65. Museum-Quality Work
“We’re from Alcoholics Anonymous.” “What’s your name?” “Well, we’re anonymous.”
Tony Soprano has a tendency to end up exactly where he started, so it’s weird to write about this show at a time of massive change and unpredictability. I draft these newsletters two and a half-ish weeks in advance. Today is March 16, and so far, over 180,000 people have confirmed cases of COVID-19 worldwide, and over 7,000 people have died from it. Travel is restricted; countries are on lockdown; the U.S. is trying to scrape by with a set of mismatched state and local policies attempting to accomplish what the federal government won’t. I’m working from home indefinitely, and I live alone, so this newsletter is only going to get weirder. But, no matter how weird it gets, I hope it brings you a little lightness, or a little connection, or a little whatever it is you need right now, even though I couldn’t possibly begin to anticipate what that might look like on April 2.
If you’re here because you’ve chosen The Sopranos for your social distancing viewing, I’m curious about whether you’re finding the experience comforting or horrifying. On the one hand, it might be a little soothing to dip into a fictional world where nothing ever really changes. On the other, the reason this fictional world never changes is, uh… mostly to reinforce the inevitability of death. But its circularity also reminds us that our routines and habits and norms are often bullshit we’ve built up to inoculate ourselves from having to think about what we really want and what others really need from us — and I hope this real-world disruption of those forces inspires some reexamination and change, both on an individual level and a broader social one.
Not that watching this show helps me really commit to that hope. The season five finale is a tying up of loose ends, but more importantly than that, it’s a return to form after a disruptive previous episode. Tony and Carmela fall into their marriage’s old habits, including enabling AJ. Their younger child is back to his pre-eyebrow incident juvenile delinquent ways — with the added twist that he’s now figured out how to monetize them. Because he’s not actively jockeying to join the Mafia, Carm disregards the “following in his father’s footsteps” red flag and decides to nudge him into pursuing an event planning career; Tony, once he’s confirmed that event planning isn’t gay, goes along with this, albeit without any active parenting. He’s back to his established therapy routine too, and not even Melfi laying out the pattern for him step-by-step can faze him — in fact, he’s more thrown off by the return of the horse painting (as though any significant animal in his life is ever gone for good.)
Even the choice to kill Tony B. himself is, I’d argue, a return to stasis — or at least a choice that follows standard, stasis-oriented Tony logic. His cousin is going to be killed soon; it’s just a matter of when, how, and by whom. Taking on the task himself gives Tony control over all those variables, and the desire to maintain control is his most pressing motivation. And that desire is, as Sil points out, amplified and warped by Johnny Sack’s involvement in the situation. Tony didn’t send Tony B. away out of a desire to save him; he did it to assert himself, not Johnny, as the person making the rules. And in order to assert that position, he has to treat his cousin as yet another short-term sacrifice in the long game of consolidating and cementing his power.
If Tony has changed at all in these five seasons, it’s only in that he’s become more ruthless in pursuing that goal. That increasing coldness is underlined in the episode’s final moments, an “everything has changed, but nothing has” montage on the level of the second season premiere. It’s a series of shots of the Soprano family house, an echo of the season’s opening sequence. This one is wintry while that one was autumnal; where that one felt totally devoid of human life, this one features Carmela, worried, welcoming Tony home. Restored warmth in one area is offset by increasing chill in another — an backdrop for characters who have fully bought into the zero-sum ideology of scarcity, whose only guiding principle is that there’s only so much to go around, so you’d better claim as much as you can for yourself.