An American Existentialism?
Alex Schulman
In fact, a disillusionment that used to be the prerogative of the few
has become common property; and what exhilarated Socrates and
Shakespeare, who were in a sense sufficient to themselves, is found
depressing by men who lack the power to find meaning in
themselves.
(Walter Kaufmann, From Shakespeare to Existentialism)
THE POPULARITY OF THE HBO SERIES The Sopranos (1999 – 2007) may just
be another sign of America’s long-standing love-affair with the gangster
genre, but it may also signify – indeed one hopes it signifies – something
more: an existentialism for a nation typically thought to have genetic
immunity from that allegedly European affectation. To the extent that the
series has been ‘read’ by academics, it has come expectedly under two of
the optics it invites: either various strains of postmodernism, which note
its playful self-referentiality, viz. the gangster genre, or, for even more
obvious reasons, the scholarly residue of psychoanalysis.1
It is telling, on the latter count, that the writers of the series created, in
Dr Jennifer Melfi, not quite the caricatured psychotherapist of previous
1
See Maurice Yacowar, The Sopranos on the Couch: Analyzing Television’s Greatest
Series (New York 2002); David Lavery (ed.), This Thing of Ours: Investigating The
Sopranos (New York 2002), and Reading the Sopranos: Hit TV from HBO (New York
2006); Richard Greene and Peter Vernezze (eds.), The Sopranos and Philosophy: I Kill
Therefore I Am (Chicago 2004); and Thomas Richard Fahy (ed.), Considering David
Chase: Essays on the Rockford Files (Jefferson, NC 2008). Most of these works limit
their analysis to the first three or four seasons, which is perhaps one reason why
the series’ existentialism is not a major focus.
doi:10.1093/camqtly/bfp023
# The Author, 2010. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of
The Cambridge Quarterly. All rights reserved. For permissions please email:
journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
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The Sopranos
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2
See Phillip Rieff, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (New York 1959), and The
Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud (New York 1966).
3
We see Melfi’s own highly conflicted reactions to her work with Tony because
we also sit in on her psychotherapy with the unbearably smug Dr Eliot
Kupferberg. Kupferberg constantly taunts Melfi, in the guise of wanting to liberate
her professional conscience, that she is only interested in Tony Soprano because
he fulfils a desire she has for excitement, a sort of teenage girl crush on the bad
boy. Of course he, like every other ‘citizen’ on the show, is also fascinated by the
mob universe at a tabloid level. Fellow fans of the series, in my experience, often
report that Melfi is one of their least favourite of the show’s main characters, but I
think it is telling that the writers portray her as, though far from flawless, head
and shoulders above the other representatives of psychotherapy that pop up from
time to time.
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American drama, obsessed with dreams and buried childhood traumas
(though she is sometimes that) but rather a very classical Freudian – that
is, not just a trained talk therapist, but something of a Freudian philosopher who seeks to make her patient Tony Soprano come to terms with
the existential dilemmas facing humans qua humans. Melfi tends to see
psychoanalysis as a producer of Socratic self-knowledge, antecedent to
any of its self-improvement functions. A Dr Melfi may scarcely now be
found amidst contemporary middle-class patients in search of selfimprovement, life strategies, or just a quick Prozac script – though she
eagerly obliges Tony as to the last. Generally she is the sort of Freudian
Phillip Rieff complained had been buried by the ‘triumph of the therapeutic’ that compromised Freud’s American followers and obscured its
progenitor’s unflinchingly bleak, existentialist/pessimistic world-view,
including the potential of psychoanalysis therein.2 In this sense Melfi is
not just a framing device, via her sessions with Tony, for explorations of
the moral and psychological conflicts inherent in the Sopranos universe.
She is a stand-in for the project of the show itself, which seeks to make its
audience come to terms with the bleak, the sad, the ignoble via its compromising position of being entertained by, and even identifying with, the
gangsters in question.3 The show was its audience’s therapy for six
seasons, as Melfi’s office was Tony’s therapy: but properly understood, this
was therapy as Freud actually saw it, no sort of a ‘cure’ at all, but rather a
tool for coming to terms with the fundamental inadequacies of selfconscious life in modern civilisation. That The Sopranos is fantastically
entertaining does not detract from its fundamental moral and intellectual
seriousness: it certainly merits being placed alongside Miller, Albee, and
Kushner in the canon of post-war American dramatic writing.
It is noteworthy that HBO’s dual masterpieces The Sopranos and The
Wire (2002 – 8) are the two American pop-cultural creations that have
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raised the most critical enthusiasm in recent years, so much so that the
question of which is ‘the best TV series ever’ became a parlour game
among bloggers and critics, most of whom virtually assumed that any
answer must be one or the other. In praise of The Wire, in particular,
ex-reporter David Simon’s and ex-cop Ed Burns’s panorama of decaying
Baltimore, critics frequently draw comparisons with the nineteenthcentury social novel, with the adjective ‘Dickensian’ coming up regularly –
something, indeed, the show’s writers satirised in its final season, wherein
Pulitzer-hungry newspaper editors keep pressing their reporters for a
‘Dickensian’ rendering of the city’s problems. But it is indeed hard to find
a better model for that series’ sweep than Dickens (or Zola; or perhaps
Balzac’s Comédie Humaine, made multi-ethnic and post-industrial). And it
bears examining that these contemporary exemplars of critical adulation
plus demotic popularity find their genre referents in the novel, more
naturally even than in the movies.
The novel is the one middle-class art form that survived modernism
relatively intact; that is, quality novelists in the twentieth century and
onward who are doing something recognisably like what their forebears
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were doing can find a wide
and appreciative audience. With scarcely an exception, the rest of the arts,
and philosophy as well, suffered a split between elite and popular forms
from which they never recovered. Few, aside from those who have been
extensively trained in its appreciation, any longer find their aesthetic transcendence in ‘high’ art of the sort that fills the contemporary wings of
museums (or enjoys occasional impulse acquisition by the hyper-wealthy).
More likely they tarry about the museum’s other wings, or enjoy the latest
in special effects onscreen. The same is true of music, where the disappearance of the composer after modernism’s assault on traditional sensibilities, and the investment of the public’s emotion in new popular forms,
has been even more total. Philosophy, too, has mostly turned, in its ‘high’
form, into a hermetic genre where only those trained in its methods and
assumptions are expected to contribute to it or have any interest in it –
on the popular level, most ground has been ceded to the vague but lucrative DIY mode of self-help or Deepak Chopra-brand ‘spirituality’.
The novel has avoided this fork in the road – why? It is certainly
beyond the scope of this essay to answer such broad questions about the
trajectory of the arts in the West, or to give praise or blame. But ‘highbrow’ authors like Jonathan Franzen, even against their will, seem to fit
comfortably into the populist matrix of middle-class novel-reading exemplified by the Oprah Winfrey machine. Something about the investment
of meaning in recognisably human characters, and thus the production of
human narrative – even when non-linear or fragmentary – resists the
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4
Tom Wolfe, ‘Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast: A Literary Manifesto for the
New Social Novel’, Harper’s Magazine (Nov. 1989) pp. 45– 56.
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public-alienating fetish for either formalism or transgression for transgression’s sake that took over the other arts, at least in their ‘high’ modes.
One could say that, while few would-be novelists, even of the elite MFA
programme kind, are grasping after the next Finnegans Wake or Tender
Buttons, students in the fine arts who resist the temptation to design
clothes, corporate logos, or movie sets are still treading in the footsteps of
Duchamp. But I do not seek to replay the taunt of Tom Wolfe4 that only
art of the social novel variety is truly relevant – indeed, the most notable
thing about the popularity of the novelistic Sopranos is how modernist its
concerns are despite its formal accessibility: plumbing the Freudian
depths, civilisation versus savagery, the collapse of traditional values, the
split nature of the self, and so forth. And if, despite omnipresent selfflagellation about the decline of reading, the novel resists being replaced
by the movie altogether, this has something to do with the extended temporality of novel-reading as opposed to film-going. One lives with the
characters over a longer period of time, one’s life intertwines with theirs,
one feels – if the work is any good, of course – more intense loss at their
disappearance. This is harder for a two-hour narrative to occasion.
Yet the television series had rarely until now been ‘novelistic’ in the
adulatory sense rightly accorded to HBO’s best shows. Obligations of
commerce and censorship, and the stultifying effect on narrative of timed
advertising breaks, held television back to an extent that only HBO in the
1990s and 2000s made clear. HBO’s production and distribution model
apes novel-consumption far more than the programming on commercial
television. Though it remains to be seen if quality will be maintained, the
slogan ‘It’s not TV; it’s HBO’ has resonance beyond its advertising intent.
However enjoyable the programming on commercial television is, its
model of timed advertising breaks and twenty-something episode seasons
produces a creative product different from HBO’s model of individual
subscription service, no commercial interruptions, and shorter, eight- to
thirteen-episode seasons (that are not required to begin and end at the
same point on each successive calendar). Story arcs feel more organic and
less arbitrary; less like what they often feel like on the networks, a quest to
fill time. And, as David Chase revealed in comparing the creation of The
Sopranos to his earlier network jobs (on The Rockford Files and Northern
Exposure), timed advertising breaks tend to pre-structure scripts for writers –
they demand three or four mini-climaxes per episode, parcelled out
THE SOPRANOS
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5
Chase discusses this in a long interview with Peter Bogdanovich (who also
plays Dr Eliot Kupferberg) included in the ‘Extras’ section of the Season 1 DVD
set.
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geometrically – in ways that discourage a realistic portrayal of the rhythms
of life, its idiosyncrasies and psychological depths.5
Of course, good writers can do a lot within such confines, and
I would hardly deny that there has been good writing on network television. But the model of essentially perpetually serialised content that one
does not pay for directly marks the network television series as more like
a daily comic strip in a free (or so cheap as to be virtually free) newspaper than as a novel bought in a bookstore and enjoyed over weeks or
months. Thus it is no coincidence that the generally agreed-upon masterstrokes of network television, in fiction at least, have been its comedies, from I Love Lucy to Seinfeld. Plot payoff structures pre-formed by
exigent circumstances, which essentially repeat themselves across time ad
infinitum, are more friendly to quality comedy than to quality drama.
To follow on the above analogy: it was Hegel who surmised that reading
one’s morning newspaper would replace saying one’s morning prayers in
a post-theological culture; and indeed there is a ritualistic quality to
enjoying sitcoms, where the setups and punch lines can become both
utterly rote and familiar yet still cathartic, like a secularised religious ceremony. The great drama, on the other hand, feeds on a sense of the
uncanny, the unfamiliar – it is more an unforeseen revelation than the
nth midnight mass.
If the promise of the HBO model is followed through – which currently looks unlikely if the puerile (though economic) trend towards nonscripted yet decidedly non-documentary television continues – our artistic
culture may have richer reserves than we tend to think. American television had produced great comedic characters. (Indeed, HBO’s attempts to
produce half-hour-long comedies, good as many of them have been, have
never come close to a Simpsons or Seinfeld.) But it is nearly impossible to
imagine a character with the depths of Tony Soprano coming from a
network series – and not only because his darknesses would not clear the
censors. Attachment to the act of reading aside: has there ever been an
existentialist social novel quite like The Sopranos?
Encounters with philosophy and other signifiers of intellectual high
culture on The Sopranos inevitably come with something of a comedic
twist. But they signal the show’s concern with exploring the same basic
issues as the texts and ideas in question more than they do mere comic
relief, a chuckle at the expense of nouveau riche goombahs. One of the
most entertaining is the hapless Soprano male heir A.J.’s (Anthony Junior)
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6
For citation I use the episode numbers as they appear on the HBO website’s
episode guide: ,http://www.hbo.com/sopranos..
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brief flirtation with existentialism in episode 20.6 As he is supposed to be
getting confirmed into the Catholic Church, A.J. asks his parents what’s
the point, since God is dead and the universe is essentially absurd. ‘You
bein’ smart with me?’ is Tony’s reply, while his wife Carmela blames the
new teacher at A.J.’s school (‘an MA from Oberlin’), and tells A.J. in an
outburst far beneath her actual intelligence that we were born because
God created Adam and Eve and had them mate. Daughter Meadow –
the most intellectual, and most intellectually pretentious of the Sopranos –
swirls through the kitchen, clearly happy with her parents’ discomfort,
and parrots to them Madame de Staël’s observation that the only real
human choice is between boredom and suffering. ‘Go do your homework’, Tony replies. A.J.: ‘Math? But that’s the most boring!’ Tony: ‘Well
your other choice is suffering!’ implying nothing more philosophical than
a smack on the head.
Later, in Dr Melfi’s office, Tony frets over what his therapist calls A.J.’s
having ‘stumbled onto existentialism’ (‘[expletive] internet’ is his first reaction), but replies more favourably when Melfi gives him her Cliffs Notes
version of what this bleak philosophy is all about. Perhaps ‘the kid’s onto
something’,’ he mutters, when the void at the centre of a Sartrean existence is explained. Perhaps, indeed, Tony had originally protested too
much. The reduction of life to, and endless see-sawing between, boredom
and suffering that his daughter has used to display her teenage Ivy
League-bound cynicism should have already been apparent to Tony
himself. And while Tony can only tell A.J., by way of laying down the law,
that ‘even if God is dead you still have to kiss his ass!’ the audience knows
that Tony Soprano does not readily submit to kissing anyone’s ass, and
would not himself rest satisfied with such a pronouncement. Like Milton’s
Satan, perhaps the first of modern literature’s existential heroes, Tony has
determined, though not without considerable doses of depression and
doubt, that it is better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven. Hell, in his
case, is considerably more attractive than Milton’s roasted, miasmic landscape – it is upper-middle-class wealthy, highly sexualised, and sometimes
warmly familial, equal parts exciting and dangerous. Tony likes to excuse
himself by complaining that he was ‘born into’ the Mafia, but this is never
particularly convincing. He would shrivel in different circumstances, and
he knows it. The moral compromises and physical danger of death and/
or imprisonment never really outweigh the combination of boredom and
suffering involved in his equivalent of ‘serving in heaven’ – that is, being
THE SOPRANOS
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Tony’s negative appraisals of the Mafia of the postmodern age mirror
his own and others’ jeremiads about the American project: once
strong, proud, assured of itself, an institution/idea is now lamed by
external intrusions (the FBI or jihadists, two plot strands that come
7
In the haunting two-episode sequence that has Tony in a coma after being
shot by his deranged uncle (episodes 67 and 68), he dreams a ‘citizen’ alter ago
who is stranded without ID in southern California. Interestingly, the alter ago is
introduced as someone who used to be a patio furniture salesman but has switched
careers and become some sort of weapons contractor. One could interpret this
several ways, but according to its placing in the series narrative it seems to reflect
the growing concern of The Sopranos with non-Mafia-related current events,
especially post-9/11 American anxiety. This reaches its climax in A.J.’s obsession
with terrorism and his abortive wish to join the army in the final episodes.
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a respectable, law-abiding member of the American polity, the chief
example of which he can ever come up with is ‘selling patio furniture’.7
Not quite the location of a godly dictatorship, heaven is rather, as in the
Talking Heads song, ‘a place where nothing / nothing ever happens’ –
and literally, of course, no matter how dull one’s earthly life, death is the
only event after which nothing ever happens. Nothing, that is, ever again
happens to you: life, pleasure and pain, desire and fulfilment, movement,
etc. become the exclusive property of others, a melancholy point of The
Sopranos to which we will return.
It is Tony’s, and not A.J.’s, ‘stumbling onto existentialism’ that frames
the show as a whole. A.J.’s growing sense of catastrophe and his bungled
suicide attempt in the final season, fed by a vague, though pretty apolitical, obsession with Middle Eastern events and a related over-reading of
Yeats’s poem ‘The Second Coming’, recapitulate on a more self-absorbed
level (and A.J. is nothing if not self-absorbed, even when briefly interested
in the suffering of others) the Problematik with which Tony enters Melfi’s
office in episode 1. If history is at its core directionless and meaningless,
then why exult in being a part of anything that is born only to eventually
become extinct? The same, of course, goes for one’s own life, which is
why Camus proposed that suicide was the only real philosophical question. The Mafia is similar to the United States here: its members seem to
have a grand, inflated, even mystical notion of its meaningfulness, of the
order and purpose it provides in what might otherwise be a purposeless
world. At Tony’s first therapy session he reports feeling ‘like I came in at
the end’ – he means of the Mafia, beset by vigorous prosecutors and
widespread disloyalty, but when Melfi responds that ‘a lot of Americans
are feeling that way’, it is not merely a misinterpretation: her confusion
signals that Tony is really talking about both.
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There are many ways in which The Sopranos is fundamentally concerned
with Americanisation. Consider the scene with which the series ends,
which parallels in interesting ways the final scene of its first season. Season
1 (episode 13) ends as Tony and his family flee a rainstorm and receive
refuge at childhood friend Artie Buco’s restaurant, where Tony’s mob
associates are already inside eating and drinking. Tony has just survived
an assassination attempt staged by his Uncle Junior (in which his mother,
Livia, probably colluded) after a dispute over their dual authority as
leaders of their New Jersey crime family. He seeks to rebond his nuclear
family with a rather touching speech about how they should remember
the good times (like this one) when they move away and start families of
their own – the loss of nuclear family warmth has been a perennial
concern of Tony’s, symbolised from episode 1 onward by the disappearance of a family of mallards that briefly lived in his backyard swimming
pool. The setting is cosy, an island of safety in a stormy world – like the
idealised home and family themselves – and ethnically communitarian:
Italian music plays, Italian dishes are served, the walls are adorned with
paintings of the Old World.
The series’ final episode (no. 86) also ends with the Soprano family gathering to eat at a restaurant after a gang war has presumably been settled in
Tony’s favour. But now they patronise a diner that could not look more
American in its decor, nor sound more American in the music Tony selects
on the jukebox – Journey’s 1981 hit ‘Don’t Stop Believin’’, that most stirringly Midwestern of power ballads. (Similarly, it is certainly no accident
that our protagonist flips past Tony Bennett on his way to the likes of
Heart and Journey.) The Catholic Mass is replayed, greasy-spoon style, as
a group ingestion of onion rings, placed whole on their tongues like
Communion wafers. Instead of toasting with his ‘other family’,’ most of
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together interestingly in the final season) and internal decay.
An older, simpler idyll is sought: ‘Whatever happened to Gary
Cooper? The strong silent type . . . ’ Tony complains repeatedly by
way of dismissing psychotherapy, but of course he, the strong yet far
from silent boss, is the one who has had to solicit professional help.
‘Made in America’ is the title of the final episode (no. 86), and the
pun works on several levels – at first glance one sees the manufacturing label whose gradual disappearance has been a perpetual cause
for national malaise since before President Carter ill-advisedly spoke
that word. But the show’s audience knows that ‘made’ also signifies
something else here: the process of being ‘made’ is the elaborate ceremonial by which one becomes a fully fledged member of a ‘family’
and thus a full participant in the Mafia.
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8
Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations, trans. Anthony
Kerrigan (Princeton 1978) p. 10.
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whom are by now dead or comatose or imprisoned, Tony can only look
around diffidently at the anonymous Americans who sip their coffee or eat
their sandwiches, and worry about assassins and FBI tails. A.J. makes reference to Tony’s speech from episode 1 about holding on to the good
moments, but there is something far less reassuring about it this time
around. We have seen too much to trust to such a banality, and just as
their daughter Meadow dashes across the street and Tony looks up to see
the full reunion of his nuclear family, the screen cuts abruptly to black.
Water-cooler debaters surely missed the wider significance of the series’
final scenes if they argued exclusively over whether the harsh, sudden
ending (coming just as the jukebox pleaded, ‘Don’t stop’ – at which point
the series did stop) was supposed to signify Tony’s assassination. It was;
but its metaphorical aspirations within the series’ larger thematic go
further. On the basic plot level, it is strongly implied (though of course
one could argue different interpretations) that the man sitting at the
counter, who heads off to the toilets as Meadow finally successfully parallel parks and crosses the street, ends Tony’s life just as Tony looks up to
see Meadow enter the diner. (Emerging from the toilets armed would,
incidentally, be yet another Godfather reference.) The sudden cut to black is
the end of Tony’s consciousness, after which there is literally nothing
more; the assassin in question is credited only as ‘man in members only
jacket’. That should take the attentive viewer back to the first episode of
Season 6 (no. 66), which was entitled ‘Members Only’. In that episode
Tony was shot in the gut by his increasingly demented Uncle Junior. The
following episode, called ‘Join the Club’ (no. 67), begins the arc I referred
to above, where Tony dreams an alter ego who must negotiate himself out
of Tony’s coma by refusing to do the equivalent of ‘going toward the
light’, i.e. dying. Whether one thinks ‘the club’ represents death or life,
clearly ‘membership’ here is some sort of metaphor for whether or not
one is allowed to remain conscious in the world. To the extent that an
indefinite and pleasurable extension of that consciousness is a
post-Hobbesian age’s highest aspiration, its unheroic hubris, the man in
the members only jacket represents its nemesis. He negates – as something does, eventually, for everyone who ever lives – the ‘longing of ours
never to die’ that ‘is our actual essence’.8 It is not really important who he
is or why he wants Tony dead.
Pop doggerel though its lyrics might be, the song playing in the final
scene also has significance within the series beyond the neat trick of
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Working hard to get my fill
Everybody wants a thrill
Paying anything to roll the dice
Just one more time . . .
Some will win
Some will lose
Some are born to sing the blues
Oh the movie never ends, it goes on and on and on and on . . .
But of course the ‘movie’ has just ended – at least it has for its protagonist. The fact that it goes ‘on and on and on and on’ for others in this
context inverts the pop anthem’s forcefully optimistic spirit; rather, this
fact is supposed to be painful, a crowning insult. Part of the pain of contemplating nothingness, as existentialists like Camus and Unamuno
argued, is a sort of resentment towards all the lives to be lived, all the
pleasures and desires to be had, that will not be one’s own. Even more
sardonically insulting is the chasm between people as to the respective
cast list of their ‘movies’: we are invariably the main character in our
own, very rarely an important piece of supporting cast, almost always a
bit player or extra.
As in much of existentialism, death is always at the centre of life in The
Sopranos. In many ways this series is more honestly death-obsessed than
HBO’s mostly contemporaneous drama Six Feet Under (2001 – 5), which
pitched itself as aggressively willing to look mortality in the face (it was set
in a family-run funeral parlour). Partly this is due, in the one as in the
other, to the protagonists’ line of work; but to view The Sopranos through
too restrictive a Mafia-genre optic would be to ignore its more universal
philosophical aspirations. Tony dies in the circumstances he dies in
because of his Mafia status; but other than the specific narrative behind
the final trigger-pull he is nothing more, in the final scene, than a person,
feebly grasping onto those few to whom his existence is meaningful (his
family) and presented with the greatest levelling force there is, at which
point all anyone can plead is ‘Don’t stop’.9 That we will invariably ‘pay
anything to roll the dice j just one more time’ for no better reason than
9
In this The Sopranos contains a direct rebuke to one of the only comparable
post-war American achievements in storytelling, John Updike’s Rabbit tetralogy
(1960–90) – whose last word, recording the dying thoughts of its protagonist,
simply reads: ‘Enough.’
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cutting to black right on the ‘Don’t stop’ plea. The key verse, I think, is
this one:
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10
High modernism’s character demotion – T. S. Eliot having Prufrock declare
he is not Hamlet – as well as its more comedic postmodern appropriation by
Tom Stoppard, is a distant cousin here: but the men and women of The Sopranos
as well as those of The Wire, do not accede to this as resignedly as Eliot’s antihero.
Their dilemma is located somewhere between Romanticism and modernism: that
is, the modern human’s problem is that the eclipse of old religious/
communitarian values allows for increasingly unlimited self-projection at the same
time as, paradoxically, modern scientific atheism demotes the individual human
life to being a meaningless speck in an indifferent universe. Here The Sopranos and
The Wire converge. In episode 58 of the latter, Detective Jimmy McNulty says:
‘You start to tell the story, you think you’re the hero, and then when you get done
talking . . . ’, not finishing the thought. But the thought is finished elsewhere in the
same episode, with the tawdry death of the outlaw Omar. Omar was a common
‘favourite character’ in The Wire because, among other reasons, he was so
brilliantly out of step with the rest of the show’s milieu: a sort of sassy urban
version of the Gary Cooper Tony Soprano is always looking for. His sudden death
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that we want ‘a thrill’ points to the simultaneously melancholic and lifeaffirming streak in Sopranos existentialism. That perhaps underscores, as
does the use of a Journey song, the show’s inescapably American milieu.
Gangster associate Bobby Baccalieri (Bobby Baccala) gives Tony his
guess as to what death by assassination is like in episode 78: ‘you probably
don’t even hear it’, a line that echoes in his head after Bobby has been
gunned down and Tony, in hiding in episode 85, contemplates a similar
fate. The abrupt soundlessness of The Sopranos’ final cut is clearly meant to
echo that comment of Bobby’s. But there are two other death models that
actually seem to be of more relevance to the whole of the Sopranos arc –
the sudden end of Tony’s nephew Christopher in episode 83 and the
living death of Uncle Junior as it is revealed in the poignant final scene
between him and Tony, where the extent of Junior’s Alzheimer’s becomes
clear.
Christopher, all told one of the show’s most pathetic characters, flips his
car off the road while driving intoxicated. Tony is in the car but escapes
with only minor injuries; he finishes Christopher’s life on the spot, ostensibly to punish him for falling off the wagon one too many times. The
episode is entitled ‘Kennedy and Heidi’ – the names of the two girls in
the other car whose approach causes the accident, and whose reaction we
briefly cut to after Christopher’s car crashes. The point, again, is to show
the abruptness with which one’s ‘movie’ can end, after which one is
simply an incidental player in the lives of others. There has been another
episode going on the whole time, that of Kennedy and Heidi, an episode
in which Christopher’s appearance is just a brief flash of light, followed
by sighs of nervous relief.10
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at the hands of an amoral pre-teen is as deflationary as Hamlet becoming
Prufrock.
11
Joshua Foa Dienstag, Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit (Princeton 2006) p. 33.
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Uncle Junior’s living death is even more existentially telling, for it
reveals in an exaggerated manner the inescapability of loss of meaning for
finite, self-conscious lives. Junior always loomed large to Tony as an existential problem: first, literally, as a rival for power who plots his death in
Season 1 and whose allegiance is never entirely clear thereafter; but
second, and in a sense more importantly, as a standing example of the
eventual decline of life into meaninglessness. Tony often tells Dr Melfi
that he sees Junior as a warning – an ageing, mediocre, childless gangster
whose money has all gone to lawyers. But then, through his dementia,
Junior becomes a warning about something else – and it is telling, in this
context, that Junior’s second attempt on Tony’s life comes from his senility
rather than any Mafia power struggle.
In the final scene between Tony and Junior it is revealed that the latter
has basically no memory of what he has done in his life. Tony tells him
that once upon a time he and his brother ‘ran North Jersey’, to which
Junior can only look away and droolingly intone ‘that’s nice . . . ’.
Considering the frequent attempts of Sopranos gangsters to shore up hopes
of enduring reputation against their ruin – ‘How will I be remembered?’
asks Johnny ‘Sack’ nervously as he enters terminal stages of cancer in
prison (episode 79) – Junior’s pathetic interaction with Tony’s news of his
life story, such as it is, should have warned the latter against too great an
investment in living for history. Perhaps it does: in any case, Tony hurries
out of the hospital and into his final scene.
The concerns of The Sopranos overlap considerably with an intellectual
tradition the political philosopher Joshua Foa Dienstag has recently
named (in wanting to reclaim it) pessimism. Pessimism in Dienstag’s
account ‘has little to do with psychology itself but with a claim of ontological misalignment between human beings and the world they
inhabit’11 – Freud, here, is a pessimistic philosopher, over and above the
founder of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis, in the end, does not help Tony
Soprano – but this is not because he is a ‘sociopath’, as Dr Melfi’s friends
(blandly assured of their ability to help non-sociopaths) keep warning her.
It is because the world-view of The Sopranos as a whole does not have
room for people solving their problems in this manner. Psychoanalysis
does not help Tony because, basically, people do not change. As in Sartre,
there is ‘no exit’ from existing with others – but also no exit from ourselves. Periodically, therapy makes Tony happier, or at least less irascible,
and every once in a while Dr Melfi gives him helpful advice about some
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35
12
Here again we are supposed to recall The Godfather, and Vito and Michael
Corleone’s never-realised wishes for their family business to become legitimate:
‘Governor Corleone, Senator Corleone . . . ’, etc.
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specific problem or other, but the idea that Tony could be liberated from
himself by talk therapy was always a non-starter.
Again, this is not because of anything peculiar to him – no one on the
show changes much. Carmela’s attempt to separate from Tony in Season
5 comes to naught, and she is making the same compromises with their
life of crime at the end that framed her series of ethical/religious crises in
the first seasons. A.J.’s brief flirtation with political and philosophical
gravity plays itself out quickly: his parents disabuse him of the notion that
he should join the army (‘he says he wants to get past the hate’) and land
him a cushy job in entertainment. Christopher never kicks his addictions.
The clever but unfocused Meadow, whose plans to become a doctor were
always a point of pride to Tony,12 decides instead to coast into her boyfriend’s law firm, where it is strongly implied she will be defending organised crime figures and corrupt politicians – thus repeating Carmela’s
series of moral compromises.
The way the figure of Tony’s mother, Livia, looms over the show,
especially in its first seasons, has perhaps skewed the critical focus on psychoanalysis’s place in The Sopranos. The mother is a minefield in vulgar
Freudianism, as Dr Melfi keeps reminding Tony, who can only protest
that, though he ‘understands’ Freud (‘I had a semester and a half at Seton
Hall’), he himself never wanted to fuck his mother. The sexual overtones,
of course, are there – why else name her ‘Livia’ but to suggest the febrile
incest politics of the Julio-Claudians? But if Livia is a Freudian figure, it is
at a deeper level than that. Dr Melfi’s best estimation of her – as
someone ‘incapable of experiencing joy’ – makes her a living negation of
the pleasure principle, and something considerably darker than a reality
principle, to the extent that the latter is just rational adjustment to social
life. She is a nemesis, once again, to post-Hobbesian humanity’s workaday
hubris: its desire to experience life pleasurably, ad infinitum. Really,
though, ‘It’s all a big nothing’, as she tells A.J. from her hospital bed in
Season 2 (in the same episode in which A.J. ‘stumbles onto existentialism’;
Livia ensures that this is not just an academic exercise), ‘Don’t expect happiness . . . you die in your own arms . . . ’, and so forth in her
not-quite-grandmotherly fashion. These musings return in episode 84,
when A.J., in therapy after his botched suicide attempt, tells everyone
what Livia informed him about life.
Even from beyond the grave, nothingness gets its revenge on the
post-Hobbesian pleasure principle. But then again, in Tony Soprano’s
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13
Pessimism, p. 30.
Tony’s sister Janice (one of the show’s truly incredible creations – though
space does not allow me to discuss her in the depth she deserves) is a standing
example of the mendacious vacuity in much Western appropriation, à la carte, of
Eastern spiritual motifs. Other examples: the Hasidic Jew who would rather die
than compromise his integrity, until he is threatened with castration (episode 3);
the local priest who basically shakes down Paulie Walnuts for spiritual protection
money (episode 74); and so forth.
14
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experience, pleasure often negates itself. As often as Tony learns the
straight-Freudian lesson that the pursuit of instinctual pleasure puts the
higher complexities of ‘civilisation’ at risk – his extramarital affairs continually threaten his family; taking immediately gratifying violent revenge
on Mafia enemies jeopardises long-term wealth-creation, etc. – he
equally often sees the more basic ‘ontological misalignment’ in the
achievement of human gratification. While frustration would be painful,
fulfilment eventually leads to boredom, and we face a never-ending
renewal of the cycle, until the song/movie suddenly stops. Boredom,
Dienstag writes, is ‘a peculiarly modern contagion, one of the long-term
effects of linear time’.13 Boredom or suffering – recall Meadow’s
announcement. The metaphor Tony uses several times to Dr Melfi is
‘chasing it’ – ‘it’ being that moment of completeness or transcendence,
always just out of reach, ‘and just when you think you got your hands
around it . . . ’ (see episodes 81 and 83) whoosh, it’s gone. Outside The
Sopranos this metaphor is often used in connection with addictive behaviours such as drug abuse or compulsive gambling. Thus cocaine or
meth, for example, create such an abnormal spike in the brain’s pleasuresaturation mechanism that one cannot but keep trying to return to and/
or eclipse. The show covers these examples too – but again, its philosophical point is more basic. Life itself is ‘chasing it’, and there is no Faustian
moment of getting one’s hands around it for good.
But if one stops ‘chasing it’, what is one left with? The Sopranos does not
put much stock in religious solutions: consider coma Tony’s strange,
comical encounter with the Buddhist monks in the episodes 67 and 68
arc. Other sites of potential sacred rebuke to the morally compromised
Sopranos universe are invariably revealed as false promises – most explicitly in Carmela’s platonic ongoing flirtation with her priest, but elsewhere
in the series as well.14 The mind-clearing, desire-annihilating aim of
Buddhism is nothing more, within Sopranos terms, than another version of
Uncle Junior’s blank living death. In the end, the postmodern Mafia
Catholicism with which he was raised suits Tony well enough. Sins of the
flesh are forgiven without much ado, just as Carmela at some point
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37
15
Walter Kauffman, From Shakespeare to Existentialism (New York 1960) pp. 1–24.
See also the hagiography of Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
( New York 1998), for whom Shakespeare, especially through the characters of his
major tragedies, anticipated Nietzsche’s transvaluation of values.
16
Antony and Cleopatra, I. i. 2.
17
Here I would count, besides Tony: Carmela, Janice, Livia, and Uncle Junior
on The Sopranos; for HBO’s other major works I would count The Wire, Deadwood,
and Rome, with it remaining to be seen whether the currently ongoing Big Love will
deserve a place.
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decides to simply ignore Tony’s philandering. The search for the transcendent, here, is just another sort of chasing it, as Tony finds out when he
can’t quite hang on to the spiritual epiphany he has (on mushrooms) at
the end of episode 81.
If The Wire is Dickensian, The Sopranos can only be called
Shakespearian, especially if we accept the philosopher Walter Kaufmann’s
claim that Shakespeare adumbrated (as he did much else) existentialism.15
Of course its language is demotic, where Shakespeare freely mixed the
demotic and the poetic. But it is Shakespearian in so far as it transmits a
philosophy through mimesis, and through characters that bring philosophy to life more than most philosophers do. It would be silly to compare
Tony directly to Hamlet or Lear, but at least when one compares him to
other mimetic efforts in contemporary American arts and letters (television, movies, novels, etc.), one gets a similar sense of the production of
uncanny and heretofore unseen depths that one might get in comparing
Shakespeare’s characters to those of Christopher Marlowe or Ben Jonson.
Tony is in many ways an unpleasant person, but there is an inner vastness
to him that is unequalled in the film or literature of our times. The
Godfather series splits early on between the life-affirming Vito and Sonny
Corleone and the increasingly morose, sepulchral Michael, stewing in his
moral oblivion; Tony, it might be said, incorporates all these characters.
In addition, he can never be made to seem the object of a morality tale
the way Michael Corleone or even Gatsby might. He is the hero in his
mimetic universe in much the same way Hamlet is in his – impossible to
love fully, impossible not to root for. He lacks Hamlet’s cognitive powers,
of course, but he often seems to ‘o’erflow the measure’16 of his life-world
much as some Shakespearian characters do. Only slightly less vast than
Tony are the other major figures of the series, and slightly less than them
the main characters of HBO’s other best 1990s and 2000s dramas.17 The
Sopranos thus should be ‘read’ – both as to the moral universe it creates
and the individual it places within that universe – more like Elsinore and
Hamlet than like the various postmodernist models of film studies would
currently allow.
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To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
(V. v. 19– 28)
The second half of this soliloquy has captured readers’ imaginations more
readily than the first, but the first three lines especially are some of
Shakespeare’s most evocative. Quoted within The Sopranos, they take on a
different affect than at the end of a relentlessly bleak tragedy. Tony is
never completely resigned to Livia’s view of life as ‘signifying nothing’.
But his desires – and Johnny Sack’s desires, and ours – to have life be
something, mean something, more than an infinite series of petty tomorrows will never quite be fulfilled either. Gary Cooper’s stoicism will not
save us from this conclusion. But life is also addictive enough to be
chased, all the way to ‘the last syllable of recorded time’ – in Tony’s case,
perhaps better to say the last two syllables, that power ballad turned
dirge, ‘Don’t Stop’.
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To close in this vein, consider one of The Sopranos neatest and easiest to
miss appropriations of high culture. The story arc of the fourth season
involves Tony’s increasing problems with the neighbouring New York
crime family, led by the ageing Carmine Lupertazzi. Carmine’s underboss, Johnny ‘Sack’, resentful of Carmine’s leadership, plots an assassination, with Tony’s connivance. At the last second, in episode 52, Tony calls
it off, telling his erstwhile crony that to create such chaos in Mafia organisation is ultimately bad for business all round; and anyway, the old guy
will die eventually. To which news Johnny Sack replies, incensed, that he
can’t bear to go to work tomorrow, take orders again ‘like it never fucking
happened?! . . . Creeps in this petty pace!’
I missed this allusion to Macbeth through several viewings of the
episode, lost instead in the profane rhythms of the gangland dialogue. But
true enough, it ties The Sopranos into one of Shakespeare’s great protoexistentialist moments, the speech Macbeth makes after he can only greet
news of his wife’s death with indifference: