30. Undershirts, Yelling.

“Where do people find the time?” “To get well?”

When I was in my early twenties, a man did some horrible things to me, the kind of horrible things that men routinely do to women. The precise details aren’t relevant; trust me when I tell you that they were bad — shame-inducing, terrifying, you get the idea. But the worst thing was that they didn’t end once he was finished with me. For years, I felt responsible. Not guilty (for once), but accountable. As if, on top of having to live through the experience as it happened, I had then been tasked with doing something about it once it was over, and I could not figure out what the fuck it was I was supposed to be doing. 

All the options available to me were useless, because those choices were tied to institutions, institutions designed to protect powerful men. I can admit now that I didn’t do myself any favors in how I navigated them. I insisted, whenever anyone asked, that I didn’t want personal vindication, that I wanted a resolution that would ensure that he would never do those things to any other woman again — nothing more, nothing less. What a tremendous load of bullshit. I would have happily embraced preempting others’ pain as a side effect, but I wanted him to be punished, to suffer, and to feel no regret whatsoever while he did. 

That’s impossible, of course — so impossible that, for years, I wouldn’t even let myself admit that was what I wanted. How self-indulgent! How impractical! How divorced from a world in which every form of justice that’s offered to women is either useless or rife with strings attached! (It goes without saying that I couldn’t move on until I admitted I wanted revenge.) But the impulse to make useless, limited options work, to try to become the exception to the dozens of rules that restrict women — I wasn’t liberated from that because I knew that it was futile, that the only forms of justice that would leave me satisfied would require me to sacrifice my soul in the process.

There are few narratives that represent how insane this unsolvable problem will make a person. It’s pretty much “Employee of the Month” and Elle — another important entry in the Chilly Bitches Who Love Monochromatic Outfits and Being Too Curious For Their Own Good canon. And that’s because, as The Sopranos has critiqued previously (in season one, in “Boca”), critiques here, and will critique again (in two weeks, more gruesomely, in “University,” and again in the back half of the season), stories about violence against women are built to serve men’s character development. 

“Employee of the Month” works because it understands all those dynamics (although it spends a bit too much time explaining them), because it presents its central dynamic as both an ethical and a gendered one. Its fundamental question is: How much of your soul are you willing to give for personal justice? But it doesn’t forget that this is a question that women have to answer more often, and that men, no matter how well-meaning, tend to be more of a burden than an aid in our attempts to do so. It’s not just a matter of what Jennifer Melfi will sacrifice; it’s also a matter of whether, in making that sacrifice, she’d want to bring more men with little respect for her boundaries into a situation in which her ability to exert control is already limited — a matter of figuring out whether the irresolution she has now is better than the one she has a slim chance of gaining in the future. 

There’s some good writing on this episode (but also: thank god it predated Peak Thinkpiece), but a lot of it is written by people who haven’t had to go through something like this, and so much of it fails to recognize that the final scene is both a definitive moral claim and a moment of exhaustion. Because the episode is so effective in laying out a genuinely conflicted choice, it’s easy to empathize with the feeling of being fucking done, and it’s also easy to understand why so many people felt the question the episode asks might not be permanently answered, that the final scene might be more of a not now than a no.

I’ve always thought her decision was a permanent one (the cut to black silence, a first in the series, telegraphs that affirmatively.) But I do think that this immediate question is replaced with a more complex long term one: What will she put up with from Tony to hang onto the comfort of knowing she could, if she wanted, have his work at her disposal? 

It’s a question that will become harder to grapple with as Tony becomes less and less willing to attempt basic human decency, but it’s kind of easy here. He’s a pain in the ass in the first half of the episode, but its second half is one of the last few times we’ll see Tony’s potential to be good. He tells Christopher flat-out that he loves him; he’s very concerned about hypothetical knee stitches (much to Carmela’s irritation.) But it’s downhill from here. Aside some brief flashes of empathy — some of them misdirected onto a horse — the possibility of redemption grows smaller from this point forward. And the mental balancing of the piece of mind that comes with having his loyalty vs. the complicity that comes with being loyal to him becomes more difficult.