Great Sopranos of Our Time
My four seasons of The Sopranos come in four neat boxes of DVDs. If I confine myself to a couple of episodes per evening, I can get through the whole disgusting saga in less than a month, and so leave a decent interval before I start again. The challenge, however, as with The West Wing, is to keep to the ration. Under the spell of such a rich, multi-plotted, invisibly directed narrative drive, there is a constant temptation to watch a third and fourth episode straight away, stretching the supposedly repellent experience deep into the night. The night, after all, is where the action is taking place, even when set in daylight. In the dark night of the soul it is often three o'clock in the afternoon on the pool terrace of a mobster's house in New Jersey. The rule of law exists only to be flouted; power to be flaunted; any scruple to be parodied. It's appalling. I love it.
Love it more, in fact, than the Godfather movies, which are supposedly the superior cinematic achievement, the fons et origo from which the mere television serial draws and dilutes its inspiration. (There is also a likelihood that it got some of its brio from GoodFellas, but Scorsese, in his turn, was almost certainly inspired to his hectic story by the urge to rebel against the stately progress of a common ancestor.) David Chase, the writer-producer who can be thought of as the man who made The Sopranos in the same way that Aaron Sorkin made The West Wing, was not personally involved in the Godfather project. Chase did his apprenticeship as a writer for The Rockford Files and later as a writer-producer for Northern Exposure. His idea of a big movie was Fellini's Otto e mezzo; of a crime movie, Cul de Sac; superior European stuff. There is no doubt, however, that the Godfather trilogy was on his mind, because it is on the minds of all the male characters in The Sopranos. Only two of its main actors were ever directed by Francis Ford Coppola: Dominic Chianese (Uncle Junior) and Tony Sirico (Paulie Walnuts) both played minor roles in Godfather II. But every Soprano-related male character has a frame of reference drenched with Godfather minutiae. Whether sitting out front at the Pork Store (their idea of the outdoor life) or lurking dimly in the depths of the Bada-Bing combined bar and strip-joint, they conduct long symposia in which Corleone family scenes are alluded to by the line and sometimes recreated almost in full, with sound effects. This is the kind of mediacultural fallout that gives respectable Italian community leaders the hump: Italo-Americans defining themselves as the heirs of gangsterism.
But these characters are gangsters, so why shouldn't they? What other kind of movie memories would they have on the tips of their thick tongues? The Horse Whisperer? The Bridges of Madison County? And the truth is that every American, of Italian extraction or not, knows the Godfather films by heart; and most of the rest of us do too. The real question here is whether the Godfather trilogy really is the armature of the spin-off, or whether the spin-off is bigger and better than the armature. Surely the latter is the case. We shouldn't let the size of the picture fool us. In the little picture, a lot more is going on, and it's a lot more true. Most of its many directors would probably like to make movies, because movies will make their names: one of the several ways in which the celebrity culture distorts culture. They will never work better than under Chase's guiding hand. Chase hated working in network television, but he hated it for the way it was sanitised. He has rebelled by seizing the opportunity HBO uniquely offers and making another kind of television, a kind that tells fewer comforting lies. If he had rebelled by making movies, his would probably have been better than most, but the pressure would have been on to do what the Godfather movies did: clean up the act.
(The rest of this article is in The Meaning of Recognition, published by Picador in 2005.)
Love it more, in fact, than the Godfather movies, which are supposedly the superior cinematic achievement, the fons et origo from which the mere television serial draws and dilutes its inspiration. (There is also a likelihood that it got some of its brio from GoodFellas, but Scorsese, in his turn, was almost certainly inspired to his hectic story by the urge to rebel against the stately progress of a common ancestor.) David Chase, the writer-producer who can be thought of as the man who made The Sopranos in the same way that Aaron Sorkin made The West Wing, was not personally involved in the Godfather project. Chase did his apprenticeship as a writer for The Rockford Files and later as a writer-producer for Northern Exposure. His idea of a big movie was Fellini's Otto e mezzo; of a crime movie, Cul de Sac; superior European stuff. There is no doubt, however, that the Godfather trilogy was on his mind, because it is on the minds of all the male characters in The Sopranos. Only two of its main actors were ever directed by Francis Ford Coppola: Dominic Chianese (Uncle Junior) and Tony Sirico (Paulie Walnuts) both played minor roles in Godfather II. But every Soprano-related male character has a frame of reference drenched with Godfather minutiae. Whether sitting out front at the Pork Store (their idea of the outdoor life) or lurking dimly in the depths of the Bada-Bing combined bar and strip-joint, they conduct long symposia in which Corleone family scenes are alluded to by the line and sometimes recreated almost in full, with sound effects. This is the kind of mediacultural fallout that gives respectable Italian community leaders the hump: Italo-Americans defining themselves as the heirs of gangsterism.
But these characters are gangsters, so why shouldn't they? What other kind of movie memories would they have on the tips of their thick tongues? The Horse Whisperer? The Bridges of Madison County? And the truth is that every American, of Italian extraction or not, knows the Godfather films by heart; and most of the rest of us do too. The real question here is whether the Godfather trilogy really is the armature of the spin-off, or whether the spin-off is bigger and better than the armature. Surely the latter is the case. We shouldn't let the size of the picture fool us. In the little picture, a lot more is going on, and it's a lot more true. Most of its many directors would probably like to make movies, because movies will make their names: one of the several ways in which the celebrity culture distorts culture. They will never work better than under Chase's guiding hand. Chase hated working in network television, but he hated it for the way it was sanitised. He has rebelled by seizing the opportunity HBO uniquely offers and making another kind of television, a kind that tells fewer comforting lies. If he had rebelled by making movies, his would probably have been better than most, but the pressure would have been on to do what the Godfather movies did: clean up the act.
(The rest of this article is in The Meaning of Recognition, published by Picador in 2005.)