Chase is a writer adept at character development, seconded by actors with years of Broadway and independent film experience, whose performances evoke each character’s complex and comic humanity.   James Gandolfini in the lead role as Mafia boss, Tony Soprano, catches the Don’s inchoate mix of savagery and innocence; he is someone trained to be a thug, but who can also be wide-eyed, as mopey as a kid, loving, even gentle.  Other principal characters include: Edie Falco as Tony’s wife, Carmela, who reacts to his constant infidelity with a mix of martyrdom, Catholic responsibility, brutal honesty, anger, and passionate but repressed sexuality; the late Nancy Marchand as his terrifying mother, Livia (Augustus’ murderous wife), playing against type— her usual grande dame—as a lower-class, paranoid woman whose only joy is inflicting her own misery on others; Dominic Chianese as Tony’s Uncle Junior (elder, but not senior), who melds wisdom with resentment and comic pathos as a man stymied by lifetime status as second fiddle; and, finally, Lorraine Bracco as Tony’s sexy, dutiful, and fragile psychiatrist, Dr. Jennifer Melfi, who is attracted to him precisely by what also repels her—his criminal penchant for violence and his brutish masculinity.   

            The show moves television forward to a place where pop culture becomes art.  It achieves this formidable feat, first, by renewing the gangster/Mafia theme so as to make public enemies into people with whom we identify.   The show also provides, as great novels and films do, detailed information about the way we live now—from the look of our houses and cars, to the feel of private moments with mistresses, family, or psychiatrists, to our mode of consuming, mourning, celebrating, and dealing with youth, middle age, old age, sickness, death, betrayal, anxiety, and depression.   Lastly, the show focuses on a criminal who belongs to two “families.”  There’s Tony’s nuclear family of wife, daughter Meadow, and son Anthony Jr., a family whose desire for unalloyed upper-middle class happiness, defined partially by material success and primarily by the capacity for self-actualization, he shares.  Then there’s Tony’s professional family, the Mafia, among whom, ostensibly, rigid old moral rules and loyalties prevail.   Tony is trapped between these two families, and through him we gain insight into our own situation as contemporary Americans.  The measure of Chase’s achievement is his managing to make a New Jersey Mafia boss into a representative American, a kind of contemporary Babbitt, who embodies the culture wars—between virtue and happiness, between disciplined “character” and the protean self, between dying traditions and a vacuous modernity—that currently tear apart the American soul and keep us from creating the new moral perspective, cultural identity, and, above all, new politics that we need.      

Popular Culture

Chase suffuses “The Sopranos” with references to popular culture; it’s both the subject and object of the series.  He gives us a Mafia boss who’s seen all the Mafia films and TV series and who’s quite self-conscious about the genre.  His mob and everyone else on the show refer to and are often ruled by the images derived from pop culture—they parody lines from The Godfather films and Goodfellas (“He made him an offer he couldn’t refuse”;  “He lies with the fishes”; or Joe Pesci’s famous question, preparatory to murder, “You think I’m funny?”)  Many of the characters are pop culture addicts and wannabees.  For example, Christopher, Tony’s nephew, wants to write screenplays and acts out his aggression—Raging Bull style—when he takes an acting class.  Janice, Tony’s sister, brags about a talent for “visualization,” bills herself as a video director, and aspires to stardom in pop music.  Jackie Aprile Jr., Meadow’s errant boyfriend, flunks out of Rutgers but hopes to make it in men’s fashions.

            Chase exploits the gangster/Mafia theme with great effect when Livia dies.  Both before and after her funeral, Tony watches Cagney in The Public Enemy, desperately trying to see his vile mother in the nostalgic light of her Depression experience and the old culture the Cagney film embodies.  But Tony’s attempt at posthumous filial affection doesn’t work.  Dr. Melfi describes his nostalgia by its right name—“whitewash”—and reminds him that his mother was nothing like Cagney’s.  Indeed the two mothers, if equally loopy, are antithetical: Cagney’s mother loves him in spite of what she knows about his criminality and she prays for his salvation; Livia allows her nihilistic emotions—she hates everyone, including herself and her children—to turn into nihilistic actions.  When Tony puts her in a plush nursing home, she is so mad at him that she conspires with Uncle Junior to have him killed.   

            The gangbuster aspect of the popular culture mob story finds its way into “The Sopranos” via the bumbling effort of the FBI to wiretap Tony’s mansion, only he is hardly Al Capone. Likewise, the FBI, far from the heroic versions of Hoover and Ness that radio and television set forth in the postwar years, comes off as both persecutory and inefficient  —part of “big government” that we need “off our backs.”  Nor are Tony and his mob heroic.  They appear perverse, forlorn, small-time, and burdened by both their mob jobs and their personal lives.

            Chase doubtless knows that he is writing the last act of the gangster/Mafia theme.  For the Mafia, at least in America, now seems defunct: Gotti is in jail; Las Vegas is a legitimate, family-oriented gambling and shopping resort; “action” lies with Fidelity mutual funds and hedge funds like Long-Term Capital Management; and state governments, via lotteries, have taken over the numbers game.  Moreover, the gangster/Mafia theme has considerable competition for our attention from serial murderers, angry adolescents who wreak havoc on high schools, and global terrorism.   

            But for Chase, who is an expert at drawing every possible ounce of meaning from it, the gangster/Mafia theme is too rich an element of popular culture to abandon.  Since it began, say with the Depression-era films of Cagney, Robinson, and Raft (and later Bogart, Widmark, and Palance), the hallmark of the gangster/Mafia theme has been the ambivalence of attraction and repulsion, which it elicits simultaneously from its audience.   The simplest attraction of the theme is the vicarious danger, combined with the license to kill or maim, that representations of criminal life afford us.   Another simple attraction, in a society where individualism reigns and urban life often means atomization, is the community that Mob life provides.  Nothwithstanding the rigor of its rules, the Mafia can be a haven from a heartless world.  Best of all, with the gangster/Mafia theme, we can have our cake and eat it too.  We get off on vicarious aggression and a kind of romantic familialism, and at the same time are encouraged to be moralistic: criminals live by the sword and die by it; “crime doesn’t pay”; and in the end the good guys—honest folks like ourselves—prevail.  Moralism, the opposite of empathy, reinforces the distance between the mobsters and us.   

             During the late 60s, the 70s, and early 80s, the gangster/Mafia theme took on new sophistication—Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde and Altman’s Thieves Like Us, or, in another vein, the Coppola masterpieces The Godfather I and II and Sergio Leone’s epic and beautiful Once Upon A Time in America, and, of course, Scorcese’s apparently endless deepening of the theme in Mean Streets, Goodfellas, and Casino.  

            All these films attract because they allow us to recall and understand some important aspect of our collective American and/or ethnic-immigrant past.  The Penn and Altman films remain moralistic and distancing, but they show us the Depression experience with pathos and lyricism, and with the understanding that the public enemies of the era were often innocent, ordinary folks driven to crime by poverty and desperation.  In the Leone movie the bad guys—Jews and Italians—are still bad, but the film spans half century of immigrant and urban experience, allowing us to explore in detail, if also to recoil from, our immigrant and ethnic roots. 

            Scorcese’s films are about men and women who grew up in the urban Italian American neighborhoods of the immediate postwar period.  Scorcese is measuring the historical and personal distance that separates him and others (e.g., Mario Cuomo and Rudolph Guiliani)—the second generation that has by now made it to the top of American culture and society—from the peculiar and thin layer of civilization and social order, beneath which lay savagery, that constituted the “hood” as they grew up in the 1950s.   One can imagine a young, bookish, and sickly Martin Scorcese, at once impressed by the neighborhood social status of “made men” and frightened and repulsed by their occasional but revealing displays of murderous aggression.   

            The Godfather films add further historical dimension to the Mafia theme because they deal with subjects that Americans like to avoid, namely power and politics.   The Godfather I and II provide a vivid analysis of how Italian-Americans, early on in their immigrant struggle for status and wealth, imported from Sicily and established in America a countervailing system of power—an entire quasi-governmental hierarchy of dons and capos and soldiers.  This was the organization that helped Italians deal with ethnic competition, and that mediated between them and the larger cultural, social, and political establishment—to wit, the way that Don Vito Corleone appropriates Irish political bosses, judges, and cops who might have otherwise ignored or harmed Italians, or the way that the second Don, Michael Corleone, intercedes with Senators for even bigger stakes in The Godfather II.  

            But precisely because it is about a corollary government and about power and political corruption, The Godfather series establishes considerable distance between its principal characters and its audience.  Remember that The Godfather films appeared during the era of Vietnam and Watergate, events that shook American society and bred cynicism about our political system.  Remember also that, even without Vietnam and Watergate, Americans don’t need much to be wary of power and politics.  The American republic was founded on the view that the government that governs best is the government that governs least, and Americans are quick to accept Lord Acton’s liberal maxim that “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”  The Godfather saga and the artful characterizations of Brando, de Niro, and Pacino are brilliant studies in the awesome exercise of power.  But these same characterizations confirm Americans in their belief that power is not only inherently corruptible but dangerous to boot, and that sane people should therefore stay as far away from politics as possible.

            Anyone who follows “The Sopranos” can see that Chase subtly plays with the many variations of ambivalence found in gangster/Mafia films.  Yet these films do not provide his principal theme, but only a familiar subtext for another kind of story.  For his story’s central theme he looks beyond pop culture and American cinema to world literature, to a literary genre that begins in the eighteenth century with John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera and that culminates in the twentieth century with Brecht and Weill’s The Threepenny Opera—that is, the genre that uses criminal behavior as a satirical and critical  commentary on extant society.  In Gay’s work and even more in the opera comique of Brecht and Weill, one finds no ambivalence toward, nor distance between, the criminals and the respectable folk.  The world we thought we knew is shockingly inverted: the criminals and the honest folk all live and act in the same corrupt society, a fact which obviates any hypocritical or invidious distinction between them.  Similarly, even though Tony Soprano is a criminal, he is a mirror image of ourselves.  Which is why his existence opens up a window on the dilemmas of American society at the dawn of the twenty-first century.   

Happiness

            “The Sopranos” opening scene tells a story about generational change and social mobility, the American Dream.  Tony drives through his territory, northern New Jersey, and as he moves along from the New Jersey Turnpike (surrounded by the smokestacks of old industrialism), through the gritty Newark neighborhood (the Neck and the Ironbound) of his childhood, to his new neighborhood in the posh suburbs, many of us relive the mythological but also real American journey—from immigrant poverty to wealth and position via professional and business achievement.     

            The introductory scene moves through the past but winds up squarely in the present, in the driveway of Tony’s architecturally nondescript but humongous mansion,  that proclaims from every golden brick, “We have arrived.”  Speculative builders now routinely erect such oversize houses, replete with standard opulent accoutrements, for the newest winners in the American success lottery—stock traders, lobbyists, doctors and dentists (profiting from metropolitan sprawl) with both center city and multiple suburban offices.     This is the House and Garden special of 2001, the edifice of happiness for new entrants into the upper-income brackets of America’s class society.     

            Yet Tony Soprano, despite his fancy house, is far from happy.  Indeed his incapacity for happiness defines the series from beginning to end.  It manifests itself in physical symptoms—anxiety attacks, swoons and momentary loss of consciousness—as well as moodiness, depression, and sudden outbursts of anger and aggression. 

            One could easily find simple explanations for Tony’s unhappiness.  One might say that his misery stems from the guilty conscience of a criminal: Tony murders, steals, extorts, and maims; he is sexist pig who uses women and constantly cheats on his wife; he is a bigot who misprizes blacks and Latinos; and his wealth offers no solace because his worldly goods are ill-gotten gains, bought, as it were, with “blood money.”  But thus far in the series, the only crime that haunts Tony—as much for the loss of community as for the loss of a person—is the murder of his old friend and fellow mobster turned FBI informant, Pussy.  Otherwise, Tony enjoys his Mafia-acquired wealth and is in many ways proud of his Mob identity and status: he values its code of honor and loyalty, and, to an extent, enjoys the violence, and the release of aggression that it affords him.  

            Or again, one might blame Tony’s unhappiness on his burdensome responsibilities: two families (nuclear and Mob) to care for.  His children, Meadow and Anthony Jr., are self-absorbed brats who take his money but disassociate in different ways from its source.  Throughout the series he has to deal with resentful and disloyal members of his Mob family.  Yet our affection for Tony, notwithstanding his brutal methods, stems from the fact that he is also big, generous, capable, someone who can carry—and enjoys carrying—a bigger load than most.   

            The mystery of Tony’s unhappiness only deepens when we compare him, in the tradition of The Beggar’s Opera, with the more respectable folk that people his world. Doctors fare very badly.  Uncle Junior, believing that names are charms, trusts a local oncological surgeon named John Kennedy.  But the surgeon, loathe to operate under the tutelage of a superior rival from Sloan-Kettering, won’t answer Junior’s phone calls and lets him suffer through what he knows to be ineffective chemotherapy treatments.  All of Dr. Melfi’s psychoanalytic associates act in contradiction to the “caring” values of their profession, by advising her not to treat Tony.   Businessmen fare no better.  Though Tony exploits the gambling compulsion of a local merchant, we feel little sympathy because the man is weak and, as someone who betrays both business and familial responsibilities, essentially the author of his own ruin.  University officials are open to threats and pasta bribes (a Georgetown admissions official) or are hucksterish fundraisers (a Columbia Dean, who cadges $50,000 out of Carmela).   Hollywood filmakers variously exploit Tony’s nephew, Christopher—picking his brains for information about the Mob or promising contracts so they can both steal his screenplay and use him for one night of hot sex.  Carmela’s priest is a sexual tease who preys on the lonely wives of Mob men for flirtation and food.  And, of course, there are the usual suspects—corrupt politicians and FBI agents.  A congressman creates lucrative construction “opportunities” for himself and the Mob; the FBI and other government agencies, show no scruples in trying to nab Tony.  Violence notwithstanding, Tony conducts business in accordance with an old code of loyalty and honor, whereas the panoply of respectable businessmen and professionals betray personal and professional ethics—private and public virtue—at every turn.    

            So the central mystery of the series, why Tony Soprano is miserable, remains.   As of now (mid-third season), neither he nor us have a satisfactory answer.  This is where psychoanalysis comes in.  Mafia chieftains don’t usually see psychoanalysts, because the goals of therapy— “honest consciousness” and the minimal happiness that derives from what Freud called “rational misery”—are not likely to recommend themselves to mafiosi.   Happiness is not particularly a Mob desideratum; the Roman motto  “Strength and honor,” affirmed before battle, is more in tune with its world view.  And  “honest consciousness,” or the truthful discourse required by analysis, is the antithesis of the Mafia code of omerta (silence); one true word, so to speak, and a mafioso finds himself whacked.     

            The ironies here are rich and prolific.  Tony is trapped between his desire for (personal) happiness and his obligations to his nuclear and Mafia families.  Happiness, expressed through self-actualization and hedonistic satisfaction, is the animating principle of a contemporary culture in which each person does as he likes, that is, makes the law unto himself and decodes meaning and strictly situational ethics from experience.   Duty, loyalty, and rigorously enforced axiomatic laws handed down from generation to generation are the hallmarks of the old family and Mob culture, the strictures of which, like the laws of Moses, were written in stone for all eternity.  Tony believes he must uphold the Law as he learned it during his childhood in the 1950s.  But like the rest of us, he lives in 2001.  

            Which is why, for Tony, psychoanalysis is an endless trap.  It is the trap where he must confront the above contradictions, yet it is the act of holding these unexamined contradictions together that constitutes the meaning of his life until now.  It is the trap where he’s damned if he tells the truth and damned if he doesn’t (in the former case, he betrays the mob; in the latter, he betrays himself and Melfi).  And it is also the trap where, because therapy is not intended as mere venting or insight, he is forced to make choices among the contradictions of his existence, and having chosen, to act.  But in Tony’s circumstances, action constitutes still another trap.  If he leaves the Mafia, he gets whacked; if he leaves his wife, he loses his nuclear family and especially his children, which is equivalent to death.  Therapy then fails to make him happy (or at least happier), while instead and ironically it adds to his unhappiness.

            In the third season there is a conversation between Uncle Junior and Tony that suggests what Chase may be up to.  Junior, possibly dying of cancer but still alert to Mob concerns, quizzes Tony about how to handle a “made man” whom both know to be a fuck-up and a possible threat.  Together they explore the situational ethics and the strategic concerns entailed in dealing with this man.   At one point Tony asks Junior, “How do you know when you’re making the right decision?”   Junior responds, emphatically, by saying “You don’t know; you make the best choice you can, given the situation, go on to the next thing, and in between try and take your pleasures where and when you can.”

            Junior’s statement may be what Freud meant by happiness as “rational misery.”  And it may also be the singular moral that “The Sopranos” offers: that our current anomic society is the best we can hope for, and this being so, psychological assumption of responsibility for ourselves—learning to cope with isolation—is all we can do.  But if this is the moral of the story, it isn’t good enough, either for Tony or us.

            For it is precisely this despairing message that makes us all, Tony included, unhappy.  This is no place for an extensive discussion of Freud, but I believe that, out of his own private and political fears, he conveniently if brilliantly transposed the political to the psychological and focused on personal rather than civic responsibility as the means of dealing with the many dilemmas of human existence.  This leaves us and Tony on our own, befuddled by an a historical view of man and society, and obliged to face difficult decisions relating to both private and public action devoid of either the idea or substance of moral and political order.   

            Along with the promise of equality, or the pursuit of happiness remains the core value of American capitalist democracy.  But the pursuit of happiness in private—in the sphere of the family or in business—depends on what the founding generation called “public happiness,” that’s the willingness to assume civic and political responsibility for the destiny of our nation and the world, and to continue together to build a better (global) society.    The founders were intellectually rooted in classical thought, and they took from the Stoics the view that human maturity and happiness were intertwined and that both depended on the constant expansion and simultaneous transcendence of the ego outward, to ever broader spheres of human activity beyond the self.  To attain individual happiness, one had to care for one’s family, friends, and neighbors and one had also to exercise one’s public obligations as a citizen, or, if called to such duty and prepared for it, as a leader and statesman.  The exercise of citizenship or leadership might be difficult, but the reward was great and highly prized: to realize the full extent of one’s humanity as a social and political animal; to amass honor and reputation for achievement from those capable of bestowing it; and, finally, to make history—change the world—not by one’s self, but happily allied to one’s peers.  In the deepest possible sense, then, happiness derives from a form of friendship and community made possible only by public life.     

            Neither Clintonian liberal incrementalism nor Bush’s reactionary and regressive Reaganism constitutes such an assumption of civic responsibility or yields such a public life.  And happiness is hard to find in an ultra individualist “turbo-capitalist” society where an old politics and culture are dying or dead and where a new politics and culture are powerless to be born.  Market values alone cannot make us happy, and the market itself, especially when denuded of political regulation, is what corrodes traditional moral and cultural principles. 

            We can, then, conclude that Tony Soprano is unhappy because, even with his many responsibilities and numerous affective and business relationships, he remains a desperately lonely man.  Neither his old Mafia code nor his wife and children’s belief in self-actualization nor his shrink’s belief in “honest consciousness” are sufficient to resolve his misery, or to restore the joy that he gets, in the first episode of the series, from watching a covey of ducks—social animals all—who temporarily make his empty swimming pool their home.  Tony Soprano, in short, is a new kind of Mafia boss, one with whom we can wholly identify, because he is obliged to fend for himself—as a mobster and a man, as a Don and a father, as a public and private figure—in a society where all the old moral and cultural compasses are broken, and where, because of the failure of political will, no new compasses are in sight.