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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
In the show's gripping new start, Tony, Carmela, Dr. Melfi and the gang, increasingly cut off from their illusions and their supposed loved ones, freefall through a hopeless world of divorce, betrayal, lust and rage.
Mar 5, 2004 | After my parents got divorced, every time my dad would come to the house he'd comment on how bad the yard looked. "Those bushes are pretty overgrown, huh?" he'd say, smugly, or, "Doesn't anyone mow the grass around here?" At the time, his comments depressed me, as if our scrappy lawn somehow signaled that our family was falling apart. Now I recognize that he was comforted by the fact that our lives didn't continue smoothly without him, that his absence was felt.
This season finds Tony Soprano lurking around his old house like a ghost, looking for signs that his family needs him. (Spoiler alert! This article discusses the first four episodes of this season of "The Sopranos." If you don't want to know bits of the plot from these episodes, you should stop reading.) Even when he can't manage a conversation with his wife and kids, Tony (James Gandolfini) seems to take solace in his role as the family's provider and protector. When Tony discovers that A.J. (Robert Iler) and Carmela (Edie Falco) have had a run-in with a black bear in the backyard, he asks Carmela, "Why didn't you call me when this first happened?" He gives her extra money and insists that she and A.J. stay in a hotel until it's safe again, but Carmela refuses. So, he absurdly sends some flunkies over to sit in the backyard with a rifle, just in case the bear returns.
Since the first season of "The Sopranos," Tony has embodied the contradictions of the male psyche, the Catch-22 of wanting to be in charge and in control, but also desiring genuine love from those around him. In the process, as the lead character in surely the most influential television drama of the last 10 years, he's become an American archetype: the traditional man unsure of his place in a changing world, the alpha male struggling to gain respect from those who resent him for his domineering ways. But this season many of the characters find themselves in similar binds, looking for someone or something to turn to, but coming up short and reverting to their same old misguided habits. The concept of family has always been the loose thread that held these messy lives together, as if a Sunday meal or a game of cards could keep these characters from drifting, separately, out to sea. But the recklessness of last season frayed their already weakened ties, and this season everyone seems to be on their own, and they can't rely on traditions or their place in the hierarchy to pull them through. These aren't exactly highly adaptive, flexible characters, after all, and creator David Chase takes pains to demonstrate just how far off the mark lives can drift when they're guided by haphazard, self-serving choices.
With Tony staying at his deceased mother's house and Meadow away at college, Carmela and A.J. are alone together in the house. Like Tony, Carmela turns to old tricks to sustain her relationship with A.J., cooking up formal family meals even though there are only two of them, pushing A.J. to have the kind of conversation that will soothe her into feeling that all is well with them, and offering the kind of forced affection that turns to rage on a dime. When she inquires about whether he completed his chores, at first she ignores his snottiness and cajoles him with affected sweetness, singing, "It's so nice to have a man around the house."
"You should've thought of that before," A.J. mumbles, and Carmela quickly abandons sweetness for outrage. While on the surface A.J. is acting like "an asshole" (as Carmela reports to Tony), he really just can't, like most teenagers, tolerate these transparent attempts to force him to interact on her terms.
Without Carmela's disapproval to react against, Tony seeks out another mirror for his relationship with his relentlessly judgmental mother. Who better than Dr. Melfi (Lorraine Bracco), a woman who's been silently judging Tony for years? Of course, it's absurd that Tony considers her a reasonable option: He knows next to nothing about her, and he pays her to listen. And yet it's equally obvious why she would be appealing to him, since most of the people in his life are on his payroll, and since he seems unable to tolerate relationships that actually include another human being's thoughts or needs. So he announces his intentions to Melfi the way he'd spring a job on an underling, as if his decision is all that's needed for everything to fall into place.
More absurd than Tony's decision, of course, is the inherent dishonesty of Melfi's relationship to her client. "You know, Anthony, during therapy I never judged you or your behavior," she deadpans before letting loose a torrent of harsh assessments. To make matters even more complicated, just under her judgments, there's a groundwater of desire that she can hardly stand to acknowledge. Even in her sessions with her own therapist, which play out as a struggle for professional one-upmanship, Melfi is never honest. As Chase has deconstructed the gap between family ideals and the disappointment and ambivalence ingrained in family relationships, he also sheds light on the wide rift between what a therapist-client relationship is supposed to look like, and what that relationship actually can be.
"The Sopranos" has always played with these gaps between the control and order of formal roles and the chaos of resentment and selfishness that threatens to topple them, but somehow the reassuring framework of tradition seems less structurally sound than ever this season. Conversations between Tony and his business associates tend to begin with niceties and expressions of familiarity and respect, and more frequently end in rage, egomaniacal outbursts and lines drawn in the sand. When Christopher, as the lowest man on the totem pole, is forced to pick up the tab over and over again, Tony tells him it signals his respect for those above him. The truth, of course, is that Christopher doesn't respect these people, and no amount of dues paying will change that.
