling to every link). A bullet in the torso got the message across, but it didn't take. He's back to being beat-up-'em, bed-'em-down Tony, except more of an automaton, a bad boy reverting to type but not really reveling in it. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinL1wCJeF_8ewMB742GLB9GZFx1I5S1r2HMr1py3VGL80wC8Tept8YIzkzAgs-QG45MiPuaJwudUtIR3V5qCm1rlz6aSSzOTbtNHtE5PCjLg4P1FT4fcfDEoZBe1snN0s_UElhoggB2VoM/s1600-h/P4220041.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinL1wCJeF_8ewMB742GLB9GZFx1I5S1r2HMr1py3VGL80wC8Tept8YIzkzAgs-QG45MiPuaJwudUtIR3V5qCm1rlz6aSSzOTbtNHtE5PCjLg4P1FT4fcfDEoZBe1snN0s_UElhoggB2VoM/s200/P4220041.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5056758802545650850" /></a>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 and eat some steaks, only to discover that the motel has been replaced by a depressingly respectable hotel that only offers sandwich wraps after 11. Tony grumbles about this but accepts it. It's a smaller-scale version of the episode's parallel narrative of Uncle Junior in a group home for the criminally insane, where he goes from being a tinpot dictator running a secret Poker Nation with chips as currency to a medicated institutional yes-man (joining in a singalong of "Take Me Home, Country Road," for Christ's sake); it's a forced capitulation to a bland new world. (The explosive anger of Junior's behind-bars Bacala -- played by Ken Leung, the star of Spike Lee's superb, unappreciated Showtime film <span style="font-style:italic;">Sucker-Free City</span> -- is all about trusting in a role model/mentor, then feeling betrayed.) In Miami, Tony gripes to Paulie about Johnny Sack's holier-than-thou attitude toward marital fidelity, and takes a young blonde 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? A bit of both, probably -- but more of the latter. <br /><br />The title of this episode, "Remember When," is spoken by Tony, when he grows disgusted by Paulie's nonstop Glory Days yammering during a dinner with Beansie and their lady friends, and leaves the table in disgust. "Remember when is the lowest form of conversation," he says. <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgwVYL7jC68Nf-vvg1nrwHymevZKRNXBvm2Cg2w8jwr0ZVAda9ZurGjkSFbAyPggyG4IaQQ8AqRcjUfbhkm2_icNnqEEFUS1xq03bbfPbOJ0m548aG_gr9CNmr_3ZCHdBUs-nbcWMRiTSj/s1600-h/P4220012.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgwVYL7jC68Nf-vvg1nrwHymevZKRNXBvm2Cg2w8jwr0ZVAda9ZurGjkSFbAyPggyG4IaQQ8AqRcjUfbhkm2_icNnqEEFUS1xq03bbfPbOJ0m548aG_gr9CNmr_3ZCHdBUs-nbcWMRiTSj/s200/P4220012.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5056759390956170418" /></a>Funny, though: three episodes into the second half of Season Six (which is so different in tone from the first half that it should probably be considered a shadow Season Seven) and it seems the final stretch of <span style="font-style:italic;">The Sopranos</span> is about the consequences of failing to remember and fully comprehend past choices, and having to face the consequences of having made those choices. If the first half of this season 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 the second half is about the past catching up with you, inflicting inconvenience and sometimes grave damage; and how the inconvenience and damage wouldn't be such a serious threat if you hadn't made the wrong choice; and (a corollary) how the the consequences of a past bad choice wouldn't be so troublesome if they caught up to a changed person. <br /><br />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 <span style="font-style:italic;">can</span> change. 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 a pre-emptive whacking of Paulie made for a suspenseful sequence on rented boat -- one that any viewer with a brain would have recognized as psychic return to Big Pussy's execution, without the aid of a flashback -- but the whole setup seemed inplausible to me, because Paulie's a petty thug, not a novice meathead, and because, even if Paulie 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.) <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgARhB9UmBd08eCsTzLHDYeysYWsmG2xG7f3fbOlyg6yBs5fBpM5R9knsnlh2yxDm1nBiyFlZ4qeHpCWSo7-0v61IdJFvG8QjzEFoRgMmqT7nd4VeYyUdHQoUMLFFEkaEmhIK4yAfDXcM_6/s1600-h/P4220013.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgARhB9UmBd08eCsTzLHDYeysYWsmG2xG7f3fbOlyg6yBs5fBpM5R9knsnlh2yxDm1nBiyFlZ4qeHpCWSo7-0v61IdJFvG8QjzEFoRgMmqT7nd4VeYyUdHQoUMLFFEkaEmhIK4yAfDXcM_6/s200/P4220013.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5056760056676101314" /></a>But like Paulie, I digress. The point is, bills Tony thought he'd skipped out on keep coming due. In the season opener, Essex County cops found a gun he dropped a year-and-a-half earlier; from the look of dumb astonishment on his face when the police mobbed his house, you could tell he'd barely given that piece a second thought. In "Remember When," he runs from his cherry-pop killing, the 1982 murder of a Newark bookie; Paulie rather pathetically tried to reassure him that there couldn't be much left, but as Tony rightly observed, bones and teeth are all they need. (In the season opener, "Soprano Home Movies," Bobby Bacala left copious amounts of his own DNA at the scene of his own cherry-pop murder, a killing ordered by Tony, out of greed for a better deal on black market medicine and a desire to assert his power over Bobby, who beat him in a drunken brawl.) True, Tony appears to have wriggled out of the gun charge, and he escaped responsibility for the 1982 killing as well, thanks to jailed mob boss Larry Barese fingering the late Jackie Aprile for the murder. 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 situation comedy: <span style="font-style:italic;">Everybody Fears Tony.</span> <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYiExhgV4wmw0H58dSixei-9YzWZS1CUlDt7HlbySDmeosaVoJUr-5zIP9n675ZVa1AnaQbT4wwEI8sBoQJnDC1fQAXalYenonSvsG8T1oOch1z8u0bsM-l-RHS29_EdP5fBri6tQ7Qffu/s1600-h/P4220047.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYiExhgV4wmw0H58dSixei-9YzWZS1CUlDt7HlbySDmeosaVoJUr-5zIP9n675ZVa1AnaQbT4wwEI8sBoQJnDC1fQAXalYenonSvsG8T1oOch1z8u0bsM-l-RHS29_EdP5fBri6tQ7Qffu/s200/P4220047.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5056758368753953938" /></a>Or maybe series creator David Chase is about to unveil the series' ultimate bit of misdirection: its insistence that certain events were one-off incidents that didn't mean anything beyong the episode in which they appeared, and that we should forget about them, because <span style="font-style:italic;">The Sopranos</span> isn't that kind of TV show. Wouldn't it be unsportsmanlike, and maybe wonderful, if it turned out Chase was lying about that -- if all of a sudden, <span style="font-style:italic;">The Sopranos</span> became like <span style="font-style:italic;">Deadwood</span> or <span style="font-style:italic;">The Wire</span>, a show with an elephant's memory, and brought down the whole crew over an investigation into Ralphie Cifaretto's murder of his pregnant stripper girlfriend Tracee (which I never believed would have gone so conspicuously unnoticed), or had Paulie return from Miami and open his own front door to see the disappearing Russian from <span style="font-style:italic;">Pine Barrens</span> standing there with a machete? In other words, a final six in which a string of seemingly long-defused outrages suddenly pop one after the other, like Chinese firecrackers. <br /><br />That's probably too grand and too traditionally satisfying a strategy for Chase, though. He's an aficionado of the anticlimax, which is why it makes perverse sense that Tony would keep having to leave his home not because of unpunished sins he broods over constantly, but because of errors and offenses he hasn't thought about in years. (Al Capone got nailed over income taxes.) Tony may have given himself permission to forget certain things (morally speaking, everybody has a touch of Uncle Junior's condition). But other people -- cops, victims' relatives, maybe witnesses he didn't know existed -- never forgot. It would be poetic justice if the lowest form of conversation did Tony in.<br /><br />Then again, maybe punishment for Tony will be the recognition that he's lived a nasty, brutish life, that it brought shame and pain to many of his loved ones (cue <span style="font-style:italic;">Godfather</span> music) that it's too late to do anything about it; what's done is done. My former <span style="font-style:italic;">Star-Ledger</span> colleague <a href="http://blog.nj.com/alltv/2007/04/sopranos_rewind_remember_when.html">Alan Sepinwall</a> speculates that in the final stretch of episodes,<blockquote>"...we're going to see a lot of characters suffer a fate worse than jail or even death: being forced to confront who they really are.<br /><br />In episode one, it was Bacala who had to abandon the pretense that he could be a made man without blood on his hands. Last week, 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 decay into lonely, pathetic old men, not useful for much besides dirty jokes and stories about the good old days.<br /><br />Characters have been telling old stories all season, often about the resentment that grows between fathers and sons, or between mentors and proteges. Here, Junior recalls the day his father (Tony's grandfather) made him walk home 11 miles for turning down a 25-cent tip from a rich woman. Carter 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 Soprano gave Tony the Willie Overalls hit when Tony was 24, but Tony quickly and forcefully says that he was 22.<br /><br />It's those details they don't forget. Even in the grips of dementia, Junior knows he walked 11 miles. Carter remembers the exact grade on the test. Tony remembers how old he was when his father made him into a killer (which he in turn would do to Christopher and Bacala).<br /><br />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."<center>__________________</center><br /></blockquote><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxh4Acxp8uaxlx5nr12TQbnwCKb6xIWP4UYyzD-rilLDXYYCRI1LobusvWTocMTtITHheVGd3EXpIVxMoRb_KnRUdtAnEom0OsszP1YXXJo4dvJXjtnPiN66bchq7ptm5ZPYTLgRpcLpPz/s1600-h/P4220027.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxh4Acxp8uaxlx5nr12TQbnwCKb6xIWP4UYyzD-rilLDXYYCRI1LobusvWTocMTtITHheVGd3EXpIVxMoRb_KnRUdtAnEom0OsszP1YXXJo4dvJXjtnPiN66bchq7ptm5ZPYTLgRpcLpPz/s320/P4220027.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5056761010158841042" /></a><br /><center>__________________</center><br />The bifurcated structure of "Remember When" played like a cousin of acclaimed early <span style="font-style:italic;">Sopranos</span> episodes, particularly Season One's "College" and Season Three's "University." But the parallels between the main storylines -- Uncle Junior/Carter Chong and Tony/Paulie -- seemed more muddled here than in earlier mirror-structure installments. Uncle Junior is Carter Chong's surrogate dad behind bars, but Carter eventually grows disillusioned with Junior and lashes out against him, as he apparently never did against his real father; Tony belatedly realizes how disappointed he is in his father figure/mob big brother Paulie, and comes close to murdering him, but doesn't. But wait: Carter had another, better father figure, his granddad (even though he never puts it in quite those terms). And Tony had a real father, Johnny Boy Soprano, and a sorta-kinda surrogate, Uncle Junior -- the former retaining mythic status even though he poisoned his son's life with violence, the latter serving more as an irritant to Tony and an obstacle to his ascension than a guru or role model. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSz735hEE9caFbUsQquRKoGvHXRjJPmGBTOPVVWAksDMeEYko6dq7Iabi1rNL73kOKdCo14s6jSHLKqOAyhothmuhW7u7vlwDl2Nys7Qq_4YCsHzQtBpk9ijcngBrX8o3ttpveEqTIQLB3/s1600-h/P4220026.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSz735hEE9caFbUsQquRKoGvHXRjJPmGBTOPVVWAksDMeEYko6dq7Iabi1rNL73kOKdCo14s6jSHLKqOAyhothmuhW7u7vlwDl2Nys7Qq_4YCsHzQtBpk9ijcngBrX8o3ttpveEqTIQLB3/s200/P4220026.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5056764424657841426" /></a>Then again, was "Remember When" really that muddled, or have the show's writers just gotten more confident, more inclined to let scenes and lines of dialogue complement each other obliquely, without the Playwriting 101 symmetry that many TV series (even <span style="font-style:italic;">The Sopranos</span>) equate, often speciously, with Art? I doubt episode writer Terence Winter intended one-to-one correspondences here, and that's probably a good thing. And when all is said, done and explicated, the superficial parallels between <span style="font-style:italic;">Sopranos</span> characters aren't as important as their actions, which often just erupt without warning or explanation, just as they do in life. This is my favorite aspect of <span style="font-style:italic;">The Sopranos</span>, and of most HBO dramas, for that matter: the insistence that human beings are mysterious creatures who usually don't know what they're doing, much less why they're doing it. This is as true of the show's most self-aware characters (Tony, Melfi, Meadow) as it is of the more caricatured supporting players (Silvio, Paulie, Janice, Bobby). <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigwDMqlCmSW5i8bxPk_Y6pjqxomfOEdmSqyhQBuCPF6f41X15VGeXDn-m2EWk_xNi5Dqeau_9jdUmsbXVoEQM8oGZMwbbwIYqjyXzPETXtREjvAGIb7SONdKkZ0CqWsD6ikVIa8fJEh6ta/s1600-h/P4220036.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigwDMqlCmSW5i8bxPk_Y6pjqxomfOEdmSqyhQBuCPF6f41X15VGeXDn-m2EWk_xNi5Dqeau_9jdUmsbXVoEQM8oGZMwbbwIYqjyXzPETXtREjvAGIb7SONdKkZ0CqWsD6ikVIa8fJEh6ta/s200/P4220036.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5056764003751046402" /></a>But the one characteristic that unites all of them is a willingness to speak the language of self-knowledge without stepping outside of themselves and standing at sufficient distance from their own egos to make true perspective possible. 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 <span style="font-style:italic;">The Haves and Have-Nots</span>; 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." 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 <span style="font-style:italic;">The Sopranos</span> 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 seen by others, it's a documentary.<br /><center>______________________</center><br />Sopranos<i> recaps run every Monday at </i><a href="http://www.mattzollerseitz.blogspot.com">The House Next Door</a><i>. For more articles about the series, see </i>The Sopranos<i> in the sidebar at right.</i></span>Keith Uhlichhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09366621160453356504noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2472021095791259178.post-65198038258300049802007-06-14T08:56:00.001-04:002007-06-14T08:56:51.021-04:00Sopranos Mondays: Season 6, Ep. 14, "Stage 5"By <a href="http://www2.blogger.com/profile/16921028537989131859">Matt Zoller Seitz</a><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3rGhWd-RE8_DRQ6JpxlMlPzA6WtfvusXL0XynRN31KA9ibArXQzH6w7js9t5Ccpr4rov7PLXftTN7LUVIf0PeeWrdHyKvU-gsQYAoNTIgY4W4bvcXl4u-zwIM0AdDGdI8k5rMP1ES0Brs/s1600-h/vlcsnap-6627468.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3rGhWd-RE8_DRQ6JpxlMlPzA6WtfvusXL0XynRN31KA9ibArXQzH6w7js9t5Ccpr4rov7PLXftTN7LUVIf0PeeWrdHyKvU-gsQYAoNTIgY4W4bvcXl4u-zwIM0AdDGdI8k5rMP1ES0Brs/s400/vlcsnap-6627468.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5054117915825650354" /></a>"Is it possible on some level [that] you’re reading into all of this?" Dr. Melfi asks Tony Soprano, after Tony says he suspects that his cousin, budding filmmaker Christopher, based a hot-tempered, spouse-betraying gangster boss on Tony. <br /><br />"I’ve been coming here for years," Tony replies wearily. "I know too much about the subconscious now."<span class="fullpost"> <br /><br />And on that note, let's dive into "Stage 5," arguably the most self-reflexive episode of a series that's already offered plenty. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoPHmH9Am81BPFTSnwrqEN6j2A8e2O1JnDViNLghgp9iBgOuYmXeaSV7yK4_o017_G3KQarUYrtm94BdHYlmeG8Nlt-Id20v2ZmtDzDC27f54WR3cEOc3daMLOgghgbdvbB9QfBsr2hT47/s1600-h/vlcsnap-6096064.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoPHmH9Am81BPFTSnwrqEN6j2A8e2O1JnDViNLghgp9iBgOuYmXeaSV7yK4_o017_G3KQarUYrtm94BdHYlmeG8Nlt-Id20v2ZmtDzDC27f54WR3cEOc3daMLOgghgbdvbB9QfBsr2hT47/s200/vlcsnap-6096064.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5054131243109169874" /></a>The hour was remarkable enough for its richly detailed events, including the premiere of Christopher's first film as producer, a mob-flavored splatterfest entiled <span style="font-style:italic;">Cleaver</span>; Carmela's confrontation with Tony over the implication, via Chris' movie, that Tony slept with Chris' doomed stoolie fiancee, Adriana; Silvio's survival of a mob hit, apparently instigated by New York underboss Doc Santoro, that killed Gerry "The Hairdo" Tortiano; Tony's admission in therapy that he fears Chris hates him and wants him dead and has forgotten Tony's big-brotherly love for him; and of course, the sudden decline and death of cancer-ridden gang boss Johnny Sacrimoni, who faced his final curtain with fear in his eyes. He kept smoking those coffin nails right up to the end, so stubbornly that even his wife Ginny, who was furious over his unwillingness to quit, busted out a pack at Johnny's bedside after hearing her husband call out for his mother. It was as if she thought the promise of one more puff might inspire John to turn on his heel and walk away from the light. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKKV2zbMS37wEBGleqRA52Uw7mdv-Nd6tqFYr66RQVruunFRpTF3Lm3nMW6s-Sv3XADQg85pwnzrIxB0I-LMfUr4gXc5t1In870NAimGhXTC6oPstxUw6gL9YTWiNaarPZML4uIMi162n1/s1600-h/vlcsnap-6134464.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKKV2zbMS37wEBGleqRA52Uw7mdv-Nd6tqFYr66RQVruunFRpTF3Lm3nMW6s-Sv3XADQg85pwnzrIxB0I-LMfUr4gXc5t1In870NAimGhXTC6oPstxUw6gL9YTWiNaarPZML4uIMi162n1/s200/vlcsnap-6134464.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5054131827224722162" /></a>On top of that, there was a persistent, at times suffocating aura of futility -- a sense that individual hits, schemes, scores and power plays don't mean much once you've accepted the fact that, as Carmela once put it, "Everything ends." "Stage 5" was the most literally and figuratively funereal hour the series has yet given us. It was reminiscent of the Season Three "Deadwood" episode "Unauthorized Cinnamon." The latter was as afterlife-fixated as "Stage 5" but more uplifting, celebrating the human life force even as it conceded the limits of its power. No such celebration for "Stage 5," a melancholy-to-depressive installment whose very title was a synonym for death -- a reference to a nonexistent stage of cancer beyond Stage Four.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMrUAvze-IU4f8hSHeyJdnyG6ynFx7l8jm2mhDXoijYYR2eI7RnZzDz1JkBrtcUx9z0Na29dhJ4P2OQxZWWtHGnj3VpIQBOM6rOI9GpdkF6NBvZdk-kTfBt2hTZtAzaJD0gKX3CfIY3ykY/s1600-h/vlcsnap-6021999.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMrUAvze-IU4f8hSHeyJdnyG6ynFx7l8jm2mhDXoijYYR2eI7RnZzDz1JkBrtcUx9z0Na29dhJ4P2OQxZWWtHGnj3VpIQBOM6rOI9GpdkF6NBvZdk-kTfBt2hTZtAzaJD0gKX3CfIY3ykY/s200/vlcsnap-6021999.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5054131475037403874" /></a>The characters, led by Tony, spent much of the hour going about in pity for themselves, to quote a certain Ojibwe saying. Johnny dies of cancer; Phil Leotardo talks about his own heart attack, nurses an ancient family grudge against America's ruling classes (his family name got changed from Leonardo to Leotardo at Ellis Island) and worries aloud that he's compromised too much during his life. Shockingly, he even expresses doubts about the wisdom of staying mum while serving time, and about failing to personally avenge the death of his brother, Billy, at the hands of Tony's cousin, Tony B. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZg2PEPDZBftp47BkAmbdYd859BGduyst4onw8tMMjaMOBW4X31vl6zeolaO6xxsj1FKgtXYtTOLJ5fZg60XVdgG8OKRx99Jt1EPIRxJSbH_6zS_ATvP7Cq1mK9GCbddTOqtgzer2RdMoV/s1600-h/vlcsnap-6120907.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZg2PEPDZBftp47BkAmbdYd859BGduyst4onw8tMMjaMOBW4X31vl6zeolaO6xxsj1FKgtXYtTOLJ5fZg60XVdgG8OKRx99Jt1EPIRxJSbH_6zS_ATvP7Cq1mK9GCbddTOqtgzer2RdMoV/s200/vlcsnap-6120907.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5054133128599812898" /></a>Tony himself seems stricken, battered, exhausted. Whether brooding over Johnny's fate or sweating Christopher's cinematic hit job (“All those memories are for what? All I am to him is some asshole bully”), you can tell his mind is elsewhere -- most likely, on the prospect of his own demise and the question of whether he'll leave behind anything but money, grief and fat jokes. (When the Bada Bing inner circle gathers to hear news of Johnny's death, a slow dolly into Tony's face in profile isolates; it's as if a dark thought has just snuck up on him.) Paulie Walnuts' toast to the dearly departed consists of bragging that he's kicked cancer; then he quotes the Blood, Sweat and Tears song "Spinning Wheels," which, considering recent events, seems like a Top 40 omen. (The first line is, "What goes up/must come down," echoing Tony's admission to Melfi in the pilot that he felt like he came into the business at the end, and the best is over.) The Reaper -- or The Cleaver -- gets everyone eventually. Why spend your days on things that don't make you happy?<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIlqC4y_N6oFwF2hN-V6RSDK_W16VprHzIkSVm0CFCrXP0DdLQp-5Sk4M8NoKaBdy_MrG_FaMowweXyY35QyfZUasPpVnCsXWiXzg5kXniH3Wm7ekG-MHByryZhmqAibO9aM1Sshfpvk0r/s1600-h/vlcsnap-6137992.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIlqC4y_N6oFwF2hN-V6RSDK_W16VprHzIkSVm0CFCrXP0DdLQp-5Sk4M8NoKaBdy_MrG_FaMowweXyY35QyfZUasPpVnCsXWiXzg5kXniH3Wm7ekG-MHByryZhmqAibO9aM1Sshfpvk0r/s200/vlcsnap-6137992.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5054137483696651074" /></a>In what I suspect will later seem one of the most important scenes in the show's entire run, "Little" Carmine Lupertazzi, Jr., the other executive producer of <span style="font-style:italic;">Cleaver</span>, meets Tony for lunch at a country club, where they discuss succession in an era of two-bit gang warfare and increased federal harassment (the FBI even made an arrest at the premiere of <span style="font-style:italic;">Cleaver</span>). Tony -- who wants somebody to step up and lead the family but would rather it not be him -- asks Carmine what happened to his ambition. Little Carmine responds by describing a dream he once had. In the dream, his father turned 100, and Little Carmine gave his father "a mellifluous box," which the elder Carmine looked upon with “...gaze of absolute disappointent," because there was nothing in it. His dad told him, "Fill it up...Come back when I'm 200." On the basis of that dream, and his wife warning him that she didn't want to be the wealthiest widow on Long Island, Carmine decided to seek happiness outside of the family business. The dream "wasn't a dream," Little Carmine explains to Tony. "It was about being happy." It's also about the foolishness of pursuing wealth, power and the approval of one's elders (or social betters) instead of actually living your life and enjoying each day as if it's a gift (even if, as Tony laments, the gift is a pair of socks). <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlBSM1jKkA54IIibqtATxHswPJPgRoewTrx7hRmvSCHlfiHQ-NzHF_qGHf16NmA_RMG85lBJm7XTuuvuD5Jijr22V75MgKT-nb2l5d6Gt6-veAZeZQdV-0eOOnMnpy2RXcZe2Dd0nBdxmP/s1600-h/vlcsnap-6118369.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlBSM1jKkA54IIibqtATxHswPJPgRoewTrx7hRmvSCHlfiHQ-NzHF_qGHf16NmA_RMG85lBJm7XTuuvuD5Jijr22V75MgKT-nb2l5d6Gt6-veAZeZQdV-0eOOnMnpy2RXcZe2Dd0nBdxmP/s200/vlcsnap-6118369.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5054132398455372546" /></a>As if that's not enough to chew on, "Stage 5" turns its mortality obsession back on itself, deploying so many images and lines of dialogue calling attention to <span style="font-style:italic;">The Sopranos</span> as a TV series that at times, the episode doesn't seem to be posing the question, "Will anyone remember us fondly after we're dead" but rather, "Will anybody remember <span style="font-style:italic;">The Sopranos</span> as anything but a blood-'n-guts gangster show?" <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjE5qVu5yltyo0oe6wHleBuD346tQLrc8yd2okf_IbozS-OMCfWsdwA8CCqPZtGuL5QN-SIqnkqP4xUxRjliEJRjxw6FM44sfvOo40TknXaDewV8BnjOIBOmjvI1HAQaI-lq3HrySdr3vUe/s1600-h/vlcsnap-6020286.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjE5qVu5yltyo0oe6wHleBuD346tQLrc8yd2okf_IbozS-OMCfWsdwA8CCqPZtGuL5QN-SIqnkqP4xUxRjliEJRjxw6FM44sfvOo40TknXaDewV8BnjOIBOmjvI1HAQaI-lq3HrySdr3vUe/s200/vlcsnap-6020286.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5054141125828918098" /></a>There are warnings of the dangers of overinterpretation that seem like intentional retorts to Tony's remark to Melfi. Christopher wriggles away from charges that he based the film's mob boss villain (played by Daniel Baldwin, with a voice that sounds like Bob Hoskins doing an "American" accent) on Tony. Whether Chris intended the comparison or not, he damn sure did it on purpose, yet he begs off responsibility, insisting that creativity is a mysterious thing. "It was an idea, I don’t know, who knows where they fucking come from? Isaac Newton invented gravity cuz some asshole hit him with an apple!" he tells the film's credited screenwriter, Timothy Daly's J.T., before braining him with a Humanitas prize. (This isn't just a follow-up to a joke from a previous episode where the hard-up J.T. tried to sell his Emmy and found out it wasn't worth jack; it's also a sideways reference to the fact that <span style="font-style:italic;">The Sopranos</span> won a Peabody award the same year as that bastion of liberal enlightenment, <span style="font-style:italic;">The West Wing</span>, a fact that even the show's most trivia-minded fans have already forgotten.) <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizoKSlYFs1o5eM2q2QRaffgJgFa0HNs5DMqj6pneGYH36kgzvd5rX5xOmhdu82lh6petlIzBok2gvb_UvtEynBGxop-5u938Bi-LFktIzrX4BH29xQk0IAtGjT1RtEUVypv6GUNotWwiJy/s1600-h/vlcsnap-6019470.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizoKSlYFs1o5eM2q2QRaffgJgFa0HNs5DMqj6pneGYH36kgzvd5rX5xOmhdu82lh6petlIzBok2gvb_UvtEynBGxop-5u938Bi-LFktIzrX4BH29xQk0IAtGjT1RtEUVypv6GUNotWwiJy/s200/vlcsnap-6019470.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5054148581892143970" /></a>Then there's the bit where an unseen viewer's widescreen TV shows Geraldo Rivera interviewing mob experts about the current New York mob madness. The panel bets on possible replacements for Johnny with the same jocular attitude you find in conversations about who's going to get whacked next on <span style="font-style:italic;">The Sopranos</span> (which in turn echoes a comment about <span style="font-style:italic;">Cleaver</span>, "These audiences today, they want blood"). The punchline: a reverse angle revealing that the TV belongs to none other than Peter Bogdanovich's Dr. Kupferberg, the shrink behind Dr. Melfi's shrink. ("This Santoro thing...I called it a year ago!") Carmine praises his own film's cleverness, particularly a closeup of a crucifix and a vaudevillian hanging from a rearview mirror. ("The sacred and the profane," Carmine beams.) And let's not forget the "interpretation" of Phil's heart problems as "...a metaphor. He lost his balls is what I’m saying.” (If so, it's a metaphor for a metaphor.) <br /><br />Are we seeing evidence that the writers sometimes worry that detractors are right -- that <span style="font-style:italic;">The Sopranos</span> is a whack-'em gangster soap gussied up in academic pretension? In scenes like the one with Carmine and Tony at the country club -- where the gangster-gone-Hollywood Carmine orders seared ahi, mixed greens and an iced tea, and Tony orders a Philly cheesesteak -- you gotta wonder.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeudrv7LTybcG-6XJwTI_fJL8aUi04PPzq6xOsbJJfpEeWjGbq5oHFVdKqjzCmawxM6ROKR_NrJkTacAT6Eyiwq5IXsBU4Npo0YiyEO8TKPOrrWuZ1oIqWhEQXzcKDpzAULKFJmVO9WuKt/s1600-h/vlcsnap-6139963.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeudrv7LTybcG-6XJwTI_fJL8aUi04PPzq6xOsbJJfpEeWjGbq5oHFVdKqjzCmawxM6ROKR_NrJkTacAT6Eyiwq5IXsBU4Npo0YiyEO8TKPOrrWuZ1oIqWhEQXzcKDpzAULKFJmVO9WuKt/s200/vlcsnap-6139963.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5054148723626064754" /></a>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 (Sidney Pollack 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. After all, the blood on O.J. Simpson's hands doesn't make him any less of a great running back. <br /><br />This is a self-justifying observation, not just for gangsters, but for those who write TV shows about gangsters, but there's a strong hint of self-awareness to it, a sense that it's being offered not as an apology but as 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 fiancee-banger, and Phil worrying that he muffed some of the most important choices of his life. After all these years, is it possible that <span style="font-style:italic;">The Sopranos</span> judges itself as harshly as the harshest critics judge <span style="font-style:italic;">The Sopranos</span>?<br /><br />That seems hard to believe, considering the enjoyment the series takes in being black-heartedly hilarious ("Fuck Ben Kingsley! Danny Baldwin took him to fuckin’ acting school!") and their evident pride in its longevity, ambition and popularity, and in the simple fact that it exists at all. "You made a movie," Tony tells Christopher, in a rare, tender moment between them. "Nobody can take that away."</span>Keith Uhlichhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09366621160453356504noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2472021095791259178.post-4969885117290559342007-06-14T08:55:00.000-04:002007-06-14T08:56:10.258-04:00Sopranos Mondays: Season 6, Ep. 13, "Soprano Home Movies"By <a href="http://www2.blogger.com/profile/16921028537989131859">Matt Zoller Seitz</a><br /><br />"Is this it?" Carmela asks Tony in Sunday's episode of <span style="font-style:italic;">The Sopranos</span>, after waking up to the sound of cops beating on their front door.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVYMIVMq6A03v-a9H8zyDb0SefMpAzxgZkq8VoUXX2ym2znS9T-y97VpbowpUx_j1JKFh4CtHTwauXh2fCX3cin8AsainGwfpmW6lSNMNy9kLqqix-sCBzNyOq9w1pCITpTnRSTmKOt1qi/s1600-h/gun.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVYMIVMq6A03v-a9H8zyDb0SefMpAzxgZkq8VoUXX2ym2znS9T-y97VpbowpUx_j1JKFh4CtHTwauXh2fCX3cin8AsainGwfpmW6lSNMNy9kLqqix-sCBzNyOq9w1pCITpTnRSTmKOt1qi/s200/gun.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5051250130398613714" /></a>No, it's not quite "it" -- if by "it" you mean the point where Da Family's bad deeds finally catch up with it. Tony is rich enough to buy a good lawyer, and the charge that prompted his latest arrest is old and weak (possession of a handgun and hollow point ammunition -- fallout from the end of Season Five, where Tony fled from the feds' arrest of Johnny Sack and chucked his piece in the snow, where it was discovered by a dumbass suburban teen). But in another sense, yes, this is "it" -- the final stretch for <span style="font-style:italic;">The Sopranos</span>, the series. To answer one Carmela quote with another -- from Season Four -- "Let me tell you something. Everything comes to an end." <span class="fullpost"> <br /><br />The opening sequence of this episode -- an off-kilter prologue, really, with an alternate narrative that opens like a hypertext link -- also echoes the lyrics of the show's theme: "Woke up this morning/Got yourself a gun." But this time, it was a gun Tony that didn't have anymore -- and damn sure didn't want. The charge, though not quite resolved, looks like it won't stick (emphasis on "looks like"), so it counts as a close call -- one of many that Tony has endured over six seasons, the most drastic of which was his shooting by demented Uncle Junior. That near-death experience, complete with purgatorial dreamworld visions, didn't change Tony permanently -- he just turned sensitive for a few weeks, got sized up as a softie by more predatory men, then re-embraced his instinct for self-preservation, starting with a flamboyant beatdown of his gym-muscled chaffeur that was intended to show his crew that the big dog still had teeth. <br /><br />Tony's said that guys who live this kind of life tend to go out one of two ways: on a slab or in the can. But there's a difference between knowing and understanding, and while Tony knows the risks of mob life, it's still not clear that he truly understands them -- or that if he does understand them, that he has the willpower, or even the inclination, to act against <span style="font-style:italic;">omerta</span>, his fucked-up childhood, a possibly genetic predisposition to violence, and an addiction to big houses, big cars, big TVs and (it would seem) lifetime membership in the Blowjob of the Day Club. (Tony got a B-Day BJ from Carmela this episode, but her self-satisfied "Happy birthday" suggested it was a special gift for a special occasion.) A leopard cannot change its spots.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFUt5E8bFY2u7Ve-VSaCfCk1fI-K-UpVI76pa5SiefWdd2aqIFXY_Hq9Z-4yHS7jCwuK1hgS-RbdWde0Rh_AKfeuRr1no2zADDv-eFI3sgmNfv8tOC_Gdif6S_sYvWtZEK_OdIeiQ9OVmm/s1600-h/vlcsnap-16732264.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFUt5E8bFY2u7Ve-VSaCfCk1fI-K-UpVI76pa5SiefWdd2aqIFXY_Hq9Z-4yHS7jCwuK1hgS-RbdWde0Rh_AKfeuRr1no2zADDv-eFI3sgmNfv8tOC_Gdif6S_sYvWtZEK_OdIeiQ9OVmm/s200/vlcsnap-16732264.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5051256864907333858" /></a>I've said in other House recaps -- and in a piece published in Sunday's <span style="font-style:italic;">Star-Ledger</span> -- that <span style="font-style:italic;">The Sopranos</span> might be the most cynical long-running series in TV history, a worst-case-scenario look at human nature in which people can always be relied upon embrace their own caricature and do whatever's most convenient for them at any given moment. Dr. Melfi's passive tough-love notwithstanding, there isn't much noble behavior on display, just thugs and thugs-by-proxy tearing into each other like hyenas. The characters keep going through the motions of change, or reform, only to slip back into old behavior. How many times has Christopher relapsed into substance abuse? How many times has Tony sworn off adultery only to find himself in flagrante four or five scenes later? How many times has Carmela flirted with her conscience (through therapy, religion and simple anger over Tony's brutishness) only to drift back into Tony's embrace? The show's detractors have a point when they ask if the lurid weekly spectacle of <span style="font-style:italic;">The Sopranos</span> isn't ultimately exploitive and numbing, no matter how many times creator David Chase and company shock us (and themselves) out of complacency with a stakes-raising atrocity, a satirical jab or a moment of real introspection (like the ones Tony seemed to experience during the first half of Season Six). And a part of me would still like to see Tony and people close to Tony suffer for their sins, partly to bring <span style="font-style:italic;">The Sopranos</span> in line with classic gangster narratives (the prospect of which apparently fills Chase with self-loathing, otherwise he wouldn't keep insisting that the show isn't a gangster story), and partly because yes, from week to week, the show often does seem a bit fatuous, like <span style="font-style:italic;">Scarface</span> for <span style="font-style:italic;">New Yorker</span> subscribers (the pop culture-laden insults that pop out of the gangsters' mouths often sound more L.A. writers' room than Jersey Turnpike). <br /><br />But the closer we get to the end, the more convinced I am that such an outcome simply isn't possible. I say that not just because Chase seems to have a low opinion of the human species but also because of of the peculiar genius of <span style="font-style:italic;">The Sopranos</span>, which takes an aspect of TV storytelling that's long been considered a weakness and treats it as a strength. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7fphPZg06YhiFzyzw5D7WrNRGCkVsheTYtNI7UuMvlwHEBJ9m9kspWzsfB8l2varBq0SM2Tdg7YXUBNG3f30Y1RTfUloPMUR_sRfOyXCZgSYB3rNm6bvbZ9x-8XmBXQl4cdKsKpJD8Ztx/s1600-h/vlcsnap-16731987.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7fphPZg06YhiFzyzw5D7WrNRGCkVsheTYtNI7UuMvlwHEBJ9m9kspWzsfB8l2varBq0SM2Tdg7YXUBNG3f30Y1RTfUloPMUR_sRfOyXCZgSYB3rNm6bvbZ9x-8XmBXQl4cdKsKpJD8Ztx/s200/vlcsnap-16731987.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5051440710982439170" /></a>Movie snobs (those who look down their noses at TV for not being movies) trumpet commercial narrative cinema's preference for a forward-moving, goal-directed story in which characters face problems, learn something about themselves and change (usually, but not always, for the better); they contrast this tendency with TV's open-endedness, its cyclical repetitions, and its addiction to what might be called <span style="font-style:italic;">kinetic stasis</span> -- the dramatic equivalent of running in place. And it's true: Kinetic stasis is TV storytelling's DNA. On TV, characters do things and have things done to them; they go through dark nights of the soul, or get married or divorced, bury a child, go back to school and drop out, convert to Catholicism or buy a new boat; but in the end, they don't really change all that much, because if they did, viewers that tuned in each week to be reassured by the sight of familiar characters and situations would get irritated and stop watching, the ratings would fall, the sponsors would pull out, and soon there would be no show. Every now and then comes a show like <span style="font-style:italic;">The Wire</span> and <span style="font-style:italic;">Deadwood</span>, where there's a continual sense of collective forward motion, and key characters change so drastically that from one season to the next that they truly seem to have become different people. But these exceptions don't disprove the rule.<br /><br />Intriguingly, though, some of the most memorable TV shows -- usually comedies like <span style="font-style:italic;">The Honeymooners</span> and <span style="font-style:italic;">All in the Family</span> and <span style="font-style:italic;">Everybody Loves Raymond</span> -- don't bother depicting characters that grow and change because they aren't interested in that process and perhaps, on some level, don't believe that it happens as often as movies and plays and novels would have us believe. These series would rather show us the many ways in which human beings <span style="font-style:italic;">don't</span> change -- the ways in which they stay consistent, true to form or type, from cradle to grave, despite occasional flurries of effort designed to convince themselves and their loved ones that this is it, they're really changing, and from now on everything is going to be different. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgd7WTGd0dmLeav4QoIQ-uIT_t5MojWcC55eyVXMmio6iXtk8hMIGA7TFtkiNO8BG7J52iNRU2HUtWkfvlVgcWngnKnPL5v8m0uKO0K4nnCrkebep4xej3Uycgj5e1idWoCUfvsd-MzXeX7/s1600-h/vlcsnap-16731398.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgd7WTGd0dmLeav4QoIQ-uIT_t5MojWcC55eyVXMmio6iXtk8hMIGA7TFtkiNO8BG7J52iNRU2HUtWkfvlVgcWngnKnPL5v8m0uKO0K4nnCrkebep4xej3Uycgj5e1idWoCUfvsd-MzXeX7/s200/vlcsnap-16731398.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5051262276566126834" /></a><span style="font-style:italic;">The Sopranos</span> is the ultimate example of this. It takes the kinetic stasis that's an incidental quality of other shows and puts it right in the foreground. On some level, <span style="font-style:italic;">The Sopranos</span> is often about characters becoming the thing that their subculture requires them to be, or the thing they were born to be. Anyone who goes against preconditioning, whatever its form, suffers. Eugene Pontecorvo wanted out, was told he couldn't leave, and hung himself; Vito Spatafore came out of the closet, found the beginnings of a new life, then tried to return home a changed man and got beaten to death in a cheap motel room. Christopher keeps trying and failing to kick drugs, but his real drug is Da Family. He gave up his true love to appease it -- a gangster to the core. A.J. can't really force himself to break away from the family; he gestures toward creating a new life with Blanca and her kids, but under his parents' roof. (The episode has a good laugh at the expense of A.J.'s identifying with Blanca's culture when Tony comes home from jail and A.J. says, "in my neighborhood people don't get out right away.") Meadow has spent the entire series trying to be something other than a godfather's daughter (rather comically -- the show rarely takes her aspirations seriously) and now seems to have grown closer to her parents than ever before. (When the cops roust Tony in "Soprano Home Movies," she complains to her mom, "That show of force -- was that all about humiliating dad?" Yep -- just like the feds hauling Johnny Sack away from his daughter's wedding.) And Carmela and Tony's marriage is an affectionate bond that rests on a bedrock of lies, trades and compromises; she's a mob wife and he's a mobster, and that's that. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHqaFWhoimfhQ1oHibuyPGbPdsGZG0wn5uxCdye16HHnHS9IIFCXNghjVci2jCoEtspWgyds-pvRc8gJtFVrSqDnPZ0qWXJ_PvgNOqNiYxveQUoVlPo8yKamda3W4UQGiSSNJvnDEjM71E/s1600-h/vlcsnap-16734787.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHqaFWhoimfhQ1oHibuyPGbPdsGZG0wn5uxCdye16HHnHS9IIFCXNghjVci2jCoEtspWgyds-pvRc8gJtFVrSqDnPZ0qWXJ_PvgNOqNiYxveQUoVlPo8yKamda3W4UQGiSSNJvnDEjM71E/s200/vlcsnap-16734787.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5051441209198645538" /></a>Sunday's action was all about enforcing hierachies and deepening the status quo; it was a demonstration of Tony's inability to escape being Tony even when escape is the whole point. He and Carmela try to flee the anxiety surrounding Tony's gun charge and the irritation of A.J.'s new situation by heading out to Bobby and Janice's spectacular lakehouse to celebrate Tony's birthday. By the episode's end, Tony has resserted his personal and professional dominance over Bobby -- probably the only guy in his crew he can really trust -- by loutishly reminding Bobby that his good life comes from Tony, insulting Janice during a drunken Monopoly game, and provoking Bobby into a clumsy, stupid fight. (The music in the scene is Dave Brubeck's "Take Five" -- as in, take a break, relax.) Unable to accept the fact that he lost the fight, Tony obsesses for the rest of his vacation, then avenges himself by forcing Bobby to do a hit, something Bobby had avoided doing until now. The action confirms Tony's trivial sadism, certifies Bobby's helplessness before Tony and bonds Bobby ever tighter to the organization. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3SIp7w7D0eLDt8P_73yHRlx5UUwqKldW5B9gcQ-udewyiyhUUGa3J_GgHuizj2E9zBzpe-98a_0rQikMkrzaFpVd_I74VurIA-ZRn6lWDNMgJYE4djFeq9I2Cf3PH4xykrLwebUQTDLbN/s1600-h/vlcsnap-16735766.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3SIp7w7D0eLDt8P_73yHRlx5UUwqKldW5B9gcQ-udewyiyhUUGa3J_GgHuizj2E9zBzpe-98a_0rQikMkrzaFpVd_I74VurIA-ZRn6lWDNMgJYE4djFeq9I2Cf3PH4xykrLwebUQTDLbN/s200/vlcsnap-16735766.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5051441355227533618" /></a>On <span style="font-style:italic;">The Sopranos</span>, when a character compliments another character on bettering himself, or simply changing, it's usually a sick joke. "The credit goes to you," Janice tells her brother, noting how mellow he's become. "You've really changed." Of course neither Tony nor Janice has really changed -- they've just become more powerful and loathsome over the years, and more tragic because of the glimmers of self-awareness that keep getting snuffed out. The sense that Tony had a chance to really change but missed his moment is indicated, subtly, when Carmela spots a jumping fish (probably the most important animal on this show, even more important than the ducks in Tony's Season One dream) and Tony looks up too late to see it. <br /><br />"You're a young man," Bobby tells Tony. "We both are. The world's still in front of us." But the episode's real message can be found in another Bobby line, when he tells Tony that he's glad he never had to do a hit because DNA evidence makes it so hard to get away with crime these days. It's a significant image: you literally cannot escape your identity.</span>Keith Uhlichhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09366621160453356504noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2472021095791259178.post-14715280153753950472007-06-14T08:53:00.000-04:002007-06-14T08:54:52.382-04:00Sopranos Mondays, Season 6, Ep. 12: "Kaisha"By Sean Burns<br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/5221/398/1600/ep77_05.jpg"><img style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/5221/398/400/ep77_05.jpg" border="0" /></a>Not with a bang… not even a whimper… it was more like a wet fart.<span class="fullpost"><br /><br />The sloppiest, most depressingly anti-climatic "Sopranos" episode yet also suffered the grave misfortune of being the season finale – or is that mid-season finale? Whatever you want to call it – “<a href="http://www.hbo.com/sopranos/episode/season6/episode77.shtml">Kaisha</a>” was hardly the kind of hour that’s going to leave folks looking forward to the final eight episodes next year.<br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/5221/398/1600/ep77_01.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/5221/398/200/ep77_01.jpg" border="0" /></a>Appallingly edited, the show lurched in fits and starts from Thanksgiving to Christmas, with a massive amount of screen-time devoted to Christopher falling off the wagon yet again, this time in the company of Julianna Marguiles’ hotcha real estate broker – a gal who can apparently slide from herbal tea to smoking H in the space of one abrupt cut. Their relationship was an out-of-nowhere development -- the sort of thing the show used to let play out over several weeks, instead of just dropping in our laps as an oversized confusing flashback.<br /><br />Such time warping also proved problematic as we saw Phil Leotardo receive a clean bill of health from his doctor, and then walk into the same hospital suffering a coronary immediately thereafter. Was this going backwards too, like the earlier Chris and Julianna stuff?<br /><br />I guess not. After a riotous sit-down with Ray Abruzzo’s malapropism-prone Dubya stand-in, Little Carmine Lupertazzi, it certainly looked like we were finally headed for the New York/New Jersey dust-up that’s been simmering ever since Season Four – but Phil’s heart attack may (or may not) have put a pause on those hostilities.<br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/5221/398/1600/ep77_03.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/5221/398/200/ep77_03.jpg" border="0" /></a>Meanwhile, whiny, petulant AJ miraculously transformed overnight into a responsible grown man, doing well at his new construction gig, using his smarts to avoid a physical conflict, landing a gorgeous girlfriend, and rebuking his father’s lifestyle all in one fell swoop. (When Tony wondered aloud why his son didn’t use his connections to get a break on an expensive piece of jewelry, “I have a job” was the kid’s cutting reply.) Again, like the Chris and Julianna subplot, this was a giant Big Gulp worth of character development that should have grown organically over a span of weeks – not mere minutes.<br /><br />Though the story-points were unforgivably rushed, “Kaisha” still somehow felt slow and enervated. After Agent Harris was nice enough to drop by Satriale’s pork store and mention the threat of retaliation from Phil’s Brooklyn crew on “somebody close to Tony” (suddenly the FBI is tipping off gangsters?) the rest of the running time cruelly teased us by following Christopher in and out of his car and on his way to restaurants – the kind of narratively useless shots you usually only see on this show right before somebody gets whacked.<br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/5221/398/1600/ep77_04.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/5221/398/200/ep77_04.jpg" border="0" /></a>The threat of violence hung over the episode like a dark cloud, and when all was said and done -- nothing happened. There was no resolution to anything that’s happened all year, just a sense of festering unease. I understand that the bummer rhythms of this season have been a ploy by Chase to show the sad, emptiness of these people’s lives – but with “Kaisha,” “The Sopranos” finally became just as sad and empty as the characters it chronicles. After five brilliant, forceful headlong episodes at the start of the season, the program has slowly drifted into stasis.<br /><br />Furthermore, after all this mucking about, we’re pretty much right back to where we were at the end of Season Five. Okay, so maybe the kids have left the nest, but Carmela’s Parisian epiphany seems to have been for naught. With the spec house back up and going, she’s once again bought and paid for. Tony’s back to most of his old tricks. Save for that surprisingly heartfelt monologue at Phil’s bedside (this hour’s lone moment of excellence) it’s almost as if his life-altering experience never happened. His Melfi session this week had already been covered, practically verbatim, in Season Three’s “<a href="http://www.hbo.com/sopranos/episode/season3/episode38.shtml">Amour Fou</a>.” Chris is still stuck in a boring loop of self-destruction and recovery. New York and New Jersey are still teetering on the brink… as they have been for years now. So what exactly happened that made this season so necessary?<br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/5221/398/1600/ep77_06.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/5221/398/200/ep77_06.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>The Christmas gathering in the final scene was almost too excruciating to watch, and not just because we had to see James Gandolfini in a beret. It was just such a hollow celebration -- a bunch of miserable, depressed people half-heartedly pretending to be full of holiday cheer.<br /><br />Of course, come January I’ll be tuning in to see what happens next. But for the first time in the history of the show, I can’t say that I’m excited about it.</span>Keith Uhlichhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09366621160453356504noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2472021095791259178.post-54877772332828935682007-06-14T08:52:00.001-04:002007-06-14T08:52:59.216-04:00Sopranos Mondays: Season 6, Ep. 11: “Cold Stones”By <a href="http://www.blogger.com/profile/3624772">Sean Burns</a><br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/5221/398/1600/ep76_02.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/5221/398/400/ep76_02.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>Can’t you feel it all starting to crumble around them?<span class="fullpost"><br /><br />It was another joyless week in Jersey, as this week’s episode, “<a href="http://www.hbo.com/sopranos/episode/season6/episode76.shtml">Cold Stones</a>,” set the stage for a mob war with <a href="http://www.hbo.com/sopranos/cast/character/phil_leotardo.shtml">Phil Leotardo</a>’s New York crew in the same bleak, muffled tones we’ve come to expect from this season. Even the inevitable whacking of Vito Spatafore was a muted affair, occurring mostly beyond the frame-line and devoid of the show’s signature graphic violence. (On this morning’s Howard Stern Show, actor <a href="http://www.hbo.com/sopranos/cast/actor/joe_gannascoli.shtml">Joseph Gannascoli</a> explained that not only was this one of four “endings” filmed for his character, but what aired was also a shorter and more discreet edit of the scene they originally shot.)<br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/5221/398/1600/ep76_01.2.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/5221/398/200/ep76_01.1.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>After spending the past ten weeks watching our characters try on different personas and alternate lives, it looks like everybody’s about to start slipping back into their old, now ill-fitting skins with a sigh of weary resignation. Vito’s attempt to buy his way back into The Life was half-hearted at best, complete with hollow-sounding re-assurances to his wife that he was on the verge of making things right with Tony.<br /><br />It was an unexpectedly fine performance from Frank Vincent this week, as we saw stray traces of his ambivalence about killing Vito – it began to feel as if he was goaded into it by the double-barrels of his horrible shrew wife and the Catholic Church’s relentless persecution of gays. The episode was shrouded in homosexual panic: Phil “came out of the closet” before he whacked his brother-in-law, and then freaked out over the bodybuilding competition on TV. Tony walked in his living room to hear A.J.’s friends telling stupid gay jokes, and even T’s driver-side blow-job was a subtle callback to the first time we found out about Vito.<br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/5221/398/1600/ep76_05.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/5221/398/200/ep76_05.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>But the most significant development in “Cold Stones” was the almost complete un-raveling of Tony’s recent progress. The decision to get rid of Vito took a painfully visible toll, as Gandolfini blustered and sputtered a series of rationalizations (one of which was quite amusingly shot down by Silvio) before trying to dull his rage with whisky and strippers. Note the music cues that accompanied Tony’s night on the town: AC/DC’s “Back In Black” segueing into Skynard’s “Simple Man.” T immediately went back to being sullen and uncommunicative in his therapy, and I was convinced he was going to put that brat son of his in the hospital. (Have you ever seen a look of murderous disgust like quite the one Gandolfini registered upon seeing A.J. on the Internet in his underwear, “giggling like a fuckin’ schoolgirl?”)<br /><br />Still unsteady on his feet, Tony dithered a bit in the face of Phil’s antagonism and was initially trying to strategize his way out of a war – too bad Silvio and Carlo accidentally got rid of that option. The killing of Fat Dom at Satriale’s --prompted by, again, more stupid gay jokes-- was one of the sloppiest and most brutal in the show’s history. (And how does <a href="http://www.hbo.com/sopranos/cast/character/silvio_dante.shtml">Steve Van Zandt’s</a> ridiculous wig manage to stay glued-on even when he’s getting a piggy-back ride like that?) There was a ghoulish brilliance to the shot of these two idiots playing cards next to the dead body, and Tony’s no nonsense appraisal of the situation (“Tell Gab I hope she gets over the flu!”) seemed to slam shut any doors that had opened since his near-death experience.<br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/5221/398/1600/ep76_03.0.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/5221/398/200/ep76_03.2.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>Vacation’s over -- it’s time to be the boss again. And Tony’s first move was to straighten out A.J. the way he should have years ago. (The cliched, jerky hand-held camera in the garage was director <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0887700/">Tim Van Patten’s</a> only visual misstep in this otherwise quite exquisitely helmed hour.) It was a scene that left the viewer strangely torn; seeing the Old Tony again, so cunning and commanding, was like being back somewhere you weren’t really certain you ever wanted to return. Still it was hard to stifle a cheer when he wiped the smirk of A.J.’s face by smashing the little shit’s windshield – back in black, indeed.<br /><br />Of course, the real question on everybody’s mind is “Why so much Paris?”<br /><br />At times, the travelogue aspects of Carmela and Rosemary’s trip seemed shoehorned in as a way for Chase to justify the expense of an overseas shoot. (On the other hand, having just sat through Ron Howard’s shockingly pedestrian use of the same areas in <em>The DaVinci Code</em>, I was simply thrilled to see location footage photographed with a bit of panache.)<br /><br />Just when she started to seem hopeless, Carm’s finally starting to ask questions about Jackie Jr., and admit it-- you knew she wasn’t going to be able to sleep in a <a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/5221/398/1600/ep76_04.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/5221/398/200/ep76_04.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>strange hotel without having another Adrianna dream. Falco’s such a mesmerizing actress; I was captivated by the contradictory play of emotions across her face throughout the trip, and found her mini-existential crisis surprisingly moving. (And as our pal <a href="http://www.blogger.com/profile/13847944">Alan Sepinwall</a> pointed out in his <a href="http://www.nj.com/search/index.ssf?/base/entertainment-0/114827617264330.xml?starledger?etv&coll=1">Star-Ledger column</a>, the Eiffel Tower’s searchlight was a neat visual rhyme with the airport beacon outside Coma Tony’s Costa Mesa window.)<br /><br />Also touching was Tony Sirico, hunched and glowering in the corner throughout the episode with barely a line of dialogue to call his own. The former buffoon is radiating a terrific sadness these days – a perfect fit as the troops seethe with dissatisfaction, getting ready for a pointless war that nobody wants, and an inevitable ending that will probably feel like a mercy-killing for some of the most miserable people in television history.<br /><br />It’s all going to rot these days – Silvio pointed out that there are rat turds in Satriale’s kitchen and the Bada Bing’s sign is covered in bird-shit. But Carmela assures us that no matter how much we worry, in the end everything gets washed away.</span>Keith Uhlichhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09366621160453356504noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2472021095791259178.post-13301475725192774832007-06-14T08:50:00.000-04:002007-06-14T08:51:19.328-04:00Sopranos Mondays: Season 6, Ep. 10: “Moe ‘n’ Joe”By Sean Burns<br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/5221/398/1600/ep75_03.jpg"><img style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/5221/398/400/ep75_03.jpg" border="0" /></a>How many amazing <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001254/">James Gandolfini</a> reaction shots can you squeeze into one hour?<span class="fullpost"><br /><br />The hulking bear of an actor might have the most expressive eyebrows since John Belushi, and they certainly got a workout in this week’s episode, “<a href="http://www.hbo.com/sopranos/episode/season6/episode75.shtml">Moe ‘n’ Joe</a>.” Of course, there’s never a shortage of great Tony faces when Janice is around -- and Aida Turturro’s hilariously monolithic self-absorption was cranked up to eleven this week, reminding us all how much her shrill, anarchic presence has been missed since she’s been relegated to background status this year.<br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/5221/398/1600/ep75_02.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/5221/398/200/ep75_02.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>Last week I wrote of expecting “fireworks to come” in this year’s final three episodes, but I’ve begun to back off on that prediction. (It figures -- whenever I think I can guess what’s going to happen on this program, I’m inevitably proven wrong.) As our friend <a href="http://www.blogger.com/profile/13847944">Alan Sepinwall</a> noted in the comments thread, this batch of episodes seems headed more towards an implosion than an explosion. “Moe ‘n’ Joe” continued in the same muted tone of the past several weeks, and while several important plot turns occurred, the execution was again low-key, almost lifeless. Rewatching these past few episodes I’m noticing a very deliberate slackening in the drama -- this is how their world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper.<br /><br />The final breaking of Johnny Sack by the Feds was almost too excruciating to watch. <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0192603/">Vince Curatola</a> has been such a powerhouse on the program over the years (he also smokes a cigarette with more style than anybody in showbiz) it was something of a heartbreaker to see this once pompous, quick-tempered boss glumly accepting his fate, barely able to work up enough energy to curse his “friend” Tony Soprano for swooping in and stealing his wife’s house right out from under her.<br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/5221/398/1600/ep75_01.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/5221/398/200/ep75_01.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>There’s a vivid sense rightnow of everything just sort of ebbing away from our characters. It was another hour about the very palpable fear of weakness: Loudmouth Paulie is finally rendered soft-spoken, with his strangely moving secret cancer revelation, and Tony can barely bring himself to look at the ailing Bobby Bacala – already the show’s resident castrato, now emasculated even further by a humiliating eyepatch after an embarrassing mugging. Christopher has no choice but to stand by helplessly while the Feds tow away his precious pilfered Maserati, and Tony is forced to spend a dinner listening to all sorts of disrespectful blather from one of Johnny’s semi-legit business partners. Did you ever think the day would come when some civilian could shit-talk Tony Soprano like that and not wind up in the hospital?<br /><br />No wonder T was taken back with such admiration by Janice’s vicious dressing-down of bratty Bobby Junior – it was the episode’s only display of strength!<br /><br />At last we understand why Vito’s Gay Hampshire was rendered in such over-the-top idyllic fashion. In a throwback to that brilliant moment in “<a href="http://www.hbo.com/sopranos/episode/season5/episode64.shtml">Long Term Parking</a>” when Christopher sees a ratty vision of his future <a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/5221/398/1600/ep75_04.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/5221/398/200/ep75_04.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br />at the gas station, Vito realizes that even heaven on Earth isn’t quite worth it if you have to actually work for a living. His abject uselessness on the construction site – another of the hour’s uncomfortable wallows in weakness – was unfortunately over-cooked by a voice-over narration, the series’ first. I’m always hyper-sensitive to any shake-ups in the program’s rigidly classical format, but there was nothing in that narration that wasn’t already being conveyed visually.<br /><br />Drunk and listening to “My Way,” Vito returned not just to New Jersey, but to his old way of life, coldly executing an innocent man in an underplayed wide-shot. Again, there was nothing momentous about the presentation of his virtual suicide, just an air of seeping, depressing inevitability.<br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/5221/398/1600/ep75_07.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/5221/398/200/ep75_07.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>So did Tony finally reach some sort of peace regarding his relationship with Janice? Another surprisingly productive session with Dr. Melfi tackled the way his sister has scarily morphed into his mother (I believe Janice even dropped a couple of Livia quotes during the episode.) Did Tony finally recognize that his resentment of Bacala is because he sees too much of himself in the way the teddy bear is ground down daily by this impossible woman? It’s tough to tell, as Gandolfini’s usual masterful performance once again showed us a man rocked by contradictory impulses that he can’t even explain to himself.<br /><br />Maybe the Sacrimoni house was a genuine gesture of goodwill, or maybe was it just another way to stick the shiv in Carmela? One might expect the newly faithful Tony Soprano to be devoted to his wife, but his inability to cheat seems to be making him resent her more than ever before.<br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/5221/398/1600/ep75_05.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/5221/398/200/ep75_05.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>It doesn’t help that Carmela, the most willfully blinkered character on the program, is currently laboring under the delusion that this real estate project will give her some sort of identity outside of Tony’s shadow – and yet she still needs him to lean on the building inspector. Carm seems to die a little bit inside every time Angie Bompinsero takes a business call, but in typical “Sopranos” fashion, it never occurs to her that she wouldn’t have such headaches right now if she only considered building the damn house legally. She’s been living outside the law for so long that this is a completely foreign concept, and let’s credit Falco for plumping new depths of petulant un-likeability when she didn’t get her way.<br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/5221/398/1600/ep75_06.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/5221/398/200/ep75_06.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>But the episode’s clear highlight was when Tony reacted to one of Meadow’s crying jags the way we viewers do – with profound disinterest. “You know who’s good to talk to about this stuff… your mother,” he offered, with those exhausted eyebrows speaking volumes as he tried to figure out how he could disentangle himself from his weeping daughter long enough to get his breakfast out of the microwave. Every ding of the oven’s timer brought another hysterical grimace from Gandolfini -- a sharp comic encapsulation of this season’s grumbling, weary discontent.</span>Keith Uhlichhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09366621160453356504noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2472021095791259178.post-18513269684908045832007-06-14T08:48:00.000-04:002007-06-14T08:50:20.135-04:00Sopranos Mondays: Season 6, Eps. 8 & 9: "Johnny Cakes" and "The Ride"By Sean Burns<br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/5221/398/1600/ep73_01.0.jpg"><img style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/5221/398/400/ep73_01.0.jpg" border="0" /></a>Howdy, folks. Sean Burns here pinch-hitting for Matt on Sopranos Monday. As if this task wasn’t daunting enough already, it turns out that last week’s “Sopranos” episode, “<a href="http://www.hbo.com/sopranos/episode/season6/episode73.shtml">Johnny Cakes</a>,” turned out to be a miniaturized, Jersey-hood version of “<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0402399/">The New World</a>.”<span class="fullpost"><br /><br />Sure, this time we’ve got franchise restaurants instead of British colonialism, and in lieu of the naturals we’re stuck with a foul-mouthed racist old lady, but the gist is the same – watching an ancient culture surrender itself to dubious, inevitable developments thrust upon it by outsiders. Obviously <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0153740/">David Chase</a> is an artist of a far more cynical temperament than Terence Malick, <a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/5221/398/1600/ep73_02.0.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/5221/398/200/ep73_02.0.jpg" border="0" /></a>and his idea of “progress” here seems to be exchanging one old load of miserable bullshit for a newer, shinier one, but the theme was spelled out a few weeks ago, back in the hospital when our gang was discussing dinosaurs: “evolve or die.”<br /><br />“It’s over for the little guy,” sighed Patsy Parisi, after trying to shake down a new Starbucks-ish coffee shop and getting stonewalled by a middle manager. There’s not enough wiggle-room on this low level to creatively account for protection payouts. And how can a couple of mobsters cause any real headaches for some CEO by breaking a window, when there are 1,200 other shops on the East Coast?<br /><br />The times, they are a changin’. And so is Tony Soprano.<br /><br />Yes, the man who Carmela once accused of “sticking his dick in everything that walks,” <a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/5221/398/1600/ep73_06.0.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/5221/398/200/ep73_06.0.jpg" border="0" /></a>actually spurned the advances of Julianna Marguiles’ hotcha real estate broker. Tony turning down sex? What’s next, skipping dessert?) Naturally this sudden attack of virtue came about a little bit late and more than a little bit clumsily. But earlier, in an uncharacteristically valuable session with Dr. Melfi, we were able to watch Tony test-drive his usual rationalizations, insisting that he couldn’t be blamed “for seeking an outside avenue” -- only to discover that the old lies he always told himself suddenly weren’t working anymore.<br /><br />Tony and the realtor did, however, consummate something: a business deal (which probably means more to most people than fucking these days, anyhow.) Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider’s teleplay cannily used the gentrification of the North Ward to stand in for a disappearing way of life. The key difference is that while Tony used to mawkishly sentimentalize “the old ways,” we saw a very different man strolling through the neighborhood. Selling that quaint poultry <a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/5221/398/1600/ep73_04.1.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/5221/398/200/ep73_04.1.jpg" border="0" /></a>shop to make way for Jamba Juice could be a sign that Tony is turning a corner. It would appear that taking a bullet from his old-school uncle has finally hipped him to the fact that “the good old days” aren’t all they were cracked up to be.<br /><br />It’s a point that came through most powerfully in A.J.’s storyline. Much like his mother, the boy is finding it impossible to create a life outside his father’s looming shadow. His misguided attempt to “join the family business” was an unmitigated disaster, and in a startlingly effective moment, we and Tony both learned that the half-cocked revenge scheme was inspired by the kid’s memories of watching “The Godfather” – the ultimate romanticized gangster myth – with his dear old dad.<br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/5221/398/1600/ep73_03.3.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/5221/398/200/ep73_03.3.jpg" border="0" /></a>Tony might as well be summing up his own recent journey when he said to the kid: “But that’s just a movie!”<br /><br />The episode did have its share of odd moments. I’m still puzzled at what to make of “Brokeback Vito’s Adventures In Gay Hampshire.” Though of a piece with this season’s theme of characters trying out alternate lives for themselves, there’s something stilted and surreal about these sequences that isn’t quite cohering for me. Of course it didn’t help that Vito’s perfect man – a motorcycle-riding-firefighter-who-can-cook! – was granted an over-the-top heroic entrance that looked like suspiciously like an out-take from “<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080492/">Can’t Stop The Music</a>.”<br /><br />Much better handled was the hilarious scene at Blockbuster, as A.J. and his sidekick indifferently went through the motions of customer service while chatting on their cell-phones and cursing. It’s Chase’s sickly funny vision of our garish, impersonal, franchised nation, proving once more that “The Sopranos” is hardly a television show about the Mafia – it’s a show about America the way we live now, from Starbucks to shining Starbucks.<br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/5221/398/1600/ep74_02.jpg"><img style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/5221/398/400/ep74_02.jpg" border="0" /></a>On the other hand, this week’s episode, “<a href="http://www.hbo.com/sopranos/episode/season6/episode74.shtml">The Ride</a>,” felt like a bit of a place-holder. Now that Tony is finally beginning to straighten up and fly right, Chase and company took a breather to remind us that regular life is… well, it’s kinda dull sometimes.<br /><br />“Sure, every day is a gift,” Tony repeated once more, “but does it have to be a pair of socks?”<a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/5221/398/1600/ep74_01.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/5221/398/200/ep74_01.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br />Spelling everything out with uncharacteristically ham-fisted obviousness, Terence Winter’s teleplay used a broken, dangerous carnival ride as a metaphor for our characters’ appetite for self-destruction. Janice noted in the final moments that even though this shoddy teacup contraption could have killed her daughter – the child still wanted to get back on the ride.<br /><br />It’s a sentiment that certainly applies to Christopher – who, when faced with a blushing pregnant bride and shiny new McMansion (“stately Wayne manor,” he called it,) eventually stopped jabbering about his domestic bliss long enough to spin out on a heroin bender.<br /><br />The episode’s early highlight found Tony and Chris hi-jacking a hi-jacking, accidentally stumbling over a biker gang mid-robbery and swapping bullets, making off with a trunk full of stolen wine. The amusing escapade was discussed, celebrated and then endlessly rehashed… most pathetically in T’s basement, as the two men sadly realized they had nothing else to talk about, so why not bring it up again?<br /><br />More amusing was the cheerful, tangential corruption that accompanied cheapskate <a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/5221/398/1600/ep74_04.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/5221/398/200/ep74_04.jpg" border="0" /></a>Paulie’s mishandling of the St. Elzear’s Feast. You know the times have changed when a friendly little religious festival (one that used to be quite a lucrative endeavor) gets all gummed up because the new parish priest wants a larger cut of the take. There was an amusing men’s room discussion, wondering how a humble street fair can compete with DVDs and videogames for your entertainment dollar these days (a conversation that’s no doubt being echoed in every movie executive’s boardroom) and the hour’s most haunting visual showed a statue of the Saint festooned with cash.<br /><br />(This feast debacle also prompted the show’s funniest line of the year thus far, as Tony surveyed Paulie’s gross mismanagement and smiled: “You’re doing a heck of a job, Brownie.”)<br /><br />It’s never a pretty sight when Tony Sirico is forced to do some real acting. Don’t get me wrong --he’s a great, cartoonish sidekick, but giving Paulie Walnuts a prostate cancer scare is hardly an effective use of this particular performer’s <a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/5221/398/1600/ep74_03.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/5221/398/200/ep74_03.jpg" border="0" /></a>gifts. (Much like Little Steven Van Zandt, Sirico needs to bounce his persona off one the show’s more seasoned actors, otherwise his scenes tend to run off the rails.) Curious though, how after Paulie’s reconciliation with his mother, we saw a shot of that wind Tony’s always carrying on about.<br /><br />The ghost of Adrianna loomed large over the proceedings. Could Carmela’s close encounter with Ade’s mom finally be enough to knock her out of denial? Edie Falco played the confrontation close to the vest, but I thought I saw something flicker behind her eyes when Tony had to pour himself a drink in order to get through his (absolutely ludicrous) explanation.<br /><br />Stranger still was the flashback to last season, when Christopher broke the news to Tony. <a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/5221/398/1600/ep74_07.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/5221/398/200/ep74_07.jpg" border="0" /></a>It was a brilliantly acted moment – memorable for both Michael Imperioli’s whimpering helplessness and Gandolfini’s chilling shift from anguish to ice-cold sociopath mode. Yet the scene felt awkwardly inserted, like one of those sitcom clip-shows that always clumsily segue with characters saying stuff like: “Hey, remember that time I came over to your house and…”<br /><br />I guess we can only expect that an episode all <em>about</em> boredom would have to be a little on the tedious side. “The Ride” felt like a transitional hour, with Chase lining all his characters up in the same mood of seething discontentment, setting the stage for the fireworks to come in this season’s final three episodes.</span>Keith Uhlichhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09366621160453356504noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2472021095791259178.post-59387680480397173942007-06-14T08:47:00.000-04:002007-06-14T08:48:17.092-04:00Sopranos Mondays: Season 6, Ep. 7: "Luxury Lounge"By Matt Zoller Seitz<br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/1600/artiewideshot.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/400/artiewideshot.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>If the first six episodes of this season felt like a voyage into unexplored territory, Sunday night's "Sopranos" episode felt like a return to familiar stomping grounds -- specifically those stretches of Season Two and Three when you felt pretty sure that David Chase and his writers were trying to run out the clock a bit while they figured out how to stage the mandatory season-ending string of whammies.<span class="fullpost"> <br /><br />Written by Matthew Weiner and directed by Danny Leiner, this episode, titled <a href="http://www.hbo.com/sopranos/episode/">"Luxury Lounge,"</a> wasn't unwatchable. It had unifying emotional threads, specifically envy and its twin, resentment. Diverse groupings of social strivers directed those feelings toward higher-ups on the food chain (aspiring Hollywood player Chris Moltisanti flying to L.A. to bag Ben Kingsley and becoming obsessed with the swag handed out to the sorts of people he dreams of emulating; failing restaurant owner Artie Bucco resenting Tony Soprano and the freelancing mob goons who were robbing him in a credit card scam) while the powerful expressed indifference or condescension toward those beneath (Kingsley's wary rebuffs to Hollywood parasites; Tony realizing the depth of Artie's despair too late to halt its consequences). All in all, though, the hour still felt slack and formulaic. (Admittedly that may seem an odd complaint, considering that last week's episode, <a href="http://www.hbo.com/sopranos/episode/season6/episode71.shtml">"Live Free or Die</a>," struck many viewers as meandering and uneventful -- but I thought it was the year's second most suspenseful episode, after <a href="http://www.hbo.com/sopranos/episode/season6/episode67.shtml">"Join the Club."</a>) <br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/1600/kingsleyCU.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/200/kingsleyCU.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>Yes, the episode moved season-long arcs a few steps forward. Tony subcontracted Johnny Sack's hit-by-proxy to a couple of triggermen from the Old Country. Chris tried and failed to sign Ben Kingsley to star in his digital horror flick, fell off the wagon, spiraled into swag-envy and mugged guest star Lauren Bacall for her goodie bag. While Chris made an ass of himself on the left coast, his Jersey crew ran wild, ruining Artie's business, violently exacerbating tensions between Artie and Benny Fazio and ultimately leading Tony to rebuke Chris for his lack of focus. There were further hints that the Arabs, one of many clients in the credit-card scam, will prove important later, perhaps as a tool to entrap Chris into becoming an informer. (Years ago, I predicted that Chris' story would end with him becoming a postmodern cousin of Henry Hill in "Goodfellas," perhaps retroactively establishing him as the series' invisible storyteller -- but for now, I can only wonder.)<br /> <br />Still, these plot points weren't so much integrated into the episode as jabbed in like tent stakes, and the script seemed to have been written by somebody wearing work gloves. This was definitely an episode <a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/1600/chrissyphone.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/200/chrissyphone.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a> where you could say it wasn't the characters who were cloddishly transparent, but the show itself. Chris has always been a dunderhead who can't keep his trap shut, but his flattery of Bacall ("You were great in 'The Haves and Have-Nots'") was a badness twofer, a fumble-fingered summing-up of the episode's themes and a gag so lame it almost made you feel sorry for a character who deserves no sympathy (which, I concede, may have been the point). I also winced at red-hot immigrant hostess Martina rebuffing Artie with, "You stare at me like food." Her follow-up image, of laughing at Artie while screwing Benny atop a pile of stolen money, was more potent, if equally obvious.<br /><br />Poor Artie got stuck with the lion's (or mouse's) share of clunkers -- a real shame considering the caliber of John Ventimiglia's performance. He was exquisitely desperate, Willy Loman by way of "Big Night" (a film indelicately referenced in the pre-credits, back-to-square-one cooking montage -- scored, naturally, to 'old country' music). He and coastar James Gandolfini saved that pro forma Bada Bing scene between Artie and Tony, where Artie indicated a gyrating stripper and told Tony, "You could fuck her" and then went on to establish that Artie couldn't, because he's the responsible one. But on this show, the actors shouldn't be asked to perform salvage work. This isn't "Six Feet Under," where subtext equals text -- or at least, it doesn't have to be that way. The same point could have been made with silent expressions, or with a more oblique bit of dialogue. There were too many lines like that--particularly, "We lead the world in computerized data collection!", which sounds like Todd Solondz after a lobotomy.<br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/1600/chrissy.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/200/chrissy.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a> My <a href="http://www.nj.com/columns/ledger/sepinwall/index.ssf?/base/columns-0/1145853943279560.xml&coll=1">Star-Ledger colleague Alan Sepinwall</a> was fonder of this episode than I was, and found Artie's scenes especially effective. "'Luxury Lounge' had the same starting point as <a href="http://www.hbo.com/sopranos/episode/season4/episode45.shtml">'Everybody Hurts,'</a> one of the low points of the already-low Season Four," he wrote. "Artie gets a crush on the sexy new Vesuvio hostess, she winds up costing him a lot of money and he tries to play tough guy to get revenge. But where 'Everybody Hurts' wallowed in what an ineffectual joke Artie was, 'Luxury Lounge' worked because it took Tony's oldest friend seriously. For the first time since the season one finale (which got referenced both with Artie's hunting rifle and Tony's story about Vesuvio being his port in that storm), Artie wasn't just the clown good for nothing but making antipasto. He was the honest man in the dirty town, the guy who struggles trying to do things the right way while his pal Tony is rolling in crooked cash. Artie's no saint, as evidenced by his yearning for Martina and then the way he dogged her when he realized she was with Benny. But in that scene in bed with Charmaine and the one at the Bing with Tony, you saw a man who had gone past midlife crisis (remember the earring?) and into existential despair."<br /><br />I'll give Ventimiglia his due. He's a versatile, often sly actor -- rent <a href="http://www.indieking.com/treeslounge.html">"Trees Lounge"</a> or <a href="http://www.arcofilms.com/ontherun/varietyreview.htm">"On the Run"</a> if you don't believe it -- and he managed to sell (or at least rescue) every scene he did. He has a soulfulness that this show rarely taps because of its vested interest in portraying Artie as Tony's schmucked-up, law-abiding doppleganger (a role ceded to Ventimiglia's pal and frequent collaborator, "Trees Lounge" <a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/1600/artieCU.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/200/artieCU.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a> director Steve Buscemi, throughout the first half of Season Five). In some images, your heart just couldn't help but go out to him: depressed and smoking at the Bada Bing; backing away in mute shock after Tony told him to shut up and cook; addressing a freshly-shot rabbit carcass with a faux-street-tough "Motherfucker!" He was credibly frightening when thrashing Benny, then joyous-yet-pathetic executing a karate move afterward. (Am I remembering wrong, or did the episode <a href="http://www.hbo.com/sopranos/episode/season5/episode63.shtml">"Test Dream"</a> confirm that in high school, Artie was the dangerous one, and Tony the tag-along hero-worshiper?) Still, improving on "Everybody Hurts" doesn't strike me as the best use of the show's time or Ventimiglia's, especially considering that the six-hour run-up was more ambitious and focused, and much less obvious. <br /><br />Moving on to product placement, I know the high-toned Home Shopping Network blather was "ironic" and germaine to the episode's themes. But it was still painful, because if the brand names are real, there's no such thing as a satire on advertising. Really, now -- <a href="http://www.commercialalert.org/madisonvine.htm">"Survivor"</a> and <a href="http://www.adrants.com/2005/04/apprentice-product-placements-wreak.php">"The Apprentice"</a> get creamed for this kind of thing. From Oris watches to Cingular phones, every product featured in "Luxury Lounge" got one, sometimes two closeups, plus a worshipful verbal description that sounded like ad copy. Unfortunately, this has been the "Sopranos" norm since the opening of Season Two, when Home Depot was name-checked as a great place to buy body disposal supplies and Coke products started showing up on every dinner table. <a href="http://medialit.med.sc.edu/sopranos.htm">HBO insists it gets no money from product placement,</a> that the merchandise is given to the show in hopes of exposure. <a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/1600/kingsley.0.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/200/kingsley.0.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a> But considering all the self-conscious, ass-kissy, take-you-out-of-the-moment dialogue that goes along with the goodies, "free" doesn't really mean free. And Kingsley's public-service-announcement statement that Hollywood goodies are an obscenity, and he only accepts them for charitable purposes, seemed less like a condemnation than an excuse for whorishness. (Was that Ben Kingsley talking, or "Ben Kingsley"? And either way, why didn't I believe him?) Like Steven Spielberg, whose "Minority Report" featured product placement out the wazoo and justified it with a scene that humorously criticized high-tech selling techniques, the "Sopranos" gang has found a way to sell out while seeming to be above that sort of thing. <br /><br />Am I being too hard on the episode? Almost certainly. But it couldn't help but suffer in comparison with the preceding six. "Luxury Lounge" wasn't quite a stand-alone like <a href="http://www.hbo.com/sopranos/episode/season3/episode37.shtml">"Pine Barrens"</a> or <a href="http://www.hbo.com/sopranos/episode/season1/episode05.shtml">"College,"</a> nor was it a carefully sanded piece in a larger dramatic puzzle; it fell somewhere in between, and that neither/nor quality highlighted irritations that a stronger episode would have minimized. After six brisk laps, this was a leisurely stroll. The downtime gave you plenty of opportunities to think about the show's irritating tendencies, which surely wasn't the intent. Even the mugging of Lauren Bacall -- which was admittedly both shocking and grimly funny, given the show's subtheme of starfucking-as-manifestation-of-social-envy -- left a sour aftertaste. Notwithstanding certain obvious exceptions -- Hal Holbrook's great guest shot this season, for instance -- it's telling that both people and products wrangle their way on to "The Sopranos" so that they can be mocked and abused. Frank Sinatra, Jr., whose dad publicly (and hypocritically) groused about being associated with the mob, did a "Sopranos" guest shot, and now Bacall, the epitome of class, shows up and gets punched in the face. That's entertainment.</span>Keith Uhlichhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09366621160453356504noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2472021095791259178.post-35691795617936136372007-06-14T08:45:00.000-04:002007-06-14T08:46:41.504-04:00Sopranos Mondays: Season 6, Ep. 6, "Live Free or Die"By <a href="http://www.blogger.com/profile/9141616">Matt Zoller Seitz.</a><br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/1600/ep71_05.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/400/ep71_05.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>In the <a href="http://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=12917687&postID=114503464612482127">comments section</a> of Odienator's recent article on <a href="http://mattzollerseitz.blogspot.com/2006/04/5-for-day-parting-shots.html">parting shots</a>, House regular Wagstaff speculated that "if [a] movie has a philosophy, then that philosophy is most directly expressed in the final shot."<span class="fullpost"> I countered that if you considered the first and last shot of any halfway decent movie, "you get a snapshot of the filmmaker's worldview so accurate that nothing in between can deny it. Sort of polygraph-by-cinema." If you subject <a href="http://www.hbo.com/sopranos/episode/season6/episode71.shtml">Sunday night's "Sopranos" episode</a> to the polygraph test, the statement seems crystal-clear, and consistent with every episode that's aired during this exceptional season: it was about the difficulty of envisioning a life different from the one you're living -- and the greater difficulty, even impossibility, of making it happen. <br /><br />The hour opened with a wide shot of the still-recovering Tony Soprano shambling around the backyard of his palatial McMansion in his bathrobe and having his reading interrupted by the grinding whine of a defective ventilation unit. He walked over to the unit, futzed with it, ripped off the top and hurled it away in disgust, then resumed reading. Moments later, the grinding noise returned, and rather than attack the problem again, Tony ignored it. <a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/1600/ep71_01.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/200/ep71_01.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a> The episode's finale showed forcibly-outed mobster Vito, who'd fled to a small town in New Hampshire that seemed to be filled with handsome young bourgeois gay men (my brother Richard remarked, "He could be dead already; maybe this is heaven"), strolling down main street and then ducking into an antiques shop. When he asked the clerk about a particular vase, the clerk complimented Vito's taste. "You're a natural," he said. As the clerk walked away, director Tim Van Patten's camera dollied in slowly on Vito as he continued to regard the vase. What made this shot so potent was Vito's unselfconsciousness. For the first time in his history on the series, he seemed completely at ease. (Actor Joseph Gannascoli, who's seemed out of his depth in other episodes, underplayed this and other moments exquisitely). <br /><br />Those two shots are gateway images that invite us to reflect on everything we've seen this season. In a sense, Tony's story and Vito's story are the same story. They're about men who want to change (or escape) the lives they have, and become different people -- or the men they always should have been. <br /><br />Tony's near-death by gunshot shook him up and caused him to adopt a live-and-let-live approach to mob management. After his discharge from the hospital, he cheerfully released a paramedic from having to repay money he'd been accused of filching from Tony's wallet. Then agreed to Phil Leotardo's hard bargain to stay employed by the waste management company. This week, Tony ran afoul of his crew by greeting news of Vito's closet homosexuality with a shrug. "I got a second chance," he said of Vito. "Why shouldn't he?" <a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/1600/ep71_07.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/200/ep71_07.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>And a more poignant response to his crew: "You gonna take care of his kids after he's gone?" Notwithstanding his calculated public beatdown of his new driver last week, he does seem softer and more reflective than we've ever seen him. Lying in bed with Carmela, the vertical scar on his exposed belly suggested a C-section; could we really be privy to the gradual birth of a New Tony? (This arc echoes saloon owner/powerbroker Al Swearengen's brush with death in Season Two of <a href="http://www.hbo.com/deadwood/?ntrack_para1=leftnav_category0_show2">"Deadwood,"</a> which announced the birth and maturation of a more socially constructive yet still hardassed Al.) <br /><br />The defective ventilation unit illuminated Tony's present problem and his larger arc. Vito's exposure tossed a wrench into the gangster machinery, and Tony can't just ignore that grinding sound. His hamfisted jabs at enlightened thinking ("It's 2006! There's pillow biters in the Special Forces!") don't work on this bunch, which views homosexuality as a much graver sin than, say, killing a guy and scattering his body parts across Ocean County. Sooner or later Tony will have to (1) give the order to kill Vito, (2) stand by helplessly while someone else freelances the deed, or (3) take a stand and pay the price. <br /><br />More significantly, though, that opening reminds us of Tony's failure to recognize the root cause of his psychic distress: he's a murderous criminal. Every reform-minded move up to now has been cosmetic, the equivalent of tearing the top off the air conditioning unit, tossing it away and going back to his reading. Even therapy hasn't really attacked the heart of the matter. As Sean Burns pointed out, it often seems that Melfi's therapy is not making Tony a better man, but a better gangster. His dead mother isn't the problem, he is.<br /> <br />Vito, meanwhile, appears to be enjoying his own version of the rustic yuppie life that Eugene Pontecorvo was denied when he escaped his mob-ligations by hanging himself. As Vito wandered around that small New Hampshire town, he seemed more relaxed -- more himself -- than we've ever seen him. The masterful slow-build sequence depicting his flight included eerie shots of Vito trudging through torrential rain after his car <a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/1600/2001hotelgateway.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/400/2001hotelgateway.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>broke down (abandoning the vehicle we'd seen him in during his various mob errands). Drenched in water and barely protected by a thin poncho membrane, the infant-doughy thug was reborn at a bed-and-breakfast, courtesy of an innkeeper who refused to take a fistful of thank-you cash. For all she knew, he was just some traveller trying to get out of the rain. Vito awoke the next morning in an elegant four-poster bed, framed in a low-angled master shot that faintly reminded me of astronaut Dave Bowman's evolutionary stint in the white room at the end of "2001."<br /><br />It's surely no accident that Vito's stopover in Norman Rockwell country echoed Tony's sojourn in Coma Land, right up to his climactic arrival at a welcoming home. (Vito, unlike Tony, dared to step inside.) I also doubt it's an accident that this episode saw Carmela chew out her pop for looting and dismantling the new house she was building for herself and Tony. (Her dad countered that the house was a lost cause because she was supposed to wrangle the proper government permits to build with inferior material, and didn't do it; in other words, she neglected a problem that threatened a long-term dream, and now she has to accept the consequences.) This season is all about new beginnings (or reconstructions) and how they are thwarted by a variety of forces, from luck and bad judgement to social conditioning and genetics. <br /><br />This was another tight, strong episode; except for a pro forma "Lost in Yonkers" quip by Chris and an unconscionably lame conversation between Meadow and Finn that sounded like it was ghostwritten by the "Six Feet Under" gang, every scene and line stood on its own while simultaneously strengthening this season's serious and compelling themes. I was going to end by observing that the episode's title, "Live Free or Die," had the wrong conjunction, that it should have been "and." But then I woke up this morning and read my colleague Alan Sepinwall's <a href="http://www.nj.com/tv/ledger/">Star-Ledger</a> wrapup and saw he'd already made that connection and many more. This "Sopranos" column is less thorough than the others in part because Alan already said a lot of what I wanted to say, so rather than ramble on, I'll just invite you to click <a href="http://www.nj.com/columns/ledger/sepinwall/index.ssf?/base/columns-0/1145248844144520.xml&coll=1">here.</a></span>Keith Uhlichhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09366621160453356504noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2472021095791259178.post-52423620444808030902007-06-14T08:41:00.000-04:002007-06-14T08:45:09.759-04:00Sopranos Mondays: Season 6, Ep. 5: "Mr. & Mrs. John Sacrimoni Request..."By <a href="http://www.blogger.com/profile/9141616">Matt Zoller Seitz.</a><br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/1600/ep70_02.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/400/ep70_02.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>Sunday's episode of <a href="http://www.hbo.com/sopranos/episode/?ntrack_para1=feat_main_text">"The Sopranos"</a> began with the reading of a wedding invitation, then showed the bride's father, imprisoned mob boss Johnny "Sack" Sacrimoni, taking off his jailhouse togs, donning a suit and tie, and petitioning the court for permission to attend an event he'd waited his whole life to see.<span class="fullpost"> He was allowed six hours of freedom, including transportation time, provided he paid for security screening at the wedding and reception and spent all six hours within sight distance of federal agents. Of course Johnny agreed. What else could he do?<br /><br />The blessed event started with a metal detector screening at the church that nearly exhausted the gunshot-weakened Tony. It continued with an awkward reception dance between gangsters and agents, and ended with Johnny being prematurely evicted from the cake-cutting ceremony and packed off to jail in tears. (Afterward, Tony’s boys mocked Johnny's breakdown as a sign of weakness – a scene that informed Tony’s climactic decision to reassert his Alpha Male dominance by beating his muscular new henchman to the floor of the Bada-Bing office, then loping off the to washroom to puke blood in private, twice.)<br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/1600/img02_ep70_378.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/200/img02_ep70_378.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>Are we ever going to see a stand-alone episode of “The Sopranos” again? I’m not complaining; I’m just curious, because this one flowed naturally out of episodes One through Four, all of which have insisted on the baseline ugliness of gangster life, and exposed the anxiety beneath the macho façade of nearly everyone in this line of work (except maybe Paulie Walnuts, who once announced he’d tallied up his major and minor sins, assigned each one a purgatorial value, then resolved to do the time). Written by <a href="http://www.hbo.com/sopranos/cast/crew/terence_winter.shtml">Terence Winter</a> and directed by actor-filmmaker and regular “Sopranos” helmer <a href="http://archive.salon.com/people/conv/2000/11/13/buscemi/">Steve Buscemi,</a> this episode zeroed in on a facet of gangster life that's usually acknowledged only in passing: the mostly-hidden social cost of being a mobster. <br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/1600/ep70_01.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/200/ep70_01.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>As we've already seen in "The Sopranos" and pretty much every prior gangster story, the gangster life affords crude freedoms denied to the law-abiding. Mobsters steal and kill, they keep mistresses and cavort with hookers and strippers, they entrap and destroy decent people, and they bribe society's guardians to look the other way. (The wives and girlfriends are bought off, too.) But the gangster’s freedom isn't absolute. Besides the obvious downsides (incarceration, death) there are serious, if typically invisible, social penalties. A gangster can’t forge honest or meaningful relationships with anyone who’s not part of The Life because he can’t risk revealing what he really does for a living. (That’s why Tony’s terrified of losing his gig as a “waste management consultant” – it’s not just an easy paycheck, it’s his cover story and the source of his health plan and tax forms.) Most of all, the lie envelops the gangster's wife and children, who publicly endorse the breadwinner's facade because if they don't, no one will. But over time, deception becomes self-deception. Six seasons after we first met them, Tony, Carmela, Meadow and A.J. are only now beginning to understand that the world knows their business, and probably always has. <br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/1600/ep70_04.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/200/ep70_04.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a> Social-striving mobsters live in constant fear that their veneer of respectability will be torn away and they'll be exposed as parasites. Sometimes they're doomed to be exposed anyway; no matter how circumspect the gangster and his family are, there will still be days when the larger society (represented by cops or prosecutors) feels emboldened to call a gangster a gangster and make everyone connected with the life feel like the pariahs they are. "The Sopranos" has often acknowledged this anxiety in the past, but never as frankly as in Sunday's episode. Except for the prosecutor who fought Johnny’s day pass, the government adopted a businesslike attitude toward their arrangement with Johnny -- yet somehow the day still felt like a public shaming in black tie. Winter's script deployed these elements without fuss, and Buscemi deepened them with God’s-eye view shots that physically diminished the gangsters at key moments (the wedding guests ascending a spiral staircase; Vito getting situated in the motel; Tony puking blood in the men’s room.) <br /><br />But there were missteps. I bought the dramatic necessity of Tony beating down his new henchman – the whole episode built up to that fight – but washroom scene or no washroom scene, I didn’t believe he could have thrashed such a strong man in his surgery-weakened condition. (If the muscleman had held back for fear of getting beaten down or killed by Tony’s crew, the moment would have been more plausible <a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/1600/ep70_05.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/200/ep70_05.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>– and, in light of the crew’s opportunism and nonstop yammering about weakness, more complicated.) And while Vito's forced eviction from the closet jibed thematically with the rest of the episode, which was all about the public exposure of lies, it was crudely written and cloddishly executed; “The Wire” handled a similar moment with more imagination and subtlety. (How much you want to bet that series creator David Chase kept the Vito-in-the-closet subplot puttering along for two seasons just so he could force Joe Gannascoli into that leatherman outfit?) <br /><br />I’m also getting restless during Tony’s therapy scenes. Aside from the occasional contrived but amusing one-liner (“Let me ask you right off, is there any chance of a mercy fuck?”) they tend not to justify their screen time, much less tell us anything we couldn’t glean by paying attention to the images and dialogue (even those are sometimes too emphatic, like the cut from Johnny’s skinny daughter saying “Food” to the exterior of Satriale’s pork store). <a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/1600/ep70_06.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/200/ep70_06.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>I’m also frustrated with Melfi in general, not just because she's content to treat the symptoms of Tony’s unhappiness rather than its obvious cause (his criminality), but because the show itself seems to be content with her contentment. <br /><br />As for the likelihood of Tony going straight vs. reintegrating into The Life, I'll make no predictions. That final beatdown shows that Tony is being tugged back toward the old life (an event presaged by his decision to indulge Johnny's request for a whacking-by-proxy instead of resisting it). But the following scene in the men's room is a reminder of the sacrifices Tony makes to maintain the status quo. This life is literally destroying him; he made his choice, and now he's paying in blood. He falls to his knees and vomits. Then he looks at himself in the mirror with a cocky-scary “I’m back” expression; then a shadow of doubt crosses his face. Then he drops to all fours and vomits again. This is a different kind of cost-benefit analysis -- conducted by the body, not the mind.</span>Keith Uhlichhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09366621160453356504noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2472021095791259178.post-32656033293126560472007-06-13T18:03:00.001-04:002007-06-14T08:41:50.364-04:00Sopranos Mondays: Season 6, Ep. 4: "The Fleshy Part of the Thigh"By Matt Zoller Seitz<br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/1600/nun.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/400/nun.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>Although my Star-Ledger colleague Alan Sepinwall and I find ourselves in agreement more often than not, I can't second his summation of Sunday's "Sopranos" episode <a href="http://www.hbo.com/sopranos/episode/index.shtml">"The Fleshy Part of the Thigh."</a><span class="fullpost"> In his <a href="http://www.nj.com/columns/ledger/alltv/index.ssf?/base/columns-0/1144041364222550.xml&coll=1">weekly wrapup,</a> he says the episode confirmed that "people don't change." <br /><br />He writes, "If there is one simple, persistent message of 'The Sopranos,' it's that you can get a new haircut, switch jobs, find another lover, embrace some new self-help philosophy, but no matter how much you talk about it, at heart you're going to be the same person you've always been. (And if you're a character on this show, chances are that person is pretty rotten.) Here's Tony, slowly recovering from an incident that by all rights should have killed him. He's talking a good game, chatting up the visiting evangelicals and the friendly scientist down the hall, telling a nurse he doesn't feel like his old self. And yet he's sneaking out of the hospital for stogie breaks, getting chesty with Phil Leotardo and basically ruining the life of the Barone family so he can protect his own interests. <a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/1600/tonycarmbed.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/200/tonycarmbed.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a> And here's Paulie, who receives the kind of information that should fundamentally alter his sense of self, and how does he respond? With the same woe-is-me, the-world-owes-me-some-ice-cream-cake attitude he displays under even the best of circumstances, blaming his own mother for the crime of taking him in and raising him, blaming Jason Barone for the bigger sin of having a biological mother who loves him more than she loves life itself. (You'll note the $4,000 a month shakedown is the exact cost of keeping Nucci in Green Grove.) And in case we doubted the depressing moral of the story, there's Tony sitting at the curb outside the hospital, declaring, 'From now on, every day is a gift,' as Janice -- the show's poster girl for staying the same deep down, no matter how often you repaint the facade -- rolls her eyes at him. <br /><br />"Sure," Alan continues, "Tony may have forgiven the paramedic from picking his pocket (assuming the guy really did it), but the whole scene reminded me of that sequence from 'Schindler's List' where Schindler persuaded Amon Goethe to show power through mercy -- which lasted for about three scenes before Goethe got bored and went back to shooting people in the head....Everyone has a selfish agenda. Tony's being friendly to Aaron, a man he once threw food at during a Thanksgiving dinner (he was Janice's narcoleptic boyfriend in season three), <a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/1600/tonyrapper.0.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/200/tonyrapper.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>because he's looking to acquire a Get Out of Purgatory Free card. Deluxe's manager is happy his client got shot because it'll boost record sales (and his cut). Hesh's daughter is fond of born-again Christians, but only because they're supportive of Israel. The insurance rep smiles and flirts with Tony, but she just wants him off the company books. About the only person who's not blatantly looking out for number one is Bell Labs retiree John Schwinn, so of course he suffers a fate worse than death: a man who loves to talk (and is good at it) robbed of the ability to speak" <br /><br />There's much in that description that no regular "Sopranos" watcher could refute. As I've said in previous columns, series creator David Chase expects the worst from humanity and confirms his cyncism every chance he gets. The world he shows is rotten to the core, and with few exceptions, nice people tend to get manipulated and manhandled (Artie Bucco, for instance) or beaten down by goons (the truck driver with the son in Sunday's episode). Throughout the series, nearly every subplot, indeed almost every scene, forces a character between choosing the expedient or purely selfish route and a new path that demands self-examination, perhaps even seismic change. The first course tends to win out.<br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/1600/carmguys.0.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/200/carmguys.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>That said, if there's one thing I know for sure about Chase, it's that he likes surprising viewers; he likes it so much, in fact, that he and his writers routinely embrace anti-climax. (Think of Tony deducing Big Pussy's betrayal via a food-poisoned dream, or hotheaded rival Richie Aprile getting whacked not by Tony or some other rival, but by abused wife Janice.) So I have to wonder, if "The Sopranos" tries, whenever possible, to give us an outcome we didn't expect, what better way to outguess, even flabbergast regular viewers than by having Tony come back from death determined to change his life?<br /><br />Yes, I know it's unlikely, given what we know about Tony. But for every bit of evidence Alan supplies to buttress the "leopard can't change his spots" argument, there's another touch that suggests Tony, arguably the show's most introspective and even philosophically-inclined character, is not beyond an eleventh-hour change of heart. Just for the hell of it -- and bearing in mind that Chase has outsmarted me too many times for me to risk grand predictions -- consider the following:<br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/1600/rapper.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/200/rapper.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a> 1. The repeated invocation of the Ojibwe saying, mysteriously posted on Tony's hospital room bulletin board: "Sometimes I go about in pity for myself, and all the while a great wind carries me across the sky." The quote suggests that Tony, like most people, is so preoccupied with his own selfish concerns that he fails to take a larger view of life, to see himself as one atom in what "Deadwood" creator David Milch calls "the larger human organism." The "great pity" part of that quote gently mocks Tony's (and our) fixation on the visible part of life -- the first-person part that we experience as individuals -- while insisting there are larger forces at play, Destiny, fate, God -- pick your mystical noun.<br /><br />2. The second, third and fourth episodes of this season contain more allusions to morality, spirituality and eternal rewards than any three consecutive "Sopranos" hours that I can recall. Besides Carmela's hospital bed apology for telling Tony he was going to hell and Tony's purgatorial adventures in Coma Land, we've seen numerous appearances by characters who represent some version of a holy man expressing a vision of life that goes beyond self-interest. Tony's Coma Land ramblings put him face-to-face with monks whose lives he'd literally made more hellish (Tony's mistaken identity alter-ego, Kevin Finnerty, sold them a defective heating system). <a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/1600/kungfu.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/320/kungfu.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a> Among other theological ambassadors, Sunday's episode featured a born-again evangelist named Pastor Bob who was once addicted to cocaine and strippers; a old nun who confessed on her deathbed to being Paulie Walnuts' real mother ("How could you be a bad girl?" Paulie cried, "You're a nun!"); a cameo by Camela's favorite hunky priest, Father Phil, and a televised glimpse of David Carradine as the hero of "Kung Fu," arguably the only network action series that doubled as a spiritual journey. <br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/1600/priest.0.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/200/priest.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>3. It's interesting that right after Tony returns from his brush with eternity, Pastor Bob sells him on evangelical Christianity as a way to relate to Christ directly, without the intercession of liturgy. Pastor Bob really means what he says -- and I was pleasantly surprised that the show treated his message with such evident respect, even if they did make him look like a buffoon later, with his dinosaurs-walking-among-humans spiel. But note that his word choice appeals to Tony's practical side; Bob is a theological salesman offering a prospective customer a better deal, a chance to get his guidance from the source and cut out the middleman. "What God wants is for you to love Him directly," he tells Tony.<br /><br />4. Intriguingly, even Hal Holbrook's terminally ill scientist, John Schwinn (for my money, one of the finest cameos in the show's history) came across as another kind of holy man, a guru nudging Tony towards enlightenment. In a memorable hospital room scene with an injured rap star De Lux and his posse, he regaled Tony with monologues that sounded like the continuation of religion by other means. Among other things, he said that two boxers fighting on TV weren't really opponents, and weren't truly separate, that they were all part of the same continuum. The perception of individuality, of distinctness and apart-ness, was an illusion, he said: "The shape is only in our own consciousness." <br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/1600/trex.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/200/trex.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>5. Dinosaurs, dinosaurs, dinosaurs. Carmela gives Tony a book about dinosaurs. Pastor Bob tells Tony (in a scene that struck me as badly misjudged because I couldn't believe such a smart salesman would tip his hand so early) that scientists are wrong, that dinosaurs walked among humans. Perhaps Tony, the 20th-century gangster, is a kind of dinosaur, <a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/1600/pterodactyl.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/200/pterodactyl.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>a species doomed to extinction by predators (other criminals, the FBI) and by its own overreaching, by its failure to evolve and adapt. But according to the script, what happened to the dinosaurs? They didn't die out, they evolved into birds. Is it not possible that Tony has it within himself to evolve into another kind of person, one who is still recognizably Tony despite being repentant and perhaps even law-abiding, just as birds retain characteristics of their dinosaur ancestors? (Aaaahhhgggghh....Sorry. I stretched so far with that last one that I think I threw my back out.)<br /><br />6. Granted, this might be temporary, but the post-coma Tony seems more inclined to forgive and negotiate than hold grudges and fight for every scrap. After demanding $2000 in cash from the paramedic he accused of ripping him off during a "wallet biopsy," he declines the cash with a wave of his hand. Later, he accepts Phil Leotardo's generally unfavorable terms of continued waste management employment with a sigh and a handshake. <br /><br />Plus, he seems more aware of the world beyond his own fevered mind. The combination of near-death experience and nonstop (if unasked-for) spiritual counseling appears to have made him subliminally aware of the continuum John Schwinn described. Both the dialogue and the filmmaking support this reading. Leaving the hospital, Tony says aloud that he was supposed to be dead, and then he basks in natural sound -- the wind, some distant church bells. Then, in the episode's magnificent finale, Tony sits in his backyard listening to the wind in the trees, and the camera tracks from left to right over the treeline, echoing a camera move in the Coma World sequence that ended Episode 3. A crane-down reveals that the treeline isn't the one in Tony's backyard, but on the Passaic river, where Tony's chief goon, Paulie Walnuts, is about to enforce the terms of Tony's employment by beating down the young man who's now trying to sell the waste management company. The editing and camerawork collapse Tony's world and Paulie's, confirming they aren't separate. The left-to-right treeline pan is repeated a second time, gliding over the trees in Tony's backyard. Then it's repeated a third time, panning the treeline over Paulie as he exits the frame in the episode's final shot. <br /><br />7. Last but not least, as I was finishing this post, Alan offered an observation that buttressed my point. Put that Ojibwe saying into Sopranos language, and what does it say? "Poor you."<br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/1600/nancym.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/200/nancym.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>Sound like anyone we know?</span>Keith Uhlichhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09366621160453356504noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2472021095791259178.post-33224039661836083222007-06-13T18:02:00.000-04:002007-06-14T12:32:21.784-04:00Sopranos Mondays: Season 6, Ep. 3, "Mayham"By Matt Zoller Seitz<br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/1600/ep68_02.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/400/ep68_02.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>The most important scene in Sunday’s “Sopranos” episode came during Carmela’s surprise visit with Tony’s therapist, Dr. Melfi.<span class="fullpost"> Poring over her conflicted feelings toward Tony, who was still incapacitated from a gunshot wound, Carmela admitted that from the very start of their relationship, she knew he was a criminal. But she chose not to think about it. “I don’t know if I loved him in spite of it, or because of it,” she said. <br /> <br />Throughout the show’s long run, fans have periodically been forced to ask themselves that question -- but rarely for long. David Chase’s series, a rude social satire disguised as a gangster soap, was usually so preoccupied with power plays, domestic melodrama and cavalier injections of comic sadism -- and so inclined to let its murderous heroes err on the side of crackpot lovability -- that you couldn’t stay conflicted. For all its metacritical self-analysis, in the end “The Sopranos” was usually content to be seen, first and foremost, as a bloody good show, emphasis on show. <br /><br />But now, in the home stretch, the emphasis seems to be changing; or at least it looks that way from the first four episodes. (Yes, I’ve seen the fourth installment, but since most of you haven’t, I’ll write around it for now.) The tricky moral calculus that informs all gangster stories has been foregrounded in almost every scene of episodes one, two and three. A cloud hangs over everything, a sense that a lot of bills are coming due, one after the other. <a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/1600/ep68_05.0.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/200/ep68_05.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>The question is, how many of Chase’s characters will grasp this fact and pay up before the universe collects at gunpoint? Not Carmela, I’m guessing. She told Melfi that over the decades, she’d confessed her deepest fears of a compromised life to friends and advisors. And she admitted that Tony’s shooting, a local media event, had forced her now-adult children, Meadow and Anthony, Jr., to “face all these years of facade-ing.” (Facade-ing isn’t a word, but you knew what she meant.) Then she executed a typical about-face and suggested that Tony’s gangsterism was a speck on the world’s moral radar. Her admissions of guilt, she told Melfi, were “bullshit, because there are far bigger crooks than my husband.” Melfi kept mostly silent during Carmela’s session, but she did manage to interject what might prove to be the most significant three-syllable word in the show’s history: “Complicit.” <br /><br />Complicit in what, exactly? Not just Tony’s life of crime, but also a generalized (and, Chase suggests, very American) tendency to put one’s own self-interest ahead of everything and everyone else. To look out for Number One. Except for Melfi, whose Talmudic scrutiny of her patients’ rationalizations makes her Chase’s true dramatic surrogate, every major “Sopranos” character is supremely selfish, even when they present themselves as compassionate. <br /><br />Silvio, who was conveniently revealed as a secret athsmatic so he could suffer an eleventh-hour respiratory attack, stepped up to play boss in Tony’s stead, and warned his wife not to ask self-interested questions about the future; but she still asked, and he listened. The day before Silvio’s athsma attack, Uncle Junior’s caretaker Bobby Bacala pressed him to rule on how to distribute proceeds that used to go to Junior; Bobby arrived at Silvio’s house the next morning as he was being loaded into the back of an ambulance, just in time to whine: “I didn’t hear from you!” Slimmed-down Vito unsubtly suggested that he’d make a pretty good boss himself, and collaborated with Paulie Walnuts, his partner in a nasty robbery of Columbia drug dealers, to avoid giving Tony’s mob-mandated kickback to Carmela; then, after Tony unexpectedly awakened from his coma, they cobbled a bag of cash and handed it to Mrs. Soprano, making a big show of their generosity. (“We’re here if you need anything,” Vito told her.) <a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/1600/ep68_06.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/200/ep68_06.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a> Tony’s quick exit from Coma Land was spurred by the sound of Paulie’s selfish drone, which pushed him into cardiac arrest; asked by Carmela to sit by her husband’s bedside and talk to him, the silver-haired capo blathered on about himself, at one point regaling Tony with an account of his three-peat victory in a military chin-up contest. Afterward, when the big boss was awake but barely functioning, Chris stopped by long enough to tell Tony he expected him to invest Chris' first venture as a movie producer, a digital horror flick about an eviscerated mobster who reassembles himself and goes after his killers with a meat cleaver. Grotesquely invoking the memory of his slain former wife Adriana, whom Chris gave up as a snitch, he said, “You owe me this.” <br /><br />As <a href="http://www.nj.com/columns/ledger/sepinwall/index.ssf?/base/columns-0/114343805218140.xml&coll=1">my Star-Ledger colleague Alan Sepinwall observed</a>, "The Keystone Kops antics of Silvio and company also neatly illustrate how much smarter Tony is than the rest of his army combined. These are dumb, dumb people, and a world without Tony telling them what to do would be a grim future indeed." <br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/1600/ep68_01.1.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/200/ep68_01.1.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a> Compared to the first couple of episodes, this one meandered and occasionally ran into a ditch and spun its wheels. And there were more than a few cringe-inducing moments -- particularly Paulie’s groin injury (“My fuckin’ balls!”), Vito’s cliched predatory homosexuality (very 1970s) and the predictably crude decision to stage a dramatically significant Vito-Paulie-Silvio conference in a hospital men’s room while Silvio was unburdening himself in a stall. (My brother Richard observed that on “The Sopranos,” “You always know there’s gonna be trouble if somebody’s taking a shit.”) In the end, the drama cohered (barely) thanks mainly to powerful performances by Edie Falco and James Gandolfini (whose winsome Coma Land performance as average guy Kevin Finnerty suggested he’ll have a long life as an Everyman character actor) and by the show’s bemused contempt for venality in all its forms. <br /> <br />Chase and his writers are so cynical about people that they make Luis Bunuel seem like Frank Capra; they expect the worst of humanity and show humanity at its worst. Even most of the one-off characters are scumbags, hustlers and swine (including Timothy Daly’s pretentious screenwriter J.T. Dolan, who’s writing Chris’ horror movie to pay off a gambling debt). And the series routinely makes room for condemnations of whole classes of entertainment industry types <a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/1600/images.49.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/400/images.22.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>-- no small feat for a drama set in suburban New Jersey. Chris describes indie moviemakers as “Douchebags who never made a film before,” and when his henchman drag Dolan out of a Writers’ Guild class, the blank-faced would-be William Goldmans don’t even get up from their seats. “An entire room full of writers, and you did nothing!” Dolan moans. <br /><br />Say this for the “Sopranos” writers: they're equal-opportunity misanthropists. They see the bad in everyone, themselves included.<br /><br />As for the dream/hallucination/afterlife imagery, I am not quite sure what to make of the final scene of Tony standing outside of the Finnerty home, making cryptic small talk with the gatekeeper (Steve Buscemi, who played Tony's most recent shooting victim, mobbed-up cousin Tony Blundetto) and hesitating to enter. Both times I watched the episode, I saw it as a surreal and rather beguiling "Godfather" riff -- business vs. personal, the family vs. The Family; Tony can't enter the domicile and be a real husband and father until he sets aside business (symbolized by Finnerty's briefcase). That's in addition to the obvious interpretation: Tony was in purgatory, the house is heaven, and he's called back to earth before he can step through the front door. There also seemed a faint suggestion that to get into heaven, i.e. to finally merge with, and be safe with, his true family, Tony will have to literally give up his business family -- meaning rat them out. Given what we know about Tony Soprano, that seems unlikely. But perhaps not impossible. Those voices rustling in the trees might be the children he never spent enough time with, or they could be the spirits of people he killed. At this point, we just don't know, and I'm fairly sure that Chase, being Chase, won't tell us.</span>Keith Uhlichhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09366621160453356504noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2472021095791259178.post-11378046895897141402007-06-13T18:01:00.000-04:002007-06-14T08:31:21.161-04:00Sopranos Mondays: Season 6, Ep. 2, “Join the Club”By Matt Zoller Seitz<br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/1600/ep67_04.0.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/400/ep67_04.0.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>From the get-go, fans of classic TV pegged “The Sopranos” as a series that owed plenty to English playwright and screenwriter <a href="http://www.yorksj.ac.uk/potter/">Dennis Potter</a>. <a href=”http://www.hbo.com/sopranos/episode/season6/episode67.shtml?ntrack_para1=feat_main_image”>Sunday’s episode</a> made the connection official by drawing on Potter’s <a href=http://www.zenbullets.com/britfilm/potter/detective.html>“The Singing Detective</a>."<span class="fullpost"> Originally aired in 1986, and featuring Michael Gambon in a tour-de-force performance as psoriasis-deformed writer Philip E. Marlow, “The Singing Detective” fused three narratives: a present-day drama about a psychiatrist trying to get the root of Marlow's childhood trauma, flashbacks to the writer’s past, and a <a href="http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/rchandle.htm">Raymond Chandler</a>-eseque 1940s film noir fantasy. <a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/1600/32m.0.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/320/32m.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>Sunday’s “Sopranos,” titled “Join the Club” – an intense hour that envisoned an alternate life for comatose mob boss Tony Soprano, who’d been shot his Alzheimer’s ridden Uncle Junior -- felt like a muscular American response to Potter’s masterpiece, from the hospital location to the expressive, knowingly nostalgic use of pop music (at one point Carmela reminisces about her early years with Tony while <a href="http://www.lyricsdepot.com/tom-petty/american-girl.html">Tom Petty’s “American Girl”</a> plays softly on a boombox) to its depiction of dreams as the brain’s abstract way of working out real-world conundrums. <br /><br />Did I say “dreams”? As you might know, Chase is <a href=http://www.nj.com/columns/ledger/sepinwall/index.ssf?/base/columns-0/1142836402123280.xml&coll=1>already on record in the Star-Ledger</a> as saying that he doesn’t consider this episode or next week’s follow-up to contain dream sequences per se (though he’s characteristically coy about saying what they actually are). Whatever label you hang on it, this material is more linear and outwardly “realistic” than the “Sopranos” dreamtime norm. and it boasts more explicitly theological imagery. In it, Tony is "Tony Soprano," a "precision optics salesman" who has somehow switched ID with a heating equipment salesman named Kevin Finnerty. Tony has to assume Finnerty’s identity in order to have shelter and food. <a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/1600/lh011a.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/400/lh011a.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a> But the longer he pretends to be Finnerty (a disreputable character, judging from the two monks who angrily accost him in the hotel) the harder it is to escape this four-star prison and get back to the domestic life he claims to value so much, a life that’s only heard in snippets on the other end of a long-distance phone line. (The tone of this extended sequence is very Dennis Potter, but the unexplained identity swap has a touch of <a href="http://www.lynchnet.com/lh/">David Lynch's "Lost Highway"</a> about it.)<br /><br />Taking Chase at his word, my Star-Ledger colleague Alan Sepinwall describes the sequence not as a dream, but as a mini-drama about Tony’s soul being trapped in purgatory: “Here Tony's stuck in Orange County, quite possibly the most personality-free corner of the world, with no way to leave (a k a Purgatory),” Alan writes. “On one end of town is a shining beacon (Heaven), on the other, a raging forest fire (Hell). Over and over, he stops to assess the worth of his own life, asking, 'Who am I? Where am I going?’ Then he steals the identity (sin) of Kevin Finnerty -- a heating salesman who lives in one of the hottest states of the union (Arizona) -- checks into another hotel, and falls down a red staircase, at which point he learns he has Alzheimer's (eternal damnation). And while Carmela's busy in the real world telling him he's not going to Hell, Tony's in Purgatory debating whether to tell his wife this is exactly the fate he has in store. It may be hair-splitting to call this something other than a dream, but Tony's misadventures in Costa Mesa were much more linear and coherent than his regular dreams have ever been. There were important details scribbled in the margins (the bartender joking, 'Around here, it's dead,' or the 'Are sin, disease and death real?' commercial on the TV), but there was an actual story here instead of Tony bouncing from one surreal tableau to another.”<br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/1600/ep67_01.1.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/200/ep67_01.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>I think it is splitting hairs to argue that this is a purgatorial vision rather than a dream, simply because in terms of plot function, there isn’t a whole lot of difference. Religious scenarios and dreams employ similar visual language; both bring us back to moral choice, and force us to ask big (often rhetorical) questions. In Coma World, and in the “real” world outside, the moral and the physical are often depicted as variants of the same thing. As Alan observes, in Coma World, a television asks, “Are sin, disease and death real?” then flashes an implied answer, a yellow crucifix. (Translation: they are, so watch yourself.) This is not a new approach for "The Sopranos." Remember Season Two, when Tony decoded the dream telling him that Big Pussy was an informant? It happened after a bout of food poisoning; subliminally, Tony understood the toxic truth about his friend but was having a hard time digesting it. Along those lines, I'm guessing it's no accident that Tony sustained injuries to the pancreas, which neutralizes acid, and the gallbladder, which creates bile (he always had anger management issues). Nor do I think it's accidental that the risk of scepsis is described as "an infection in the blood" (lots of other things are "in the blood" of a family, including Alzheimers' and a propensity for depression or violent behavior). <br /><br />Jumping back to theology and morals, is it accidental that Carmela would choose this moment to apologize for telling Tony that he’s was going to hell when he died, a line delivered as he was about to get fed into an MRI machine? I don't think so. (“It’s a sin,” she said, “and I will be judged for it.”) Nor do I think it's chance that a bar patron making small talk with Tony would choose to name-check a specific type of car, the Infinity (without end), or that the bartender would later pronounce Tony’s assumed last name so that it sounds like, “finity” (finite, or limited). And what are the odds that of all the characters to publicly rebuke and humiliate Kevin Finnerty, Chase would choose men of god – monks! – and have them be enraged over Finnerty’s installation of a defective heating system? <a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/1600/ep26_fish.0.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/200/ep26_fish.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>Knowing Chase, I doubt it’s random chance that in this alternate universe, whatever it is, Tony would have to choose between two professions, the installation of heating systems (hell) or precision optics (which help you see more clearly). There were also strong hints that Tony may have to face the choice of remaining loyal to his crime family (a group of self-interested goons who are already talking about divvying up the spoils when the boss dies) or informing to the feds. I doubt it’s an accident that Kevin Finnerty ate grouper – a fish showcased in a Season Two dream sequence (see above) which revealed that Big Pussy was an informant – or that once Tony gets comfortable at the hotel bar, he orders a grouper sandwich. (This line of speculation only goes so far, though. As a friend pointed out, the feds would gain nothing from trying to turn Tony, since he's a top boss who's theoretically the equal of the already-incarcerated Johnny Sack. If anything, they'd try to turn someone else in Tony's family and bring Tony down.) <br /><br />In any event, without putting too fine a point on it, and without getting sidetracked into the dream-vs.-purgatory conversation, it can be said that Tony’s coma vision suggests a moral reckoning, a recognition that this is the kind of traumatic event that should force any halfway self-aware person to ask what sort of life he’s built and whether he wants to keep living it as-is or change it. I doubt it’s an accident that we got to see other characters in this same episode experiencing what also looked like potential turning points in their own identities. We saw Meadow and Anthony Jr., admit to each other that their family’s lifestyle was embarrassing (after which point Anthony put his game face on, threw open a window and cursed at the press down on the street). We saw Meadow, who’s interested in being either a doctor or a lawyer, step up and second-guess her dad’s patriarchal jerk of a doctor; has she ever showed so much backbone? <a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/1600/ep67_05.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/200/ep67_05.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>We saw Anthony swear revenge on Uncle Junior -- a career best acting moment for Robert Iler (who has previously underwhelmed me) and an indication that Anthony has his father and grandfather’s volcanic temper and warped sense of righteousness and could very well follow them into a life of crime. We even saw Christopher, who’s been wanting to tell the world about mob life via screenwriting since Season One, get comfortable with FBI agents who've started hanging out in the mob-run pork store and soliciting anti-terrorist tips.<br /><br />Of course, “The Sopranos” being “The Sopranos,” there’s a chance that Chase brought this weighty stuff up only so that he could dismiss it with dark quip, then let Tony and company go back to being the same as they ever were. These characters occasionally ask tough questions of themselves, but they're rarely serious about seeking answers. Tony’s psychotherapy avoids confronting the fact that he’s a criminal; Dr. Melfi’s “progress” at getting Tony to talk through his feelings and manage his rage seems a classic example of treating the symptoms rather than the disease (or to invoke a different cliché, rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic). Tony can’t make any real progress toward improving his emotional or spiritual life until he identifies the rotting hole at the center of his personality and takes a hard look at it. Is Tony capable of that level of self-knowledge? I doubt it. <a href=http://mattzollerseitz.blogspot.com/2006/03/sopranos-monday-episode-1-members-only.html>As I wrote last week,</a> that kind of decision would run counter to Chase’s traditionally cynical view of human nature, which answers the question, “Can a leopard change his spots,” with, “You’re kidding, right?”</span>Keith Uhlichhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09366621160453356504noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2472021095791259178.post-9977116410638141402007-06-13T18:00:00.000-04:002007-06-13T15:29:50.308-04:00Sopranos Mondays: Season 6, Ep. 1, "Members Only"By Matt Zoller Seitz<br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/1600/episode66_1.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/400/episode66_1.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>Talk about starting with a bang. <span class="fullpost"><a href="http://www.nj.com/columns/ledger/sepinwall/index.ssf?/base/columns-0/114222843280440.xml&coll=1">Last night’s “Sopranos” premiere</a> broke with the show’s traditional slow-building intro by jam-packing two hours of plot into 60 minutes and capping the episode with one of its most startling violent acts: de-fanged, housebound and Alzheimers’-suffering ex-mob boss Uncle Junior (Dominic Chianese) shooting New Jersey mob kingpin Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) in the chest at close range. It was vintage "Sopranos," expected yet somehow surprising, and twisted and pathetic rather than superficially exciting. You always figured Tony might get shot, but not like this. It was downright humiliating, especially when director Tim van Patten cut to a God's-eye-view shot of fat, bloody Tony lying on the kitchen floor, laboring to hoist his bathroom-scale-certified 280 pounds high enough to grab the wall phone and call 911. <br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/1600/episode66_3.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/200/episode66_3.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>Tony can’t die, of course; at least he can’t die this soon. Series creator David Chase can go on all he likes about how every castmember is fair game, but you still know he’s not going to kill his leading man with 19 episodes left to go. So as powerful as that shooting was, it still feels a bit like wheel-spinning. (Michael Imperioli’s Chris Moltisanti survived a less embarrassing shooting incident in Season Two.) But it’s still a shocking development, one that sets the stage for Chase and his writers to indulge their David Lynch-Dennis Potter fixation by pulling Tony out of this world and putting him into another one. The lead sentence from one of my Star-Ledger colleague Alan Sepinwall’s <a href="http://www.nj.com/columns/ledger/sepinwall/index.ssf?/base/columns-0/1141626911111890.xml&coll=1">“Sopranos” preview pieces</a> now makes sense: “There are going to be more dreams. Deal with it.” <br /><br />Judging from the first four episodes sent for review by HBO, the show’s new school version of classical filmmaking craft is at an all-time high. Every camera move, shot, cut and line is charged with a sense of purpose. Watching the premiere again last night, I was struck by how deftly Van Patten and screewriter Terence Winter weave symbolic images and lines into the narrative – elements that confirm the final season’s preoccupation with score-settling, moral accountability, the necessity of confronting one’s own mortality and the realization that joining the mob means making a lifetime commitment to evil – without making a big, flashy deal of it. “The bonefish are back in season,” Tony told wife Carmela (Edie Falco), while indulging their marriage-building habit of eating together in fancy restaurants. Earlier, the show’s opening music montage – set to a dance club remix of William S. Burroughs reading fragments of his poem “Seven Souls,” which alludes to a “director” who “directs the film of your life from conception to death” – showed a bit of a Carmela dream <a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/1600/images.31.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/320/images.12.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a> in which she hung out in the bare wood skeleton of the new house she was building on Tony’s dime and smoked a joint with the ghost of Chris’ girlfriend Adriana (Drea de Mateo), who was executed last season for snitching to the FBI. It’s significant that Tony and Carmela would externalize the idea of a new beginning for their dysfunctional marriage by building a new house; it’s also significant that this house would be contaminated, in Carmela’s dream, by the appearance of a woman who was “disappeared’ for daring to go against the family, and that Carmela would later run afoul of a building inspector because the construction supervisor, Carmela’s dad, was cutting costs by using substandard material and assuming (wrongly) that he’d get away with it by calling a corrupt pal in government. Chase and company seem to be tightening the noose around every character’s neck, forcing them to consider how their crime-funded personal adventures will end. As Tony told Dr. Melfi (Lorraine Bracco) last season, there are only two outcomes for guys like him: “Dead, or in the can.” You can end up in one of those places through greed, overreaching, incompetence or bad luck, or by deciding to rat out the family, and I suppose we can expect plenty more deaths this season. Judging from the sudden, black-comedic plotzing of snitch Ray Curto (George Loros) and the revelation that Eugene Pontecorvo (Robert Funaro) was a pigeon as well, there are as many snitches in this mob family as there are straight-up gangsters. <br /><br />But aside from a sense of showmanship and a certain grim dramatic intelligence, is "The Sopranos" showing us anything we haven't seen in prior seasons? I wish the answer were an unqualified yes. But unlike a typical episode of "Deadwood," this season premiere doesn't deepen on second viewing; in fact, its weaknesses become readily apparent. You can see Chase and the gang playing three card monte, trying to distract you from the fact that the six season-old series is repeating itself. <a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/1600/images.32.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/320/images.13.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a> Funaro’s performance, for instance, was real and touching, and his death scene (in a sustained wide shot with no cuts) was remarkable, at once horrific and restrained. But his character’s storyline was so dumb and unbelievable – as if a lifelong mob hitman would ask if he could just walk away! – and Eugene’s kissy-happy scenes with his wife were so cornball that it was hard to shake the feeling that even the writers viewed this subplot as a big sick joke – a gangsterland version of a scene in a war movie where a grunt tells everyone in his unit how much he loves his wife and kids and how he’s only got two days left, then steps on a mine. We've been here before, with Big Pussy and Adriana and other characters. <br /><br />Throughout, certain creative questions loom. In this final season, is Chase truly revealing a sense of moral accountability that was often AWOL on “The Sopranos," or just jerking our chain? In past seasons, the writers and producers responded to audience gripes about dangling plot threads by saying, in essence, “Some episodes of this show are not chapters in a novel, they’re the equivalent of self-contained short stories with recurring characters -- we’re not about plot, so get over it”; this year is Chase executing an about-face and making “The Sopranos” more like “Deadwood” and “The Wire”? Or is he just bringing “The Sopranos” in line with classic gangster tales like “White Heat” and “Scarface,” which ended with the criminal heroes suffering, the better to send us home feeling secure in our own decency? <a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/1600/images.30.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/320/images.11.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a> The next couple of episodes, which are built around images of heaven, hell and purgatory, suggest “The Sopranos” is headed toward spiritual accountability -- toward the "Macbeth" and "Munich" metaphor of violence as moral stain, the belief that evil deeds come back to haunt us. (The sight of Eugene trying to wipe a blood drop from his cheek was very "Out, damned spot!") But no matter how many creative aces Chase pulls from his sleeve, he’ll have trouble allaying my gut feeling that the show should have ended two or three or even four seasons ago. By the end of Season One, “The Sopranos,” which Chase never imagined would last more than a year, had already said most of what it presumably wanted to say about the Freudian fallout of dysfunctional family life and the moral relativism and warped “ethics” embraced by gangsters. Each subsequent season was to some extent re-inventing the wheel, finding new ways to say the same things about its characters and situations. "The Sopranos" sustained itself through sex, violence and some very effective, at times Luis Bunuel-ish black humor. More a curdled social satire than a straightforward gangster story, it is arguably the most cynical long-running series of all time, a show in which nearly every scene depicts characters being confronted with the choice between selfish expediency and a higher good, and invariably choosing Option A. From Tony and Johnny Sack (Vincent Curatola) to Carmela and the kids to the FBI agents investigating the family and the various politicians and businesspeople swirling around them, Chase's characters rarely make choices out of altruism, a sense of cosmic rightness or simple kindness. When the “right thing” does manage to get done, it’s often piggybacking on self-interest. (At the funeral, Chris says he hangs with his AA sponsor not just because the guy keeps him from falling off the wagon, but also because he’s great at forging documents.) <br /><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/1600/episode66_5.0.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7536/1115/200/episode66_5.0.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a> Not for nothing did last night’s pilot start with the line, “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.” Chase seems inclined to believe the worst of everything and everybody, including his audience (which, judging from the mail Sepinwall and I get at the paper, is more interested in fucking and whacking than in dream images and satirical jabs at American delusions). Chase shows human beings as he believes they usually are, not as they ought to be. On "The Sopranos," self-interest and appetite trump law, justice, love and friendship. Immoral characters stumble to the brink of spiritual crisis, peer down into the abyss, take a few steps back, briefly ponder their lot in life, then ask, “Which way to the whorehouse?” The only major character that’s not a moral and ethical basket case is Dr. Melfi, who could have sought vengeance on her rapist through Tony but chose not to (and even she’s no Girl Scout). Everyone else is looking out for number one, even when, especially when, they claim to be acting for the greater good of family or society. In case you missed this theme, Paulie Walnuts (Tony Sirico) spells it out in a future episode, stating that each person is really just an animal who’s alone from birth through death and must fight for every scrap he can get. In such a blatantly Hobbesean universe, it’s no surprise that characters would resist true change with every fiber of their being. Righting a sordidly misguided life must be like trying to turn an aircraft carrier around. It’s tempting to continue with business as usual while believing a line from a golden oldie that played during Junior's bloody rampage: “Nothing can be done.”</span>Keith Uhlichhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09366621160453356504noreply@blogger.com0