“The Sopranos” and the Allure of Evil
“The Sopranos,” hailed by many as the greatest show in TV history, was one of the first introducing us to the Lovable Villain type.
Episode five of The Sopranos, College, opens on a wooded campus in Maine. Tony Soprano is with his daughter Meadow (a cheeky Jamie Lynn-Sigler), to see if the school is a good fit for her. It should be a break from his strenuous New Jersey life, where he is a huncho in the “waste management business” — code for his Italian-American crime family. The road trip should also be an opportunity for father and daughter to bond. New Jersey, however, follows them even to the far reaches of New England. At a gas station, Tony spots a mobster-turned-FBI informant. After dropping Meadow off at a campus, Tony stalks and kills the man, juggling his roles as father and mob enforcer, struggling to keep the two apart.
We know Tony has killed people — you don’t become a made man with clean hands. But, as he garrotes the snitch to death, this is the first time we actually see him do it. If you were charmed into thinking Tony is a flawed but decent guy — perhaps by James Gandolfini’s seductive performance — the scene is a brutal reminder that he is not, that he is an antihero at best, capable of extreme good and extreme evil.
We now know that the scene almost didn’t air. Twenty-five years ago, before the episode ran on HBO, the company’s CEO Chris Albrecht vetoed the scene, believing it would make Tony so unlikeable it would hack at viewing numbers. Albrecht thought people sided with murderous protagonists when their depravity was revealed through innuendo, that they revoked their affection when that innuendo was replaced with explicit scenes of violence.
Show creator David Chase prevailed over Albrecht, arguing it was implausible not to show a mafia boss dealing out the ultimate punishment for violating the mob’s ultimate rule — thou shall not snitch. This especially because Tony, in the first few episodes of season one, confesses his angst over what he believes are the mob’s falling standards — the inability of mobsters to keep their mouths shut, to live up to the Gary Cooper ideal, to be “the strong, silent type.”
Chase, it turned out, was right. The episode endeared fans to the show and to Tony, who remains a cult hero till date, like Michael Corleone (The Godfather character whom the show references often) and Tyler Durden, from Fight Club. The show became, over six seasons and eight years, one of the most successful in TV history, winning twenty-one Emmys. It heralded the age of prestige TV, a category including The Wire, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and Better Call Saul. It proved TV, like cinema, can be high art.
Chase appreciated the allure of evil, the reserves of love and admiration that bad boys, even murderous bad boys, can command. Tony Soprano enjoys our affection even when he provides many occasions to disillusion us of it, to have us reevaluate our siding with him. He cheats blithely on his wife, Carmela, a well-coiffed Eddie Falco who, with pursed lips and vacant stares, conveys the frustration of being in a sexless, loveless, and morally questionable marriage.
Tony gives us many other reasons to despise him. He is not only a misogynist but also a racist, asking Meadow in the College episode if she was going to India to learn “how to not get diarrhea.” He reserves special scorn for black people, giving his daughter’s biracial college boyfriend an earful in one scene. In another scene, he suffers a panic attack after seeing the smiling, tuxedoed black figure on an Uncle Ben’s box — the show’s dark humor at its most fluent.
He also orders the torching of his friend’s restaurant. He whacks his cousin. He almost strangles one of his lovers to death, and almost kills his own mother, Livia, a Nancy Marchand who is a convincing picture of misanthropy.
We excuse him for these deeds because, though they disgust us, we understand the logic behind them. We understand they serve a practical purpose — to enforce mafia law, to save Tony’s own skin, and to protect his family. You could say the FBI informant knew the rules when he joined the mob. And Tony puts his goomah in a chokehold only because she threatened to disclose their affair to his wife, threatening to snip at the thin thread binding House Soprano. He kills his cousin to forestall his capture by a rival gang, giving him the mercy of a quick death. He nearly kills his own mother because she plotted to kill him. He has the restaurant torched to prevent an assassination from taking place there, which would put it out of business. It is a zany decision, the sort only someone used to solving problems with violence would make, but his heart is in the right place. So, we forgive him, recalibrating our moral standards to accommodate him. Years later, we will show the same leniency to Walter White, Breaking Bad’s antihero. We’ll say he only got into the meth business to save his family from financial ruin.
As the years pass, however, Tony grows progressively immoral, his crimes harder to excuse or forgive. I imagine David Chase wanted to test the tensile strength of our empathy, to see how far it could bend. Tony becomes cruel to his wife, and frustrates her efforts to divorce him. He beats a man for dating a woman he broke up with, in said woman’s presence, effectively emasculating him — not because he loves her, but because he resents that her new lover makes her happier than he ever did, to his mind a kind of emotional cuckoldry.
In another scene, he gives an underling a beat-down, just because the chap’s athletic build reminds him of his own bygone youth. Elsewhere, he nearly sleeps with the fiancée of his heir apparent, the drug-addled Christopher Moltisanti, played by Michael Imperioli. Tony even begrudges the younger man’s efforts to wean himself off heroin.
I’m particularly repulsed by one scene in the home of Tony’s sister Janice, an Aida Turturro with a mop of curly hippie hair. She, like Tony, is not the strong, silent type, her emotions often finding release in destructive torrents. Tony chalks this up to the “Soprano gene,” blaming biology to relieve himself of ethical responsibility. Janice, however, takes steps to change, joining an anger management class, staving off an angry fit for weeks. Tony is bent on derailing her progress, seeing it as an indictment of his own moral torpor. He goads her, relentlessly, until she yields to her rage. He walks away, smiling, satisfied. This version of Tony is not immoral in order to save his own skin or that of his kin, or because it serves any practical goal. He is immoral because it feeds his ego, because his insecurities compel him to make the people around him share in his misery. It is here our sympathy for him starts to cede room to our repulsion.
Nonetheless, we are at this point too invested in Tony to turn on him completely. We still hope he escapes punishment. We hope he does not get whacked in the show’s final scene, where it looks like he might get done in, as he dines with his family in a restaurant. We don’t learn what happens, the screen blacking out, leaving us guessing, the uncertainty consistent with the demands of moral ambiguity that the show constantly asks of us.
We can hardly forswear our sympathy because Tony surprises us with bursts of kindness. His moving concern for his two children. His solicitude for the son of a late colleague. How he feels upset when a pregnant sex worker is murdered, while everyone else only grieves the fact that she was killed in an inconvenient place. It is why Carmela sticks with him for as long as she does. Sure, she is smitten with the material trappings, but she is also charmed by his capacity for goodness. Carmela is us, and we are Carmela.
Tony’s sympathetic side ensnares us especially because it comes with Gandolfini’s superb acting. Gandolfini is larger than life in every sense of the word — his Bigfoot frame, his breezy charm, his colorful bon mots, his toothy smile promising mischief. Even when he says something unforgivably bigoted, it is with such humor, with such spring in his step, that you might be tempted to forgive the unforgivable. Gandolfini makes crime look cool, look like a faddish political statement, to the point we catch ourselves siding with him against the FBI agents out to get him. His vices acquire the veneer of a righteous protest, railing against convention and authority, a breakaway from our boring moral lives.
We also forgive Tony’s crimes because they are only make-believe, only televised immorality. We watch him in the privacy of our homes, the anonymity giving us the permission to tolerate his behavior, knowing no one will judge us for it, and knowing no harm will come to us. In reality, we would react to a person like Tony by keeping our distance, just like the Cusamanos, the Sopranos’ next-door neighbors.
As they drive through forested Maine, Meadow asks her father if he is in the mafia. He denies it, outraged. He eventually makes a concession, not admitting to her charge, but revealing just enough to placate her sulky-teenager silence. He says some of his money comes from “illegal gambling and whatnot.” Then he asks, “How does that make you feel?” The Sopranos asks this question at every turn — how does what we know about Tony Soprano make us feel? We feel repulsed, but also sympathetic, enthralled… and thoroughly entertained.