The Meaning of Recognition (10 page)

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
or
NYPD Blue
, 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 sanitized. 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.

When I first saw
The Sopranos
, my immediate candidate for an epic predecessor was
I, Claudius
, now available as yet another set of DVDs begging to be watched one after the
other. If Chase had ever mentioned
I, Claudius
in an interview, I hadn’t seen it. (Among the extra material in the first box of DVDs is an interview with Sorkin which reveals that he
did, indeed, have
I, Claudius
in mind.) My only evidence for a direct borrowing was the name of Tony’s dreadful and deadly mother, Livia. But I would have been surprised to learn
that Chase hadn’t taken
I, Claudius
on board. If the resemblance was a fluke, it could only be because, should you set out to draw a picture of unfettered violence shaping the
destiny of an extended family, you would necessarily end up with something like the Roman empire after Tiberius consolidated the dubious achievement of Augustus in subordinating all law to the
leader’s will. Mussolini thought of Fascism as Rome’s glory born again, but he had a debilitating habit of letting potential enemies continue breathing. The emperors were living in a
bloodbath and so are this bunch.

In the last episode of the fourth season, the reliably psychopathic Ralphie (Joe Pantoliano, barking and cackling as he did when fighting off the killer dykes in
Bound
) has his brains
beaten out by Tony in person. The even more psycho Christopher is whistled in as a cleaner, and we get a shot of him holding Ralphie’s hand. Unfortunately for the viewer’s peace of
mind, the hand is no longer attached to the rest of Ralphie. Tony and Christopher are both shocked to discover that Ralphie has been wearing a wig throughout the series. Neither is shocked by the
process of cutting Ralphie up. Dilettante viewers of the show who stumble on scenes like this are sometimes put off, but it takes some pretty selective stumbling. Scenes of actual violence are
rare. What is always present is the
threat
of violence. The wise guys work their Thing by intimidating each other from the top of the hierarchy down, and maintain the cash-flow of their
Thing by intimidating everybody else. When the soldiers toe the line and the civilians keep up their payments, life can go on peacefully from episode to episode. But if, God forbid, one of the
subordinate wise guys should get ambitious, or some innocent citizen should get the idea that there is a real law beyond the one that the wise guys impose, hell briefly but effectively breaks
loose. It hardly ever does, because every member of the crew, whether a made man or not, has proved in his youth that he will go on kicking and hitting until the victim expires. Murder is the nuke.
It spends most of its time not needing to be used. The rubato of the show’s physical action depends on this. In that respect,
The Sopranos
is unsanitized; and it was in that same
respect that the
Godfather
movies were always as clean as a whistle.

Even the most fervent
Godfather
fan will agree that in the third movie the magic fell apart. It was a rush-job, and it showed: showed most fatally in the script. The lighting looked
right, with all the mandatory sepia
sfumatura
that had been so revolutionary in the first movie. Fudges in the direction were mainly incidental. Coppola must have been working against the
clock when Michael, suffering insulin shock during his visit to the Italian monastery, called for orange juice and candy. A factotum bearing a tray of orange juice and candy rushed straight into
frame, as if a tray of orange juice and candy were always kept ready in an Italian monastery in case a visiting American regime-chief with diabetes should happen to drop by. Other directorial flat
spots were inevitable. The orchestrated multiple killing to holy music had been invented triumphantly in
The Godfather
. Used again in
Godfather II
, the depraved epiphany had
already been dished out once too often. In
Godfather III
the same trick is disguised by having the sacred music happening in the Palermo opera house during a performance of
Cavalleria
Rusticana
, but it’s transparently, and undramatically, the same trick. Directors have often repeated what they themselves invented, but the price is high, because it reminds us that the
direction is being valued above the action, and perhaps always was.

What a director can’t afford at all is to be unsure of where the script is going. What is Michael doing being
sincere
about going legitimate? But sentimentality had set in a lot
earlier than that. It had been there from the beginning of the saga, which notionally occurs in a flashback in the second movie: but the same fudge rules the first one as well. When Vito Corleone,
played by Robert De Niro in the flashback, kills Fanucci the extortionist, Vito doesn’t set up a reign of extortion of his own. You would think that he flourishes solely from the olive oil
business. He dispenses justice, not injustice. From the beginning of
The Godfather
, in which Vito is played by Marlon Brando, Vito is a figure of benign wisdom, busy saving the helpless
Italian civilians from the indifference of ordinary American law. It’s a comforting notion, but as phoney as the bumps in Brando’s jaw-line: like them, it is made possible only by the
plentiful introduction of cotton wool. The Corleone family, we are assured, makes its money from gambling and prostitution: the accepted human vices. At a critical moment for the plot, Vito even
rules out drug-trafficking as ‘a dirty business’, as if the rest of his business was clean. Protection rackets are scarcely mentioned.

In his soon to be published
Cosa Nostra
, John Dickie points towards a different picture. Though meant as a serious contribution to modern Italian history, it can safely be predicted
that Dickie’s book will be a media sensation, not least because it has a dozen potential movies in it. (Two of them,
Salvatore Giuliano
and
Le Mani sulla Città
, have
already been made, but they will be made again.) The news that matters, however, is about the real nature of the Mafia’s modus operandi in Sicily. As the nineteenth century turned into the
twentieth, the Sicilian grain fields were worked by peasants whose condition was only a step up from slavery. They were left with a cupful of the grain they reaped: the rest was taken by the
gaballoti
, the overseers who had been put in by the absentee landlords who were living it up in Palermo. It would have been nice if the Mafia had gone into battle on behalf of the
peasants. Unfortunately it was common for the
gaballoti
to be members of the Mafia.

*

Extortion and protection were always the core business of the Sicilian Men of Honour. In America, after the internal Mafia war of 1930–31,
Cosa Nostra
was, in
Dickie’s useful term, Italianized. In Italy, families from the different regions had had little idea of nationality: America gave it to them. The Soprano family, who originated in Naples, are
part of this larger context. But no matter how large Our Thing got, the petty squeezing of the helpless remained at the heart of it, as a permanent reminder that in those halcyon Sicilian days
Robin Hood gave nothing to the poor except grief. Modern Americanized operators such as Lucky Luciano thought big. But there is no reason to think that the Mob has ever dealt in big-time stuff. The
crime families got big by adding smalltime deals together, and the small-time deals have always started with protection and loan-sharking. Of the gangster movies,
Good-Fellas
and
Donny
Brasco
probably give the truest picture: an average deal is a couple of slot machines being broken open in the back room, and a big deal is three machines. A Mob boss gets rich from his
lion’s share of the stolen and extorted money passed up to him by the lower ranks. (Trace the rake-off upwards and you get a flowchart of the way the Mob’s finances work: there is a
pay-out at each level, but finally the
capo
banks most of the take for doing nothing except keeping all those below him in line. Tony banks his in the ceiling of his house, or in a locked
box out in the yard.) Muscling in on the unions might look like a big deal, but only because every member of the union is feeling the squeeze. There has never been much chance of a Mob boss turning
into Warren Buffet, or even into Ivan Boesky. The stuff in
Godfather III
about taking over Immobiliare was science fiction. You could make a movie about the Mob moving in on Microsoft.
Everyone would like to see how Bill Gates reacted to a horse’s head in his bed. But it would be a fantasy. Mobsters are opportunist hoodlums, not business geniuses.

In
The Sopranos
, this mean reality is much more realistically portrayed. People can be friends of the family and still be soaked. Artie the restaurant owner, who is really trying to
play it straight, foolishly borrows money from Tony to cash in on what looks like a sure-fire Armagnac franchise. Artie’s hard-working wife, brighter than he is, is outraged. Tony guesses
it’s a scam, but he only warns Artie against getting into debt: he doesn’t refuse the money. The moral here is that Artie, who might have got rich slowly, should never have tried to get
rich quick. Once he defaults on the debt, his restaurant belongs to Tony. (The wise guys have a name for this process: they call it ‘buying in’.) Artie’s grieving face is an
emblem for the show. Artie is still Tony’s friend, but now it is no longer a case of doing Tony the occasional favour, such as letting him run up a huge tab. Now Artie must do nothing but
favours: he will never be out of hock. And this is what Tony can do to a pal. What he can do to a mere acquaintance, let alone to a stranger, happens often enough per episode to remind us that his
hulking charm adds an extra meaning to the word ‘irresistible’. Far from helping the little guys, Tony gets the little guys in his power. He does it by terror. But usually the mere
suggestion of terror is enough.