19. A Man Made a Wager. He Lost.
“She kept talking about my father’s feeble-minded brother, but I always thought she meant you.”
One of the things that distinguishes The Sopranos from everything else on television is its literary storytelling tendencies. It obsesses over its characters’ inner lives, and it rejects the expectations of episodic and season- and series-long narrative structures in favor of meandering thematic exploration and delayed gratification. And it plays around with symbolism — which is not unprecedented; as is the case with many things I love on television, Twin Peaks did it first.
But is unusual in that The Sopranos uses symbols largely as a way to explore ambiguous and slippery ideas about its larger context, rather than as clues that reveal some sort of mystery. (Unless you consider its characters’ psyches a puzzle that can be solved, which is an exercise that I would argue is antithetical to its obsession with the limits of our ability to know others’ inner lives and, often, our own.) There are signs everywhere in the series, but they function more as thought exercises than plot points: the ducks, of course, but also breakfast food in general and eggs in particular, that one specific cat, most horses, and all fish.
One recurring symbol that often gets overlooked in fan discourse is the car. I love the way the show twists the distinctly industrial-capitalist American idea that a car equals independence, agency, and freedom, turns it inside out and forcing us to examine the hollowness of individualist ideals. Yes, sometimes a car is just a way to get from Point A to Point B. But often, the scenes which take place inside of or on the subject of cars reveal a character’s level of self-sufficiency, or their sense of their own emotional/relational freedom.
“The Happy Wanderer” doesn’t feature my favorite car content in the run of the series, but it’s a pretty thin episode, so this newsletter was going to be one of the following:
A meditation on car symbolism
An ode to James Gandolfini’s recurring bit where he dicks around with medical equipment at Junior’s appointments
An investigation into what the fuck was going on in the early aughts that made people think it was interesting to watch other people play poker for long stretches of time
I settled on the cars, which I was planning on covering at some point, so it might as well be now. (It probably goes without saying that I’m back on team Season Two Is Weak, and will remain on the roster through next week at least.)
“The Happy Wanderer” centers on David Scatino, the father of Meadow’s classmate Eric, with whom she’s been practicing a duet for Cabaret Night. David has racked up significant gambling debts with Richie and accrues more with Tony. He could probably skate by on Tony’s goodwill and buy himself time — until Richie’s love of chaos strikes again, and Tony tries to assert authority over Richie’s wild energy by strong-arming David until he gives him Eric’s Jeep as payment.
Then, in an impressive bid for Father of the Year 2000, Tony passes the Jeep along to Meadow, who is not super grateful for the gift. (Carm is also mad at Tony about this, but only because she’s worried that the Scatinos’ connections to Georgetown might come back to haunt Meadow’s chance of admission there — so, not exactly moral indignation on her part.) Tony is somehow surprised that Meadow is disgusted by the prospect of driving her friend’s Jeep around in front of him, thus flaunting the spoils of her dad’s illicit job.
“Everything this family has comes from the work I do,” he reminds her — which is true, but obviously not something she wants to think all that closely about. Little moments earlier in the season have made it clear that Meadow sees a car as a way to liberate herself from life within the confines of the Soprano house — and while she’s upset about the moral and social crises at play, she also resents the fact that the origin story of this particular car leaves her even more closely tethered to the parts of her family she’s trying to avoid.
Her idealization of a car as a source of freedom is a distinctly suburban American teenage ideal, but the series doesn’t restrict this fantasy to teenagers. Being in a car liberates characters to initiate conversations they’d never have within the confines of a building — see: Meadow and Tony’s road trip chats in “College,” Carmela openly admitting her jealousy on the way home from date night in “Pax Soprana,” Melfi and Tony talking in her car in “Isabella,” and several Tony-Christopher conversations, most notably Tony asking Christopher if he might be depressed in “The Ballad of Tennessee Moltisanti.” All of these moments represent unusual openness — all of which ultimately get shut down or revealed as fraught. Being in a car might make characters freer to express their inner lives than normal, but they’re still not that free.
And, as in the case of the Jeep, cars also reflect characters’ material limitations and dependencies — namely, the fact that getting what they want often hinges on another person losing it. Janice is fully at peace with the fact that her mobility is contingent on Livia’s incapacitation, but Meadow is furious that hers is contingent upon her father’s work. But would she care if Tony had simply bought her a car using money he’d earned by exploiting David Scatino’s gambling addiction, or through some other equally immoral endeavor? And does she feel bad that her acquisition of the Jeep leads indirectly to her getting the Cabaret Night solo she wanted all along? The episode leaves us hanging, treating Meadow like a litmus test for our faith in people’s ability to reject circumstances that incentivize staying shitty.