79. Because They’re Stupid, That’s Why!
“You two get in a fight?” “I don’t know!”
My dream material possession is the faux merch mug for Cleaver, a fictional movie so stupid it would absolutely star Mark Wahlberg and be produced by Randall “My Man” Emmett if it were real. (Please indulge me, it’s been a while since I made a reference only true Bravoheads will enjoy.) But then again, part of the appeal of Cleaver in 2020 is that it’s the kind of silly, midbudget charisma void of a genre film that rarely gets made now — or, if it does, gets quietly put out to pasture on some streaming platform, with the algorithm only unearthing it for subscribers with truly irredeemable taste.
And yet, in all its inanity, it still manages to dredge up some genuine hurt feelings; like Little Carmine, Cleaver is very stupid and myopic on the surface but not wholly devoid of wisdom and attention to others. (Which, relatedly: How embarrassing that Little Carmine so easily learned and acted upon the lesson Tony has struggled against for all these years.) Though Tony and Adriana, unlike their on-screen stand-ins, never slept together, Carm’s real-life paranoia is justified — as is Christopher’s real-life resentment about the actual way Tony got in the middle of his relationship with Ade.
A series of arguments results: Carm fights with Tony, Tony fights with Christopher, Christopher beats J.T. to coerce him into telling Tony he made up that plot point, and Christopher and Carmela confront each other as well. That disagreement is one of the few one-on-one conversations we see this pair cousins have, and of course, it doesn’t tell us much about their relationship to one another, but it tells us a lot about their respective bonds with Tony. And Tony, for his part, is far more concerned by the tenuousness of his bond with Christopher than the continuous rockiness of his marriage; realizing Christopher hates him brings him to the verge of tears in therapy — emotional territory he usually reserves for feeling that he’s failed AJ.
Tony, Christopher, and Carmela’s tangled feelings run deep and long, but they feel insignificant against watching Johnny Sack die in prison. His passing is sad and drawn out, and, like Bobby’s perfunctory rite-of-passage hit last week, more mundane than you’d expect or want. Johnny’s physical weakness is alarming, but the real pain comes from seeing him emotionally weakened to the point where he seizes a false sense of control wherever he can find it: during visits from his family, while sneaking cigarettes, by pursuing the companionship of and accepting guidance from a wife-murderer/prison doctor who gives him false hope about his prognosis.
That last part is the most unsettling proof that Johnny has been stripped down to his barest self. He’s not only quick to trust someone who’s bullshitting him, simply because he tells him what he wants to hear, but he’s also willing to trust someone he would, under normal circumstances, find absolutely reprehensible. It’s a horrible way to die — wasting away slowly, and losing the most distinctive parts of yourself in the process — and it could happen to any of us, regardless of the communities we’re born into or the careers we pursue or the commitments we honor to those we choose to have in our lives.
We’re far less likely to go out like Phil’s mentee, Gerry Torciano, who gets assassinated in a restaurant in the only moment of the series that actually feels like a glamorous, old-school mob movie. At a glance, the hit presents a counterpoint to Johnny’s aggressively civilian death as well as Cleaver — a sad, dumb, money-grubbing replication of a long-gone time — but it also reminds us that long-gone time never really existed, at least not in the fantastical way these men have reimagined it. Things might have been more luxurious and exciting once upon a time, but that lack of boredom was built on a foundation of abject, endless terror — although, to be fair, relentless in-the-moment fear is one way to keep long-term existential dread at bay.