Friday, April 18, 2003
Book Review: This Thing of Ours: Investigating The Sopranos (ed David Lavery, 2002).
Originally published in Metro 136, 2003.
Fans of The Sopranos have been keenly awaiting the fourth series for almost two years, a wait which has brought pain only sharpened by the knowledge that Channel 9 hold the tapes, and are delaying their airing for seemingly no other reason than the ratings and revenue delivered by a ‘special encore screening’ of the third series.
However, there is some respite. This Thing of Ours: Investigating The Sopranos – one of the first academic publications on the series – is as thorough a collection as could be hoped for by fans and academics alike, and is a welcome change from entertaining but ultimately trivial publications like The Sopranos Family Cookbook: As Compiled by Artie Bucco and The New York Times on The Sopranos. Middle Tennessee State University’s David Lavery has brought together a diverse collection which encompasses foreign perspectives, close textual readings, cultural analysis and contemporary gender theory, as well as the local viewpoint of a native New Jerseyan.
This Thing of Ours is divided into five sections. Before it begins, Lavery’s Prologue disturbingly reveals that he received threats as word got out that he was compiling the collection. The ‘Introductory’ builds on ideas of the cultural impact of The Sopranos, and introduces the reader to the basic critical framework which has been built around the show. Ellen Willis and Albert Auster, in their reprinted essays, then establish the ‘ground rules’ for Sopranos analysis. Willis categorizes it as ‘the richest and most compelling piece of television - no, of popular culture - that I’ve encountered in the past twenty years’ (p 2). Willis’ ‘richness’ description echoes through much Sopranos criticism, for example Auster calls it ‘the kind of sprawling narrative that was once considered the special province of the nineteenth-century novel’ (p 10).
Part Two, ‘The Media Context’ is focused largely on the importance of HBO to The Sopranos, and of The Sopranos to HBO. David Lavery & Robert J Thompson come at their piece with a focus on creator David Chase, and relate the development history of The Sopranos while discussing Chase’s distaste for corporate America: ‘I considered network TV to be propaganda for the corporate state - the programming not only the commercials’ (p 18). In a nice juxtaposition, the following three pieces, by Paul Levinson, Dawn Elizabeth B Johnston, and Mark C Rogers, Michael Epstein & Jimmie L Reeves, provide analyses of various elements of this ‘corporate state’. Levinson suggests that the nudity and explicit language of The Sopranos could never have found its way onto any other network. Rogers, Epstein & Reeves discuss ‘TV III’: the development of television into a ‘digital age’ which now sees networks like HBO trying to build an identifiable ‘brand’ which encompasses more than just programming. But perhaps the most intriguing contribution to this section is Paul Levinson’s analysis of the show’s reception in Canada, a culture split between those who embraces it for its narrative richness, and those who angrily reject its explicitness as being ‘un-Canadian’, an undercurrent being that such explicitness is an unwelcome American intrusion into Canadian programming: ‘I don’t care if The Sopranos won a billion awards. The show won awards in the States. This is Canada. We have a mind of our own’, wrote one viewer (p 38).
In Part Three, ‘Men and Women’, Cindy Donatelli & Sharon Alward’s piece is an absolute highlight. Donatelli & Alward chart the development of the Mob film by using its women as a reference point. They take The Godfather’s Kay Adams (Diane Keaton), Goodfellas’ Karen Hill (Lorraine Bracco) and The Sopranos’ Carmela Soprano (Edie Falco), Livia Soprano (Nancy Marchand) and Jennifer Melfi (Lorraine Bracco, again) and analyse the way they motivate and respond to the men who traditionally drive the Mafia narrative. The progression is followed from Michael Corleone (Al Pacino), who strikes dread into his wife; through Henry Hill, whose wife gets some thrill from her involvement but is ultimately punished along with Henry; to Tony, who seems at times utterly helpless at the hands of contemporary female characters ‘constructed from bits and pieces of Madonna’s material girl, Jennifer Lopez’s in-you-face attitude, and Andrea Dworkin’s post-male feminism’ (p 60): ‘The Soprano women may not be “made men”, but Tony answers to them’ (p 65). They even find time to have a dig at Kay along the way: ‘for all her “good girl” posing, she is enjoying herself, though a nose-stuck-up-in-the-air WASP bitch is not going to admit it’ (p 63).
Their piece is usefully paralleled by Kim Akass & Janet Macabe in Part Four, ‘Genre and Narrative Technique’. Akass and Macabe, instead of reading the development of the genre in terms of its female characters, take a close look at Tony Soprano in relation to the women in his life, and reveal a narrative and generic world where women have more narrative authority than ever before.
In Part Four, much is made of The Sopranos’ cultural awareness, both in the way the show continues and knowingly refers to a generic tradition, and also in that the characters are just as fluent in generic convention as the creators. Glen Creeber compares Tony with his nephew, Christopher (Michael Imperioli), observing that each sees themselves with reference to the Mafia films of their generation.
While Tony’s “traditional” sensibilities appear to represent Coppola’s old “film school” generation (represented by the series’ own homage to “classical” film aesthetics), Christopher clearly encapsulates the new priorities of Tarantino’s “video store” generation, particularly its apparent obsession with the forms and moral aesthetics of the television action series (p 134).
Similarly, David Pattie analyses the importance of Mob movies to the characters in The Sopranos, coming to the conclusion that even though Tony feels he identifies with the honour and respect cherished in The Godfather, his fears are actually closer to the central problem of Scorsese’s Mob films: that ‘the organization to which he has devoted his life does not give that life a meaning’ (p 144). Pattie suggests that the mobsters of The Sopranos love The Godfather movies because Coppola and Puzo’s world provides a comfort which derives from the assurance that their lives are meaningful. It’s a depressing thought, but one reflected in other contemporary Mafia films. In Donnie Brasco (Mike Newell, 1997), like The Sopranos, Benjamin ‘Lefty’ Ruggerio (Al Pacino) we see a mobster whose life is not like Don Corleone’s or Henry Hill’s, but is closer to that of a suburban employee: hardworking, stressed, and constantly passed over for promotion. Even the Mob, it seems, is not safe from modern discontent.
Part Five, ‘Cultural Contexts’, unfortunately, seems to have no real common thread, containing Lance Strate’s commentary on living in ‘Sopranoland’, Douglas L Howard’s piece on language, Steven Hayward & Andrew Biro’s Marxist reading, and Sara Lewis Dunne’s meditation on the significance of food in The Sopranos.
There is no question that This Thing of Ours is a thoroughly considered collection. The appendices - featuring episode and character lists, and a wonderful glossary of intertextual moments and allusions - are exhaustive; as is the index. However, a number of curious things arise. The same quotes appear over and over again throughout the book, as if David Lavery had instructed his contributors to focus on certain moments, or perhaps these quotes are universally considered to be especially evocative of the series. It certainly provides for concrete reference points for those not familiar with the intricacies of the series, but for fans, it may jar a little after a while.
Of more concern is the amount of misquoting. Normally, a little inaccuracy can probably be forgiven, however Lavery in a footnote to his Prologue attacks rather nastily another critic for a (negative) review which contains ‘several glaring errors’ (p xiii). Lavery goes so far as to suggest that these trivial errors demonstrate a connection between misreading and misremembering (p 256). The errors in Lavery’s connection are far more glaring: Carmela is misquoted on p 158, ‘psychology’ instead of ‘psychotherapy’ is quoted on p 13, and only Kevin Fellezs actually goes to the effort to use the real surname of Paulie ‘Walnuts’ Gualtieri, the rest, Lavery included, seemingly content with the moniker Paulie Walnuts. Trivial stuff, but Lavery himself puts it on the table when he casts aspersions on critics who are not dedicated enough fans to verify quotes as rigorously as Lavery himself purports to.
They are fans who write here, that is unmistakable (there is not a negative comment in the book). Thus readers are entitled to expect the sort of close examination that fans do best. Similarly, the contributors’ unconcealed enthusiasm for The Sopranos makes for exciting reading, and a wonderful tendency to adopt the language of the show in their writing. Thus, ‘whack’ has become standard language for kill, and there are quotes like: ‘therapy is no fucking comedy’ (p 5), and, in relation to the role of the strippers at Bada Bing!, ‘just dance and suck cock’ (p 71). Trivial errors aside, it is elements like this that elevate This Thing of Ours above the usual and make it not only a solid collection of academic work, but a pretty good read as well.