[On January 25th, 1947 Al Capone died at the age of 48. So for the 75th anniversary of the end of that notorious life, I’ll AmericanStudy different cultural contexts for American gangsters & organized crime!]
On the minor
characters who exemplify the real strengths of the troubling Golden
Age TV show.
Full disclosure
first—up until a couple years ago I had only ever seen bits and pieces of David
Chase’s groundbreaking turn of the 21st century HBO show The Sopranos. It was during the
lockdowns of 2020 that I, like apparently so many of my
fellow Americans, finally got around to streaming the show—and even then, I
only got into somewhere in the middle of the second season before stopping. I
fully recognized and agreed with how well the show was made on every level,
starting with a truly titanic (and apparently
quite taxing) central performance from James Gandolfini as the
conflicted mob boss and family patriarch Tony Soprano. But at the end of the
day, I couldn’t help feeling that it was the latest in a long line of cultural
glorifications of such gangsters, and I simply wasn’t interested in making
my way through six seasons/86 episodes of that familiar narrative (between this
and my non-favorites
post on Breaking Bad, maybe I need
to turn in my AmericanTVStudier Card, I dunno).
I need to say a
bit more about what I mean by “glorification” in this case, though. I’m not
thinking of the humanization of Tony, which was probably inevitable the second that
such a brilliant actor was cast and which is fine in any case (TV characters
should be multi-dimensional humans!). I don’t even really mean the way that the
show pushes its audience to root for Tony, although that was the case and is
deeply problematic—not just because he’s a murderous mob boss, but
also and especially because he’s a terrible husband and
father, a racist who abuses women, etc. (and
no, having a truly awful
mother doesn’t make any of those things much better). No, my biggest
problem with The Sopranos’ portrayal
of its gangster protagonist is that one of the show’s central themes—the ways
in which turn of the 21st century America is a
culture in decline—directly supports Tony’s consistent
nostalgia about the good old days of mob and criminal life (as well as
white supremacy, toxic masculinity, and a good deal more besides). Those
narratives gave us our gangster
in chief, full stop.
So clearly I’m
not much of a Tony fan—but in the portions of the show I watched (and of course
I’m open to pushback on any of this from folks who’ve seen it all, along with anyone
else as ever!), I did find its portrayal of many different layers of the
criminal worlds of turn of the century New Jersey and America consistently
compelling. Particularly exemplary of that element of the show was the brief
season one plotline (in episode three, “Denial, Anger, Acceptance”) involved a Jewish American hotelier
(Chuck Low) who was having problems
with his son-in-law (Ned Eisenberg) and came to Tony and the mob for help. Eisenberg’s
character in particular worked within the world of the show—he was a stubborn
badass who impressed Tony and his men despite their intent of intimidating him—but
also, in his brief screentime, opened up interesting themes of
multi-generational familial and cultural identities, the roles of faith and
tradition in modern American society, and the similarities and differences
between Jewish and Italian American organizations. The Sopranos wasn’t the kind of show that would follow these multiple
characters and families, but even in brief glimpses they were to my mind the
best of its stories and world.
January Recap
this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other gangster stories or contexts you’d share?
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