I’ve written countless
articles over the past several years slamming both David Chase, the showrunner
of The Sopranos and the series itself in regard to its role in the
Golden Age of TV. One of the arguments I keep coming back to is how OZ, which
came before The Sopranos was groundbreaking and revolutionary in ways
that the latter show just wasn’t. I’ve made that argument in both terms of
race, where I doubt I’ll be refuted as well as how it dealt with more controversial
issues including homosexual relationship and consent. But one of the ways I
haven’t focused on is a more telling one: the critical difference between OZ
and The Sopranos when it came to presentation of female characters.
And the
clearest way you can tell the difference is through Edie Falco who starred on
both shows. In the fall of 1998 she was cast in The Sopranos while she
was still playing Diane Wittelsey on OZ. After the first season of The
Sopranos was shot Falco appeared on the third season of Oz no doubt
wanting job security in case The Sopranos didn’t work out. (This was
nothing new; Lauren Velez who was cast as Gloria Nathan on Oz was
starring on New York Undercover at the time and divided her time between
the two series until Undercover was cancelled at the end of the 1997-1998
fall season.) When The Sopranos became a smash hit and Falco won her
first Emmy showrunner Tom Fontana graciously was willing to release Falco from
what was a supporting role to a lead role and wrote Wittelsey out of the
series.
(While he did
so clumsily – her character went on vacation to London and never came back – it
is a measure of the respect Fontana had for Falco that he didn’t decide to kill
her character off, which was basically the only way almost every major left OZ.)
I should
mention the first time I became aware of Falco’s skill as an actress was during
the second season of OZ. I’d been aware of her talent for a while – she had
recurring roles on Law & Order and Homicide and she’d
demonstrating occasional brilliance in Season 1. But the first moment I was
aware of her brilliance as a performer came in the second season premiere.
On OZ,
Wittlesey’s character was a corrections officer who had a difficult backstory.
She had a young daughter from a former marriage whose husband had been both a
biker and had abused her. She’d given birth in her teens, had drunk and used
drugs and had survived an ugly divorce. Her mother had cancer and was in and
out of chemo (she died during the third season). She’d been having an affair
with Tim McManus, the head of Em City when a friend of her ex Scott Ross ended
up in the unit on a life sentence. In order to supplement her income when her
overtime was cut, she’d entered an arrangement to sell bootleg cigarettes with
Ross. McManus found out about it and ordered her to stop but Ross told her that
was not going to happen and said she had more to lose from exposure than him. Immediately
afterwards the riot took place in Em City and Wittelsey was one of the
civilians taken hostage.
In the
aftermath of the riot Alvah Case (Charles S. Dutton) leader of the commission
charged with the investigation determined that Ross, who was one eight people
found dead when the governor gave the order for the National Guard to storm the
prison, had actually been murdered. Eventually he suspected Wittelsey and at
the end of the episode confronted her. Rather than answer his question directly
she responds: “Have you ever been a riot?”
“The idea of
being a hostage, the mob mentality. You get carried away; you stop being human.
You become part of something else. I have made every mistake there is. I
have fallen in love with the wrong me, I had a baby out of wedlock, I drank too
much, I snorted too much. I have done things to make money – including this job
– which makes me dread getting out of bed. But each time, I made the
choice. I chose to drink. I chose to stop. When my husband got
abusive, I chose to walk. I refuse to be anybody’s victim. These
mistakes I’ve made, they are a part of me. They are like my skin…and I do not
regret what I’ve done. Do you hear me? No regrets, no remorse. I just keep
going.”
It was one of
the most powerful monologues I’d heard to that point in my years of viewing TV.
Falco deserved an Emmy just for that show. (OZ was never nominated for
any major Emmys.) Her bravado hides terror and it is only because of persuasion
by her boss to Case that she is not charged. Furthermore, she spends much of
the season trying to cover her lie which Schillinger (J.K. Simmons) knows is
one because he saw her kill him. She will later engage it what may be
entrapment in order to get Schillinger in pawn and will convince McManus to
perjure himself in court to protect her. McManus responds by telling her that
while he were cover for her, he demands she transfer out of Em City
permanently. Their promising romance sputters out for good.
Diane Wittelsey
throughout her three seasons remains sympathetic and true to the monologue she
delivers above. Now compare her to Carmela Soprano. In Season 3 Carmela begins
to see a therapist to deal with her own concerns about her husband and his
behavior. This therapist is nothing like Dr. Melfi (I’ll get back to her). On
her second visit, he tells her in no uncertain terms how dangerous it is for
both her and her family if she remains married to him. He tells her very
clearly that the only course of action she has is to leave him.
Tony Soprano is
not physically abusive to Carmela in the way he is to his ‘other’ family but he
regularly cheats on her with multiple women and has been very rough emotionally
to A.J. (and it will only get worse). She has been at best willfully blind to
how her husband makes a living, which must have been very difficult after he
was nearly killed at the end of Season 1. She’s beginning to notice the ‘friends’
who keep disappearing. And she has far more resources available to her than
Diane ever did.
She never sees
the therapist again. At the end of Season 4 when her husband’s jilted mistress tells
her of the affair she’s been having with Tony, she throws him out of the
house, more likely because this is a bridge even she can’t pretend to ignore.
As we all know during Season 5 her husband bullies her into refusing to get a
proper divorce and does everything to isolate her. At the end of Season 5 she
takes him back after he gives some perfunctory talk about having changed which
not even she can believe. In that same episode Adriana is murdered (I’ll get
back to this too) and despite seeing her ghost in Paris, she never even asks
about what happened to her nephew’s fiancée.
I’m not going
to pretend that Falco didn’t deserve all the Emmys and other awards she got for
playing Carmela Soprano – it was a powerful performance on many levels and Falco
could show power in numerous scenes. What I am saying is that Carmela is the
kind of woman that Diane would have no patience for if they met on the street.
Jackie Peyton, the next character she played after The Sopranos might
have more – she was unfaithful to her husband and an addict – but like Diane
and unlike Carmela, she had a demanding job and was working barely above the
poverty-line. If Carmela had come to All Saints Jackie would have tried to
force her to leave her husband - hut
wouldn’t be shocked when she didn’t.
And to be very
clear Carmela Soprano was the most active female cast member of The Sopranos.
All of the other major female characters of The Sopranos clan seemed
more content to be adjacent to their significant others. Livia Soprano was
happy to make people miserable from a distance. Janice’s biggest ambition was
to be a mob wive rather than a powerful woman. And while I acknowledge every bit
of the sadness of Adriana’s storyline, you can’t escape the fact that this essentially
the same arc and fate we see Pussy Bompansaro (Vincent Pastore) undergo during
Season 2. I will grant Adriana was more innocent than the other rats on the
series but it all led to the same place. (And I’m not sure what it says about
David Chase that the only way he could realize Drea Da Matteo’s potential as an
actress was to reuse a storyline he’d given to a white middle aged man a couple
seasons previous.)
But what about
Dr. Melfi, you ask? Viewers of OZ will well remember that this show to had a female
psychologist: Sister Pete, exquisitely played by Rita Moreno. Sister Pete could
be equal parts compassionate and combative with both staff and indeed some of
the deeply disturbed prisoners she treated. She was more sympathetic to the
criminals she treated than Jennifer Melfi would become to Tony Soprano but she
had a clear sense of when she was being manipulated: her sessions with Chris
Keller (Christopher Meloni) in Season 3 and throughout the series showed that
she would have no time for her patients facilitating.
So if she had ever
been Tony’s therapist (and boy, I would have paid double my subscription rates
for that crossover!) I think she would have known very clearly the kind
of man Tony was, probably by the end of their first session. And even though
she was compassionate to monster far worse than him in OZ she would not
have brooked his behavior to a certain limit. Put simply, had Tony reacted the
way he had to Sister Pete if she’s raised the issues about Livia at the end of
Season1 (he seemed about to punch Melfi) she would have gotten to her feet,
told him to leave and would have terminated services with him immediately – if she
didn’t decide to call the cops.
And if she had
been Melfi’s psychiatrist instead of Peter Bogdanovich, she wouldn’t have
messed around with Melfi’s back and forth after she chose to go back to him in
Season 2. I suspect her reaction would have been as blunt to Melfi as Carmela’s
therapist had been to her in Season 3: this man is dangerous; he’s using you
and you’re just giving him what he wants. (She also speaks from experience.)
This is for the
record the attitude keeping with two other therapists who played complicated
psychiatrists on both versions of HBO’s In Treatment. Paul Weston (Gabriel
Byrne) had to deal with similar personalities to Tony and his protégé Brooke
Taylor (Uzo Aduba in 2021) actually did deal with a patient like him: a white
collar criminal with narcissistic tendencies who she realized quickly was
manipulated her.
I’ve talked
mostly about how OZ was superior when it came to female characters then The
Sopranos was and there were better variations even in smaller roles; Claire
Howell, a sexual predatory prison guard who was more brutal than some of the
male; Suzanne Fitzgerald (Betty Buckley) Ryan O’Reilly’s birth mother who
abandoned him with an abusive father and came back to take responsibility for
her sins, criminal and family wise and Stella Adler (Patti LuPone) the prison
librarian who tried to find ways to reach the younger prisoners and deal with
her own illness. Many of these
characters were in the love interest/family type but none of them were defined
by it, unlike the women on The Sopranos who were almost entirely
adjacent to the men.
But perhaps the
biggest difference may be a thematic one and it is best summed up in a line
said by Kareem Said in the first season finale. I’ve quoted it before in a difference
article but it’s worth repeating:
While the tension
is unfolding during the riot McManus tries to persuade Said (Eamonn Walker) to
try and resolve things peacefully. Said says it’s not to him. McManus replies: “Yes
it is. And Said shouts out:
“The best prison
wouldn’t be good enough. I’m going to try to explain this to you one last time.
I’m not saying the men in this prison are innocent. I’m saying they are here
not because of the crimes they committed but the color of their skin! Their lack of
education! The fact that they are poor!”
None of these
qualifiers remotely applies to Tony Soprano or any of the members of his crew.
You might argue the second is a factor but we all know the first and third mean
are far greater an influence. I’ve already pointed out how utterly white The
Sopranos is and how racially diverse OZ is.
David Chase’s
argument for the thesis of The Sopranos was that given the choices
people will always made decisions that will effectively disturb their way of
life the least. It is taken to an extreme in the mob but he argues it applies
to everybody everywhere. But because he centers The Sopranos exclusively
around white people, both in crime and in the suburbs, then a subtle
implication is that only white people have this same kind of freedom.
The prisoners in OZ certainly don’t, and the slingers in The Wire definitely
don’t. And considering how unenlightened both Tony Sopranos and almost
everybody in his circle were on almost everything that didn’t regard the mob,
it’s harder to argue that’s it out of a certain intellectual choices either.
The larger
implication of The Sopranos is just as toxic. Carmela Soprano would be
the first of a long line of female characters in the next decade who would be
burned in effigy by the Internet because they committed the cardinal sin of being
an obstacle to their husbands being allowed to at best cheat on them and
engage in toxic behavior at the workplace and at worse beat and kill other
people. And Edie Falco got off light in comparison to Betty Draper on Mad
Men, Skyler White on Breaking Bad and – though she wasn’t his wife –
Debra Morgan on Dexter. Apparently for the crime of being on the side of
morality, they were judged whiners and far worse. So in a way at least Carmela and
so many of the women around her got off lucky: at least they were allowed to
make bad choices as long as they didn’t get in the way of the men’s monstrous
ones or you know point them out.
(This was a
sin, I should mention, that was pretty much exclusive only to The
Sopranos among HBO dramas. In a later article I’ll go into detail about how
the three successive series after The Sopranos were far more willing to
give female characters lives of their own and expand beyond the tropes they
were given.)
That’s the
biggest problem I have with The Sopranos even twenty-five years later. I
don’t deny the brilliance of its acting, writing and directing. I don’t deny it
was a pioneer in many ways (though perhaps not as much as its defenders insist
when they ignore OZ) I don’t deny that it was revolutionary and that
many of the greatest shows on TV couldn’t have existed without it. But that doesn’t
mean it wasn’t fundamentally flawed in a way I just can’t see in The Wire or
Deadwood or in later shows like Mad Men or Breaking Bad. The
problem is that, unlike all those other series, The Sopranos is emotionally
hollow at the center. It has no deeper meaning; it walks away from even the
idea there is one. And it has a darker view of human nature that is based
solely on both its racial and sexual perspective that just don’t correlate with
what we see in any of the other major series that came out of HBO.
The message of The
Sopranos is simple. White people, mostly male, mostly high middle-class and
not well educated, are violent, abusive, will make choices based more out of
self-interest rather than altruistic ones and while people around them might
pay for their decisions as a result, many of them can at the end of the day
just have a nice dinner with their family. We knew this before The Sopranos debuted,
we sure as hell know it now. In that sense, it doesn’t matter what happens
after the screen cuts to black in the series finale even if he does get shot.
Here's the
eulogy for Tony Soprano and the show he represented if he was killed. Tony Soprano
was a prick then, and he’s a prick now. The only difference is now he’s a dead
prick. He was responsible for the deaths of a lot of other pricks and he is
survived by a family of pricks, male and female. He is currently residing in Hell
along with many of people who died for him, including his own nephew who knew
this was where he was going because of it but still went on serving him,
sacrificing his fiancée. He only had a negative effect on the lives of those
around him, abusing others, emotionally and physically. He hurt many people and
killed many more, usually for no good reason. His legacy was a series of other TV
characters who did the same behavior and worse to other innocents and were
cheered on by millions. Those people who spent so much time doing so should do
what he never did and take a good look in the mirror. He should not be missed
but people do anyway. Go figure.
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