15. Whatever Happened to Baby Janice
“What is she into?” “I don’t know… negativity?”
One of my favorite relationships on The Sopranos is the A.J.-Livia bond. He’s too stupid and inattentive to fall for her manipulations, and exactly stupid and inattentive enough to be one of the few people who infuriates Livia more than Livia infuriates them — a dynamic that’s on full display in the back half of “Do Not Resuscitate.” A.J. goes to visit Livia, and she feigns dementia and tosses around the kind of passive-aggressive statements that would goad any other member of the family into defensiveness. But A.J. absorbs none of it — because he’s A.J., but also because he’s distracted by his curiosity about the relationship between DNR, which he heard his father and aunt discussing, and DNA, which he’s doing a report on in school. (It’s probably all genetical.) Finally, he just asks Livia if she knows the difference and explains the context for the question — which enrages her, at least until she finds a way to twist this new information into ammunition against Janice’s efforts to manage her.
I’m of two minds about this interaction. On the one hand, the show relies on A.J.’s accidental gossip habit as a narrative device maybe a little too often; this is also how Livia found out about Tony’s therapy. And, while it makes sense for mistakes to repeat in a show that fixates on the (im)mutability of our behavioral patterns and commits to letting its characters fuck up in the same ways over and over again, you could also argue that it’s too easy to dip into the A.J.-as-unwitting-messenger well again. It’s convenient to have a character at your disposal who can accelerate conflicts without having to face personal consequences for doing so.
On the other hand, teenage boys are very skilled at serving as unintentional Patients Zero in the spread of family secrets. My brother (who is now 27 and still has this habit, along with some other strong A.J. tendencies) has mastered the art. If you tell him something and ask him to pass that information along to another family member, he will never, ever loop them in. You’re better off attempting to communicate via ESP. But if you explicitly ask him not to repeat something, everyone will know by sundown. A similar inverse proportion takes shape around how much you would like him to listen to something you’re saying in his presence and how diligently he actually listens, so sometimes he will share information you didn’t want him to spread that you didn’t even think he heard. So, in conclusion, yes, I find A.J.’s role as the point of origin for so much family drama to be a credible one.
In fact, I think almost all the family dynamics on the show are alarmingly true-to-life, and “Do Not Resuscitate” is full of little details that reinforce that feeling. I love Meadow’s desire to have a relationship with Janice — it’s such a late-teens thing, to try to get the non-parental adults in your family to recognize you as a fellow adult. And that general dynamic is amplified by the way that Janice, at least at the surface level on which Meadow currently knows her, possesses things that Meadow wants to grow up to have, things from which her parents discourage her: progressive politics, a life beyond New Jersey, a resistant attitude toward authority and respectability.
Less positive but equally authentic is the sibling-specific way that Janice and Tony bounce between combativeness and affection. I love the moment where Janice tries to please Tony by telling him she’s come around to agreeing with his perspective on Livia, which works for roughly three seconds before he gets annoyed with her for the fact that she wasn’t in agreement with him in the first place. But, despite how insane they make each other, they also understand each other in a way that others don’t. Janice introduces more chaos and conflict, but Tony also appreciates the fact that he’s no longer handling the Livia problem — now with medical confirmation that her stroke was fabricated — entirely alone.
If “A Guy Walks into a Psychiatrist’s Office” reveals how the family can be tyrannical, “Do Not Resuscitate” reminds us why it’s so hard to walk away from that tyranny: even if your familial contact mostly involves being manipulated, manipulation is still a form of human contact that keeps you from being totally alone. And while manipulation is the Soprano family’s primary mode, it’s not their only mode. These people are generally awful at treating their family members with love and respect — but they’re also capable of being better than they have been, and we get to witness that in small, tender, not-entirely-selfless-but-not-wholly-selfish moments like Janice taking Meadow’s insight and maturity seriously, Janice and Tony dipping their feet in the pool, and Tony carrying an injured Junior in his arms.