Family Ties Hold Strong
THE SOPRANOS: “THE SECOND COMING”
HBO
THE NATIONAL POST
A.J.'s problems draw compassion from family
There was a surprisingly lame bit of writing in Sunday's episode of The Sopranos. A.J., still depressed over the breakup of his engagement and just about everything else, is surprised in his room by big sister, Meadow. He tells her how screwed-up the world is ("do you realize we're gonna bomb Iran") and criticizes her for watching Borat ("it's not fair to the people involved"). She tries to buck him up, telling him that no matter what privileges she's enjoyed, this is an Italian family, and he, the son, will always be the favourite.
That's probably true enough. But it was uncomfortably explanatory for this show, and Jamie-Lynn Sigler as Meadow certainly couldn't bring it to life. A.J.'s sociopolitical conscience also sounded rather pat - as if the show itself were assuring us that it was keeping up with world events - though it's psychologically plausible. A boy who's always led a sheltered, uninquistive life is suddenly shocked into awareness, and swallows everything at once. He's 20 and experiencing all the customary years of adolescent disillusion rolled into one.
A.J.'s also being affected by the college classes he's been auditing. Last week, it was Wordsworth on materialism; this week, it's Yeats on the apocalypse and The Second Coming: "Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold " A.J. can identify with that on every level. Carmela, who's always had a conflicted relationship with high culture, went into indignant worried-mother mode with one of the episode's two funniest lines: "What kind of poem is that to teach college students?"
She had a lot to be worried about. This was the episode in which A.J. tried to commit suicide in his parents' pool. Tony, seeing it just in time, threw down the sandwich he was eating, jumped in and rescued him. His first reaction after fishing the boy out was to shake him and say angrily, "What's wrong with you?" His next was to ask, "Are you all right?" and his third was to break down in tears, hold him and say, over and over, "Oh, my baby." The scene, as written by Terence Winter and acted by James Gandolfini and Robert Iler, was wrenchingly moving.
In a way, it brought father and son back from the brink. Tony, who the previous week murdered his surrogate son, this week saved his real one. I doubt if anybody was surprised. Blood really is thicker than water. By this stage, I think, most of us have stopped judging Tony. We just watch, fascinated, as he blunders from one action or response to another. Our stand-in, of course, is his shrink, Dr. Melfi, whom we saw this week in one of her periodic sessions with her own therapist. (And who, one wonders, treats him? Does this pattern of infinite regress at some point turn back on itself?)
I once heard of a psychiatrist who said that Tony's therapy accomplished absolutely nothing, and praised the show for its realism in this regard. The self-satisfied Dr. Kupferberg, who has a vicarious fascination with Melfi's gangster patient, points to research indicating "talk therapy serves to validate sociopaths." Which may be the show ruefully kidding itself: It's talk therapy and we're the shrinks.
Is Tony a sociopath? He recognizes loyalties outside himself, and he doesn't kill for the satisfaction of it, so he isn't a psychopath. One of the few mob characters who might qualify for that description is the late Christopher Moltisanti, who sacrificed his girlfriend and capriciously murdered a (legitimate) colleague. The others have ties. Even Paulie loved the mother who was really his aunt. Even the awful Phil Leotardo is partly motivated by the desire to avenge his brother. But their community feelings stop short within their own organizations, often under their own roofs.
The metaphors have been getting graphic. Phil and Tony, the New York and New Jersey bosses, are now jointly responsible for unloading asbestos onto the landscape. No wonder Tony's annoyed that A.J.'s new concerns include the environment. Paulie rather hilariously brings the themes together when condoling with Tony over A.J.'s death wish: "All these toxins we're exposed to --it's a wonder there aren't more kids [attempting suicide]."
The Soprano family continues to play the self-righteousness game, as, come to think of it, does almost everyone on the show. "I am intimately acquainted with the Soprano family curse", says Carmela, acidly accusing Tony of always "playing the depression card." A.J., in family therapy, blames everyone, including his grandmother Livia for informing him on her deathbed that life was garbage. (I'd forgotten that. Everything on this show comes back to bite you.) Tony clings to the idea that he has redeeming features: "I'm a good guy, basically. I love my family." Indeed he does; this week he all but killed a guy to prove it, one who'd insulted his daughter. (There were no actual deaths this week, which may presage a bloodbath to come.) He even likes to think of himself as a good citizen. In the very first episode he drew a line, while talking to Melfi, between his own actions and those of terrorists blowing up children (the kind of thing that now appalls A.J.). And even now, the only way in which he'll try to ingratiate himself to the FBI is to offer them (probably) useless information on a couple of Arabs who used to frequent the Bing.
That storyline may or may not be going anywhere; it keeps recurring, but tenuously. We are presumably in for a showdown between Jersey and New York. This week ended with Tony visiting Phil, who refused to see him, merely taunting him from what looked weirdly like a medieval turret (or at least like something from Monty Python and the Holy Grail). Little Carmine, who'd brokered the abortive meeting, here went beyond mere malapropism to favour Tony with a sublimely mixed metaphor that was the show's other funniest line: "You're at the precipice of an enormous crossroads." With only two episodes to go, we all are.