This season of The Sopranos is just so unexpectedly good.
We've been used to the ups and downs of the Family drama. Maybe it's a something-for-everybody thing, but I was least interested when Carmela was leaving Tony and not exactly satisfied with the wrap-up to the Ralphie Cifaretto saga. It's not just that I want violence, nudity, adult language and adult content...although last night's episode hit the quadfecta. I want some payoff for that escalating sense of dread that's the most of what I can now recall from the final episodes of the first season. I want to know that I followed these villains for a reason. I don't know if that needs to end up with Tony dead or in witness protection of committing suicide or walking away. I only know I need something in the upcoming final four episodes to make me feel like there was a plan all along, and although time is running out, all the stakes are running high, high, high.
Both Matt Zoller Seitz and his old newspaper colleague from New Jersey, Alan Sepinwall, are doing excellent weekly summaries and analyses. Both guys are obviously film scholars and both serve to illuminate and remind. So much is happening in the episodes this season that it threatens to slip away even as consumed.
Last season was primarily about the impossibility of escaping the organized crime life. Tony dreamt about it for a couple episodes, in the very first episode a mobster committed suicide due to being unable to leave, all of it a hangover from the Adriana shocker that capped the previous season and busted any positive illusions we might have had about these guys forever.
I'm getting into SPOILERville here, so just
stop
stop
stop
if you haven't seen this week's episode or plan to watch the whole season only on DVD someday.
While the episode traded on the same parallel storyline motif it's been using all season, this one wasn't about shitting up the place or reminiscing about why the hell are we so old and feeling nearer the end than the beginning of our lives. This was about the future; this was about sons.
A.J. coming out of the funk through diaper mob violence, Tony's auto-acknowledged genetic call of the wild. Christopher, who Tony has often said is like a son to him, wrestling with the code and then, in one simple, inhuman act embracing it. All signs ahead pointing to doom: will David Chase give us the end of all ends that we're so dreading and craving?
Plotwise, Christopher's story was the more compelling to me, if only because he displayed a level of self-awareness about his addiction and his family's pattern of addiction. An echo of Tony's own fear regarding A.J. but one that Tony, ever the asshole, prefers not to acknowledge as he prods Christopher toward the bottle.
I was struck by Christopher's stairwell confession to a fellow AA attendee, a stranger who expresses instant sympathy for Christopher's perceptive and damning critique of his boss, maybe too instant. "Unicorp" sounds like a front, and the conversation after the meeting felt all con, with Chris opening up all too much about Adriana, even as he bends the fact just enough for cover. Maybe I'm wrong (and Chase has proven us all wrong over and over) but I'm expecting that member to show up again, eventually with a badge.
Does Chris eventually blow that guy's head off as well? Or does the Adriana story land him in witness protection?
Because it was the final violent act that was so unexpected, so shocking, so bringing everything into focus, all the issues Chase has more than hinted about in interviews over the years.
While I'm already reading explanations about Christopher redirecting his frustration in what he did, if the show is about our inability to admit the real truth about our existence to ourselves, then this is the signature moment. Per Matt:
JT told him a truth he didn't to hear, and Chrissy literally shot the messenger.
For the only time I can remember, certainly an exceedingly rare occasion, someone speaks the word "MAFIA" on The Sopranos. Not surprisingly, it gets him killed. I had always heard that the mob hated that word, an FBI word, the opposite of "goodfellas" because it implied something terribly wrong and with an ethnic slur in the middle. Not Roman soldiers living out the code in the modern age. Just reactionary southern European thugs in the New World.
"You're in the MAFIA!" means I know who you are, I know more than I should know, I don't want to cross this line. But of course, line-crossing is what bad guys do for a living. And not even Dr. Jennifer Melfi utters its name.
Chase gave away the show two times in the episode.
He had Tony say directly, "Is this all there is?" which is surely the problem he's had since he first passed out from anxiety watching the family of ducks in his swimming pool.
Then he actually had Tony say (for the second time in the series), "It all turns to shit." Last time he called himself the reverse Midas. This time he's not taking responsibility for it, that evasion the corollary show theme applying to all the show's characters save Melfi (she proved herself when she made the decision not to tell Tony about her rape, denying herself the certain retribution which would have followed). As I've written before, everything a Soprano touches turns to shit. Whether Tony, Carmella, Christopher, Uncle Junior or Janice, one can argue even Meadow but the jury's still to report, their selfish desires always lead to pain and profound loss for some other party, deserved or not.
The suspense keeps us tuning in, but the echoes of our own lives, the lies we tell ourselves, the compromises be enjoy, that's what keeps scratching at us overnight. Chase's genius is to tell several huge stories at once -- a deadly family refracted through the lens of contemporary affluence consumerist society; the almost documentary-like historical twilight of the Five Families; and the struggle of knowing the trap you're in but, even at the height of your power,s being absolutely incapable of getting out.
I can't know what Chase has planned for the series ending, but Tony deserves his comeuppance. I'm just worried that in creator Chase's vision of his Soprano world...that just doesn't happen.
1 comment:
Thanks for the links to further analyses (like I need more distractions to procrastinate with as I'm trying to get out of here!), and your own. I, too, was blown away by this episode, arguably the darkest of the dark thus far.
Did you notice how when they did the slow-mo stuff in the bar, the footage of Tony et al laughing and making fun of Christopher (from Chris's POV) made it clear that this whole crew is IN HELL? With the smoke and shadows, all that was missing was a few horns and pitchforks in the background...
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