Watch Me Watch: The Sopranos 1.1 and 1.2 -- "Pilot" and "46 Long"

First off, I have to admit to something. I have never seen an entire Godfather film. I went through 4 years of film school and never sat through what many believe to be one (two?) of the greatest American films of all time, one that shaped and humanized the crime drama into what we (or at least I) today identify with Al Pacino, Robert DeNiro, dons, "whacking," and the East Coast, particularly NYC and Jersey (complete with accents). So admittedly, watching The Sopranos with no working knowledge of the genre is almost akin to having never read a superhero comic and deciding to start with Watchmen. But the gangster genre, while I've never really gravitated towards it (never seen Goodfellas, Casino, or Scarface either, though I do happen to love Raekwon's Only Built 4 Cuban Linx), is so ubiquitous, so uniquely American that we all already have at least a preliminary knowledge of the devices and stereotypes found within it. And perhaps this is why The Sopranos, and the Godfather films, never really appealed to me. Plus I'm not Italian. But as the decade comes to a close and I read over and over again the debate between The Wire and The Sopranos as the best shows of the past ten years, I find myself curiously drawn to the HBO crime drama (not the one in Baltimore, though I've only seen one season of that as well), more as a student of television than out of some cliched love for gangsters and made men.

That said, I can see why The Sopranos was so insanely popular at the turn of the millennium. It's the perfect mash-up, one of Girl-Talk-ian proportions, combining as many possible different premises into one entity, and just like Girl Talk or Super Mash Bros., the fun part is identifying the parts of the whole and how they fit together. It's a workplace/family/psychological drama, and I get that only from the first two episodes. Who knows how much more will come to light like a barely recognized Journey sample over the course of the show's six seasons?

I should also premise this admittedly ambitious endeavor to chronicle the series by saying that not much has been spoiled for me. Yeah I know how it ends, but it seems like it was so ambiguous that it doesn't really matter. And really, knowing the ending without having the in-between isn't as much of a loss as I once thought (at the same time, if anybody spoiled Lost for me right now, I'd flip a shit, so it's goes both ways I suppose). I know most everyone eventually dies, but at this point I can barely tell you anybody's name outside of Tony, so it doesn't really matter as long as I avoid any specifics from here on out. So in my opinion, this is as about as virginal a viewpoint as anyone's really going to get, given how insanely popular the show was in its original run.

All this brings me to the first two hours. I'm not really sure how I plan to go about these recap/reviews, but I suppose it'll be just that: a little recap, a little review, with some hopefully entertaining ramblings and philosophizing sprinkled in for flavor.

"Pilot"
To return to the mash-up analogy, the pilot episode sets up a number of different premises. This is a show about a man in therapy. This is a show about a man's issues with his family. This is a show about a man who is, literally and figuratively, a boss, and all the pressure and dilemma that that might entail. This is a show about Italian-Americans in New Jersey. This is a show about many things but immediately from the pilot you can tell, and this is true of all great shows, that this is a show about characters. No matter how you choose to pick apart the series, the characters are what make you invest your time, and I find it interesting how these particular characters fall into established norms. Each person we meet in the pilot is almost archetypal (in as much as television and filmic entertainment in general has created its own archetypes. Yes, I'm elevating it to that heady of a level, get used to it, it's kind of my thing), the conflicted criminal, the infidelious husband, the young buck trying to make his way up the ladder, the mother-daughter conflict, every single thing about the show isn't necessarily something we haven't seen before, but like I said, it's a mash-up.

The pilot opens with the brooding mass that is Tony Soprano in therapy. Having recently suffered an anxiety attack, he's been forced to subject himself to the humiliating process of sharing his feelings. The disparity is immediately obvious, the tough gangster having to talk about his feelings about the ducks that lived in his pool. As he relates the events leading up to his collapse and we meet the population of Tony's world, it's never not clear that the ducks he keeps coming back to are the avatar of a deeper problem. A heavy-handed metaphor perhaps, but in a pilot it's probably better to get your point across as clear as you can. If the series wasn't more nuanced over its run, I can't imagine it holding its audience as long as it did. But ham-fisted or no, it's a credit to Tony's intelligence that he doesn't need to be told outright that the ducks are an outlet for his own inadequacies as a family man. He gets it. The comparison is right in front of him. He just doesn't want to admit it to himself that someone like him could be so affected by a family of ducks in his pool, just because of the emotional parallels he draws between the ducks and his own kin. (Interesting side-note, and I may have just missed seeing him, but I believe the father duck is absent when we see Tony dip into the pool, bathrobe and all, just to feed the ducklings. A telling detail)

As we meet his compatriots in crime, and learn of the tumultuous times occurring in organized crime we see that this apparent softness has a very real effect on Tony's livelihood. The Family (capitalized so as to designate itself from Tony's actual family) is in flux, and Tony has been indirectly accused of not being as hard-nosed as his predecessor. He certainly doesn't seem all that pussified when he runs over a terrified debtor in a car that's not even his, in broad daylight. In fact much of the violence committed in the first two episodes, particularly that committed by Tony himself, comes off as nothing more than an Act of God, an inevitability, something that just happens and you can't really do anything or complain about it. I'm sure the series will explore the consequences of its violence, but starting off this way implies the innate (and admittedly terrifying) power of the Family, and especially of Tony, The Patriarch. It makes you scared of the man, but at the same time, Tony himself muses on the fine line he must walk, one thinner and more treacherous than that of anyone else, since if he goes too far one way or the other, too hard or too soft, he's liable to piss somebody off and get himself whacked, which is most likely one of the most persistent tensions throughout the entire series. In short, the pilot achieves a lot in 50-odd minutes. Tony's almost immediately deified, iconic, something to feared and loved at the same time. Probably why everybody watching latched on so quickly.

"46 Down"
The second episode makes us get our hands dirty. We're hijacking trucks full of DVD players (a "new technology," apparently, dating the show in a way I wasn't really expecting) and Italian suits. But the interesting part of this episode for me isn't the crime aspect of organized crime, but rather twofold: Tony's mother, for one, and the more meta- elements sprinkled in, for another.

I can see Tony's mother becoming one-note pretty quickly without some variation on the "poor me, I'm old and nobody loves me" schtick, but up front, I find her one of the more fascinating problems in Tony's life. And it never occurred to me the parallels between a typical Italian mother and a typical Jewish mother. It's clear that she's really the biggest thorn in Tony's side, moreso than a bumbling Christopher and his meth-head associate, moreso than a wife that barely trusts him (and rightfully so given his past and present indiscretions), moreso than having to go to therapy even if he doesn't want to. In fact, the relationship between Tony and his mother is almost necessary for the therapy device to work (since as Tony even points out, therapy is all whining about your issues with your mommy), so it makes sense that she's so goddamned infuriating.

The other, more postmodern aspect, and what probably makes The Sopranos so critically acclaimed (critics love postmodernism), is the constant references to what we already know. The episode opens with the mobsters watching former mobster John Gotti being interviewed and talking about the current state of organized crime, i.e. it's falling apart, it's not the same as it once was, it's a cliche now, which is exactly what I was thinking all the times people told me to watch The Sopranos and I didn't want to. Gangsters are cliche. But when you take cliched gangsters and have them comment on how cliched they themselves are, it all of a sudden is acceptable. This is more a critique of how accepted postmodernism is, and how easy it is to take something that's been done a thousand times before and all of a sudden transform it into something credible and worthwhile than a critique of the show itself, but most of the time it works. Toying with genre conventions is fun and cool, but sometimes it seems too easy to me. But of course, in the postmodern age, it's not easy to escape genre conventions, or the comparisons to genre inventions, so I suppose the fact that The Sopranos embraces it and addresses it right away is somewhat admirable. Much like the mother-Tony relationship though, this postmodernism is tied into the themes of the show, as well as Tony's character. He himself laments the passing of the old ways, how nobody's willing to serve some time for the Family, instead eating cheese and turning government witness, pretty much fucking over the entire organization on a fundamental, structural level. Again, probably another reason the show had so much success, but more from a critic's angle than an audience's angle.

In all, the first two episodes proved to me, a non-believer, that there is life left in the gangster genre, something I had written off and previously had no interest in. Watching the series from a 2009 point of view might skew me a little, but when I remind myself that this postmodernity seems trite now, it was pretty revolutionary in 1999.

Addenda and et cetera
- I hope to use this setup as a way to pace myself, seeing as how I tend to watch in large chunks, marathonning 5 episodes in a row or more, but I'll do my best to slow myself down, so as not to subject you all with massive 6-episode-recaps-in-a-single-post kinds of scenarios.
- I also hope that this wasn't too long-winded and that everybody made it through. It's a work in progress, and although I'm more or less using the AV Club's TV Club template I hope it evolves into something a little more unique.
- Unmentioned above: Tony's truly terrifying dream described at the end of the pilot episode, where he unscrews his belly button and his penis falls off, only to be scooped up and flown off with by, you guessed it, a duck (or at least some kind of waterfowl).
- Also unmentioned above: In relation to the overall meta-ness of the gangster genre, one of my favorite moments of the second episode was a brief, and completely pointlessly gratuitous, cameo by Martin Scorsese. Christopher's response of "Marty! Kundun! I loved it!" was a nice punchline.
- At first I laughed at how dated and ugly a lot of the clothing and hairstyles were in 1999 (God, it doesn't seem that long ago, does it?), but I'm starting to think it's more of a comment on the Jersey/faux-riche culture the show takes place in. Were we all really still wearing track suits and teasing our hair like it was the late 80s in the late 90s, or are these people just stuck in the past? I'm thinking the latter.
- Speaking of Jersey though, for being hyped as an industrial wasteland, its representation in a lot of pop culture doesn't seem so bad. The whole state's basically a glorified suburb, but really, who can compete with NYC? And between this and Garden State, Jersey doesn't seem so bad. Quite lush and green in fact.

This is the beginning of what may be an arduous endeavor, but I hope I can continue with some fresh (and maybe a little more original) observations. As for future plans for the space here, I'll present you with some TV history, ponderings on the current and future state of television, and some unnecessarily academic readings of some of my favorite shows. I hope everyone is ready to hear why Lost is our generation's Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, and The Odyssey all rolled into one.