The Sopranos Rewrites the Genre - From Mean Streets to Suburban Meadow

From Mean Streets to Suburban Meadow:
                   The Sopranos Rewrites the Genre

       Like Westerns, gangster pictures have moved in and out of vogue in Hol-
       lywood with the regularity of tides, often disappearing for years before
       suddenly returning in the form of a smash hit.
\
                                              -Harlan     Lebo, The Godfather Legacy

       The richest and most compelling piece of television-no,         of popular cul-     \

       ture-that    I've encountered in the past twenty years is a meditation on
       the nature of morality, the possibility of redemption and the legacy of
       Freud.                                           -Ellen   Willis, in 77ne Nation

       At this point in time it's a little bit hard to take mobsters all that seriously.
                                           -David    Chase, creator of The Sopranos

          he next chapter in the long-running mythological saga of the Ital-
          ian American mafia begins in a psychiatrist's waiting room in
          suburban New Jersey.
        There, uneasily contemplating a sculpture of a naked woman, sits
    Tony Soprano, an overweight, fortylsh Italian American husband and
    father who has been suffering from debilitating panic attacks. Con-
    fused and scared, he has reluctantly decided to do something unthink-
    able for someone in his line of work. A mafioso committed to ornerta,
    the code forbidding any discussion of mob business with outsiders,
    Tony Soprano has turned to the tallung cure for relief from his suffer-
    ing. And this tough leader of men seeks help from a woman, no less, a

FROM MEAN STR.EETS TO SURUK.BilN MEADOW I 137

  primly sexy paisana named Dr. Jennifer Melfi whose forebears came
  from the same "part of the boot" as Tony's family.
      What would bring a mob boss to such a state?
      Both of his families, the one at home and the one at the job, are
  busting his coglioni big-time. He's trying to do the right thing by his
  widowed mother, Livia, house-proud wife, Carmela, and two spoiled
  luds, A.J. (Anthony Jr.) and Meadow, while taking care of business as a
  capo in the New Jersey mob. His marriage is shaky, mainly because of
  his repeated infidelities with a series of "gumads," or mistresses. (What
  ironists these wiseguys are, calling the hookers and strippers they keep
, on the side by the southern Italian variant of comare, or godmother.)
      Tony's cantankerous mother is furious that he wants to move her
  into a nursing home. His bitter and volatile uncle, old-time mafioso
  Corrado "Junior" Soprano, wants to murder a rival in the restaurant run
  by Tony's childhood friend. Meanwhile, Czech gangsters are trying to
  break Tony's monopoly on garbage hauling in northern New Jersey.
  ("Waste management consultant" is how he describes his occupation to
  Dr. Melfi.) His loose cannon of a nephew Christopher deals with the
  upstart competitors by killing their representative-who also is a mob
  boss's nephew, and like Christopher, a member of the reckless, coke-
  snorting "new generation" of gangsters-and dumping the body on
  Staten Island, all without Uncle Tony's permission.
      And if this wasn't enough agitii, the feeling that the best days of
  "this thing of ours" have come and gone, and that he's not in the same
  league as the fabled mafia bosses of yore, haunts Tony. "Lately I'm get-
  ting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over," he tells Dr.
  Melfi. The psychiatrist's response is both clueless yet totally apt:
  "Many Americans, I think, feel that way."
      All the above unfolded in barely a half-hour's screen time in the de-
  but episode of The Sopranos, which aired Sunday, January 10, 1999, on
  the premium cable network Home Box Office. But the new series of-
  fered much more than efficient exposition. The writing-by the show's
  creator, the veteran television writer and producer David Chase, and
  others-was witty, multilayered, and as profane as is possible only on a
  premium cable channel. The acting, by a predominantly Italian Ameri-
  can cast led by James Gandolfini, up to then a reliable supporting actor

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in movies and TV, was vivid yet nuanced. The camera work, by director
of photography Alik Sakharov, was cinematic-the          show is shot on
35-millimeter film stock instead of videotape-with naturalistic light-
ing giving compositions a painterly quality rarely seen on network tele-
vision.
    The show's opening credit sequence was a masterpiece of montage.
To the pounding rock beat of the sinister theme song, "Woke Up This
Morning," Tony Soprano drives his big black SUV from New York City
through the Lincoln Tunnel and into northern New Jersey, past the
hideous wasteland of oil refineries and truck stops, through an old eth-
nic worlung-class neighborhood, and on to his destination: his subur-
ban home, with its manicured lawns, lush greenery, and swimming
pool. Besides being technically accomplished, the superbly shot, ed-
ited, and scored sequence worked as metaphor for Italian American
upward mobility over three generations, from poor immigrants to blue-
collar residents of urban Little Italys to middle-class suburbanites.
     The Sopranos from the first proclaimed itself both the heir to the     1

tradition epitomized by the Godfather films (with a secondary debt to
Scorsese's Goodfellas and the James Cagney classic Public Enemy) and
a radical break from the CopPola-Puzo trilogy. The series, as critic
Stephen Holden observed in The New York Times, "carries 'The God-
                                                                            I

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father's epic themes into the present, turning tragedy into comedy
and vice-versa."' David Chase also extends The Godfather's depiction of
organized crime as a more raffish form of capitalism into the twenty-
first century, with mob business once again part of a much larger cor-
ruption.
     That The Sopranos never could have existed without The Godfather
was obvious from the first episode, when Tony's nephew Christopher
Moltisanti misquotes one of the film's most famous lines as he and an-
other gangster dispose of a corpse. When Christopher mutters, "Lewis
Brasi sleeps with the fishes," the other, older hoodlum disgustedly cor-
rects him, "Luca Brasi. It's Luca Brasi."
     The Sopranos is nothing if not acutely self-conscious about its debt
to the Coppola-Puzo films and to other exemplars of the genre. Critic
Chris Messenger, in "The Godfather" and American Culture: How the
Corleones Became "Our Gang," observes, "No single vehicle has so well
captured America's decades-long affair with mob narrative as does The

Sopranos." Jlavid Chase is "unrelenting in his portrayal of a culture and
media industry so deeply imbued with what could be called Godfather-
                                                                                 I
ness-that there is no way out to an original or summary statement of
influence and effect, origin and ~ e ~ a r a t i 0 n .That
                                                       j ' ~ awareness extends
to the show's characters, who "live in an America that has been com-
pletely colonized by T h e G ~ d f a t h e r . " ~
      "Once I got started on writing the pilot, it became sort of central to
the idea that these guys would have been shaped by especially 'The
Godfather,' " David Chase has said. "They refer to 'The Godfather' all
the time, that they would live 'The Godfather' in their heads. They
would talk about 'The Godfather,' and they would compare things to
'The Godfather.' And to a certain extent, 'Goodfellas.' But mostly, I
think, for a lot of wiseguys, 'The Godfather' is like the Koran."'
      Chase and his writers deploy their life-imitates-art strategy so effec-
tively that the show's characters seem to live within the narrative frame
of the Mafia myth as much as they inhabit an actual geographic entity
called New Jersey. When Christopher shoots a bakery clerk in the foot,
the act evokes the incident in Goodfellas when Tommy De Vito, the
psychotic hoodlum played by Joe Pesci, shoots Spider, a young waiter
in a tavern, played by Michael Imperioli. In another episode, Carmela
and her women friends attend a lecture about the accomplishments of
Italian American women. The gung-ho speaker, in the midst of her
paean to paisanas, deplores pop-culture portrayals of Italian American
women as mob wives; the remark wounds the respectability-craving
Carmela and outrages her friends. Jennifer Melfi's ex-husband Richard
is a militant antidefamationist who complains incessantly about movies
that depict Italians as gangsters. He's frustrated when Jennifer tells
him he should be more concerned about ethnic cleansing, and his son
says that mafia stories, rather than slurring Italian Americans, consti-
tute a; American pop-culture mythology, as the western once did.
      The male psychiatrist whom Tony consults when Dr. Melfi won't
see him justifies his refusal to accept Tony as a patient by saying, "I
p a t c h the news like everyone else. I know who you are. And I saw An-
alyze This. I don't need the ramifications that could arise from treating
someone like yourself."
      Tony's indignant rejoinder is priceless: "Analyze This? Come on, it's
a fuclung comedy!"

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     At the most mundane level, The Sopranos' debt to The Godfather is
evident in the frequent allusions to the Corleone trilogy. Silvio Dante,
Tony Soprano's consigliere and owner of the Bada Bing strip club, loves
to quote Michael Corleone's "Just when I thought I was out, they pull
me back in!" from 111. The Luca Brasi allusions continue after the se-
ries's first episode and Christopher's mangling of the "sleeps with the
fishes" line. In the second season, the older gangster who corrects him,
Sal "Kig Pussy" Bonpensiero, himself ends up sleeping with the fishes
when Tony discovers he has been informing to the FBI and conse-
quently "whacks" him. The lulling takes place on Tony's boat, and he
and his henchmen dump Pussy's body in the ocean. Not long after-
ward, as Tony uneasily celebrates his birthday with friends and family,
his daughter Meadow gives him Billy Bass, a mechanical fish that
"sings" the A1 Green soul classic "Take Me to the River."
     Chase has paid homage to the ur-mob movie in several of his cast-
ing choices. Dominic "Uncle Junior" Chianese played Johnny Ola, a
partner of the Meyer Lansky-like Hyman Roth, in Godfather 11. An
episode titled "The Weight" features Richard Bright, who was the
stone-faced Corleone hit man A1 Neri-the        guy who whacked poor
Fredo in the boat on Lake Tahoe-in all three Godfather films.
    Just as actual gangsters like Salvatore "Sammy the Bull" Gravano
are rabid Godfather fans, so is Tony Soprano. His wife Carmela tells the
freeloading priest whom she keeps around as a spiritual adviser that
Tony watches DVDs of Godfather 11"all the time." Tony predictably is
not a fan of 111. (The priest, however, wants to know, "Where does he
rank Goodfellas?")
     But the show's relationship to The Godfather goes much deeper
than clever allusions and casting choices. David Chase has spoken of
his long-standing desire to create a gangster story; he and his father
would avidly watch TV shows like 7'lze Untouchables and movies like
Public Enemy while he was growing up in New Jersey. But what story
would he tell? Where could he possibly take the genre, after not only
The Godfather and Goodfellas but also Donnie Brasco (released in 1997,
only two years before The Sopranos debuted), with its dispassionate
view of the avarice, brutality, and sleaze of quotidian mob life? Hadn't
it all been done?
     Chase's struggle to carve out his own piece of fictive mob turf has

FR.OM MEAN STR.EETS TO SUBlJRBAN MEADOW / 141

    him grappling with what literary critic Harold Bloom famously dubbed
    the anxiety of influence. Bloom's theory of the psychology of influence
    posits a conflict of Oedipal dimensions between an artist and his or her
    creative forebears. (Bloom cites the workings of influence on poets, but
    his theory applies to any artist.) Artists must struggle to find their own
    voice through an ambivalent and anxiety-ridden relationship with the
    precursors whom they most admire. The artist must "swerve" away
    from the admired forebears by taking a corrective action that implies
    that although the formidable precursor was correct up to a point, the
    "new" artist has surpassed the i n f l ~ e n c e . ~
        David Chase swerved away from Puzo, Coppola, Scorsese, et al, by
    embracing the declino del padrino and relocating the gangster story
/
    from its traditional urban, working-class setting to the affluent suburbs.
    According to Fred GardaphC, Chase has conceived T h e Sopranos in
    "the tradition and spirit of the U.S. gangster film," making it "a com-
    mentary on not only the genre but on contemporary life in the United
    States." By moving the gangster to the suburbs, where today most
    Americans live, Chase "has breathed new life into this cultural icon
    that has captured the attention of American audiences since his first
    appearance in the early silent films."6
        Chase himself has observed:

       T h e Godfather and Goodfellas . . . were neighborhood movies
       about the old neighborhood. This is a suburban story. This is
       about mobsters in suburbia. And for me that's not farfetched be-
       cause I grew up in the suburbs in New Jersey and that's where
       the mobsters were. They had begun, where I lived, to move out
       of the city of ~ e w a r k New
                                  ,     Jersey, into the surrounding, sort of
       leafy suburbs. And that's what I grew up with.
           . . .' I mean, it doesn't take place in Little Italy. You don't
       have sit-downs in New York . . . He's [Tony Soprano] in the sub-
       urbs, he goes to the garden store and has a house with a lawn
       and all that. &,kids         go to a suburban school. He drives a
       Suburban, as a matter of fact.'

       "When you think of the mob, you immediately think the Lower
    East Side, Little Italy or the Bronx," says actor Michael Rispoli, who

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played the terminally ill mob boss Jaclue Aprile in the first season of
The Sopranos. "Hut instead they put it in suburbia, which made it ac-
cessible to all suburbanites, so they can't say, 'Well, that's not a world I
know about.' It is a world they do know about, and [organized crime] is
happening in their m i d ~ t . " ~
    Relocating the mob narrative from urban mean streets and social -
clubs also links The Sopranos to other pop-culture works about subur-
ban malaise, including films such as American Beauty and director
Todd Solondz's Welcome to the Dollhouse and Happiness. Chase's gam-
bit resonates for yet another, real-world reason: it makes sense for
criminals to leave the city because the 'burbs offer more opportunities
for enterprising crooks.
    T h e New York Times reported during the summer of 2004 that a
popular school superintendent in Roslyn, Long Island, had been in-
dicted for stealing millions of dollars in school district funding. "Our
enduring image of government corruption has to do with big-city pols
and the golden era of Tammany Hall, but there aren't any Boss Tweeds
navigating Lexus sport utility vehicles along Main Street here," the
Times reporter o b s e r ~ e dThe
                              . ~ influence of Ross Tweed and Tammany
was on the decline back in the 1920s, and New York City government
has been "relatively clean" for decades. "Not so suburbia. In fact, to
read the news these days is to survey a sprawling realm of suburban
malfeasance that would leave the Tammany pols humbled."1°
    The Times cited a range of crimes, from school funding rip-offs to
costly insurance scams to travel voucher fraud to sexual abuse, perpe-
trated by public officials and their accomplices. But these Long Island
misdeeds pale in comparison to what's been happening in Tony So-
prano's home state. In a subsequent article, the Times jocularly tallied
instances of fraud and other corruption in New Jersey politics, most in-
volving associates of Governor James McGreevey-a major fund-raiser
indicted for soliciting campaign contributions in exchange for govern-
ment favors, appointments of ethically challenged andlor incompetent
persons to high posts, and, most egregious, the indictment of the gover-
nor's top campaign contributor, whom McGreevey unsuccessfully sup-
ported to be head of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, on
charges of hiring a prostitute to try to thwart a federal investigation.

FR,OM MEAN STR.EETS TO SIJBURBAN M E A D O W 1 1 4 3

        Twice in the article the correspondent, Peter Appelbome, reached
    for Sopranos analogies to give the paper's readers a sense of the degree
    of the sleaze and alleged criminality of Jersey politics. The pertinent
    pop-culture referents for suburbia have changed, as now T h e Stepford
    Wives has been supplanted by T h e Sopranos. The scandal involving the
    top campaign contributor offered, according to Applebome, "enough
    familial amity and Machiavellian moxie for a month's worth of intrigue
    at the Bada Bing.""
        But New Jersey isn't the only state whose quiet, tree-lined streets
    have attracted wiseguys. In September 2004 federal prosecutors in-
    dicted Anthony Megale, a resident of Stamford, Connecticut, on rack-
/
    eteering, illegal gambling, and extortion charges, claiming that he was
    the underboss of the Gambino organized crime organization. The U.S.
    attorney for Connecticut said that the presence of the Gambino crime
    family underboss in Stamford "troubles us," but another federal prose-
    cutor observed, "Organized crime is in the suburbs because suburbs
    are nice places to live . . . There's no reason why the chief executive of-
    ficer of an organized crime family does not want to live nicely in
    Wilton, Conn. There are just as many opportunities in the suburbs as
    there are in cities, and probably less competition."12
        (The usually au courant David Chase thus far hasn't exploited the
    possibilities for Tony and company to conspire with corrupt officials to
    get a piece of the suburban spoils. The closest he's come is a plotline
    about New Jersey mobsters, including the Sopranos, colluding with a
    Newark city councilman on a waterfront development project.)
        But David Chase's relocation of the gangster story wasn't only geo-
    graphic. Well aware that the genre needed reinvention-"Who cares
    about a mob crew in Brooklyn or New Jersey; we've seen that and seen
    that and seen that"13-Chase ventured into new territory: the domestic
    and intrapsychic lives of his gangsters, and their conflicts in both
    realms.
        T n e Sopranm hardly ignores the daily business of organized crime.
    We see Tony and his crew conning and hustling. We watch them hijack
    trucks, perpetrate insurance and stock market scams, run high-stakes
    poker games, deal drugs, connive with corrupt politicians. We witness
    the mayhem and murder they commit in the name of "business." But

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organized crime per se takes a back seat to the show's depiction of men
engaged in coping with their families, lovers, the noncriminal world,
and each other.
    Sons and grandsons of poor immigrants from Campania, they and
their friends and families struggle with some very American prob-
lems-an uncertain economy, rebellious children, fiercely competitive
college entrance exams, the burden of caring for aging parents, sub-
stance abuse. The men and women in Sopranoland have been affected
by the profound changes in gender roles and sexual behavior that have
transformed America in the wake of feminism and the sexual revolu-
tion. They're well aware that the rules of engagement in what used to
be quaintly called "the battle of the sexes" have been rewritten since
Tony's cherished 1950s.
    They also cope with the changes in America's racial order since the
civil rights revolution of the 1960s. Tony and Christopher in particular
cling to a racist view of blacks and other non-Euro-Americans as
threatening outsiders. Tony is openly hostile to Meadow's half-black,
half-Jewish boyfriend, and he takes sadistic pleasure from humiliating
an African American cop who stops him for a traffic violation. But Tony
will do business with blacks when it's expedient (he forms an alliance
with a corrupt activist minister) and his intolerance also stops at the
bedroom, when he takes a Latina gumad named Valentina.
    The show's central themes-the decline of organized crime and its
impact on the men and families who depend on this waning tribal sub-
culture and its peculiar economy-converge in the fleshy figure of
Tony Soprano. Despite all the trappings of "the good life" (cue the Tony
Bennett tune) that he has accumulated, Tony is beset by feelings of
loss and a belief that the good old days-for both America and the
American mafia-have passed.
    When, in his first therapy session with Dr. Melfi, she asks him,
"Are you depressed?," Tony demurs, and then fumes.
    "Whatever happened to Gary Cooper, the strong silent type?" he
says. "That was an American. He wasn't in touch with his feelings. He
just did what he had to do. See, what they didn't know is that once they
got Gary Cooper in touch with his feelings they couldn't get him to
shut up. It's dysfunction this, dysfunction that, dysfunction vaffancul'."

FllOhl M E A N S T R E E T S TO S U K U H B A N MEADOW I 1 4 5

        Though Tony is a baby-boomer Italian American who as a young
    man casually participated in his generation's cultural rebellion-long
    hair, drug experimentation, rock music-as       a suburban paterfamilias
    he longs for the 1950s, with its cultural conservatism, political qui-
    etude, and moral certainties. When his daughter, Meadow, speaks
    frankly about sex at the dinner table, pointing out that the twenty-first
    century is about to arrive, Tony snaps, "In this house it's 1953."
        Like many middle-class American white males of his generation,
    he's confused by what America has become and is uneasy about his sta-
    tus in a changed nation.
        "All through the last part of the nineties-all the period that The
1
    Sopranos was gestating, you might say-was a period in which Ameri-
    cans didn't know where to turn, culturally and politically," observes
    Flavia Alaya, a New Jersey-based academic, political activist, and
    author. (Alayals memoir of love and sex in the 1960s, Under the Rose,
    has become a feminist classic. In it she chronicles her relationship as a
    young Italian American academic with the Irish American Catholic
    priest and housing activist Harry Browne, with whom she had three
    children before Rrowne went public with their affair so they could
    marry.) Alaya is an unabashed fan of The Sopranos and has little pa-
    tience with denunciations of the show by Italian Americans. "I really
    think this program is a wonderful cultural event-not         one that we
    should loathe, but one that we should welcome," she says.

       Really, we've been in a quandary-land of a fog. As someone
       who considers herself on the American left, sort of sophisticated
       politically, I felt that even more. I don't know where Chase fits,
       but I don't think he's a conservative Republican! So I think he
       understands, or at least feels, that Americans are going through
       some land of, "Where do we go from here? What do we do with
       ourselves?" The fact that it was the turn of the century, too, is
       also a condition of our malaise. So, everything should have been
       better, right? The millennium came, and it went, "Thud!" So,
       when Tony is having this nervous breakdown, it's like the entire
       country. To me, everybody's saying, "Yeah, that's me. That could
       be me. That's us!" That's all of us trying to deal with this.14

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     David Chase pinpoints a delicious irony in Tony's malaise: "The
kernel of the joke, the essential joke, was that life in America had got-
ten so savage, so selfish even a mob guy couldn't take it anymore. That
was the essential joke. And he's in therapy because what he sees every-
day upsets him so much. He and his guys invented selfishness, they in-
vented me first, they invented it's all about me. And now he can't take
it because the rest of the country has surpassed them."15
     Imagine Tony's response to the theft of millions in funding by that
Long Island schools superintendent. "Stealin' from hds! Madonn', can
you believe that shit!" he might exclaim. (His indignation would no
doubt be mixed with some admiration for the scale of the scam, not to
mention envy.)
    Tony Soprano is both exotic and familiar, an upper-middle-class
family man "who, except for his occupation, is pretty much like the rest
of us."16 The show's focus on Tony's domestic and inner lives brings
him closer to us. We can relate to his problems with his wife and chil-
dren, his aging mother, and his other difficult relatives, and to his loss
of certainty about his place in the world. His concerns, and those of
the other men and women in his world, become ours, so much so
that we see in "our mobsters, ourselves," as cultural critic Ellen Willis
puts it."
     Critic Carlos Clarens's important insight-"Stay close to a charac-
ter, whether in print or on the screen, and that character [runs] the risk
of turning into a protagonist"18-explains how audiences can come to
identify with malefactors like Tony and company. The Sopranos takes
this tactic further than any previous mafia movie, novel, or television
show. The show's format-a       continuing television drama, with each
episode approximately an hour long and uninterrupted by commer-
cials-allows viewers to spend more time in the company of its charac-
ters than a two-hour film. (As of this writing, five seasons comprising
sixty-five episodes have been shown, and one more season is planned.)
We get to know much more about Tony and the men, women, and chil-
dren in his world than we ever did about the Corleones. We know them
far more intimately, too, being privy to their dreams and fantasies, their
fears and desires, their strengths and frailties. Knowing them so well,
we can be deeply affected by them.