Monday, June 11, 2007
Rich Food in a Time of Decline: Some Thoughts on the Sopranos Finale
The ending was the only outcome David Chase et al. could have opted for, seeing as the structural arc of the series seemed foreordained to end with Tony's death-or-capture. My initial irritation with the "Oh yeah? Live with this forever" attitude you can easily read into the finale was bullshit, though, because in deflecting an "ending," the narrative actually reinforced itself.
The Sopranos was always television show about decline. The very idea of the Mob, bound by an antiquated honor code befitting Sicilian immigrants or the Old World, surviving into suburban New Jersey in the twenty-first century was an incongruity built into the pitching of the pilot. Tony's succession as head of the family seemed a sort of genealogical endgame, because he knew A.J. would never take up the business and had to stretch out to Carmela's side of the family--to her cousin Christopher whom he re-christened as his own nephew--for any hope of continuation. Decadence crept in; A.J. was weak and dissipated, fainting at the prospect of military school and ringing up thousand dollar checks at Meatpacking clubs. Christopher's own struggle against heroin and drinking practically did him in, and when Adriana was revealed to be working with the FBI and Sil had to shoot her, it increased the pressure on Christopher to enshrine himself as heir apparent by quickly marrying another woman, so as to produce his own offspring.
It didn't happen. Christopher, too, was killed in the end. After Vito died, triggering the final war, there was Bobby. Carlo flipped and Sil was injured. Paulie, never trusted with too much, succumbed to paranoia about his own death and superstition over a cat thought to be obsessed with Christopher's framed picture. He was already too old and could never be the nucleus around which a new family might form (he was the only unmarried member, after all). The crew shrank faster than it could grow, and the ones who remained were aging. It was Patsy, a sixty-ish soldier, whose son was to eventually solidify the Soprano future by getting engaged to Meadow, a union founded on a sense of urgency as much as Meadow's willed blindness to the sources of her father's wealth.
And it's wealth that's the locus of the anxieties of capitalism and gender. To avoid complete collapse, capitalism must generate replicate its dynamics on ever larger (and maybe increasingly vulgar) scales. Historians of empire and proto-neocons like Daniel Bell frequently conclude that affluence undermines the virtues required for it to exist: thrift, diligence, the ability to forego immediate pleasures. This is understood to be the underlying reason for aristocratic torpor, perversion and sexual sterility. Tony Soprano, anti-hero, demanded loyalty and allegiance and espoused conservative political views but lived more like a dauphin, with a sprawling series of marital infidelities and an appetite for fattening Italian food.
This celebration of a sort of life-sustaining moribundity remained at the heart of the show. A generation after the wealthy fled Newark for places like West Caldwell, returning (if at all) only to commute--in the case of Sopranos, to a butcher shop with offices in the back. They enmeshed themselves in federal urban redevelopment plans, through dummy union jobs and corrupt subcontractors: parasites on an already-blighted city. The entirety of North Jersey, a juxtaposition of Superfund sites and built-out subdivisions is of course much more nuanced than the Leno-esque national punching bag it's often made out to be. It is, among other things, swollen with fertility for organized crime's decadent anachronism, for religiose murderers and homophobes who kiss each other on the cheek. Such anachronisms had to give way sooner or later, execution-style or in a drawn-out trial, but in the case of Tony Soprano all we'll know is that his empire was indeed untenable.
The Sopranos was always television show about decline. The very idea of the Mob, bound by an antiquated honor code befitting Sicilian immigrants or the Old World, surviving into suburban New Jersey in the twenty-first century was an incongruity built into the pitching of the pilot. Tony's succession as head of the family seemed a sort of genealogical endgame, because he knew A.J. would never take up the business and had to stretch out to Carmela's side of the family--to her cousin Christopher whom he re-christened as his own nephew--for any hope of continuation. Decadence crept in; A.J. was weak and dissipated, fainting at the prospect of military school and ringing up thousand dollar checks at Meatpacking clubs. Christopher's own struggle against heroin and drinking practically did him in, and when Adriana was revealed to be working with the FBI and Sil had to shoot her, it increased the pressure on Christopher to enshrine himself as heir apparent by quickly marrying another woman, so as to produce his own offspring.
It didn't happen. Christopher, too, was killed in the end. After Vito died, triggering the final war, there was Bobby. Carlo flipped and Sil was injured. Paulie, never trusted with too much, succumbed to paranoia about his own death and superstition over a cat thought to be obsessed with Christopher's framed picture. He was already too old and could never be the nucleus around which a new family might form (he was the only unmarried member, after all). The crew shrank faster than it could grow, and the ones who remained were aging. It was Patsy, a sixty-ish soldier, whose son was to eventually solidify the Soprano future by getting engaged to Meadow, a union founded on a sense of urgency as much as Meadow's willed blindness to the sources of her father's wealth.
And it's wealth that's the locus of the anxieties of capitalism and gender. To avoid complete collapse, capitalism must generate replicate its dynamics on ever larger (and maybe increasingly vulgar) scales. Historians of empire and proto-neocons like Daniel Bell frequently conclude that affluence undermines the virtues required for it to exist: thrift, diligence, the ability to forego immediate pleasures. This is understood to be the underlying reason for aristocratic torpor, perversion and sexual sterility. Tony Soprano, anti-hero, demanded loyalty and allegiance and espoused conservative political views but lived more like a dauphin, with a sprawling series of marital infidelities and an appetite for fattening Italian food.
This celebration of a sort of life-sustaining moribundity remained at the heart of the show. A generation after the wealthy fled Newark for places like West Caldwell, returning (if at all) only to commute--in the case of Sopranos, to a butcher shop with offices in the back. They enmeshed themselves in federal urban redevelopment plans, through dummy union jobs and corrupt subcontractors: parasites on an already-blighted city. The entirety of North Jersey, a juxtaposition of Superfund sites and built-out subdivisions is of course much more nuanced than the Leno-esque national punching bag it's often made out to be. It is, among other things, swollen with fertility for organized crime's decadent anachronism, for religiose murderers and homophobes who kiss each other on the cheek. Such anachronisms had to give way sooner or later, execution-style or in a drawn-out trial, but in the case of Tony Soprano all we'll know is that his empire was indeed untenable.
