12. Donuts. No Wonder He Can’t Lose Weight.
“A day at the mall in mules and I’ll be crippled for life.”
[Note: I tried to find a still of A.J. and Meadow sitting under the “Safe Families. Everybody Needs One.” banner in the hospital, which is one of my favorite shots of this season, but I failed. This is not a bad second choice; I just felt compelled to state my intent.]
Hallucinations are not quite the same as dreams; Tony Soprano imagining the Reformation model-slash-Italian exchange student next door is not quite the same as him imagining his mother reenacting an iconic scene from Psycho. They get at the same subsconscious concepts, sure, but they represent different relationships between the subconscious mind and the conscious life. Dreams recycle parts of our lived experience so we can make sense of them in our minds. They might step into the uncanny valley, but there are always tells: weird juxtapositions, out-of-character behavior, horses in living rooms. Hallucinations are much more difficult to see for what they are — that’s kind of the central premise of them — and, as a result, they dismantle the boundary between our subconscious thoughts and our conscious lives and throw our ideas about the nature of reality entirely off balance.
The apparition of Isabella is not, in and of itself, particularly ambiguous. You don’t need to be a licensed mental health professional to know it boils down to mommy issues, although there are a few interesting details the episode doesn’t explicitly unpack for us. The horse hooves beating in the background of Tony’s idyllic pastoral daydream are obviously part of the pre-technological fantasy, an inversion of the show’s fixation upon cars, which is at play throughout much of the hour (and which I’m going to dive into at length in a later issue.) But they’re also a funny precursor to Livia referring to Green Grove as “the glue factory” at dinner, and, in our post-season four world, they can be retrospectively reinterpreted as a harbinger of doom. I also love that Isabella is a dental student — while it tracks with Tony’s soft spot for high-achieving brunettes, traditional Freudian interpretation considers teeth to be symbolically related to trust issues. Dreaming of your teeth falling out means you don’t trust your friends; imagining taking an aspiring dentist out to lunch means you shouldn’t trust your mother, I guess.
But, while the primary hallucination itself isn’t ambiguous, it projects ambiguity onto everything else we see — imagined or real. Every time I watch this episode, I catch myself wondering whether Carmela really does threaten to cut Tony’s dick off. And the moments of ostensible reality all feel as weirdly suspended as Tony’s fantasies. The jump cut to Junior barfing is so surreal, as is the way Tony sort of levitates around rather than walking, especially in the moment when he gets up from the dinner table and walks up the stairs. The music choices also add to the unsettling, distorted effect — this is one of only a few episodes in the series with truly unimpeachable needle-drops. (Relatedly, this episode and Captain Marvel have me gunning for a Garbage revival; bring on the Shirley Mansonaissance.)
A lot of that suspended-reality feeling comes from the way that the episode immerses us in Tony’s depression, really forces us to marinate in it. He claims in therapy that he’s “like King Midas in reverse — everything I touch turns to shit,” and the episode certainly drives that point home; there is nothing here that is not, somehow, shaped by the depressive force of his unchecked guilt. It structures not only his storyline but every side plot as well: Christopher relates to it; Silvio thinks it’s a natural consequence of occupying a position of power, which is why he also thinks Christopher can’t possibly understand it; Carm tries to beat it down with sheer force of will; and Livia identifies it as a vulnerability upon which she can seize.
Which, of course, backfires on her. Tony’s brush with assassination triggers a fight-or-flight response that causes his consciousness to click back into place and forces him to reorient himself from the Pussy problem. The fact that the threat of danger kick-starts Tony’s system is one of his more relatable traits — who hasn’t craved a jolt of adrenaline to break up the monotony? — but it also will form the foundation for his increasing unlikability over the course of the series, as he’s more than willing to do harm to others in an effort to chase down that excitement.
Even now, it reflects poorly on his capacity to leave this life behind. I’m not sure whether we’re to think Agent Harris’s visit to the hospital and Tony’s subsequent conversation with Carm about witness protection are real or hallucinated — but either way, like Isabella serves as a vector for his longing for an idyllic past, those moments showcase the depth of his investment in this career. (They also make me laugh, as someone who was, improbably, born in Utah. My parents lived in Salt Lake City for a few years in the late 80s and early 90s — not, as far as I’m aware, for criminal reasons, but as you might imagine, they did not fit in.) Tony’s renewed commitment to the Family over the family answers the question that last week’s episode raised, re: what he would do if he found himself in the position to become an informant.
And yet, even with his overarching priorities crystal-clear, he still can’t fully redirect himself from the Pussy problem to the Livia problem, still can’t fully divest himself of his loyalty to his mother. Even at the height of his adrenaline rush, with all his priorities and desires in clear focus, he can’t bring himself to look at his mother accurately. His unwillingness to engage substantively with her is not quite his downfall — but it very nearly could have been, and though the target will shift from season to season, I think a case can be made that his refusal to engage in serious, committed reflection will become the core of both the suffering he experiences and the suffering he creates as the show continues onward.