Interviewed by the authors for a long postmortem (it reads like an extended commentary track), David Chase takes the Marcus Aurelius long view of the transience of human endeavor, denying that The Sopranos will have any legacy, destined to join the stardust that yawns ahead. In the fullness of time, perhaps so, but in the lousy here and now The Sopranos retains a deep, admonitory hoofprint and, forgive the word, relevance. It “holds up” as quality crime drama and soap opera and its violence—at its worst overly florid and sadistic—still has the clout to shock even when you know what’s coming. But other series are re-watchable and influential without wielding lasting diagnostic abilities bordering on the prophetic. Depicting how things were then with evocation and a keen eye and ear for entropy, The Sopranos shows how we got to where we are now, a country stewing in its own stale juices.
Coming at the ragged end of the Bill Clinton era and sticking around through most of the Bush presidency, The Sopranos records and preserves the cusp of the pre-9/11, post-9/11 atmospheric shift, when national confidence had the wind knocked out of it and terrorism superseded organized crime as the chief preoccupation of the feds, the red needle on the fear gauge. It pulls back the tarp of the underlying malaise afflicting white America, a malaise compounded of postwar nostalgia, creeping age, waning virility and vital purpose, and a nagging belatedness (Tony himself: “Lately, I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over”). The gong of decline is tolled at the outset. The rackets aren’t bringing in the money they used to, the minorities are taking over . . . Why can’t things be the way they used to be when young snots respected their elders, made men didn’t cut deals and rat out associates but took the full rap, and they played Jerry Vale on the radio?
It’s the MAGA mentality in its dormancy, Trumpiness on training wheels.
Way down the line (in episode 80), Tony, tired of listening to Paulie’s nattering on about the glory days, silences the dinner table with a dismissive “‘Remember when’ is the lowest form of conversation.” But that reflects Tony’s irritation with Paulie’s lack of an off-switch on his mouth more than a revulsion at reminiscing. Remembering when is an irresistible tug and drug on The Sopranos, its characters as mired in the monochrome past and the thickets of family lore as the residents of William Faulkner’s fabled Yoknapatawpha County. What Chase and his writers grasped is that the nostalgia of Tony and company isn’t a soft cotton-candied wistfulness of the way things were. There’s a hard edge to it, an anger simmering beneath, a bitter entitlement looking for an excuse to lash out. It’s the gripes of wrath.
The Sopranos reveals how a certain vintage of white person has perfected the art of playing the victim. One of the show’s genius strokes was casting Nancy Marchand, best known then as the Katharine Graham-ish menschy newspaper proprietor in TV’s Lou Grant, as Tony’s mother, Livia, the most un-nurturing mother ever inflicted on a sensitive brute, cawing “Oh, poor you!” at Tony after he indulges in one of his sad-sack complaints—a line reading for the ages. Yet Livia, malignant as she is (shades of Siân Phillips’s Livia in I, Claudius), is likewise suffused in maudlin, martyr self-pity, wearing her crummy housecoat like widow’s weeds and dabbing at a faucet drip of crocodile tears as she bemoans being chucked onto the scrap heap of life. As for Uncle Junior (Dominic Chianese), don’t get him started, he’ll chew the bark off the entire drive home with his complaining. The Sopranos is a choral litany of bitching and bemoaning rooted in bad faith: a refusal to take responsibility for their own actions and instead play the blame game. It’s the Make America Great Again mentality in its dormancy, Trumpiness on training wheels.
The mordant irony of The Sopranos is that the gravest violence isn’t the staccato killings and maimings meted out episode after episode to this mook or that, but the slow-motion assault on the environment that unfolds like a curse. Tony fronts as a “waste-management consultant”—technically true, if by waste management you mean disposing of dead bodies within a tri-state area and convenient waterways—and what helps bankroll the gangster lifestyle of him and those around him is a diversified operation of toxic dumping, half-assed asbestos removal, and garbage hauling to God knows where, along with the usual extortion, hijacking, and other fun stuff. As the Mob operations befoul air, water, and soil with carcinogens, karma exacts its toll fee. The characters are a virtual cancer cluster: Uncle Junior (who survives), Paulie Walnuts (ditto), Bobby Baccalieri Sr., Jackie Aprile Sr., and, saving the best-worst for last, Johnny Sack. A heavy cloud cover of mortality hangs over The Sopranos, a wintry load, and it’s telling that the only truly joyous moment of carefree laughter Tony Soprano enjoys is in the pool with the splashing ducks. Once they depart, it’s paradise lost.
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