Reckoning With Ghosts of Masculinity’s Past, Present, and Future - The Sopranos Two Decades Later
Spoiler Warning - Massive spoilers for the entire Sopranos series.
It took me twenty years to get around to watching The Sopranos in full and I’m so glad I waited. Had I continued binging with my girlfriend at the time in 2008, who would bring the show’s DVDs home from her job at Blockbuster, most of its subtextual explorations of masculinity and themes of violent exploitation would have been lost on me. I may have come away with a base understanding of “organized crime bad, but Tony still pretty cool,” and, honestly ... he still has his moments. Now, as we sit at the threshold of an upcoming prequel film its creators promise will live up to its legacy, I wonder if that’s even possible as I reflect on how The Sopranos challenged me in ways modern media consistently fails to, and why.
I’d venture to guess upon mindful observation that the average white American male can see the worst of himself all over HBO’s acclaimed Sopranos. And, oh boy, is it ever amplified with a massive bullhorn. Personally, in AJ Soprano, I see the most cringeworthy moments of abuse of my own adolescent privilege, completely lacking any self awareness or humility from my confused and abused masculinity’s past. Christopher Moltisanti reflects back to me the ceaseless existential and patriarchal conflict of my present; a struggle to make something of myself under the watchful eye of modern American patriarchy and neoliberal capitalism’s strict gaze or risk coloring outside its socially accepted lines by reckoning with demons of my past. He represents glimmers of hope that I might grow into someone capable of love, maturity, community, and real family if only I can be so bold to take the risk. And Corrado “Junior” Soprano, perhaps saddest of all, is my ghost of a potential future. In him we see a self-hating man who never had an immediate family of his own and is doomed to lose his mind suffering alone due to his poor life choices in an underfunded institution, in tandem with the American experiment itself.
Good art invites us to reflect and meditate on our own faults and insecurities. How those faults are resolved is up to us because stories can’t do that work for you. They can’t tell you the right way to behave, the correct choices to make, or which are the best manners to have. Modern Prestige TV and media often attempt to do exactly that by inviting us to project judgement outward to “those other bad white people... I’m already one of the good ones and this show reminds me of that fact.” The Sopranos isn’t concerned with babying the viewer into a moral imperative or to feel comfortable in its world. This creates space for nuance each viewer can explore on their own terms. That being said, if you find a guy who idolizes or sees the best of himself in any of the characters of The Sopranos… run. Run very far away.
There is a constant throughout The Sopranos, an aggressive performance three centuries of American patriarchal supremacy hitting a critical mass of dysfunction as both the dominant cultural force and a monster grown out of control as everything is crumbling around it. It’s a devil on the shoulder of every white man who has ever lived in this country built on white male supremacy whispering to him that the inhumane system hurdling both he the individual, and humanity itself toward a climate oblivion managed carefully by super wealthy oligarchs is actually the pinnacle of existence he’s somehow earned. It is presented to us as a throne upon which we will rule someday... somehow. It tells us we’ll eventually be one of those oligarchs in pure contentment until the end of time because death isn’t real. Aren’t we all just temporarily embarrassed millionaires after all? Again, what makes The Sopranos so successful and re-watchable 15 years after its end is that it screams these ugly truths boldly from a mountaintop, forcing the subject it examines to reckon with himself in a much more subversive way than the finger-wagging, shaming pathology modern Prestige TV has adapted in more recent years. As stated in the opening of this piece, there will be an audience not emotionally ready to understand the message, but I don’t think that makes it any less valuable. There’s a reason The Sopranos isn’t being dragged out for cancellation in the square of public opinion in spite of its loud, brash, and occasionally played for laughs portrayals of misogyny, racism, and patriarchy’s chokehold on society.
The subtext that is constant in nearly every frame of The Sopranos, from the opening moments of Tony’s domineering and skeptical presence in Melfi’s office until its final abrupt blackout, is that these performances of a broken and exploitative masculinity are spider webbing and wreaking havoc across the community from which these men leech and deal out abuse. The feeding beast that it is, it mutates and destroys whatever good might exist in everything and everyone it touches. What almost every character fails to recognize is that this form of masculinity is eating the men performing it alive too. By the final scene, an unflinching refusal to ever push back against the Freudian Id, or Carl Jungs “Shadow” self, driven commitment to gluttonously feeding that bottomless pit of dysfunctional masculinity has been the cause of death for literally every single main male character except possibly Tony (depending on your interpretation of the final scene). And even for Tony, the “optimistic'' take on that final scene is that it’s possible he’s not dead, our journey with him has just reached an abrupt end and we’re left to sift through what we’ve learned about him as the trajectory for the rest of his life. Take a closer look at the final moments of the episode and the decisions that brought Tony there. With the camera placed directly in his POV for much of the scene, we are shown that his decisions have led him to live even a simple night at the diner with his immediate, closest family in a high alert state of paranoia terrified that any sudden noise, shady character, or man in the bathroom could be his doom. All the while forced to continue the performance of masculinity that has killed every man he’s ever had close relationships with. Endless reflections have surely been written about Tony and his journey, but for the purposes of this piece, I’d like to focus on my personal ghosts of masculinity’s past, present and future for a closer examination.
AJ Soprano - The Tragic King of Fail Sons
I was about six years old when I had my first panic attack. I don’t remember it specifically because I was so young and it happened several times: I was put on swim team before I was physically or emotionally ready, I’d stumble off the giant starting blocks, smash face first into the water, my goggles would fill up with water, I’d feel like I was drowning, I’d hang on the lane line begging to quit. The terrifyingly intimidating and screeching coach would scream at me “KICK!” until I either powered through and struggled to the other end of the pool or gave up and climbed out in shame and embarrassment. I quit swimming for several years because of these experiences and never thought much of it again… even in high school I would have the same panic attacks once every couple dozen races if the goggles I chose were worn out and leaked. It’s taken me another twenty or so years of layers and layers of other traumatic events and abuse to go “Oh hey, there’s something wrong here, huh?” and begin to deal with it.
The most prominent thing I place the blame on for that delayed diagnosis and treatment? My cultural understanding and internalization of masculinity.
In Season 3, Episode 3 of The Sopranos, “Fortunate Son,” AJ takes a hard hit on the football field and begins to act strangely. He reaches for condiments at the dinner table and just completely whiffs them. He tries to report not feeling well and goes unheard. The episode ends with him passing out where he stands on the football field, seemingly apropos of nothing. The show chalks this up to AJ apparently having “the panic attack gene” like his dad. Something I’ve also been told in some form or another by friends, family, and practitioners alike. Personally relating to another traumatic experience I’ve had of undiagnosed concussion, that episode ends and I do the “Leo DeCaprio pointing at the TV meme” and shout “AJ has a concussion and no one notices or cares!” Sure, the panic attacks are relatable, but the show would have you believe this is all genetic. This theory of mental illness almost always being “genetic” or caused by “chemical imbalance in the brain” was all the rage in the early aughts during the show’s production; nature over nurture. We also see it as the most we could yield masculinity to the stigma of mental health at the time. So the writers seem compelled to pay lip service to that. But this is a show that spends a lot of time, seemingly self aware, exploring generational trauma as a passing down of abuse, not genetics. It’s a confusing, conflicting message and one of the show’s few thematic fumbles. But I find that our journey with AJ Soprano is exploring the ways in which “hurt people hurt people” to be much more interesting than that shallow diagnosis of genetics.
It's obvious to anyone that our main understanding of AJ Soprano on the surface is that he’s a spoiled little shit who will coast through life blissfully unaware of his privilege. He can’t even be bothered to show up for his own immediate family as we see classic, comedically played moments like giving his middle aged mother The Matrix on DVD for Christmas and furthermore, being too lazy to even bother to wrap it. Again, I can relate back to so many holidays handing family members half thought out gifts “wrapped” in a pillow case. There’s plenty of other examples throughout done bluntly, like his failing school, or with more subtlety, like the fact that he is a loud and awful drummer with no concern for how obnoxious it is to those around him. All details which I absolutely love. Complexity is introduced over time as, through the years, AJ stumbles upon what in modern dialect we’d refer to as “getting woke.” In Season 3, Episode 4, “Christopher,” in which the gang struggles to reckon with Columbus Day getting “canceled” (an episode panned at the time of its release that has only grown thematically more poignant, complicated, and hilariously laced with layers of irony with age) we witness one of AJ’s first forays into what will become his and several other characters’ major arc and source of anxiety: what does one do with the alienation of learning your life’s comfort is predicated on others’ exploitation? His role in the episode is quite small, as a foil to Tony who is frustrated by the distraction of the whole debate over Columbus Day. AJ reads from the opening pages of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, quoting Christopher Columbus (as sourced by Zinn) himself:
They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane… They would make fine servants... With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.
Such a great detail for a few reasons. On a more subtle note, there’s a bit of comedic play to his character faults we’ve come to know and love, in that he’s only on the first page and already wielding it over his father with a self-righteous, angst filled rage. It's a dense book that took me years of reading in chunks at a time to get through as a politically interested adult. I’d venture to guess the flunking AJ Soprano isn’t getting much further than those first few pages. Second, it plants the seed of AJ learning about his alienation as a person without much other purpose beyond consuming at the hands of others’ exploitation. Finally, it’s a great selection to exemplify the entire series’ underlying themes around the unraveling of a nation and culture built upon violent domination and subjugation of others by showing these things have been a staple of it since literally day one.
This moment, not quite halfway through the series, may have been a bit of a non-sequitur to his character at the time, as it was shoved into an already very thematically ham-fisted episode. But it informs the continuation of his story as we see the snowball pick up speed and come to a crash landing in the show’s final season. AJ’s internal conflict with that alienation plays out as we see him having a back and forth struggle of whether to follow in his father’s footsteps of repressing the alienation through indulgence in greed, consumption and violence, or continue to learn so he might challenge his own worldview and see if there's anything that can be done to alleviate the anxiety. The beauty of AJ’s arc through this story is that even as one of the very few characters who attempts to break himself from the cycle of meaningless consumption and abuse by studying international affairs online, understanding the modern American empire’s role in spreading death and destruction around the world, and how he materially benefits from it… no solution for this problem and this sense of alienation appears to exist anywhere around him in his own world of early 2000s, wealthy, suburban, New Jersey life. His sister Meadow’s story explores this a little more, but she still ends up wooed back to the family and their opulent lifestyle by a man within its orbit. AJ’s struggles with it however sends him hurdling into a deep depression that climaxes in a suicide attempt followed by in-patient psychiatric treatment.
Again, the show’s on screen narrative suggests he just has the “wrong genes” that cause a chemical balance in his brain, which he inherited from his father. The family laments this must be the case and figures medication and time spent out with “the boys” (which leads to further problems) are the only cures. Given the era of the show’s production was so focused on the theory that mental health is all about medication-based treatment for genetic imbalance, it’s interesting to consider if the meta-narrative of his anxiety’s mistreatment and alienation was intentional, or if the writers and producers truly believed the words they were putting in their characters’ mouths on this subject: a question I often asked during my viewing. Anyone watching the show through the eyes of more modern psychology sees AJ’s story and understands his depression and struggles are a function of trauma and abuse; the impacts of growing up as an unloved afterthought under the roof of an abusive and literal murderer father who is passing on the same unaddressed trauma from his own childhood experience. We now know medication is not necessarily the best or only way to treat this type of trauma and that actual healing work is best done through relationships with professionals who are trained to address these specific issues.
AJ Soprano is us. We are him. As much as it pains me to admit it, there is no escaping or denying my own past. It’s a struggle I’m sure many men of my background can recognize with any modicum of mindful observance. From acting out based on ignorance of his race, gender, and wealth based privilege in his teen years to the depression suffered upon learning about those privileges and feeling alienated from an ability to do anything about it, to repressed and undiagnosed trauma. All of these things were buried by performance of a brand of masculinity I knew wasn’t healthy for me, but I thought would help me blend into the herd. While I didn’t grow up in a wealthy suburb or have physically abusive parents, I lived a financially privileged enough life almost perfectly generationally aligned with AJ’s experience. We grew up as the first generation to easily be able to obtain access online to way more information about our role in Capitalist exploitation than our parents’ generation. The misfortune in all of this is that our culture, to this day, still offers almost no socially acceptable alternative or acknowledgement of the discomfort and anxiety this causes. It’d be too much of a digression from the topic to investigate all the routes I’ve personally explored in detail, such as a life of service in the non-profit professional world, relationships, volunteering, mindfulness, escape into fantasy, drugs, or alcohol but suffice it to say, I’ve searched far and wide and still found no escape. And so, the panic attacks continue.
The show does a beautiful job however, capturing AJ’s attempts at escape during a very specific moment in American history and culture: The “War on Terror” in Afghanistan and Iraq which have only just come to an end twenty years later in the month I’m writing this. While The Sopranos does a great job dodging the bullet of directly addressing 9/11 as so many other shows at the time did in clumsy ways that would age very poorly (I’m looking at you The West Wing), the moments when it does wink at it are not the show’s strongest moments. We see in later seasons members of the crime families bizarrely warming up to the federal agents tasked to tail them, the show also depicts casual racism against Middle Easterners portrayed in a light that is more derogatory than reflective and satirical as racism is throughout most of the rest of the series. By the show’s finale in June 2007 however, the US was 6 years deep into what we now know would become twenty year long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan from which young men and women often return struggling to find themselves in a world unconcerned about treating their PTSD or rewarding their sacrifice in stark contrast to the flag waving propaganda support for them portrayed in mainstream media. Which leads us to the final arc of AJ’s story.
In the final episode of The Sopranos, AJ still struggles with his ongoing depression which he continues to indulge by going online to study the crimes and follies of the American empire’s spreading War on Terror. He’s lamented that it all makes him feel so sad and hopeless. However, contrasting the horrors of war abroad to the horrors of the war at home which he is subjected to by engaging in his family's lifestyle, he considers an approach that perhaps the grass is greener on the other side and he can find a version of the manhood he’s been searching for in that war. Keep in mind that the early 2000’s was rife with propaganda for military troops and the “dignity and honor” of being a soldier in the War on Terror in a much different way than it is now. Men AJ’s age (and mine) were bombarded with advertising, propaganda, and military recruiters in our high school telling us the war would provide us moral purpose in a world that had spent our coming of age years telling us we’d reached “the end of history” and that there was nothing left to do except sit back and mindlessly consume. That conclusion left many of us feeling spiritually devoid and empty and surely is attributable to a fair amount of enlistment. Throughout the episode we see AJ’s considerations of escape through the military hit a few beats: we start by seeing him attempt to begin working out and mention an interest in joining the military. His parents are horrified. He then justifies he’ll be able to join something like the CIA as a desk analyst of some kind and be out of harm's way. A few brief lines of dialogue on this topic do such a fantastic job using six seasons of AJ’s character development to critique the American military system. A common trope of military service is that “smart kids'' will be designated to safer roles as officers or at desk jobs. But through the years we’ve watched AJ fail miserably at everything he’s ever pursued. He’s constantly flunking school, getting into trouble, trying new hobbies or career paths and immediately giving up as he rapidly loses interest. But whether the subtext of this is intentional on the writers and producers’ part or not, it’s brilliant: The presumed safety of your role as an American military service member is much less dependent on your “smarts” than it is on race, social conditioning, and familial wealth. This is also to say nothing of the escalation of AJ’s ideas for escape to joining intelligence as the crimes of the CIA are historically some of the most egregious, unaccounted for, and violent ways we have spread covert violence in the name of the American Empire.
Throughout the episode, Tony and his wife Carmella desperately seek ways to divert AJ’s attention from his considerations of military service. Their solution? Nudge him toward a job with a family friend’s sleazy, porn adjacent media production company using nepotism and a shiny new BMW. And he obliges. He is the absolute king of Millennial Fail Sons. May we all kneel at the foot of his throne. Having an extra decade’s hindsight on the failures of the War on Terror, the twist had me jumping out of my seat cheering as AJ proudly steps out of the offices of the production company blissfully unaware of his privilege having learned nothing, healing none of his trauma, and continuing to bury it deep down through acts of mindless indulgence and consumption… you know “being a man.” It's one of the show’s most triumphant, albeit cynical, metaphors. That this cycle of misery can never be solved by greater wealth, more consumption, and more greed; but there’s also not much other alternative offered to wayward young men in American culture. Seeking growth and healing through these endeavors doesn’t make things better, it only dulls the blade as our spirit is killed via death by a thousand cuts. Contrasting this option against engaging with the heavily propagandized military is such a satisfying way to portray the vague hopelessness of the Millennial male as we entered adulthood. We spent our entire childhood told we have everything and can do anything because of our status as Americans. That nothing can ever go wrong because we live in the greatest, freest country and moment in history. But as we stepped into adulthood we found nothing but a spiritual void in a collapsing economy that only works in favor of a small handful at the top. Our yearning for community and connection were left with two options at that time: Bury the pain with consumption or become pawns in a meaningless war over economic resources for the wealthy. The curtains draw on the tragedy that will be the rest of AJ’s life. We understand that the cycle of panic and the depression caused by a lack of healthy ways to express masculinity which our society works so hard to repress rather than heal continues on. It has been passed on to the next generation.
Christopher Moltisanti - “What’s My Arc?”
Perhaps the most crippling aspect of what masculinity has evolved into in modern times is the difficulty for men to be open or find space to process trauma and abuse. I’ve personally suffered sexual, verbal, and emotional abuse in relationships both platonic and romantic, male and female. I won’t discuss it beyond that here for a number of reasons. First, the worst of it I’ve only ever been able to discuss in detail with a therapist after years of building trust. Second, as an advocate of restorative justice over the punitive authority of the state or “cancellation” in the court of public opinion which serves no justice, any details I give could potentially identify people. As the victim, I believe they only need to be held accountable to me and themselves. However, for decades I over extended empathy and refused to see myself as a victim. Thanks modern masculinity! Of the smaller abuses I am comfortable discussing with friends or family I’d always say something to the effect of, “they had their own history of trauma and as a straight, white, male I should be able to handle some of their overflow.” Again… Hurt people hurt people. I’d literally weaponized my Liberal upbringing and understanding of my role in a privileged identity against myself and called it “having politics.” It is only recently that, after a year of staying inside alone during the Covid Pandemic of 2020 and incidentally enough, finally watching the full run of The Sopranos for the first time, that I found the bottom and got the strength to accept myself as a victim as well. After decades I realized multiple things can be true: I can hold an unearned systemic privilege of identity in some spaces which I work to account for, and be a victim of interpersonal abuse which my abusers should be held accountable for. The wider societal privilege does not justify the abuse or invalidate my personal lived experience.
So I finally started to fight back. But modern expectations of masculinity make it really hard.
My therapist recently referenced the theory of Learned Helplessness. In a 1967 experiment by American psychologist Martin Seligman, his team of researchers discovered that dogs repeatedly exposed to electric shock in a cage refused to leave their cage once the door was open. The conclusion we can apply to human behavior is that repeated abuse in a trapped situation convinces the victim there is no reality outside of what they’ve known. The abuse is as good as things can ever get. This theory is explored more philosophically in Jean Paul Sartre’s 1944 play No Exit. A group of three characters find themselves trapped in an afterlife that is just a room in which they dwell on the sins of their lifetime. After one character, Garcin, repeatedly tries to open a door out of this Hell in which the characters find themselves trapped, it suddenly opens and, much like the caged dogs, he doesn’t leave.
Which brings us to Christopher “WHATS MY ARC?!” Moltisanti, who I see as the clearest example of what the writers have to say about the dysfunctional and trapped evolution of masculinity at the end of the 20th century. His wrestling with fate and destiny against his desire to be free of his traumatized life is present from early on but accelerates to take center stage at the story’s climactic end.
We see early glimpses of a desire to step off the Hedonic Treadmill, the theory that as our income or material wealth increases we don’t tend to experience the desired result of happiness as an outcome, under which he and other members of “the life” find themselves burying the pain of traumatic upbringings in pursuit of something beyond selfish consumption. Christopher’s first example of such desire is his attempt to take acting classes in hopes of improving his screenwriting (Season 2, Episode 5, “Big Girls Don’t Cry”). Christopher channels the loss of his father in a scene he’s working on for class. It is revealed he’s good at this. He’s really good. But it's extremely vulnerable. With no external support he doesn’t have a safe way to handle the emotions that arise. The miscalibrated wiring of his masculinity, which is programmed to respond to all discomfort with violence, has an allergic reaction to healthy expression of emotion and vulnerability and goes haywire. It takes control and destroys this chance at freedom as he brutally assaults a classmate on stage to ensure he’ll never be welcome back. The door out of Hell was open and his brain was quite literally too miscalibrated to handle it. I’ve witnessed this type of severe triggered response multiple times in real life and even when the reaction’s not physically violent, it's absolutely terrifying. In controlled therapeutic environments however, reliving traumatic experiences through acting and staged blocking has actually been shown to heal forms of PTSD as covered by Bessel Van Der Kolk in his book The Body Keeps the Score. This being a newer, more experimental therapy, it's fascinating to see the show stumbling upon something so far ahead of its time, and the reactionary failure of such a moment without any clinical controls in place.
Moving on with his life as if nothing happened, Christopher continues to violently abuse his girlfriend, his community, his family, and drugs. Eventually he has become such a nuisance to his boss, Tony, he’s sent to rehab (Season 4, Episode 10, “The Strong Silent Type”). The decision is made, not because his family deeply loves and cares for him and wants to see him recover, but because his drug use had become obtrusive to their business. It was costing money. There’s no foresight on anyone's part as to what rehab will actually ask of and challenge Christopher to do. Rehab and full abstinence as a resolution for substance abuse, especially in instances where there’s a history of trauma, is culturally seen as some catch all solution, but oftentimes is not effective or is cost prohibitive to most addicts. So once again, the door out of Hell… kind of opens? But it takes external resources and support for the traumatized dogs to ever leave their cage in the Learned Helplessness experiment discussed earlier. Christopher returns home after rehab to find a family that is verbally supportive in the same superficial, surface level way they always are with each other throughout the series, but not the type he needs. They quickly pressure him back to the violent work that forces him to relive the complicated and repeated trauma of his life, which led to drug dependency in the first place.
Between rehab and his death in the final season, he is given the option to enter witness protection with his girlfriend Adriana (Season 5, Episode 12 “Long Term Parking”). This would provide the opportunity to focus on his writing, and become the emotionally vulnerable family man a small voice deep inside him yearns for. But he would have to give up the material comfort and Hedonic Treadmill pursuit he’s been conditioned to follow. This is his first of two final moments when the door out of Hell is opened again and he can not bring himself to walk out. He rejects this first offer after seeing a seemingly poor family at a gas station and the forlorn father in the driver seat looking tired and desperate. After mentally contrasting this to his life of blind consumption and minimal material struggle, the conclusion his Learned Helplessness has led him to is that he agrees he’d rather have his girlfriend executed as a traitor than take that risk. His current life is obviously miserable, but the thing these men have been conditioned to fear most is real material struggle of any kind. Something that for most people in this world is guaranteed as a constant. The men of The Sopranos of course suffer endless mental anguish in the exchange. To expand further on the Learned Helplessness of men in The Sopranos, I’d like to consider these men have made a type of deal with the devil through a historical and Marxist informed lens:
Life in the late nineties (and ever since) was a few decades into the full scale Neoliberal transition of capitalist economies that worked to expand and lower costs of supply chains for American and a few other industrialized Western states’ consumption globally. This means that we are now able to put a huge distance both geographically and in our minds between our daily consumption and the exploitation required to make it so cheap and accessible to us. The trade-off is, if we want all those cheap products so readily available, most of us will still have to perform some form of labor to convince ourselves we’ve earned this comfort. Some of us may not even have to physically strain and suffer much, but our degree of alienation from that labor (the thing we are supposedly making) is deeper than at any other point in history. Most of us in office and computer based jobs can see the rapidly approaching obsolescence and redundancy of our rote tasks (if it hasn’t already zoomed by us without our bosses noticing). And for the most part, we don't actually make anything material anymore. Less and less Americans make something you can hold in your hand and use for a specific function as their labor. Most of the work in this country not directly related to local infrastructure or medical care falls under a few related categories:
Handling the minute logistics of getting the cheap goods other people made halfway around the world to their final destination (think Amazon, other gig economy delivery, and service industry).
Making each other feel we’re inferior so that we will consume one company’s product or corporation’s media over another (think advertising, marketing, anything sales or retail).
Creating the escapes that keep us distracted from the exploitation and decline in the world around us (think… making TV).
And when it comes to men, we conditioned them, especially through the nineties, to believe their purpose was something more than this. As discussed in AJ’s story, a generation of men had been dysfunctionally raised to assume they are a special individual who is owed comfort, ease and happiness as the result of this fledgling labor, like a birthright. We find those things either spiritually unfulfilling for the few privileged among us, or out of reach for the majority. And as the line from a certain movie about a certain type of club you’re not supposed to talk about, which kids on Twitter love to insist is also a problematic contributor to “Toxic Masculinity” goes, “we’re very, very upset about it.”
Which brings us back to that unique sort of deal with the devil which The Sopranos explores. Between the few capitalists who profit immensely from the system described above, and the rest of us who have to fit into it as alienated consumers and workers, the devil of North Jersey has carved out a special opportunity for our wiseguys in the Soprano crew. Their deal is that, unlike the rest of us lumpenproletariat who will likely struggle just to meet our material needs, a wiseguy can consume all the commodified dopamine-releasing indulgences he can dream of ad infinitum. Women, gambling, drugs, alcohol; like Midas before you, consume to your heart’s content! However, one funny detail that regularly pops up throughout the series is that all of the characters except for Tony, Johnny Sack and a handful of others, live in pretty shitty houses. A Soprano man must perform ritualistic “closings of the gap” between himself and the violent horrors that make consumer capitalism in America possible:
Do you want that designer watch made from exploited labor, slave mining, and rare earth metals whose harvest are rapidly making the planet hostile to human and other life? On your warehouse or desk job salary it's far too expensive to be able to afford to peacefully walk into a perfume scented, warmly lit early 2000’s department store and purchase one from the pretty woman at the counter while Muzak plays. Still want it? Well then you have to look into the eyes of the poor migrant delivery man driving the truck you’re going to steal it from and pull the trigger yourself (a trope played out multiple times by gang members “knocking off trucks” throughout the series).
Almost every male character in The Sopranos unabashedly raises his hand and answers the offer of this life: “Yes please! Pick me!” As Americans we all make the same choice every day to get up and consume in a manner more destructive than most of the world's population. But we chose it every day from our birth and as the cultural norm, and most importantly, from a very vast distance from the exploitation that brings it to us. We don't even see it as a choice we are making. The choice is societal and systemic. We’re an individual in a massive machine. In all honesty, is there much use feeling guilty about it? Even if someone opens the door for you to exit, where do you go? Sell off everything you have and fly halfway around the world to bear witness to suffering? What material difference will that really make? So, what stops many of us “good liberals” from further indulging in a bit more of that abusive masculinity like the cast of The Sopranos? Did we just never get the offer?
The Sopranos excels at assuring us over and over that consumption will never be the thing that makes us happy. But the more the cultural weight of our warped sense of masculinity influences our willingness to get up close with that violence, the more we will usually be rewarded with the option to further consume: Be the guy that pulls the trigger, the banker that forecloses on the home, the guy who manipulates and jacks up medication prices. You can buy another car, another home, another yacht! Doesn’t it feel good to be bad?
The Sopranos’ play is to portray its characters boisterously (and often comically) exclaim “of course it feels good!” while in front of their boys, and then crushingly remind us over and over in quiet, lonely moments the painful reality that it actually crushes the soul.
Which brings us back to the final moments of Christopher’s tragic arc and his last chance to walk out of Hell; to exit the shock cage. His final episodes (Season 6, Episodes 17, “Walk Like a Man” and 18, “Kennedy and Heidi”) are rife with tension with Tony and his crew and shows Christopher’s final desperate battle with his addiction. It seems he’s captured a small twinkle of understanding that he’s sold his soul to that devil of Capitalism and his life’s been a misguided performance of masculinity. He’s maybe realized his entire life up to this point was a lie. He’s perhaps realized leaving “the life” and taking that chance at material struggle is his only shot at ever finding relief from his trauma, his disease, and discovering genuine happiness. We see him have pangs of genuine catharsis that lean towards self-actualization in connections he made in 12-step meetings. He seems to enjoy calm meetings with seemingly nice men in coffee shops far removed from his world of boisterous mob meetings in smoky strip clubs full of male aggression that is his work environment.
Meanwhile, it’s contrasted with the strains it places on his personal and business relationships with the family that has been constant throughout his entire life. They’re frustrated he doesn’t want to come to the Bada Bing for “work” where he is constantly distracted by the temptation to indulge his disease. In a final attempt to see if he can thread the needle of both lives, we’re shown what was, for me, among the most tragic scenes in the entire series. Christopher convinces himself he can control his addiction and agrees to indulge in “just a few drinks” to make a truce in an ongoing dispute with Paulie. As he offers this olive branch and a willingness to meet his crew half way, he becomes the center of a “ball breaking” session. The camera places us in Christopher's point of view as a lingering slow motion shot pans a semicircle of what are supposed to be his closest friends. They are relentlessly laughing at him as we can imagine the spit flinging from their disgusting swollen jowls. It's the moment the last of Christopher Moltisanti’s humanity and potential desire to exit the cage dies. All that is left is the husk of his living body rapidly accelerating toward destruction as he realizes he doesn’t have the strength to escape his Learned Helplessness. He will never walk through the open door. From here he drives drunk to his screenwriting partner’s home. The scene emphasizes that Christopher’s inability to quit the cult of masculine performance is the thing that truly has killed him. His partner, who he has physically assaulted multiple times in acts of coercion, politely lets him into his home and seems to offer a genuine helping hand. He appeals to the small pieces of humanity he’s witnessed in Christopher in the 12-step program. But to the drunk and broken Christopher, it falls flat. In his frustration of Christopher's unwillingness to listen or be reckoned with he finally exalts the hard truth, “CHRIS. YOU’RE IN THE MAFIA.”
Why is this such an important turn of phrase? Why is it so triggering for Christopher? Throughout the entire series, no one in the mafia uses the word. The only person who is allowed to use it without being physically assaulted is Meadow (Season 1, Episode 5 “College”) when she asks her father, alone in the car “Are you in the mafia?” He skirts around using the actual word to define himself as such exclaiming, “There is no mafia! It's just a stereotype!” However, he continues on to subtly admit as much. Outside of this moment we only ever hear the word through a TV screen or newspaper headline. This is to say that in their world, that's a word used by propagandists to disparage their lifestyle and Italian heritage. And thus they’ve learned to deflect the term in the contexts they’re most commonly acquainted with hearing it. But being truly challenged to reckon with the reality of what they are is a threat to the poison pumping their lifestyle of anxious adrenaline through their hearts: The grossly deformed, generations evolved patriarchy and performance of dysfunctional forms of masculinity driving all of their actions from wire to wire of the series.
And so, unwilling to face that voice’s call to reality, Christopher chooses to silence it with violence. He shoots his partner point blank in the face immediately after the words leave his mouth. One last chance at a wake up call. And one final refusal and objection as his soul already left his body back at that bar. His final moments come in the opening scenes of the following episode. We see him struggling to breathe alongside Tony immediately after flipping a car they’re in. Tony briefly weighs the options between calling for help or ending Christopher’s life, in a way no one could ever trace to him. Tony justifies killing his junkie nephew to himself after seeing a tree branch through the backseat of Christopher's car impaling the seat where his newborn daughter would have been had she been along for the ride. This may seem like a bold choice, placing the death of perhaps the second leading role outside the main family of the series abruptly and at the beginning of an episode. It makes sense for his death to be sudden, abrupt, unexpected, and inglorious. We’ve already seen his soul die. And why not at the hands of the man who is the personification of the devil that offered him that lifestyle in the first place? He was taught to trust this man from birth. By the time he could see the reality that Tony raised and kept him in an electrified, caged Hell, it was too late. Why should he have any reason to believe the world outside of it could have been any different?
Junior Soprano - From Satirical Foil to My Greatest Fear
About halfway through Season One of my twenty years-late binge of The Sopranos, I paused it on a screencap of Junior Soprano in his thick framed glasses, prominent Italian nose, sent it to my sister and wrote “OMG. Junior Soprano looks exactly like Grandpa J” (who, curiously enough, was more of German descent. It's our paternal grandmother, his wife, that our Sicilian roots came from; and Corrado “Junior” Soprano actor, Dominic Chianese, is of Napoli descent). But still, throughout the series he’d glimmer through as the spitting image of the elder patriarch of my family. Perhaps the connection was his whole oeuvre, as a “man of a certain era,” with a certain way of speaking, with a cozy little home. But contrasting to my own grandfather, Junior is always somehow sad for a man so proud of having run with his gang for so many years in his little house countered against his nephew Tony’s gaudy McMansion. Another man we see early on in the series as materially comfortable, but never content. Never happy. Always lonely.
Junior Soprano’s journey through the series is one that, on its surface, sees the most drastic transitions and tragic falls. It’s also perhaps the best to outline the tonal shift of the series and slow burn of its messages about what’s broken in our cultural definitions of masculinity as it plows through season by season defining what exactly this Prestige TV thing is all about. I describe the full Sopranos series as like watching the birth of a baby calf: a bloody mess pooled out on the floor, yet adorable in its stumbling. But eventually it cleans up to find its legs and confidence. Consider the contrast of our introduction to Junior, to our final goodbye with him. By the time you reach the series finale it's hard to believe the characterization of Junior Soprano in Season One is even part of the same show. There are some discrepancies about professional hierarchy happening in the background of Junior’s story as he is installed as boss of the Soprano family pretty much in name only midway through Season One, but its apparent the real rub of his anger is that the younger generation of bosses have found out he has a penchant for performing oral sex on his long time goomah. Aside from taking out a hit on his own nephew, he also weaponizes the gossip that Tony is seeing a psychiatrist. As a Millenial who was thirteen years old at the shows launch and didn’t watch it until 2021 at age thirty-five, it's hard to bring to focus, from the writers’ perspective, the degree to which these trivial grievances were meant to be hyperbolized for laughs at the absurd fragility of this brand of masculinity regarding mental health and sexuality, or to which they wanted us to really feel the emotional investment these men would place in these situations.
While we may laugh at this through a 2021 lens, it's easy to put the period of the show’s conception into context and see how plausible it may be that this was to be taken seriously. If you’d spent only an hour watching MTV or late night cable at the time, you’d come away with an understanding that the performance of male heterosexuality as an act of power domination in culture was the way of the world; that satisfying the male libido is the most important thing to a cultured society. From hypersexualized teen pop stars being questioned about their bodies and sexuality by much older men at late night desks who held a monocultural grasp on national conversation and approval, to wall-to-wall Girls Gone Wild promotions, to teen sex film romps ala American Pie, the moment made clear that the entire world is focused on the fantasies of hetero-male sexual power and female submission to it. Women were sold to us as nothing more than objects to serve our pleasure. It's possible a male writer, wealthy and well connected enough to make it to an HBO writers’ room in 1999, could see the “embarrassment” of a 70 year old man’s colleagues discovering he actually pleasures his sexual partner as detrimental to his entire hierarchical status which the audience should feel some empathy for; not the hilarious satire of masculine fragility which it has evolved to 22 years later. The entire cold war between Tony and his uncle over these sexual and mental health stigmas is played as tonally serious in a way that leaves me wondering if I would have still viewed it through that same satirical lens had my thirteen year old self been exposed to it at the time of its release while swimming through all the other cultural sludge mentioned above. People love to argue that culture has no impact on behavior, but decades later in the aftermath of an era of hetero-male sexuality celebrated, often to the point of violence and domination over women’s bodies, can we honestly say it has had no impact on generations of men who have grown up with an I.V. of it injected into our veins? Is the evolution of things like Gamergate, Inceldom, online “Men’s Rights Activists”, and #Redpill mentality of the mid-2010s to the performative LARPing, violent and aggressive protest of Proud Boys, Boogaloo Boys, and Trump supporters on the streets of Portland today or at the Capitol in January of 2021 really just a spontaneous eruption we have no historical explanation for? I’m sure if you asked any writer of The Sopranos about this now they’d tell you the whole point of shows or movies like theirs are to show you examples of how not to act. But I find it hard to believe that dorm room after dorm room of young men in the early 2000’s were plastered with posters of Pacino in Scarface, DeNiro and Pesci in Goodfellas, Brad Pitt in Fight Club, or James Gandolfini in The Sopranos hung on their walls as pious reminders to themselves of how not to behave.
This is our introduction to Junior Soprano, “a problematic man of his time,” but not quite so clear in its satire as to the degree to which we should laugh at him or feel empathy for him. The message is further complicated as his story continues from season to season to explore the relationship between dementia and loneliness. For me, he evolves from satirical comic foil to true empathetic warning of that which I fear most: being alone at the end of things. The grandfather I referenced at the beginning of this section lost his wife to cancer in the early 90s, and then lived nearly twenty-five more years unmarried, alone in his home. I like to think he was content, last of a generation that still saw the importance in being constantly surrounded by family, grandchildren, great grandchildren; regularly active in his community as a decades long serving city council member in his small town. But being given glimpses into the life of Junior Soprano’s loneliest, dementia-ridden moments as the seasons go on, these images of our elders we rarely see as we typically only make time for brief, infrequent visits during our busy lives, I wonder about their loneliness. My grandparents in their late years? My parents now? As stated at the beginning of this piece, The Sopranos method is to get you to ask yourself these questions by amplifying them with a bullhorn. Junior Soprano was a rotten, lonely man throughout his life of crime, never married, no children, and so alienated from the family he has that he puts a hit out on his nephew one season and shoots him in another (albeit in a fit of Dementia). So it’s easy to paint the depths of his loneliness on the screen. But the question remains, is this what life has in store for all of us as we approach the end of things in a world increasingly designed to fill our happiness with isolated consumption over community and family?
I feel pained watching Junior’s descent as I reflect on my life isolated from family and unmarried in my mid-thirties with a history of mental health struggles that make me question What will my mind be like at the end of things? Who will care for me? In his final scene of the series (Season 6, Episode 21, “Made In America”), Tony, feeling the walls close around him, seems to finally decide to forgive his Uncle Jun’ the only way he knows how. He reminisces on his business accomplishments and ends with,
“You and my dad… you two ran North Jersey.”
Tony tells him this in a tone desperate for validation that his pursuit of the same will vindicate him and affirm him as a good man.
“We did?” Junior slightly perks up.
“Yeah.” Tony gleams with hope.
“Oh? That’s nice.”
Junior mutters with a dismissive and submissive tone as he then mindlessly gazes back into the distance to tell us none of this ever mattered. All the violence, all the anger, all the hatred to carve out a piece of property, wealth, and land over generations in response to lifetimes of trauma meant nothing as we reach the end of things and are forced to face whatever may be on the other side alone. We see the realization trigger in Tony’s eyes as he paces out ever so slightly off kilter, in what is perhaps the most powerful, important scene in the entire series.
For me, witnessing this moment is like Ebenzer Scrooge’s encounter with the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come as it points at his neglected grave. If not for this alienated labor and cultural malaise I find myself trapped in a cycle of investing my time and energy into, then what is it all for?
Can Lightning Strike Twice? Is Corporate Media Capable of Producing Art?
The striking impact of The Sopranos after all these years is that it can force me to get uncomfortable and think about all of these existential and cultural questions that uniquely challenge privileged American men like myself in a way few shows do, while still being obsessively bingeable. Is this what great art does? Make us uncomfortable while still drawing us in? Can television exist as great art that challenges us to deeply question our understanding of the world and our place in it, while still satisfying the model of large scale production and profit required to make it?
Overall? I’d say no.
The Sopranos stands as a flash in the pan, a lightning bolt at a very specific moment in history that cannot strike again. It came about at a moment that the foundation for the vertical integration of corporate media had been laid via maneuvers like the 1996 Telecommunications Act that would start rallying the wagons of capital around mass media, in terms of who could produce it and for whom, in an even more aggressive way than it already had up to that point. It's a last dying gasp of the possibility of true auteurism, slipping scripts past the boardrooms of production executives mostly unchallenged to grab a chunk of capital with which to create something truly daring. Most big budget media we see now is carefully curated, knowing in advance who the messaging and themes are for, and what the expected return on investment in the form of profit will be. This yields endless programming, careful not to wander too far outside what is already measured and gauged as palatable to established consumers of Prestige TV or culture. In the past decade or so I’ve watched countless shows that reviewers rave to be excellent critiques of white privilege or toxic masculinity, but none of them ever actually challenge me to go inward and explore the depths of those realities the way The Sopranos did. I usually walk away from them thinking, “Yeah... I know.” It is a safer market bet to reinforce the already established virtues of an in-group than risk alienating an audience by challenging them to think outside their preconceived notions. When asked for reviews of such shows I usually find myself telling people “it just felt like watching Twitter.”
Our culture has become fractured into niche in-groups that are then neatly separated and organized in online spaces (owned and controlled by profit driven, private companies). Those of us with the disposable income to purchase and consume this type of media gather together there to discuss it and don’t see or hear from anyone outside. There’s some overlapping assumptions I touched on in the intro of this piece a producer can make about that in-group and its spending or consumption habits: they are likely college educated and white (and if not white, still college educated), living in or near major metro areas, interested in liberal social values, etc.. Producers no longer need to take risks or challenge us in new daring ways. They already know our morals, our values, and how to reinforce them in their content. They are able to carefully decide for us how to do this and push our emotional buttons in a carefully controlled way based on the almighty algorithm. If you tune into the right spaces of Twitter or Reddit long enough, you’ll find you can predict the beats, language, themes, and arcs of almost any new Prestige TV content minutes into its introduction. The Sopranos defined the broad concept of Prestige TV with its over the top production quality, but also its challenging perspectives and unpredictability. Without that, what makes any of it stand out? So, it will be interesting to see how this trend is handled in the upcoming Sopranos prequel film The Many Saints of Newark; something I wasn’t aware existed until finishing my viewing of The Sopranos in Spring of 2021. The Sopranos is a perfectly contained story that made me uncomfortable and challenged me to reckon with the trajectory of my masculinity at just the right time in my life. I don’t need or even really want more of it. Not that the show is the cause, but it is interesting to consider that for the first time in my life I started to seriously seek the appropriate professional help for the traumas discussed in the various sections of this piece in the months since finishing the show.
Entertainment for entertainment’s sake is fine. It’s great on the rare occasion it elevates to the level of art or has relevanancy to socio-political movements. But we’ve been duped by both consumer and social media conglomerates into believing these are all inherently the same and equal to one another. They’re convinced that a big budget and some spit-shine on anything they make will trick us into believing it’s on equal standing with the absolute best of the medium. We have the option to prove them wrong. We should occasionally step back and think more critically about what we are consuming. We should mindfully ask ourselves if products and content choices are made by corporations with the intent of emotionally manipulating us into believing that shallow entertainment has political meaning both before and after consuming them. Corporations are often counting on us to take to their social media and other online platforms to perform emotional outrage about their products publicly. This both keeps us riled up and garners more eyeballs that don’t want to be left out of the discourse. It keeps us engaged in their platform. It keeps us scrolling and posting. At a minimum, taking time to reflect on this in our media diet might help us to calm down online… who knows? Eventually this mindful approach to consumption might even inspire us to log off and connect in real ways that help us see nuance outside our binary understanding of online cultural and political values.
I took the time to write this piece because I approached The Sopranos this spring as I awaited a Covid vaccine doing my best to divorce myself from infusing social or political expectations as we’ve been indoctrinated to do in recent years. In doing so, I was pleasantly surprised in the ways it made me uncomfortably meditate on my core beliefs. I knew it was understood as the darling genesis of Prestige TV, but I had no idea the extent to which being produced in a time before the rules were written would give it room to elevate to something its successors will always struggle to live up to.
If you made it this far… holy moly. Wow. Geez. Thank you so much! I’m honored you’ve chosen to spend your time with my words. If it’s not apparent in the essay I was uh, “going through some stuff” which was sort of the impetus for writing this. Writing it has been part of the therapy in it’s own weird way. While maybe not quite so in depth, it is my hope to continue making this type of work. So if you enjoy a left of the dial critique of culture in this style, please hit the free Subscribe button and you’ll hopefully hear from me again soon! (“Soon'“ being a very relative descriptor of the passage of time.) If think you know someone else who would enjoy reading, please share!