The Sopranos Season 1, Episode 12, 13 - Isabella, I Dream Of Jeannie Cusamano

It's been a while since I watched these episodes, but I feel like I owe it to this project to stick it out here.  Isabella is a difficult episode of television to write about without either becoming depressed or being cliche (or more likely both).  So I've combined these all into one and am just going to throw out some things based on what I remember from 2 weeks ago.

It's disappointing how much the Sopranos leans on Freudian bullshit in the last two episodes here.  That said, this is compelling television, so I can overlook it a bit.  Tony runs into an Italian smokeshow in his backyard, a 'mother figure' who listens to him without judging.  Melfi claims this is because his brain is trying to scream at him that his mother is trying to have him killed - that his hallucinations are sort of day-dreams getting him to realize things.  I think he also flips over a glass table and threatens Melfi during these episodes.  He might not. 

Livia, meanwhile, is forgetting everything - she doesn't recognize Meadow, and she's wandering around after dark calling out for her dead sister.  This is meant to imply she's had some sort of psychic break after recommending that her son be murdered, but Livia's mental state is almost impenetrable - unless she's angry or otherwise making herself the center of attention, it's difficult to ascribe motives to her.   I'm curious to see how characters' mental states and physical states reflect one another as the series progresses - we've already seen Pussy's back injury used as a pretext to assume that he's an informant.  Tony's depression is, according to Melfi, a signal that something is amiss in his life.

Random observations -

Mikey Palmice actually uses his track suit to go jogging.  Jimmy Altieri doesn't.  They both die in it, as prophesized by Junior in the tailor's.

Tony's demeanor when he talks to the Feds is so different from when he talks to anyone else. 

It's hard to remember stuff from episodes of television you watched several weeks ago, even if you had seen them already.

The Sopranos Season 1, Episode 11 - Nobody Knows Anything

I decided to skip the writeup on the previous episode for two reasons - I watched the episode nearly a week ago, and it's not very good.  I could write a lot about Adrianna's foray into the music business but it's a slender episode, character development wise and otherwise.

Let's plow ahead with this one, which introduces Pussy as a potential FBI informant.  We haven't seen a lot of this character before now - early on, he's just one of the guys in Tony's crew.  He offered up some advice for Christopher when he was having nightmares, but he's largely been sidelined.  Here, he's accused of being a rat after he gets arrested and Tony's crooked cop gets a tip about him.  Everyone's eyeing him and acting differently around him - Tony comes over to his house and insists that he has friends that would die for him, which really means that Tony has friends who will kill him.  Paulie takes him to a spa/steam room to try to see if he is wearing a wire, but Pussy insists that his doctor has advised him that prolonged exposure to heat is bad for his already high blood pressure.

Meanwhile Jimmy, another heretofore sidelined character, also gets out of jail and goes to Tony's house to discuss some illegal things in a leading way, trying to get Tony to implicate himself in criminal activities.  It's unclear whose idea this is, the Feds or Jimmy's, but if he is an informant, it seems awfully clumsy.  Either way, Tony realizes that his cop must've gotten a bad tip, but that there is an informant.  Too bad he can't go back to that cop because he committed suicide.

I want to speak a little bit about John Heard's Vin Makazian, a character who wasn't exactly three-dimensional until this episode and then he's gone.  I never quite understood why he chose that moment to kill himself, but Tony might understand why.  It's the fact that he's still a respected member of society.  As a police officer, he's afforded special privileges.  He didn't want that - he wanted the opposite because he thought he was garbage.  When Vin's madam/therapist tells Tony after his death that 'at least with Tony Soprano, you know where you stood', he has a flash of recognition - Vin liked Tony, but Tony always treated him horribly.  It's implied that Tony might be thinking about that at the end of the episode as he stares out at a river.

Oh, and Livia's telling Junior that Tony's captains are meeting in Green Grove along with Johnny Sac and other people from New York.  The wagons are circling around Tony from Junior's crew.  How's this going to end?  I guess with the series continuing.

RANDOM OBSERVATIONS

"He's like the fuckin' Jonas Salk of backs."

"But when it comes to backs, nobody knows anything"

I know it's to provide exposition but I love how focused the local news is on Tony's life.   

I don't think Mikey Palmiece's wife shows up again, but that's a great one-scene performance if so.

Malapropism alert:  Bra-oon appliances.

The Sopranos Season 1, Episode 9 - Boca

I haven't been critiquing the quality of episodes much in these posts, but that's because they've all been  outstanding so far.  Not so with the unfortunate Boca, an episode that establishes three things heretofore unseen in the Sopranos universe - that Meadow plays girls' soccer, that her teammate is a constant presence at their house, that Junior has a mistress he's been seeing for well over a decade, and that Junior and Tony go golfing together sometimes.  This latter one is quite plausible, given Junior's already established interest in athletics, but the previous two things are artifacts of a world where serialized storytelling was not the norm. 

I just don't have a lot to say about this one.  The Junior arc about cunnilingus feels like a true story someone told the writers that they thought they had to put on screen, and it doesn't quite work.  Tony's arc is about justice and is a question as old as Aeschylus.  Meadow's is probably worth addressing - the fact that she tells her father about her coach having sex with one of her teammates and he refuses to believe this at first seems of the moment, and that she sees him stumble home completely drunk after the soccer coach is arrested instead of killed.  Given that we're shown this entire scene from Meadow's perspective, we're meant to consider what she thinks about this - Tony seems giddy about having this pressure taken off him, but his giddiness looks like blitheness to Meadow.  She'll never know that he went through an ostensibly difficult decision to not kill someone.

Random Observations

I can't remember the malapropism in this one.

"You yap worse than six barbers!"

 

The Sopranos Season 1, Episode 8 - The Legend of Tennessee Moltisanti

I'm going to focus on Christopher for this writeup because by and large, this episode does as well.  There's plenty of other critical Tony stuff, but we don't really see a very new side of him.  The episode opens with a dream, and we're pretty sure it's Christopher's dream because we only see things that relate to him - the Czech man he killed and Adriana are featured.  The Czech tells him that he didn't properly dispose of the evidence and that the wrong people will find out soon.  A hand grabs him from inside the meat case.  Christopher wakes up with a start next to Adriana.

Christopher mentioned selling his story to Hollywood in Episode 1 and now he's working on a screenplay.  Meanwhile, indictments are supposedly coming for the North Jersey crime families.  Christopher is upset that Brendan is mentioned on TV in relation to these indictments but he is not.  He pulls a gun on a bakery clerk who doesn't respect him enough.  He spirals into a depression over this non-recognition, claiming that he has no identity.  This seems like an absurd claim - he's part of a crime family and spends most of his time employed in that regard.  Since we see him writing a screenplay and he talks about how much he loves movies - we don't see criminals in movies going about anonymously.  Henry Hill in Goodfellas claims that when he became part of 'the crew', the bakery owner would serve him first even on busy days.  Meanwhile Christopher has to wait for cannolis even for a guy who wasn't there when he came in. 

Thankfully Christopher has his other criminal associates to keep him from getting too down.  First in this list is Paulie, who consoles him with this great exchange:

CHRISTOPHER:  You ever feel like nothing good was ever going to happen?
PAULIE:  Yeah. And nothin' ever did.  Who gives a fuck?

Paulie's a pragmatist or a complete sociopath.  He never had aspirations to anything more than what he's got already, and it doesn't really matter to him whether life is good or bad.  He's a great foil to Christopher as we'll see in the coming seasons.

Next up is Pussy, who informs him that it gets easier to murder people the more people you murder.  He seems to at least have some idea of what Christopher is going through.  Plus he explains to him that the logic of his dream doesn't make sense - why would his killer want to help him? 

Third on the list is Tony, who sees Christopher's behavior for what it is - a sign of depression.  He mentions how he's seen people who are obsessed with appearing as gangsters and who end up in jail because of it.  Tony starts talking around depression and therapy and suicidal ideation, but Christopher pretends to be above it all.  Tony is, after all, his boss, and showing weakness in front of the boss isn't the best career move.  Still, Tony seems genuinely excited to try to discuss these things, but after Christopher says he's never thought about killing himself, he has to turn it into a joke.

This depression doesn't get resolved until his mom calls him to wonder if everything's okay.  He lets the answering machine get it - she thinks everything isn't okay because his name is in the paper.  Vindication.  Depression over.  He's a real somebody now.

Sprinkled around this in the episode is the idea that gangsterdom is thrilling.  The Melfis discuss how gangster films featuring Italians are now part of classic cinema.  When they go in for family therapy, their therapist leads them on a big aside about how in part of his (Jewish) family, there were also gangsters.  The episode itself seems to speak to why gangster content is compelling - there are always so many things left untold.  Plus we don't pull guns on retail clerks.

Random Observations

I must be loyle to my capo.

Questions I will never get the chance to ask:  Was the choice of having the papers blowing around in the dream sequence influenced by Bela Tarr's Satantango?

I feel like this shot lived on in DVD menus and promos for the show, but when Tony is standing against a barbed wire fence as the camera pans across his face with a train in the background - that's amore. 

I really like how it's established that Jennifer's ex-husband is still a part of her life.

I think it's really challenging to write plausible bad jokes and so I have to commend whoever wrote the bits for the nursing home stand-up comedian.

Malapropism Alert:  Tennessee William, Antichrists (instead of Anarchists)

The Sopranos Season 1, Episode 7 - Down Neck

What determines who we are - nature or nurture?  This is the question that eats at Tony Soprano after his son gets into trouble for stealing sacramental wine.  Is his son acting out because he's a 13 year old boy, or because he's a 13 year old boy who has learned that his father is in the Mafia?   Tony tries to feel his son out to see what he knows, but he does very little to reassure him that he's not involved.  Meanwhile he's digging through his own memories and we get to see his recollections of 1967 Newark acted out.  We see his father beat up some guy on the block and we see a young Tony stow himself away in his dad's trunk to find out where his father and sister went every Sunday.  Tony claims he was proud of how tough his father was when he learned of his Mafia affiliation when he was a child, but he's aware that things have gotten more complicated since his childhood.  One thing that's decidedly missing from his childhood recollections is how exactly Tony got involved in the business.  We learn how much of a troublemaker he was, and how his mother would threaten him with very specific violence, but how that particular choice took place isn't mentioned.  Tony seems to have accepted this choice as an inevitability and projects his feelings on to Carmela that he's responsible for his son's bad behavior.  Livia and Junior seem to regard this theft with odd pride - both of them enjoy recounting what a scoundrel Tony was at that age.  After all, to them, Tony is a huge success.

One thing that's illuminating about Tony's feelings on the range of livelihoods a successful person can have are the other potential life paths he mentions during the episode - he claims he could've been selling patio furniture in San Diego, he mentions Rocco Altieri (sp?) moving to Reno and becoming a billionaire ostensibly in the casino business, and a classmate who invented 'the twist ties that go on the ends of salamis, he sits on his ass making millions'.  Capitalism produces some unusual outcomes - I'm inclined to see Tony's view on these lifepaths as being reflections of his upbringing as a man's livelihood demands some sort of grift - he is equally skeptical of psychiatry as some sort of long con (and indeed his mother tells her grandson it's all a scam for Jews) - but I'm not fully willing to wed that idea to the Sopranos writers.

Anthony Jr, meanwhile, has to undergo a battery of tests to make sure he isn't ADD.  When Tony and Carmela are told the results, that he manifested 5 out of the 9 possible signs of ADD, they both voice their frustration with this process.  They will handle things themselves.  Nature, nurture - whatever the case, with Anthony Jr., doctors will not be involved.

Random Observations

So much of this series is informed by Goodfellas - I had Henry Hill's line about school, 'how can I listen to my teachers talk about good government bullshit' running through my head this whole episode.  Both Johnny and Tony seem to think their sons should listen to their teachers.

I don't usually do this, but the contrivance of Tony and Anthony having a flat tire on the way to the dentist (and the dentist is apparently in Kearny?) is a bit much.

Absolutely love Young Janice giving Young Tony the finger.

Also love this actor who plays Anthony Jr.'s psychologist.  He has three scenes and nails them all.

Is Melfi entertained by Tony's stories?  She laughs in the right places, she's shocked in other places - I know at some level she's supposed to be a viewer surrogate, and Lorraine Bracco has to make a lot of choices with how she reacts to what her character is being told.  Maybe it's trying to demonstrate Melfi's empathy.

When Livia goes into her performance about how upset she is when she learns her son is seeing a psychiatrist, Anthony Jr. has no reaction.  I think upon previous viewings I took this as adolescent indifference to his surroundings, but now I think it's that even he at 13 is wise to his grandmother's bullshit.

It's 1997 alert:  Anthony Jr. mentions the first season of South Park.  It feels like every male in my freshman high school gym class knew those first 6 episodes almost by heart.

The Sopranos Season 1, Episode 6 - Pax Soprana

How do you talk to a person who has authority over you?  I suppose that's not a particularly fraught thing for most people, as most of us do it every day.  The question of how do you talk to a person who has authority over you and can also have you killed for insubordination is a much thornier issue.  Tony tiptoes around the issue of his uncle's decision to 'tax' Hesh all episode - he tells circular stories about Augustus Caesar, he tells Livia in coded language that some people need to learn to listen to other people.  But Hesh himself has this great moment where he too needs to tiptoe - he expects that Tony will pay him back his share, but he's not entirely certain.  He can't ask for it.  Everything has to be said in this roundabout way.

Likewise with Tony and Melfi - it was Carmela, not his mistress, who burned him with the candle.  Why is Tony not owning up to having a mistress?  This is the episode where he confesses his love for Melfi, so perhaps he's trying to portray himself as a one-woman man to her.  In a loving gesture, he steals her car and has it fixed.  When I first saw this episode, I didn't quite understand what a ridiculous violation this is - if you can steal someone's car to have it fixed, you can also steal it to have it sabotaged.  The crooked cop is still watching her house.  He's still having dreams about having sex with her.  Gandolfini nails how creepy it is for a person like him to start talking about how gentle a woman is. 

This is juxtaposed with the fact that he can't seem to sexually perform for either his wife or mistress.  What's interesting is that this does not seem like it was a problem for him in the past - we don't have his mistresses' take, but Carmela implies that this has never been an issue in their relationship, even though he's always had women on the side.  By the end, he's reconciled with Carmela by lying to her about how much she means to him, while we see that shot of the empty pool.  I doubt it gets much better.

Random Thoughts

Things escalate so fast with his Russian mistress - he insults her by laying $200 on the bed and she throws a candle at him. 

Carmela talks with Father Phil about how she always viewed his dalliances with mistresses as a form of masturbation.  He doesn't really seem equipped to talk about life in this way.

Again, I should write these up right away, but I don't think either of the children have a scene in this episode.  This is adult stuff in this episode.

Whose Little League game are Junior and Tony at, anyway? 

The irony in this show is often hardly worth documenting, but the fact that Junior acts indignant about a drug dealer selling to minors while not realizing that that man works for his organization is pretty high up there.

Nancy Marchand's line reads are phenomenal.  'Water, water, always with the water! It's like living next to Gunga Din!'  'Bring the cookies!'

Love that they just get a Sikh to play this auto mechanic in one scene.  Why not? 

The Sopranos Season 1, Episode 5 - College

Revenge is generally a fantasy we read in a book or see on a screen.  The opportunity to seek vengeance does not often exist in real life, and when it does, it's often through legal remedies - revenge may be best served cold, but in our day-to-day lives, it's usually served quite slow.  Those of us who swallow our road rage and back down from physical confrontation only have sports and art through which to see rights wronged, and then only vicariously.

We'll get to things done vicariously later in this post, but for now I want to say - College portrays revenge, real revenge, and it's not a win for the viewer.  Tony gets to tell a man why he's being murdered, but at the cost of his relationship with his daughter.  He's even given an out by Christopher - Christopher offers to do it himself.  No, Tony says, this is personal.  He risks his own life and this trip with his daughter to ensure that this man who wronged 'this thing of ours' comes to a bad end. The writers wisely have this person be someone we haven't seen or heard about, and the people he wronged are also all off-screen presences.  Tony claims that this is 'for Jimmy', but we know better.  I suppose an argument can be made that this is a message more to Tony's guys - if you think about ratting, we will find you and we will kill you.  Even if, as a result, the ducks are spooked away. 

Meanwhile, Carmela's day of sickness is altered by Father Intintola's unexpected arrival.  They talk about their shared love of movies, they get drunk together, Carmela confesses very emotionally and then takes communion in the sexiest way possible.  In the morning, she pretends nothing happened whereas he thinks he should be apologizing.  This is one incident I feel like I could talk a lot more about if I hadn't seen the show - having seen it already, we know nothing substantial comes of Carmela's confession.  Furthermore, it's obvious that Father Phil really doesn't want to rock this boat - whether he's scared of Tony or whether he's overwhelmed by what Carmela is confessing, he doesn't have a lot to offer when Carmela asks him what she should do.  Perhaps this is what he's apologizing for - he was blinded by his own lust and drunkenness.  I feel like someone pounding sacramental wine is somewhat of a comedy cliche at this point, but Father Phil really goes for it here.

Each character confesses something - Tony, that some of his business involves illegal gambling, Meadow that she was doing speed, Carmela that her husband is involved in terrible crimes and that she considers herself complicit, and Father Phil confesses that he had lust in his heart for Carmela.  Meadow's confession is the only one about an event that appears to be in the past - the rest are ongoing.  It's interesting that Meadow doesn't seem to judge her father; she's just happy enough that he admitted that yes, he's involved in some illegal activities.

I don't have a ton to say about College even though it is one of the great television episodes.  Part of it is that there's a surprising amount of action - Tony is trying to figure out who this guy is, this guy is trying to figure out if Tony knows who he is - there's not a lot of space in there for the psychological drama this show usually trucks in.  The other is that the story is masterfully told on screen. What do you need me for, anyway?

Random thoughts -

This episode was partially filmed in my hometown - the Odenoki Motel is actually the Ramapo Lodge Motel and is not in Maine.  Amazingly it is still there - almost everything else this seedy and rundown has been removed from this area.

I wish I knew more about The Remains Of The Day to know why Carmela was so moved by that moment in the film.

I love the detail that Petrullio does wood carvings and that he can't do lips.  Also love the two Mainers who wander in off a David Lynch set refusing to kill Tony Soprano.

Great production design moments - Anthony overfilling his mother's orange juice such that it almost spills (and comically wobbles as he brings it to her), and the wooden ducks mounted outside Petrullio's travel agency.  Those might've been there anyway but they're a great touch.

I like that they felt compelled to ADR in a line about Nathaniel Hawthorne being Bowdoin's most famous alumnus, or else the audience might think the Sopranos creators just jammed in a quote about this episode's theme.

Malapropism alert - 'Knight in white satin armor'