23. A Quote-Unquote Husky Accomplice

“What are you, six years old?”

One of the best bits on The Sopranos is Doing Mafia Shit at the Mall/in Costco/at the Party Goods Store/at the Sporting Goods Store. It’s a great sight gag, but it’s also a perfect example of how the show conveys a lot with a little. Compared to the glamorous makeshift workspaces of other mob media, these places are as aggressively mundane as the cube farms and open-office hell pits in which the rest of us contribute our undervalued labor to the above-ground economy.

“Bust Out” features several of these scenes, which is fitting given that it’s all about the fine line between what’s illicit and what’s respectable. The relationship between those two forces holds our social world together. They’re defined in opposition to one another; they each assert their strength in relationship to the other’s weakness. And the illicit side of the equation seems much stronger this week. From the insurance payout to the airline ticket scam, the Sopranos’ material success is parasitically bound up in the Scatinos’ suffering. (And dear god, is there a lot of Scatino family suffering. Their arc really drags when you’re watching week-to-week — even though it’s conceptually interesting, they’re just not as charismatic as their disreputable counterparts.) The only moment in which the Scatinos might seem to get ahead — Eric getting admitted to Georgetown while Meadow is wait-listed — only lasts a few moments before it’s revealed that David gambled away Eric’s college fund.

But the line between upstanding citizenship and its underbelly isn’t only thin in that the two exist symbiotically; it’s also thin in that there are many openings through which we can slide from one side to the other. These two categories aren’t just fluid in an anthropological sense — they’re fluid in the context of individual lives as well. Which is why Tony gets the chance to test-drive being a good person in his efforts to make amends to Beansie and be a better father to AJ.

While he couches the latter task in the desire to place AJ on the respectable side of the social equation, it’s really an attempt to assuage his guilt over his past misdeeds — to not “have another Christopher on my hands.” And, in some ways, his trial subscription to basic human decency goes well. He gives Beansie a large sum of money and convinces AJ to participate in father-son bonding. But Beansie doesn’t want the money — and Tony is, on some level, culpable for the fact that he needs it at all — and he also forgets to show up to AJ’s swim meet to witness his son almost take second place. On top of that, all his progress toward goodness occurs after he ditches a therapy session right when he’s on the verge of actual self-examination — and he and AJ’s boating day comes at the expense of some strangers’ fun.

Attempting to be a better person is equally complex for Carmela. Her short-lived adulterous flirtation with David’s brother-in-law Vic Musto is ostensibly illicit, but it also teases the possibility of a different, more moral existence. Dabbling in a life that isn’t just different but better helps clarify Carm’s restlessness — a fundamental part of her that’s intensified this season (especially since the arrival of Furio, though that may be a coincidence.) For Vic, whose professed respect for the institution of marriage only goes so far, the situation is inverted: a brief dalliance with bad behavior, cut short by a return to upstanding citizenship.

I love their awkward makeout in the Sopranos’ bathroom, which is another piece of evidence in the curious case of Carmela’s utter lack of game and a perfect collection of visual cues. Claustrophobically framed, it begins with a mirror shot (one of my favorite repeated images in the series!) and a conversation about the vertically striped wallpaper that “closes the room in.” And it ends with Carmela collecting herself in that tiny room, surrounded by tacky wallpaper that reinforces the whole prison-cell vibe. No matter how badly she wants out, she’s stuck where she is — not trapped by domesticity per se, but by the fraught material existence her home represents.

(As an aside, just in case any of my wealthy suitors are reading this and wondering how they might earn my undying love, the Sopranos’ house is for sale and I haven’t been this intrigued by the idea of home ownership since the Boogie Nights house went on the market. Also, yes, I teared up at the Gandolfini quote in that story. What an angel!)

So of course Carm’s brief flirtation with a respectable life is futile. Her and Tony’s respect attempts at self-improvement don’t just fall flat — they backfire; they just end up dragged further into the muck together. The expanded kindness and affection they extend to others is undermined by their escalating hostility toward one another. They seem to not be giving up their grievances and bad habits so much as redirecting all of them into their marriage. It feels intimate, in a weird, gross way: they know each other well enough that they can sense the change in the other — and they resent it, because they want that change all to themselves.