20. What Kind of Animal Smokes Marijuana at His Own Confirmation?
“When you’re married, you’ll understand the importance of fresh produce.”
One of the great crimes of contemporary culture is that no one managed to pull off an AJ Soprano’s confirmation group look for 2018’s Catholicism-themed Met Ball. It’s an iconic moment in an episode that’s mostly an escalating series of iconic AJ moments. First, he steals Carmela’s car to go joy-riding and gets in a minor accident, and somehow thinks no one will notice that there’s a giant scratch across the passenger side and the side view mirror is hanging on by a thread. It’s Peak Soprano Children Not Understanding Accountability, but more importantly, it sets up one of my favorite exchanges in the whole series:
“When I get confirmed, I’m going to be a man, so how come I can’t drive?”
“Who was that man we had to pick up from camp last year for bed wettin’?”
“That was the year before that!”
This argument eventually leads to the big reveal that AJ has started dabbling in existentialism, no longer believes in God, and therefore no longer wants to get confirmed. Carmela and Tony are furious, which is fair but also reveals their inability to cope with their children’s capacity for critical thought. Later, AJ seeks spiritual counsel from Livia, who heartily co-signs his nihilism. He ultimately does give in and get confirmed — but he ruins the familial detente when he gets busted hotboxing the garage at the after-party. Has anyone in all of fiction been trapped in such an intense race to the bottom in which they’re only competing against themselves?
In fairness, I can only pass so much judgment on AJ’s failure to — as Carmela aptly puts it — be a good Catholic for fifteen fuckin’ minutes, as I never got confirmed. I’d love to say I chose this after deep spiritual reflection, but I just didn’t want to deal with the process. Specifically, I didn’t want to attend the required retreat, because 1) What teenager wants to spend an entire weekend hanging out in the basement of their church?, and 2) I’d heard about some of the activities from my older friends and knew I would end up getting kicked out for not being able to control my laughter. So I didn’t sign up to get confirmed, didn’t discuss the decision with anyone, and never heard a word about it from my parents, because this happened during the year they split up. Too bad AJ’s spiritual maturation didn’t coincide with “Whitecaps,” I guess!
AJ Soprano’s Comedy Hour aside, I don’t love this episode, and I haven’t budged on my take that it’s the worst of season two and one of the worst of the series. But, on this watch, I did find myself more open to its potential. Which sort of made me more annoyed by how weak it is, because it could have compellingly solidified some of the show’s major ideas — especially those about religion. And, even though I love Christopher, it’s his part of the episode that drags it down by once again taking us too far outside the world we’ve grown invested in — this time, into Jon Favreau’s.
I can see how the AJ parts of the episode might not land with everyone — they are wildly goofy, and AJ is as frustrating as ever — but I think they actually bring just the right amount of absurdity for grappling with the mysteries of existence. I don’t think the writers are encouraging us to veer into nihilism ourselves. If you were trying to be didactic, I don’t think you’d place a lesson in the mouth of someone as stupid as AJ or as demonic as Livia. Instead, I think they’re trying to get us to see how AJ’s dabbling in postmodernism presents yet another instance of a character trying not to look directly at the thing that’s troubling them — in this case, his father’s amorality.
Regardless of their level of familiarity with German philosophers, every character here is grappling (or trying not to grapple with) with the question of the purpose of their existence. It’s a question that takes many forms — what concessions am I willing to make to those I love, what do I owe to my family, how far am I willing to go to get what I want or keep what I have — but, in answering them, they tend to self-select into one of two camps: those who are trying to live, and those who are waiting to die.
Mortality hangs at the edges of everything here, and death isn’t just a physical state in this world. Many characters experience some kind of spiritual death(s) before their material one — even if we never see the latter — either because they know their physical death is coming, or they know the conditions of their life are unlivable. They exist in a kind of not-dead-but-not-really-living limbo. It’s the plane of existence Tony occupies with greater and greater commitment throughout the series — which is why I find the relentless debate about the show’s final scene so pointless; does it really matter whether he physically dies?
And he’s never there alone. Livia lives out her days there, both against her will and of her own volition, and Pussy and Adriana end up being some of its most tragic co-occupants. Christopher revisits it every time he has a path out of this life but doesn’t take it. Angie’s back there this week, too; all her fiery desire to reclaim her life has left her, if that shot of her taking out the trash in her bathrobe with dead eyes and a cigarette hanging out of her mouth is any indication. But the episode doesn’t really tie that all together: while AJ ponders the meaninglessness of existence, it’s not clear whether Pussy is crying in the bathroom at the confirmation party because he feels guilty about betraying his friend, because he knows he’s dead, or both, and while we know Christopher obsesses over the direction of his life, it’s not clear, in this moment, whether mortality factors into that at all — although it will become explicit next week.