04. Always with the Scenarios

“I thought we made some progress on your narcissism.”

Every piece of media will, at some point, look dated. Contemporary narratives suffer the most, because contemporariness has a short shelf life. Style trends change so quickly that some argue that we’ve reached a time-is-a-flat-circle approach to aesthetics in which nothing ever falls out of the trend cycle entirely, which is of course not true. (Remember cold shoulder tops? Me neither.) Car design, technology, slang, and home interiors all give away their time periods. But even the most accurate, detailed period pieces can be traced to the context in which they were created. Technology behind the camera changes just as rapidly as that which we see on screen, and media narratives pay homage to one another often enough that we can figure out where one fits in our cultural timeline based on what it does and does not reference.

So it’s inevitable that things start to feel older as they get older, and it’s not necessarily bad — especially if what you’re creating is, like The Sopranos, striving for specificity rather than hipness. “Meadowlands” is stacked with details that remind us it’s 1999: the Geocities horrorshow Meadow shows AJ as proof of their father’s criminality, Meadow’s various permutations of layered tops, the passing references to the World Trade Center and the Promise Keepers, the spectrum of activewear-adjacent teen boy fashion worn by AJ and his peers (and also Christopher.) All of this feels decisively two decades old.

But I don’t have the same cringing oh god remember when we all thought this shit was cool reaction I often do when I watch other twenty-year-old media — because these things were never intended to look cool. They’re just another way of conveying facts about these particular people in this particular time and place. So my reaction is more oh god of course that’s what Rosalie Aprile wears to her husband’s funeral; of course Meadow Soprano rocked white-girl cornrows. (Although, tangentially, my friend Alex tried out white-girl cornrows in the year of our lord 2008, and on that day she kept annoying our friend Diana, who finally broke and yelled, “If you don’t knock it off, I’ll eat those fucking cornrows off your head!”)

However, even though these details look correct, I wouldn’t go so far as to say they look good. The show’s aesthetics are often hideous, a stark contrast to today’s sleek, aggressively stylized premium cable. Everything looks lived-in, from the living spaces to the cars to the teeth. Even the dream sequences aren’t particularly dreamy — they look like the detritus of everyday life, remixed to create something new, which is, you know, sort of what dreams are. “Meadowlands” opens with the first of many extended dream sequences (which some viewers hate and I could not love more), in which Tony wades through his paranoia about therapy, his work, Jackie’s mortality, and his mother in a series of images repeated from his real life (and also Psycho.) For the first few moments, we can’t really tell that we’re inside Tony’s subconscious — it’s the juxtaposition of things, rather than the individual things themselves, that tips us off to the fact that what we see is taking place on a different plane of reality.

However, the show’s unstylized aesthetic doesn’t preclude elegant shot composition and editing. “Meadowlands” is not a great episode — it’s not the weakest of the first season, but it falters when compared to the three that precede it, as well as the one that will follow. But it’s a good example of the unusual way the show uses visual cues to convey important information: the framing of and cutting between shots help us piece things together, much in the way that Tony tries (and, at this point, fails) to read into his own dreams.

The series loves to give us shots that replicate past moments with slight tweaks, establishing resonances between characters and events without leaning on busy-work expository dialogue to signpost those connections. (Although it does something similar with snippets of dialogue as well; characters constantly parrot one another’s phrasing, even ones who never cross physical paths.) The shot in which Tony and Livia sit on the couch at Green Grove — silent, staring forward — will be replicated with Tony alone near the end of the next episode, which revolves around a different set of parent-child tensions. It also echoes the earlier scene of Tony and AJ playing Mario Kart 64: although there’s no couch involved (James Gandolfini crouching down to the floor to play is one of the Tony moments I find most charming), it’s another brief moment of Tony sitting to the left of someone with no real interest in his attempts to connect, both of them staring straight ahead, neither one of them talking.

And, like these echoed compositions, the cuts from one scene to the next almost always tell us something: for example, Melfi’s explanation that sometimes you have to trick children into thinking they’re in control — spoken in reference to Livia — sends us directly into a scene with Christopher, who Tony needs to both rein in and encourage. Even more telling, however, is the cut from AJ’s schoolyard fight to Tony, sitting at the bar of the Bing, reading a book about elder care. That one cut pulls together the flotsam and jetsam of the rest of the episode, and in doing so, it gives us a new piece of information: Tony’s paranoia can be boiled down to guilt, but his attempts to assuage it are misdirected. He can’t make Livia see him as a better son, but he can still be a better parent — to AJ in particular, though next week’s installment will zero in on the Tony-Meadow relationship to similar effect — and can therefore interrupt the vicious Soprano family behavioral cycle.