What can make Tom Shales of the Washington Post, Caryn James of the New York Times, conservative columnist George Will, and even more conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg swoon in unison? How about a television show chronicling New Jersey mobsters filled with graphic violence, unremitting profanity, and sex so pornographic that in the not-so-distant past it would have qualified for an “X” rating? The answer, of course, is HBO’s The Sopranos, beginning its third season to the acclaim of just about everyone.
For non-connoisseurs of popular culture, The Sopranos is a family saga about the domestic and business life of Tony Soprano, the head of a New Jersey crime family, or, as he likes to call it, the waste management business. The show’s appeal does not rest primarily on the audience’s fascination with a strange, exotic subculture. Rather, the viewer is both horrified and titillated by how much the players in this otherwise alien world resemble him and people he knows. Tony lives in an affluent suburban neighborhood. Although outwardly successful, he is beset by anxiety attacks and depression, and visits a psychiatrist. He is consumed by guilt and rage toward his aging mother, especially after he moves her from her house to a “retirement community” (“nursing home,” she bellows in response). His wife, Carmela, is a typical rich man’s wife: manicured, buffed, toned in regular gym workouts, and driving a champagne silver Mercedes station wagon. His teenage children treat their parents with the kind of casual contempt and bemused superiority that all American children reared on The Simpsons and John Hughes movies do.
The Sopranos is well-written, well-acted, and has some gripping story lines. It sucks you in like good pulp fiction on the beach. It’s Upstairs, Downstairs (real, real downstairs) with New Jersey accents. But is it really “one of the greatest pieces of auteurist television ever produced,” as Tom Shales puts it? Has it “gone beyond the status of mere TV series and is rife with reverberation — ‘social significance'”?
Shales is hardly alone in the extravagance of his praise. Caryn James declares that the show “has taken on the texture of epic fiction, a contemporary equivalent of a 19th century sequence of novels. . . . [Tony’s] outlaw status offers a way of assessing mainstream society in all its savagery and hypocrisy.” In the same paragraph, she compares it to Zola’s Rougon-Macquart series and Balzac’s Comedie Humaine. David Chase has not yet been hailed as the new Shakespeare, but it may not be far behind. The Museum of Modern Art recently screened the first two Sopranos series along with various other films, such as Public Enemy, that have influenced Chase artistically.
It is perhaps not surprising that liberal members of the intelligentsia like Shales, James, and the staff of the Museum of Modern Art would love a well-crafted television show or movie that they view as deliciously morally ambiguous (Tony is a violent criminal, yet we sympathize with him and root for him against the FBI) and revealing society’s hypocrisy (the FBI is just as bad as the mob). Another hardy perennial of elite culture is the notion that underneath the sterile tranquillity and slick affluence of America’s suburbs lies a boiling cauldron of social pathologies and personal angst. The Sopranos supplies this on a couple of levels. On the domestic side, Tony is a successful businessman with a lovely wife and two lovely children, but he is seriously depressed and must take Prozac just to get through the day. Carmela is rich, attractive, a devoted wife and mother — yet lonely and miserable because her husband relentlessly cheats on her and her children no longer need her. (Can Carmela’s run for the Senate be far off?)
Because of the unusual nature of Tony’s business, however, The Sopranos goes competitors in this genre like American Beauty one better. The suburban executive who fetches the paper each morning in his bathrobe and cheers his son at the football game murders people with his own hands. Carmela is unable to take a lover to fill the void left by her husband’s neglect because the men she meets are too terrified of her husband to go near her. Tony’s son wins playground fights without raising a fist for the same reason.
The notion that the series exposes society’s “hypocrisy,” however, is rather hollow. If hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue, how can a society that has discarded virtue experience hypocrisy at all? In a culture where values are personal preferences — where they signify nothing more important about you than does your choice of a champagne over a brilliant silver Mercedes — how can Tony make an offer that can be good, or bad? Once we have blurred these distinctions, no one really knows what hypocrisy looks like.
Implicitly recognizing this paradox, some conservative commentators view The Sopranos not as an exposure of society’s hypocrisy, but as a condemnation of society’s moral relativism. Further confirming the show’s elevation to Leading Cultural Indicator status, George Will recently interviewed David Chase on ABC’s This Week. Though acknowledging the show’s general moral ambivalence, Will is most interested in its strain of anti-moral relativism:
WILL: This series is about family, loyalty, a kind of nobility of the soldiers in the Mafia. There’s a clear code of behavior. Could it be that part of the appeal of this show is that Tony Soprano, terrible husband, loutish father, bad citizen . . . in some sense insists on the distinction between right and wrong? . . . That he’s kind of going against the trend of a relativist age?
CHASE: Yes. He is going against the trend. That’s a very good point. I think that’s really interesting. He is going against the trend of a relativist age. He does insist on right and wrong within the context that he lives in. A lot of his own people, a lot of his own guys, don’t insist on that. They’ve become more relativist, and they’re rats and informers and betrayers. But not him.
Other members of the conservative commentariat also have discerned an anti-relativist theme to the show. In his National Review online column, Jonah Goldberg expounds at length on the conservative subtext of both The Sopranos and its progenitor, The Godfather. Goldberg contends that Americans love mob movies because they have something “we are sorely lacking in our culture and our art: a strict moral code.” Of course, he acknowledges, it is a pretty sad thing that Americans, particularly cultural liberals, have to “satisfy their craving for moral discipline by watching a television series about murderers.” Though Goldberg doesn’t mention it, the attack on “moral relativism” as such is explicit in several episodes.
Tony’s psychiatrist, Dr. Melfi, is virtually a stand-in for the whole idea of moral relativism. She steadfastly refuses to “pass judgment” on the “choices” of her clients. And for this, she sometimes is attacked by Tony. Likewise, Dr. Melfi is harshly criticized by her ex-husband for treating Tony in the first place. He admonishes her to “get beyond her moral relativism” and realize that she is face to face with “good versus evil.”
A continuing insistence on the distinction between good and evil, however, is hardly confined to The Sopranos and mob movies. Moral relativism may be pervasive, particularly in elite institutions, but catching the bad guys and meting out their harsh, but just, deserts remains a staple of countless films, television shows, and popular fiction. If we want to be pretentious about the “significance” of such everyday fare, we might say it reflects the irrepressible human desire for the restoration of moral order, an escape from the Hobbesian universe. Whatever you call it, Clint Eastwood, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Mel Gibson have made millions from it. Even tabloids operate as a kind of popular morality play, taking clear sides and naming and shaming the villain in every national psychodrama: O. J. killed Nicole; the Ramseys did it; Clinton is a scoundrel.
Goldberg pushes the envelope on the social significance of mob movies, however, by suggesting that, at some deeper level, enthusiasm about The Sopranos also reflects “a certain alienation not just with the relativism of American popular culture, but with the very definition of justice in America.” The very definition of justice? For this weighty proposition, Goldberg relies heavily on an essay by the respected historian Paul Rahe examining the social significance of The Godfather, book and movie. Apparently, The Godfather reveals a fundamental conflict between the modern and ancient orders, between “contract versus friendship,” and, ultimately, constitutes a rejection of America as an ideal. Whew. And I thought it was just a pretty good family drama with some imaginative gangland executions.
To be fair, there is a lot that a conservative can like about The Sopranos, just as there is a lot for liberals too, which, more than anything, may explain its broad popularity. Neotraditionalists love Tony’s response to his jaded teenage daughter’s denunciation of his outmoded social mores. After she reminds him, with a heavy, patronizing sigh, that it is the 1990s, not the 1950s, he sternly tells her he doesn’t care what is going on “out there,” it is always 1954 in his house. Tony and his crew of Mafia soldiers constantly lament the decline of traditional standards and virtues. When Tony’s son discovers existentialism and Nietzsche and declares he will not be confirmed into the Catholic Church, Tony tells him he will — because “your mother wants it.” To the insolent scoff, “what does Mom know, anyway?” Tony replies, “She knows that even if God is dead, you’re gonna kiss His a–!” Who knew Tony was a secret disciple of Leo Strauss?
To the extent that all of these disparate observers can find so much significance in a popular television series may mean that The Sopranos is an accurate portrayal of contemporary America, including its complex cultural and moral anxieties. It also could be simply another example of our endless quest for more and better entertainment to fill up our bored and empty lives. Perhaps it’s best to say simply that The Sopranos is a ripping good yarn, with colorful characters, familiar human conflicts, high drama, and just the right amount of comic relief. In this regard, maybe David Chase is a little bit — but only a little bit — like Shakespeare, after all.
Melinda Ledden Sidak is a writer living in Maryland.
