[From New York Press, January 8, 2000]
Anumber of shrinks of my acquaintance were heard to express impatience with Jennifer Melfi M.D. in the week before New Year’s, when HBO rebroadcast the first thirteen episodes of The Sopranos, preparatory to this Sunday’s launch of the new season. Dr. Melfi, therapist to Tony Soprano, is one of the central figures in the wildly popular series about a present-day Mafia capo who seeks counseling when the personal and professional pressures of his life becomes too great for him to bear.
Dr. Melfi is played by Lorraine Bracco, which is an interesting bit of casting. In GoodFellas, the film Martin Scorsese based on Wiseguy, Nicholas Pileggi’s nonfiction account of the glory days of a minor Mafioso, Bracco played Karen, Ray Liotta’s naive girlfriend and wife, and if there’s one thing The Sopranos is aware of, it’s Mafia movies—particularly the Coppola and Scorsese oeuvre. Karen bore a certain resemblance to the character played by Edie Falco in The Sopranos, Tony’s wife Carmela. Both are essentially infantile women, capable of experiencing life on only the most physical and primitive level, in terms of status and material gain. Consequently, when Tony seemed to be developing a crush on Dr. Melfi midway through the first season, it was sort of charming. The scene in which he tried to explain why he wanted his mistress to dress less like a mistress and more like Dr. Melfi was the first time we’d seen him manifest any remotely endearing quality. It was as though not Tony alone but the very figure of the gangland antihero was growing up.
Dr. Melfi has offices in the Montclair Medical Suites, not far from the North Jersey suburb where Tony lives; but we don’t know that at first, any more than we start out knowing that his usual approach to the office-block is through the doughnut shop beside the newspaper stand, out the back way, and across an alley to a little-used service entrance. We only find this out in the episode in which Tony panics thinking that Silvio—the henchman played by Steve Van Zandt—might have followed him to Dr. Melfi’s. (Actually, Silvio was just visiting a dentist on the same hall.) “I thought we were making progress on your narcissism,” Dr. Melfi comments, sounding discouraged. It’s the sort of remark that drives the mental health professionals in my family crazy.
Growing up around psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, I’m used to hearing them complain about how shrinks are portrayed in movies and on television. It’s everybody’s story. I don’t care who you are—hit man or head doctor. We’re all misrepresented, stereotyped by the media and by each other. What’s interesting is where the analytic community breaks down on the issue of Dr. Melfi. I did a little informal investigative work the week after New Year’s—asking questions, jogging memories, describing scenes, putting this or that practitioner’s remarks before this or that colleague. To a man, the analysts I spoke with all described Melfi as a mediocre if representative clinician. What nobody agreed on was whether or not she’s supposed to be perceived that way.
Is Bracco supposed to be a good shrink or poor one? Nobody seems to know. It’s an interesting question—not least of all because of the show’s stance vis-a-vis the Mob. The Sopranos is about the Mafia in decline, after its heyday. But psychoanalysis is also arguably past its prime. Are the creators of The Sopranos aware of this? If so—if Melfi is merely supposed to be typical of the current state of psychiatry rather than a credit to it—it would mean that The Sopranos was about not one but two dynasties in decline, two empires under siege: the Mafia, under attack by witness protection and RICO, and Freudian psychoanalysis by psychotropic drugs and the waning of clinical supervision.
In a way, it’s not surprising that The Sopranos should be hard to read on the issue of therapy. Its attitude toward the Mafia also hard to read. Or rather, it is and it isn’t. It’s unambivalently ambivalent, unambiguously ambiguous—that’s clarity of a kind. The Sopranos focuses on the world of organized crime but without buying into the gangster mystique that is so much a part of the American consciousness and popular culture. I think it’s one of several reasons why I was slow in warming to the series: I couldn’t understand why we were supposed to care about these people.
I also had a hard time with the duck trope. The first thing we learn about Tony is the strange attachment he’d formed to a family of ducks who’d been living in the swimming pool in his backyard. It turns out to have been their departure, in fact, that triggered Tony’s depression and panic attacks. “They were a family,” Dr. Melfi points out in the sort of intrusive interpretation she is given to. A couple of episodes of this and I was thinking, “Mother of Mercy! Is this the end of Rico?”
I was also initially irritated by the self-referential quality of the writing. The members of Tony’s immediate circle are always invoking gangster movies. They quote The Godfather and allude to Scarface. One of them has a car-horn that plays the first few notes of “The Godfather Theme.” Carmela sits around watching Mafia movies with the parish priest, and Tony’s nephew Christopher is thinking of selling his story to Hollywood. He knows someone who knows Tarantino’s development person, and later we find him writing a screenplay and worrying about the “arc” of his life. An early episode even included an appearance by Mr. Scorsese.
Finally, I felt that David Chase, the series’ creator, was playing fast and loose with the gangster-movie genre, commenting on it without really understanding it.
There’s a wonderful essay called “The Gangster As Tragic Hero,” written in 1948 by a now-largely-forgotten critic named Robert Warshow, that sets out to analyze the gangster picture and it’s place in American popular culture. The first point Warshow makes is about the gangster’s connection with the urban landscape:
The gangster is the man of the city, with the city’s language and knowledge, with its queer and dishonest skills and its terrible daring… For everyone else, there is at least the theoretical possibility of another world—in that happier American culture which the gangster denies, the city does not really exist; it is only a more crowded and more brightly lit country—but for the gangster there is only the city; he must inhabit it in order to personify it; not the real city, but that dangerous and sad city of the imagination which is so much more important, which is the modern world.
According to Warshow, the gangster offers us a chance to experience Aristotelian tragedy at a visceral level: he is “what we want to be and what we are afraid we may become.” Warshow’s second point is that the gangster film follows a Marxist trajectory: the gangster is the embodiment of enterprise who rises in order that we may see him fall—an interesting idea, if a little tendentious.
The gangster’s whole life is an effort to assert himself as an individual, to draw himself out of the crowd, and he always dies because he is an individual… At bottom the gangster is doomed because he is under an obligation to succeed, not because the means he employs are unlawful. In the deeper layers of the modern consciousness, all means are unlawful, every attempt to succeed is an act of aggression…
Warshow’s third point is that the gangster is primarily “a creature of the imagination…even to himself.” He cites Edward G. Robinson’s dying words in Little Caesar referring to himself in the third person.
It’s an eloquent account of the genre—up to 1948. But then came Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola, Nicholas Pileggi and Martin Scorsese. Puzio and Coppola made the mobster glamorous. Pileggi and Scorsese made him post-narrative. By focusing on the peripheral figure—the mechanic rather than the capo di tutti capi—and by allowing him to tell his own story in his own voice, Pileggi and Scorsese introduced the unreliable narrator into the formula. Scorsese’s big innovation was to see what it would mean for us to watch glamorous people—stars—do truly horrible things while we listened to the same acts being fondly—admiringly— recalled by one of the participants. GoodFellas showed us sadism and brutality through Liotta’s eyes—all the while suppressing the crucial fact that Pileggi’s book began with. It’s only in the last few minutes of the picture that we discover Liotta is telling his story to the FBI.
If The Sopranos manages to avoid glamorizing violence, that’s partly because we’re watching actors, not stars, do horrible things. You can’t cast actors like Brando and De Niro and not have them appear larger than life to us. The key to our perception of the characters in the television series is the fact that although the writing isn’t particularly sympathetic to them, the extraordinary performances by Gandolfini and Falco and company are.
Of course, if you inject enough realism and sophistication into a genre, it ceases to be interesting, ceases to be itself. At first it seemed to me that this was what was happening with The Sopranos. The idea of juxtaposing the gangster worldview with that of psychoanalysis—not for comic purposes—felt wrong-headed. It is the mutual exclusivity of the two ethics that make their confrontation in Analyze This so funny. The psychiatrist tells us to adapt to a world in which we can’t have everything we want. The gangster says, “Give me what I want or I’ll kill you.”
If the gangster was always, as Warshow argued, an artistic construct, a sort of self-made metaphor, Tony Soprano’s problem is something closer to meta-self-consciousness. Tony and his friends are not only conscious of living in a post-Scorsese world, they know what that means. It means it’s over. “I was thinking it’s good to be in something from the ground floor,” Tony tells Melfi, referring to the day he first collapsed. “I came too late for that, I know. But lately I’m getting the feeling I came in at the end. The best is over.” To which Melfi replies: “I think a lot of Americans feel that way.”
The Sopranos is about what it means to be a part of something whose chief characteristic is that over-ness, about living in a world in which the fat lady has for all practical purposes sung. It’s about the fact that in some sense we’re all living in a post-Scorsese world. In whatever way this manifests itself, we all feel our lives have become impossibly self-conscious. Bracco to Gandolfini: “That’s the mystery, isn’t it? The mystery of God or whatever you want to call it—and why we’re given the questionable gift of knowing that we’re going to die?”
Our problem, though, isn’t being aware we’re going to die; it’s being aware of being aware. In cinematic terms that manifests itself in the self-referential art form, the thing that cannot just be itself because it’s been so well observed and commented on. It’s the post-Freudian curse.
Is The Sopranos about two embattled value systems having a sit-down, confronting each other across the negotiating table? I honestly can’t tell. Certainly Tony thinks well of Dr. Melfi. “You were a good doctor to me,” he tells her with affection but no affect in the last episode of the first season, thinking he is going on the lam. And she’s certainly done her best. Still, it’s interesting that at this moment the patient should manage to achieve precisely the neutral-yet-caring tone that the doctor has so consistently failed to produce. It’s interesting, too, that the most insightful interpretations have come from characters other than Dr. Melfi—Carmela, for instance, who calls her friend the priest on his relationships with the married women in his parish, accurately diagnosing his need to create sexual tension that won’t be resolved.
Another bit of spiritual wisdom comes from Paulie Walnuts, the sweet-faced thug played by Tony Sirico. Paulie doesn’t know what Christopher is talking about when he starts using the language of story-structure. “Every character is supposed to have an arc. Where’s my arc?” Christopher laments. “Did you ever get the feeling that nothing was ever going to happen to you?” he asks Paulie despondently. “Yeah,” says Paulie, “and nothing did.” It’s essentially the lesson that old-fashioned Freudian analysis used to teach. You went in wondering why fate had handed someone so special a life so filled with disappointment; you learned to adjust your expectations.
Contemplating the start of the new Sopranos season, I find I’m less concerned with what is going to happen in either Tony’s life or his therapy than I am with what is going to happen in his relationship with art. The series virtually began with Tony uneasily confronting a work of art—a sculpture in Dr. Melfi’s waiting room. He looked bemused. Later, we watched him take irrational umbrage at another piece of the decor of her office, an inoffensive painting.
There’s a good deal about art in the series that has nothing to do with Mafia movies—good and bad art, mostly bad music. There’s the dreadful choir that Tony’s daughter is a soloist in. There’s the no-talent band that Christopher’s girlfriend Adriana wants to champion and “discover,” and the hopeless script that Christopher is writing. And then there’s the good “art”: the W.C. Fields movies that Tony is always quoting, the hit single that Tony’s friend Hesh (Jerry Adler) “co-wrote” with a talented young black musician in the days when he was still in the music business, before he became a shylock. And there’s the music that gets played at the beginning and end of each show. Music is in the very name of the title characters, in the phrase “soap opera” itself. (The Mafia: America’s Longest-Running Soap Opera is the name of a book written by one of the talking heads in a television program that Tony and his pals are watching in an early episode.)
Meanwhile, art and the gangster confront each other in every reference to Scorsese, as well as in such knowing jokes as the casting of E-Street Band-member Van Zandt (whose other employer, Bruce Springsteen, is another “Boss” with ties to New Jersey). Finally, art and the gangster confront each other in the dream-like, more-than-verbal puns that help draw the series together thematically, puns like “hit”—“a beautiful hit,” one character says in a late episode, referring to the murder of a long-ago Mafia bigwig. It’s the same episode in which Adriana is trying to break into the music business and in which the “gangsta” rapper with whom she wants to develop a mutually exploitative relationship confronts Hesh about the misappropriated royalties from that long-ago single.
Is a hit something that you write or something you do? What kind of a “killing” does it entail? “Art isn’t like betting or cards,” Christopher warns Adriana, meaning that it cannot be “fixed” or controlled. But of course it can. I’m waiting to see if The Sopranos knows this, or if it will end up glamorizing art in the way the gangster picture used to glamorize violence, intentionally or not. It’s a real cliffhanger. Art is one of the few things as irresistibly seductive as violence.
New York Press, January 18, 2000