Of Democrats, Sopranos and MTV Awards

What a night of TV, readers. It's a five-hour marathon of madness, between the Democratic debates, the second to last Sopranos episode, the crappy crap known as Entourage, and the MTV movie awards (Rihanna rocks!)

First things first: I enjoyed the debates, except for some mad boring interludes, and I have to say I was most impressed by HRC and Edwards (and Kucinich of course). Hillary was just calm and confident and smooth and I dunno, as a woman I just can't help but be proud to see the way she tangles with the big boys. Edwards' answers on the "bumper-sticker" slogan of the war on terror and healthcare were top-notch. Kucinich on the other hand, is just right on everything.

Now, on to the big show. There's not much one can say about this epsiode of The Sopranos except "holy sh*t," and not in a good way. As a good friend once said five minutes ago, it's like Act V of Macbeth, Hamlet or Lear when the Shakespearean shit hits the fan and the body count starts growing. Tony is all alone now, and it's both tragic and fateful. This wise person also pointed out that Tony's fate is irrelevant from here on in--his entrance into that dark room and laying down on the bed all alone signifies a death, his metaphorical death. Contrasted with the beginning of the episode when he was huddling confidently with Bobby and Silvio and sharing his concerns with them, it's quite stark.

Now, one of the reasons I am attributing much of the deep thoughts to someone else is because I spent a good part of the episode peering around the corner or running out of the room or covering my eyes or something like that. Despite my love for the show, I haven't become desensitized to its violence.

So, what's it gonna be for Tony? Everyone keeps saying death, prison, Feds, but I would add "mundane obscurity" or "diminished mob role" to the litany of possibilities, both of which would be tragic in their own way. Also, I think shit is definitely going down with AJ.

And as a coda, the massive male make-out sesson between Will Ferrell and Sacha Baron Cohen on the MTV awards made my week. It was super hot and hilarious. How ridiculous, then, that the question of gay rights is still on the table, politically speaking. Oh well.

Slate on Yeats on the Sopranos

Slate's literary darlin' Meghan O'Rourke discusses the meaning of Yeats' "The Second Coming" on the Sopranos--something that was thoroughly chewed over in the blogosphere a ways back. Still a worthwhile read for those who can't get enough Sops-talk. Holla.

The Sopranos and Poetry

"Our society is going to the brink of extinction due to male aggression, and so is the Sopranos."-swvl.

I'm loving all the poetic references in the recent eps of the Sopranos... too bad AJ had to drop out of college so we can't get his English teacher talking more than she already has about Wordsworth "The world is too much with us") and Yeats' ("The Second Coming"--appropriate title for this episode).

Last week's Wordsworth's sonnet emphasized a sense of weariness and being overwhelmed by the inhumanity of the industrial age, while the episode focused on AJs growing discontent and sadness with similar aspects of our society. This week, Yeats' apocalyptic lines were about the anti-christ and the end of our age (his belief system is mad complicated, so we won't get into it) while the episode was about the "precipice of an enormous crossroads" (thanks Little Carmine) that both Tony and AJ have reached. AJ tried to bring about his own mini-apolocalypse with a suicide attempt, while Tony is doing what I've been saying he's going to do, which is "suicide by Phil Leotardo"--either way, folks, the Falcon really cannot hear the Falconer.

Who knows what will happen? The previews make it look like all occasions are about to inform against Tony, to spur someone's dull revenge. In other words, he's about to get turned on. And the stuff about terrorism is obviously meant to parallel the specter of violence, endless revenge, and dread that both we and the characters experience. The episode was truly top-notch, so I'm going to leave my commentary at that.

And now, for your over-analyzing/general edification benefit, here are the two poems.

The World is Too Much With Us
William Wordsworth

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. -Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

The Second Coming
W.B Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert.

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Sopranos: Tony Cuts Himself Loose

*SPOILERS BELOW*
Seriously.


I don't know about you, readers fair, but my apartment was in mourning last night. We were in mourning for Christopher, whose loss seemed so sudden and cruel, but we were also in mourning for Tony, in mourning for every ounce of Tony's humanity that has saved us from hating him over the past decade or so of the show. As a wise friend of mine said last week, the two are the most similar characters on the show; they both have a deadly mix of vicious brutality and sentimental angst.

There was something deeply uncomfortable going on last week when Christopher, flipping steaks, told Tony,"I thought you of all people would understand... you undertand the human condition." Christopher knows Tony's "weakness" is like his own and Tony can't stand it. And it's ironic that their final moment last night would come moments after Christopher asked the newly aggressive Tony, "whatever happened to 'stop and smell the roses?'"

Here's the rub-- Tony doesn't want to smell the fucking roses anymore. Or cry about the ducks, or the mangled baby seat, or the endless loss of innocence that comprises everyday life, the sad state that AJ bemoans in therapy. T no longer wants to hear that nagging voice telling him that every day is precious. He's had enough with those pesky emotions that complicate his life, that make him sad, that take away his balls when he confronts Phil.

As he tells Melfi in the dream sequence, Christopher was an "emotional drain"(or strain, I forget) on him. T justifies to himself that killing Chrissy means getting rid of a potential rat or traitor or fuckup, but the real reason he did it was to cut himself loose from the vulnerability that Chris shares with him, that Chris was never able to supress quite as well as uncle T. It's the classic literary device of the alter ego. Chris and Tony screwing the same women is a maifestation of their twinned state; they have too similar hangups, they're intimate in too many ways.

As Salon's always insightful Heather H. (who puts those Slate blowhards to shame) writes, "We're being offered a glimpse of just how many layers of self-deceit it takes for the man to get up in the morning, given all of the brutal acts he's committed. Tony feels alienated not only from his own feelings, but from everyone around him as they mourn Christopher's death in earnest."

After Chris' funeral, Tony's wild journey into the unleashed Id of a Vegas peyote trip reveals an utter narcissist unburdened by human emotions--as does his looming confrontation with Phil. His puking is a purge of his past, his grimacing and shouting and vulgar laughter in the casino and the hills are a revelation of a purely animal, purely self-gratifying state of mind. He's winning now at the roulette table, yes, winning in the masculine world he longs to dominate, but we liked him better when he had a little bit of loser, a little bit of Chris, in him.

The question of redemption now rests on AJ's shoulders, and Chase and co. are not making it clear in any way whether the only "son" left is going to enter his dad's world of male aggression and cruelty or leave it in time to save his soul.


Added thought: I keep feeling as if Tony's suffering from a massive onslaught of PTSD, that his morality has been thrown off due to the relentless drumbeat of his memories of brutality and violence that have finally penetrated.

Added thought 2: Tony also thinks he's God at this point-- he feels as if fate has conspired to put Chris' life in his hands, and the casino and mountain scenes reveal the fact that he's replaced his sense of mortality with a false concept of invincibility.

The Sopranos' Critique of the American Man

Last night's episode (see Salon for a great recap) was fittingly named Walk Like a Man, and it got me trying to solidify the growing feeling I've had all season that Chase et al. have something really important--and not so good-- to say about American masculinity.

Perhaps I got that distinct impression for the first time last season when the ailing, newly-existential Tony decided to prove he was still tough. He did so by picking a fight with his innocent bodyguard, beating the crap out of him, later staring at himself grimly in the mirror while coughing up blood, and finally throwing money at the poor guy by way of apology. In terms of the world within which Tony moves, he had proved his manliness. But in the grander scheme of things, his actions were so pathetic, bullying, and small that it was embarassing to us viewers. All this talk about being a real man and providing for others--and this is what it boiled down to? Schoolyard behavior. Incidentally, I suspect Chase had our fearless leader's efforts in the Middle East in mind as he sketched out that incident.

Then of course, there was the miserable plotline with poor outed Vito--even as Tony realized that Vito's sexuality had little bearing on his "manliness" (his earning capability and contribution to the family) Phil Leotardo was so disturbed by his cousin's being gay that he brought a large gang of thugs to Vito's hotel room and beat him to death. It was a scene eerily reminiscent of "honor killings" in Pakistan and Iraq, where family members murder rape victims and sexually active women to restore honor and dignity to the family. How different is violent American homophobia from the fundamentalist Islamic views on sexuality that we so decry? And what does "honor" mean in this case, when it's honorable for five men to gang up on one?

This season, the message has been even more explicit. Tony's cruel insistence that his brother-in-law "pop his cherry" by killing someone for the first time was the kick-off. But the apex was surely Phil Leotardo shouting angrily at the black-lipstick wearing, deviant Vito junior--all of ten years old-- commanding him to "BE A FUCKING MAN" after he himself had murdered the boy's father and caused his delinquency. The scene was so miserable and futile it was perversely funny.

Sure, we laughed at the notion that angry exhortations and a five minute talk could cure the kid. But just when we expected the more human Tony to take a different tack with the boy, our tragically imperfect "hero" came in and did the exact same thing. Less sociopathically, perhaps, but the message was the same: Man up, no explanation required. The irony was that neither Tony nor Phil was "man enough" to do the truly gentlemanly, gallant thing, which would be to give Vito's widow the money she needed to move her child away from town, away from trouble.

Finally, in last night's episode, Christopher's sobriety leads the other fellas to doubt his masculinity. Tony chides him for drinking non-alcoholic beer. When Christopher reminds Tony that because T has been to a shrink he understands the human condition and Christopher's "disease", Tony is embarassed. He counters with a nasty remark about how alcoholism isn't really a disease. But he's uncomfortable because he knows what Chris says is true. As swvl pointed out to me in one of our many late Sunday night Sopranos analyses, Chris and Tony are the most human characters on the show, the least in control of the rigid manliness required by their job. But instead of bonding over their shared emotions, Tony distances himself from his nephew. For them to relate over weaknesses would be to truly admit those weaknesses--and on some level would prevent Tony from being able to continue being a "good" boss, at least as is required by mob standards.

Later in "terapy," Tony tells Melfi through clenched teeth that his coming there is all a "jack off," (I think he did the same thing in a previous season), before breaking down in tears about his love and concern for his son. He denies his emotions and feels them violently in rapid succession--of course he hates his feelings, because they are an obstacle on the road to being a perfect man. And yet his suppression of them is impossible. His anger simmers.

Christopher's feeling of abandonment and betrayal, the humiliation he feels when he talks lovingly, drunkenly and sentimentally about his daughter and gets his "balls broken" by Paulie and all the guys, is another tipping point. They have rejected his expression of emotion, and he leaves. We think he is going to turn State's perhaps, abandon the code of masculinity that has abandoned him, but instead he lets the shit flow downhill by shooting a poor shmuck because the guy wouldn't listen when Chris "poured his fucking heart out." Again, the perils of being forced to conceal one's emotions. Again, the taking out of violent impulses on those who are helpless. Similarly, Tony's son AJ's participation in the beating of a deadbeat gambler are a clear result of dad's refusal to contend with his son's depression.

People talk a lot about the absence of father figures on the show, and the importance of father son relationships. I take that theme further and say that whether intended or not, the show eviscerates the entire conceit of father-son relationships as they are constructed by our patriarchal society. Emotionless, competitive relationships between men are a formula for disaster, says Chase, and the ruthless social world of the mob is a microcosm for our nation, our world. Just look at George Bushes Sr. and Jr to understand the damage of constructions of manliness and violence on the world's landscape.

Not a single male character on the show lives up to the men above him, or teaches the men below him without permanently damaging them. In my mind, what Chase is trying to say, is that there is no such thing as "real man" in their and our world, because our conception of manhood is inherently flawed.