The Sopranos Season 2, Episode 11: House Arrest

I'm skipping again.  Basically I think the previous episode goes over themes so central to the Sopranos that I don't need to discuss them here.  Or I'm lazy.  Either one probably applies.  But House Arrest is to me a top-shelf Sopranos episode.  We get a perfect little one-off with Tony and we get deeper insight into Junior's life as a mostly retired capo.

Tony's lawyer tells him to spend less time at the strip club and more time at one of his businesses, so he chooses Barone Sanitation.  He's immediately bored with the daily grind there and he suffers a panic attack at a local waste hauling gathering.  He also develops a rash that he cannot stop scratching.  He's angry with Richie Aprile also.

Junior meets an old acquaintance at the hospital and she starts visiting him at his home.  Junior is quite vain - he hates being seen in a wheelchair and hides his CPAP mask.  He lies to this woman both about why he can't go out and why her husband used to come home with wads of cash in his pocket.  Finally he comes clean about why he can't go to a restaurant - he's under house arrest.  The final shot we see of these two, she is putting on his CPAP mask after he falls asleep in front of the television.

Meanwhile Melfi is drinking before therapy sessions with Tony.  She insists she's not an alcoholic but she gets into a screaming match with a rude smoker at a restaurant.  She confesses to her therapist that she has a fascination with what Tony will do even as she's repulsed by it.  It's always difficult to think of Melfi as anything other than a viewer surrogate, and after we watched Tony kill someone in cold blood, it's hard to imagine anything redeeming him.   Why do we watch this shit anyway?  Is it because we'd be taking shoe buffers to our rashes otherwise?  Does it make our life more interesting?

One thing that's fascinating about the dynamic of Tony is that he often does the right thing for the wrong reason.  Richie Aprile orders that a garbage truck be deliberately tipped into a parking lot because the customer is complaining about poor service.  He and the man at the trucking company get a call from the irate business owner demanding they remove the garbage, and they laugh and pretend not to understand him.  It's classic bully shit and it's a lot of what Tony does - he loves bullying people who have no recourse.  He is thrilled when Furio beats up the massage parlor owner for non-payment even as the owner alleges that Tony's protection does nothing for him.  The problem here is that Tony isn't the one doing it, so it's out of his control.  Everything has to be in his control - he panics when that isn't the case.

Random Observations

One thing I've never really commended in James Gandolfini's performance is his ability to let the viewer know Tony is on the verge of having a panic attack.  This seems like a really hard thing to get right - his eye movement and breathing and everything are so good every time.  The camera doesn't have to play any tricks and neither necessarily does the soundtrack.

This episode has some of the best lines from the Sopranos - "deconstructivism - your grandfather was a contractor".  Sadly I can't remember any of them now.  "What you don't know could fill a book" is a very funny statement.  "When I get better I'll take you to a discotheque". 

This episode also contains one of the worst jokes - the unfortunately named 'Marshall McLuhan'.  Just some of the worst 30 seconds in the show's history.

Someone did a malapropism but I can't remember what it was.  My memory's going. 

The Sopranos Season 2, Episode 9 - From Where To Eternity

How do we justify the choices we make in life?  I suppose that's our own individual cross to bear, but many of us are never truly called on to justify them.  Then again, most of us are not involved in a crime syndicate.  From Where To Eternity explains all of the ways in which people in the Soprano orbit justify themselves.  Tony claims that the Mafia are merely 'soldiers' and that soldiers only kill other soldiers.  He maintains that Italians who didn't want to slave away for the robber barons started 'this thing' and that he is simply upholding that tradition.  Melfi challenges these notions because she can't help herself from seeing the bullshit inside - it's a strange choice particularly because her raison d'etre professionally speaking seems to be to give patients the ability to justify their actions, in part to make better ones. 

Tony comes at his justification for his actions intellectually - unlike apparently everyone else in this world, he does not believe in God, or at least that is deeply suggested by his actions during this episode.  Paulie does, but his God is both easily bribed and fooled - Paulie figures he'll end up in Purgatory, but he'll serve almost no time there because time passes quickly in Purgatory.  After he sees a medium, he's upset that all his donations to the church didn't protect him from what he discovered there.  He decides he will no longer donate to this particular protection racket.

Meanwhile Carmela prays to Jesus that Christopher should be shown the light, and ironically perhaps he was.  Her moral journey is a little more difficult to comprehend - she begins the episode insisting that Tony get a vasectomy and ends it by wanting to perhaps have a child with him.  I'm not sure how all of this happened, but Carmela is a woman who has to choose what to believe - she has to choose not to guess at why Tony would leave and come back as he did that night.

I don't think we've seen Tony kill anyone in cold blood before now.  Earlier he says to Melfi that he's not one of these sick fucks who takes pleasure in killing, but he most certainly does take pleasure in murdering Matthew Bevilaqua.  It's certainly justified as much as any revenge is, but there's a very clear cat-and-mouse aspect to Tony's insincerity with the captive Matthew.  Afterwards, he and Pussy go out for a big celebratory steak and then Tony has sex with Carmela.  His conscience is, as ever, the clearest.

Random Observations:

I love that the medium might actually be legitimate in the world of The Sopranos. 

'I had [my mistress] tested for AIDS, what do you think I am?'

Someone gives up Matthew's location for $20.

Christopher's vision of Hell is really something - an Irish bar where it's St. Patrick's Day all the time.

Hey, a malapropism!  But not really - it's just that the doctor calls Christopher 'Mr. Moltosanto'.

The Sopranos Season 2, Episode 8 - Full Leather Jacket

I didn't write up the previous episode, D-Girl. It's not for any animosity towards that particular episode, which is often maligned, but I just didn't get around to it and then the need to do so floated out of my head.  It's an experiment in the Sopranos universe, that's for sure.

Regardless, let us move past that into Full Leather Jacket, a great exploration of power dynamics in the Sopranos universe.  Carmela wants Meadow to get into Georgetown because she wants her to stay closer to home, so she decides to bully her neighbor and her neighbor's sister into writing a letter of recommendation for her.  What's fascinating is that while she supposedly 'gets her way', I don't recall if we ever see any real evidence for the letter being written.  The great part about the whole exchange is that Carmela knows what she's doing the whole time even as she's being both demanding and overly nice - she's aware of the effect she can have on people as a mobster's wife.

Meanwhile, Richie Aprile's being forced into making his victim's house wheelchair-accessible.  He resents this and tells said victim that if he complains again to Tony Soprano that he will be further harmed.  But he has a present for Tony - a jacket he took off some tough guy 20 years ago.  Richie claims that Tony used to admire the jacket, but Tony appears to have no memory of it.  He later learns that Tony gave the jacket away.  Again, I've seen this episode several times, and what remains ambiguous is whether or not Tony actually liked the jacket back when it was a relevant item, or whether Tony was just sucking up to someone more powerful and older than him in the organization.  We see Tony understand power dynamics so well here - he sends his underlings to tell Richie to build the ramp and he always busts balls with people lower in the organization.

Christopher proposes to Adrianna because 'she loves me and these are her child-bearing years', according to what he tells Matthew and Sean.  He knows that even though he has been garbage to her over the last few weeks that she will take him back, and he's right. 

And lastly we get Matthew and Sean who are cracking safes with Christopher at night and trying to horn their way in on the action in the day.  They get rebuffed by Tony and are forced to kick more upstairs by Furio.  They decide that they have to make a move and that move is to shoot Christopher in a drive-by.  It's a weird choice, but we can only imagine that they decided to do so for very dumb reasons, as these are dumb people.  Christopher survives, Sean does not, and Matthew is on the run. 

Random Observations:

I assume it's a form of code switching but I love how Jeanne Cusamano says 'fuck'.

'I went to Pace College!'

One thing I really love about The Sopranos is how it deconstructs certain mythos - Sean and Matthew say to Christopher that kicking upstairs to Tony Soprano will be an honor, but they also have to kick upstairs to everyone else, including Furio.  Given that the Mafia are a ring of amoral thugs, it's not surprising that the 'rules' are usually broken.

Love Richie telling the Rocco DeMeo story twice in the same exact way.

'Don't leave handprints on the finish!'