oh hell yeah…it was recommended in the zero zero zero thread…ended up enjoying the series immensely…if you liked gomorra then you might enjoy the series 4 blocks…not quite on the same tier but it’s a pretty decent watch…arabic gangs/drug dealers in germany
The Sopranos Series - Re-Watch (Spoilers!!!)
- Thread starter jay211
- Start date
oh hell yeah…it was recommended in the zero zero zero thread…ended up enjoying the series immensely…if you liked gomorra then you might enjoy the series 4 blocks…not quite on the same tier but it’s a pretty decent watch…arabic gangs/drug dealers in germany
This is a theory posted by someone called Melfisflyonthewall. I read this years ago and remain convinced this person had some sort of connection to the writers on the show, if not it's one of the writers:
Tony's Vicarious Patricide
I. Introduction
Shortly after Kennedy and Heidi first aired, I proffered a theory that garnered some initial support in these parts but increasing disagreement since. The theory, of course, is that Christopher’s murder was primarily motivated by Tony’s repressed, displaced rage at his own Mafia “fathers”, real and surrogate, and, in that sense, can be seen as a symbolic or vicarious act of patricide. Obviously the murder was also Tony’s pre-emptive strike at a resentful mob protégé whose drug addiction and disaffection made him a prime candidate to flip. But despite that conscious, rational, and contributory motive, I believe the much more potent and important motive was the subconscious one, both for Tony and for the audience in terms of understanding a long and vital story arc in the series.
A subconscious behavioral motive is inherently one of which the actor is unaware. In a drama, that means the character undertaking the behavior can’t articulate the motive for the audience. And if the behavior itself is secret, unknown by any (living) person besides the character performing it (Tony pinching Chris’ nose to ensure his death), then no other character can possibly articulate the hidden motive for the audience either. That insight must be conveyed via much more subtle and abstract means, making audience sensitivity to symbolism, subtext, allusion, foreshadowing, and parallel especially important.
Since I’m firmly convinced that the proposed view of Christopher’s murder conforms to at least Chase’s broad intentions, and since I feel it ties together so many strands of the series going back to the very first episode, this article is my comprehensive effort to pull those strands together. I hope the length of these posts won’t be too off-putting, but I’m going all out here to make my case to the many skeptics. I will undoubtedly repeat things I’ve said in other threads while also offering a lot of new analysis. Hopefully all the bits will coalesce here in a more cogent way than in previous presentations.
To avoid post length limitations, each major section of the treatise is presented as a separate reply.
Tony's Vicarious Patricide
I. Introduction
Shortly after Kennedy and Heidi first aired, I proffered a theory that garnered some initial support in these parts but increasing disagreement since. The theory, of course, is that Christopher’s murder was primarily motivated by Tony’s repressed, displaced rage at his own Mafia “fathers”, real and surrogate, and, in that sense, can be seen as a symbolic or vicarious act of patricide. Obviously the murder was also Tony’s pre-emptive strike at a resentful mob protégé whose drug addiction and disaffection made him a prime candidate to flip. But despite that conscious, rational, and contributory motive, I believe the much more potent and important motive was the subconscious one, both for Tony and for the audience in terms of understanding a long and vital story arc in the series.
A subconscious behavioral motive is inherently one of which the actor is unaware. In a drama, that means the character undertaking the behavior can’t articulate the motive for the audience. And if the behavior itself is secret, unknown by any (living) person besides the character performing it (Tony pinching Chris’ nose to ensure his death), then no other character can possibly articulate the hidden motive for the audience either. That insight must be conveyed via much more subtle and abstract means, making audience sensitivity to symbolism, subtext, allusion, foreshadowing, and parallel especially important.
Since I’m firmly convinced that the proposed view of Christopher’s murder conforms to at least Chase’s broad intentions, and since I feel it ties together so many strands of the series going back to the very first episode, this article is my comprehensive effort to pull those strands together. I hope the length of these posts won’t be too off-putting, but I’m going all out here to make my case to the many skeptics. I will undoubtedly repeat things I’ve said in other threads while also offering a lot of new analysis. Hopefully all the bits will coalesce here in a more cogent way than in previous presentations.
To avoid post length limitations, each major section of the treatise is presented as a separate reply.
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I forgot what season but the episode where Artie wanted to fukk that younger girl who was with Benny or something..she said something like "When I said No to you, you started being mean"..lol
II. Early Evidence of Tony’s Unconscious Rage Towards His Father(s)
Throughout the earliest part of the series, Livia was the parent tagged with being the real failure and psychological detriment to Tony. When talking to Melfi about his father, Tony often smiled and described him as a “good guy” that everybody liked. In contrast, Livia’s pathological anxieties, prickly demeanor, relentless criticism of others, and insatiable appetite for attention made her a psychotherapist’s dream. Those qualities also undoubtedly made her seem less loving (and loveable) than Johnny to their children. Recall that when Carm first hears Tony is seeing a therapist, she wonders if he’s talked about his father but underscores that his mother is the real problem.
Though Tony shared some unflattering Livia anecdotes with Melfi from the get-go, he initially bristled at even the suggestion that he might harbor repressed hatred towards her. The end of 46 Long, when Tony viciously beats Georgie over the head with a phone, is meant to illustrate the consequences of that unacknowledged, displaced rage at his mother.
Tony’s capacity to confront those feelings evolved considerably, however, after Livia’s deliberate manipulation led to Junior’s assassination attempt on Tony in Isabella. By the time Livia died in early season 3, Tony was certainly able to verbalize – to Melfi, at least – his darkest feelings about his mother. In Proshai, Livushka, he spoke of being glad she died, of having actually wished for it, and called her a “demented old bat” and “fukking selfish miserable c*nt”. In other words, he was reasonably conscious of his ill feelings towards his mother and the reasons for them and was presumably, therefore, less apt to displace the associated rage onto others.
The early scrutiny on Livia meant that Junior’s determinative role in the assassination attempt was comparatively minimized, both inside therapy and out. That’s especially significant since Tony viewed Junior as a second father (a fairly obvious point that is treated in more detail later in this article.)
Then, in the season 2 finale, Melfi finally began to suggest that Tony scrutinize his father, not for his father’s own actions (which were still largely unexplored) but for some of the psychic injuries inflicted by his mother. She noted that Tony’s representation of Johnny as a “tough guy” but also as a “good guy” who loved his kids did not square with an often absentee father who would not intervene on his children’s behalf to stop their emotional abuse at the hands of a borderline mother. Tony appeared to receive this insight like a brick wall at the time.
A Meat “Cleaver” as Symbol of Tony’s Lost Innocence
In season 3, attention turned for essentially the first time to the effect of Johnny Boy’s own actions on Tony’s psychological development in the ironically-titled episode, Fortunate Son. It’s highly likely that witnessing his father viciously chop off Satriale’s finger with a meat cleaver did more to put Tony on a path of gangsterism than any other single event in his life. It was also unquestionably the moment when, despite some previous heavy life experiences, he lost all vestiges of childhood innocence. As I summarized in another thread:
When 11 year-old Tony approached his father that evening with an obvious mix of fear and awe, his dad scolded him for disobeying orders to stay in the car but immediately expressed pride in Tony's stoic and "manly" reaction to the brutality ("most boys your age would have run like a little girl"). He then defended the violence because Satriale was a degenerate gambler that owed him money and because "that's how [he] put food on the table". “Never gamble, Anthony.” He said it twice during the lecture and then closed with, “A man honors his debts.”
The lesson emphatically imparted was that gambling and related money-borrowing were the real crimes while hideous violence was an acceptable means of enforcing loans. Oh, and the other lesson was that you're not a "man" if you can't chop a finger off without feeling queasy, something Tony would have taken quite seriously since he was starved for parental approval and validation and, given his mother’s incapacity for love, would have been particularly driven to fulfill his father’s expectations.
Johnny’s explicit message was exacerbated moments later with a much subtler one, when Tony noticed Livia's unusually good mood and receptivity to Johnny's sexual innuendo as she tended the same meat that Satriale offered in part payment of the obligation that cost him a pinky. Tony tells Melfi that Livia always seemed in the best moods when she took delivery of meat from Satriale's and vegetables from another vendor (who also presumably owed Johnny money). In other words, she seemed most pleased in life when she was receiving the direct fruits of Johnny's criminal acts. For a son who would spend much of his life on a futile quest to please his mother and try to win her affection, this was the worst possible thing for him to witness.
Signs of the psychological damage wrought by this epoch were evident immediately when Tony passed out from his first panic attack as his father carved the Satriale roast. Meat notably continued to serve as a trigger for Tony’s panic attacks even into his middle age, with the last known instance occurring as late as season 3. That fact alone indicates the persistence and profundity in his subconscious of the finger-chopping incident. It also shows why a meat cleaver would have particular significance to Tony’s unconscious mind.
Throughout the earliest part of the series, Livia was the parent tagged with being the real failure and psychological detriment to Tony. When talking to Melfi about his father, Tony often smiled and described him as a “good guy” that everybody liked. In contrast, Livia’s pathological anxieties, prickly demeanor, relentless criticism of others, and insatiable appetite for attention made her a psychotherapist’s dream. Those qualities also undoubtedly made her seem less loving (and loveable) than Johnny to their children. Recall that when Carm first hears Tony is seeing a therapist, she wonders if he’s talked about his father but underscores that his mother is the real problem.
Though Tony shared some unflattering Livia anecdotes with Melfi from the get-go, he initially bristled at even the suggestion that he might harbor repressed hatred towards her. The end of 46 Long, when Tony viciously beats Georgie over the head with a phone, is meant to illustrate the consequences of that unacknowledged, displaced rage at his mother.
Tony’s capacity to confront those feelings evolved considerably, however, after Livia’s deliberate manipulation led to Junior’s assassination attempt on Tony in Isabella. By the time Livia died in early season 3, Tony was certainly able to verbalize – to Melfi, at least – his darkest feelings about his mother. In Proshai, Livushka, he spoke of being glad she died, of having actually wished for it, and called her a “demented old bat” and “fukking selfish miserable c*nt”. In other words, he was reasonably conscious of his ill feelings towards his mother and the reasons for them and was presumably, therefore, less apt to displace the associated rage onto others.
The early scrutiny on Livia meant that Junior’s determinative role in the assassination attempt was comparatively minimized, both inside therapy and out. That’s especially significant since Tony viewed Junior as a second father (a fairly obvious point that is treated in more detail later in this article.)
Then, in the season 2 finale, Melfi finally began to suggest that Tony scrutinize his father, not for his father’s own actions (which were still largely unexplored) but for some of the psychic injuries inflicted by his mother. She noted that Tony’s representation of Johnny as a “tough guy” but also as a “good guy” who loved his kids did not square with an often absentee father who would not intervene on his children’s behalf to stop their emotional abuse at the hands of a borderline mother. Tony appeared to receive this insight like a brick wall at the time.
A Meat “Cleaver” as Symbol of Tony’s Lost Innocence
In season 3, attention turned for essentially the first time to the effect of Johnny Boy’s own actions on Tony’s psychological development in the ironically-titled episode, Fortunate Son. It’s highly likely that witnessing his father viciously chop off Satriale’s finger with a meat cleaver did more to put Tony on a path of gangsterism than any other single event in his life. It was also unquestionably the moment when, despite some previous heavy life experiences, he lost all vestiges of childhood innocence. As I summarized in another thread:
When 11 year-old Tony approached his father that evening with an obvious mix of fear and awe, his dad scolded him for disobeying orders to stay in the car but immediately expressed pride in Tony's stoic and "manly" reaction to the brutality ("most boys your age would have run like a little girl"). He then defended the violence because Satriale was a degenerate gambler that owed him money and because "that's how [he] put food on the table". “Never gamble, Anthony.” He said it twice during the lecture and then closed with, “A man honors his debts.”
The lesson emphatically imparted was that gambling and related money-borrowing were the real crimes while hideous violence was an acceptable means of enforcing loans. Oh, and the other lesson was that you're not a "man" if you can't chop a finger off without feeling queasy, something Tony would have taken quite seriously since he was starved for parental approval and validation and, given his mother’s incapacity for love, would have been particularly driven to fulfill his father’s expectations.
Johnny’s explicit message was exacerbated moments later with a much subtler one, when Tony noticed Livia's unusually good mood and receptivity to Johnny's sexual innuendo as she tended the same meat that Satriale offered in part payment of the obligation that cost him a pinky. Tony tells Melfi that Livia always seemed in the best moods when she took delivery of meat from Satriale's and vegetables from another vendor (who also presumably owed Johnny money). In other words, she seemed most pleased in life when she was receiving the direct fruits of Johnny's criminal acts. For a son who would spend much of his life on a futile quest to please his mother and try to win her affection, this was the worst possible thing for him to witness.
Signs of the psychological damage wrought by this epoch were evident immediately when Tony passed out from his first panic attack as his father carved the Satriale roast. Meat notably continued to serve as a trigger for Tony’s panic attacks even into his middle age, with the last known instance occurring as late as season 3. That fact alone indicates the persistence and profundity in his subconscious of the finger-chopping incident. It also shows why a meat cleaver would have particular significance to Tony’s unconscious mind.
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Tony’s Guilt as the Fingerprint of Unconscious Blame
Though it only happened twice in the first four seasons, Tony’s damnation of himself for AJ’s increasingly mischievous behavior is important. We first see it in Season 1’s Down Neck, where Tony worries that his life example and genes alone will seal AJ’s fate as a criminal. “My son is doomed, right? . . . You are what you are. You’re born to this shyt. . . . How come I’m not making pots in Peru?”
Melfi touts the importance of free will while noting that, if Tony blames himself for dooming AJ’s future, he might also blame his father for his own life path. That connection is logically warranted since Tony has clearly been a better father to AJ than his father had been to him and since Tony at least made an effort to instill in his children -- by word, incentives, and punishment -- the mainstream moral values which his conduct regularly subverted. Tony’s father, particularly after the cleaver incident, did largely the opposite.
The same theme appears even more strongly in the season 3 finale Army of One after AJ caps a resume of scholastic offenses by cheating on an exam, resulting in his permanent expulsion. Terrified that AJ is on line to become the next Jackie Jr. tragedy, Tony pursues the extreme course of enrolling him in a military academy. This opens a therapy discussion about the degree to which Tony would accept his children pursuing a future connected to organized crime.
Melfi: You know, we never discussed exactly what you want for your children.
Tony: I don’t want ‘em to end up in Boonton with their face blown off.
Melfi: You followed your father into his business.
Tony: I didn’t have a choice. I try to make sure my kids have every opportunity. (emphasis added) Meadow’s going to Columbia, for Christ sakes. . . . She mentioned being a pediatrician once.
Melfi: You’d like that?
Tony: Yeah, I would. I would like somethin’ like that. But the important thing is that she get far away from me. [long pause] I mean, she could live close . . .
Melfi: I think I understand. And your son?
Tony: AJ? In my business? He’d never make it.
Here Tony expressly confirms what is implied from so much else in the series, that he believes the vocation of “gangster” was forced upon him by virtue of his upbringing and parenting and that he had no other option in life. So, to the extent that he is dissatisfied with that life or subconsciously regrets pursuing it, it’s safe to assume he also harbors subconscious blame towards those who he feels forced the life upon him.
Later in the episode, AJ’s panic attacks surface and thwart the military school plan, prompting Tony’s tearful, near-confession to Melfi of his own culpability for AJ’s plight. He speaks of passing his son the “putrid rotten fukkin’ Soprano gene” for panic attacks that his father (and father before him) handed down. Melfi explains that “when you blame your genes, you’re really blaming yourself, and that’s what we should be talking about.”
She uncharacteristically sits on the edge of her seat, leaning forward in her chair throughout this scene as if to physically reach out and pull Tony towards the breakthrough she sees hovering in plain view. Though the tenets of her profession keep her from articulating the admission she wants him to achieve, she uses everything else in her power to elicit it, most notably a soft, compassionate, downright pleading tone of voice.
Melfi: Anthony?
Tony: [shaking his head] You don’t understand.
Melfi: Make me understand.
Tony: We can’t send him to that school.
Melif: Yes?
Tony: How are we going to save this kid?
The scene ends there and we realize that she could not bring him any closer to grasping – or admitting -- the reason for his tears and guilt, for his desperate desire to surround AJ with strikingly different male role models and a culture that emphasizes discipline and respect for authority. That is, he would not ultimately acknowledge that his gangster lifestyle makes him a dangerous and unacceptable example for his son, just as his father and uncle had been harmful role models for him. As will prove to be the case over and over, his self-protective mechanisms triumph. He will not confront and truly condemn his way of life and consequently will not fully confront his guilt for how his behavior affects his son nor his blame for how his father’s behavior affected him.
Though it only happened twice in the first four seasons, Tony’s damnation of himself for AJ’s increasingly mischievous behavior is important. We first see it in Season 1’s Down Neck, where Tony worries that his life example and genes alone will seal AJ’s fate as a criminal. “My son is doomed, right? . . . You are what you are. You’re born to this shyt. . . . How come I’m not making pots in Peru?”
Melfi touts the importance of free will while noting that, if Tony blames himself for dooming AJ’s future, he might also blame his father for his own life path. That connection is logically warranted since Tony has clearly been a better father to AJ than his father had been to him and since Tony at least made an effort to instill in his children -- by word, incentives, and punishment -- the mainstream moral values which his conduct regularly subverted. Tony’s father, particularly after the cleaver incident, did largely the opposite.
The same theme appears even more strongly in the season 3 finale Army of One after AJ caps a resume of scholastic offenses by cheating on an exam, resulting in his permanent expulsion. Terrified that AJ is on line to become the next Jackie Jr. tragedy, Tony pursues the extreme course of enrolling him in a military academy. This opens a therapy discussion about the degree to which Tony would accept his children pursuing a future connected to organized crime.
Melfi: You know, we never discussed exactly what you want for your children.
Tony: I don’t want ‘em to end up in Boonton with their face blown off.
Melfi: You followed your father into his business.
Tony: I didn’t have a choice. I try to make sure my kids have every opportunity. (emphasis added) Meadow’s going to Columbia, for Christ sakes. . . . She mentioned being a pediatrician once.
Melfi: You’d like that?
Tony: Yeah, I would. I would like somethin’ like that. But the important thing is that she get far away from me. [long pause] I mean, she could live close . . .
Melfi: I think I understand. And your son?
Tony: AJ? In my business? He’d never make it.
Here Tony expressly confirms what is implied from so much else in the series, that he believes the vocation of “gangster” was forced upon him by virtue of his upbringing and parenting and that he had no other option in life. So, to the extent that he is dissatisfied with that life or subconsciously regrets pursuing it, it’s safe to assume he also harbors subconscious blame towards those who he feels forced the life upon him.
Later in the episode, AJ’s panic attacks surface and thwart the military school plan, prompting Tony’s tearful, near-confession to Melfi of his own culpability for AJ’s plight. He speaks of passing his son the “putrid rotten fukkin’ Soprano gene” for panic attacks that his father (and father before him) handed down. Melfi explains that “when you blame your genes, you’re really blaming yourself, and that’s what we should be talking about.”
She uncharacteristically sits on the edge of her seat, leaning forward in her chair throughout this scene as if to physically reach out and pull Tony towards the breakthrough she sees hovering in plain view. Though the tenets of her profession keep her from articulating the admission she wants him to achieve, she uses everything else in her power to elicit it, most notably a soft, compassionate, downright pleading tone of voice.
Melfi: Anthony?
Tony: [shaking his head] You don’t understand.
Melfi: Make me understand.
Tony: We can’t send him to that school.
Melif: Yes?
Tony: How are we going to save this kid?
The scene ends there and we realize that she could not bring him any closer to grasping – or admitting -- the reason for his tears and guilt, for his desperate desire to surround AJ with strikingly different male role models and a culture that emphasizes discipline and respect for authority. That is, he would not ultimately acknowledge that his gangster lifestyle makes him a dangerous and unacceptable example for his son, just as his father and uncle had been harmful role models for him. As will prove to be the case over and over, his self-protective mechanisms triumph. He will not confront and truly condemn his way of life and consequently will not fully confront his guilt for how his behavior affects his son nor his blame for how his father’s behavior affected him.
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Where’s Johnny?
The title of this early season 5 episode owes to Junior aimlessly wandering around town in his pajamas asking for his younger brother while suffering severe, acute dementia from a series of ministrokes. As is virtually always the case with episode titles, however, this one has a subtler and more significant meaning.
Signs of Junior’s dementia emerge when he keeps repeating that Tony “doesn’t have the makings of a varsity athlete”. He originally issued this insult in Tony’s adolescent years, and it was hurtful enough to Tony that he mentions it in the pilot episode. “Frankly it severely damaged my self esteem,” he tells Melfi.
Tony’s reaction to Junior’s repeated revival of the insult 30 years later is extreme. He swears he is through with Junior for all time, that Junior is “dead” to him, a reaction not even Junior’s botched hit attempt had managed to provoke. Janice openly wonders how Tony can be so fragile. Only when he realizes that a genuine medical problem was causing the behavior does Tony relent.
After medication has improved Junior’s condition, Tony visits him but still wonders ruefully why the thing Junior repeated over and over couldn’t have been something nice, why it had to be something “mean”. On the verge of tears he asks, “I mean, don’t you love me?”
The whole affair suggests that Tony feels a special attachment and sensitivity to Junior beyond that typical of most nephew/uncle relationships. That his self esteem could be so wrapped up in an unflattering remark about his athleticism says something not only about what athletics meant to Tony as a teenager (which the Test Dream and All Due Respect explore) but that he was enormously dependent upon Junior for his self esteem, period.
It’s fair to ask why Junior should hold such extreme power with Tony. Was Johnny so unavailable as a source of paternal support or encouragement that Tony actually came to depend upon Junior more for those things? There’s an interesting side note in this episode when Junior is elaborating on Tony’s athletic shortcomings. “Small hands. That was his problem.” Janice laughs derisively, “Yeah, that’s what daddy always said.” Tony looks at her a beat, clearly absorbing the subtext and what it conveyed about Johnny’s appraisal of his son’s masculinity.
I’m also reminded of a superficially casual detail from Down Neck in season 1. When Melfi asks Tony to talk about his father, he instead smiles and immediately flashes back to Junior throwing him a ball when he was a youngster, a subtle identity confusion that Melfi notices. Tony paints Johnny as ever the tough hero in that episode but also admits he “wasn’t around much”, underscoring why Junior might have been as significant a father figure to Tony as Johnny ever was.
The question of “where Johnny” was during Tony’s childhood is reflected most vividly in the vitriolic exchange between Janice and Tony near the episode’s end, which exposes the real basis for Tony’s intense resentment of his sister: she “shirked her duties” by running away to California at 18, leaving Tony at 16 “to cope with [their] head case of a mother.” While he was “mired in [Livia’s] bullshyt”, Janice was out “dropping acid and blowing roadies” (an all-time great line, btw.) A physical altercation ensues with Tony screaming at her, “You’re just like your mother, huh? Now you can do to him [Bobby] what she did to daddy.”
This is Tony’s subconscious defense mechanism at its most vigorous: keep Johnny’s hands clean at all costs; blame his defects or problems on Livia so as not to disturb Tony’s heroic image of him, an image that helps Tony avoid personal responsibility for his life’s direction.
However that defense can’t hide what’s going on in the first part of his diatribe. It clearly shows that Tony felt abandoned to Livia’s “bullshyt”, that he feels someone “shirked their duties” by not doing their part to intervene. He makes Janice the culprit, even though that’s a completely unfair and irrational position. She was only two years older, was herself an equal victim of Livia’s abuse, and she was his sister, not his parent. Clearly this is Tony venting onto Janice, Livia’s modern-day surrogate, his unconscious anger at Johnny for abandoning him to Livia’s mistreatment.
The title of this early season 5 episode owes to Junior aimlessly wandering around town in his pajamas asking for his younger brother while suffering severe, acute dementia from a series of ministrokes. As is virtually always the case with episode titles, however, this one has a subtler and more significant meaning.
Signs of Junior’s dementia emerge when he keeps repeating that Tony “doesn’t have the makings of a varsity athlete”. He originally issued this insult in Tony’s adolescent years, and it was hurtful enough to Tony that he mentions it in the pilot episode. “Frankly it severely damaged my self esteem,” he tells Melfi.
Tony’s reaction to Junior’s repeated revival of the insult 30 years later is extreme. He swears he is through with Junior for all time, that Junior is “dead” to him, a reaction not even Junior’s botched hit attempt had managed to provoke. Janice openly wonders how Tony can be so fragile. Only when he realizes that a genuine medical problem was causing the behavior does Tony relent.
After medication has improved Junior’s condition, Tony visits him but still wonders ruefully why the thing Junior repeated over and over couldn’t have been something nice, why it had to be something “mean”. On the verge of tears he asks, “I mean, don’t you love me?”
The whole affair suggests that Tony feels a special attachment and sensitivity to Junior beyond that typical of most nephew/uncle relationships. That his self esteem could be so wrapped up in an unflattering remark about his athleticism says something not only about what athletics meant to Tony as a teenager (which the Test Dream and All Due Respect explore) but that he was enormously dependent upon Junior for his self esteem, period.
It’s fair to ask why Junior should hold such extreme power with Tony. Was Johnny so unavailable as a source of paternal support or encouragement that Tony actually came to depend upon Junior more for those things? There’s an interesting side note in this episode when Junior is elaborating on Tony’s athletic shortcomings. “Small hands. That was his problem.” Janice laughs derisively, “Yeah, that’s what daddy always said.” Tony looks at her a beat, clearly absorbing the subtext and what it conveyed about Johnny’s appraisal of his son’s masculinity.
I’m also reminded of a superficially casual detail from Down Neck in season 1. When Melfi asks Tony to talk about his father, he instead smiles and immediately flashes back to Junior throwing him a ball when he was a youngster, a subtle identity confusion that Melfi notices. Tony paints Johnny as ever the tough hero in that episode but also admits he “wasn’t around much”, underscoring why Junior might have been as significant a father figure to Tony as Johnny ever was.
The question of “where Johnny” was during Tony’s childhood is reflected most vividly in the vitriolic exchange between Janice and Tony near the episode’s end, which exposes the real basis for Tony’s intense resentment of his sister: she “shirked her duties” by running away to California at 18, leaving Tony at 16 “to cope with [their] head case of a mother.” While he was “mired in [Livia’s] bullshyt”, Janice was out “dropping acid and blowing roadies” (an all-time great line, btw.) A physical altercation ensues with Tony screaming at her, “You’re just like your mother, huh? Now you can do to him [Bobby] what she did to daddy.”
This is Tony’s subconscious defense mechanism at its most vigorous: keep Johnny’s hands clean at all costs; blame his defects or problems on Livia so as not to disturb Tony’s heroic image of him, an image that helps Tony avoid personal responsibility for his life’s direction.
However that defense can’t hide what’s going on in the first part of his diatribe. It clearly shows that Tony felt abandoned to Livia’s “bullshyt”, that he feels someone “shirked their duties” by not doing their part to intervene. He makes Janice the culprit, even though that’s a completely unfair and irrational position. She was only two years older, was herself an equal victim of Livia’s abuse, and she was his sister, not his parent. Clearly this is Tony venting onto Janice, Livia’s modern-day surrogate, his unconscious anger at Johnny for abandoning him to Livia’s mistreatment.
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In Camelot: Origins of the "Kennedy" in Kennedy and Heidi
The false mythology Tony erected around his father is explored in the mid season 5 episode In Camelot. The title refers to another false mythology, the one developed around the John F. Kennedy presidency and epitomized by the widespread metaphorical reference to the Kennedy White House as “Camelot” in further evocation of the nobility, chivalry, and idealism of medieval Arthurian legend.
JFK as an elevated parallel to a Soprano mobster had seeds in the very first episode of the series. Recall that Tony was proud owner of a captain’s hat allegedly once-owned by Kennedy and that he chased his naked goomar down on the deck of the Stugots to make sure she was handling it with proper care. In season 3, Junior displays a true case of JFK hero worship by viewing his arrogant, negligent oncologist as an infallible miracle-worker largely because he shared the president’s name.
In Camelot introduces Tony to his father’s old goomar, Fran, who first impresses Tony as a classy woman that must have provided his father with love and support sorely lacking in his marital relationship. Tony gradually realizes, however, that she is a vacuous, glorified whore, unalterably intoxicated by money and material things and by the whiff of powerful men; unable, even with the ravages of age, to quell her vanity. Her selfishness manifests in several ways throughout the episode, none more telling than the fact that she had continued to smoke around Johnny even when emphysema was starving his lungs for oxygen. She glories in reliving past sexual conquests, the greatest of which was JFK, who bedded her and countless other women while president and while simultaneously enjoying the carefully cultivated public image of a devoted husband and family man.
If her status as a shared mistress weren’t enough, Fran puts the finishing touches on the Johnny Boy/JFK parallel by sharing her big-game trolling secrets (“when you’re with a powerful man, you better damn well make him feel like a powerful man”) and by donning Tony’s JFK captain’s hat and singing “Happy Birthday” in Tony’s face in a creepy re-enactment of Marilyn Monroe’s famously lascivious rendition to JFK (which seemed even more tawdry after it became known that Monroe was one of his many mistresses.)
While much of In Camelot spoke to Fran’s character, much of it also spoke very poorly of Johnny’s. First, he had given Fran’s son a beautiful Golden Retriever that belonged to the Soprano kids, ostensibly because Livia bytched incessantly about the dog’s fleas. He told Tony that the dog had retired to a farm but neglected also to mention that, when Fran’s son left home a few years later, Fran had the dog “put to sleep” (obviously with no intervention from Johnny) because she simply didn’t want to be bothered caring for it.
By the end of the episode, Tony was clearly disturbed that his father’s idea of a goomar was considerably different from his own, noting that Johnny even left a pair of slippers at Fran’s apartment (symbolic of the idea that this was really his father’s second home and a place where he gave much of his divided loyalties.) Feeling for the first time a tiny fraction of the betrayal that his mother must have felt, Tony recalled a particularly ugly instance of that betrayal, the time Livia was hospitalized for a miscarriage with heavy bleeding that could have taken her life. When Johnny finally made contact in response to urgent efforts to reach him, he sounded more put upon than concerned and didn’t go to the hospital until the next day, preferring to finish his dinner and roll in the sack with Fran and to get a good night’s rest. What’s more, when Livia accused him of having been with his goomar the night before, he said he’d spent the night at a cousin’s house and pressured Tony into repeating that lie to Livia.
Nearing tears and for the first time exhibiting not only some compassion for his mother but some fledgling appreciation for his father’s many faults, Melfi made her most direct effort yet to get him to confront and articulate those feelings. “Was there any blame for this man you emulate? The lies, the betrayals with other women? . . . Your mother had her faults, but, after all this time, what should we do with the old woman? Burn her at the stake? You need to forgive her and move on.”
It didn’t take long for him to recoil into a familiar pattern. “fukk her. My dad gave my dog away. Big deal. If it was up to her, she would have had it killed.” Of course Tony conveniently forgets here that it was his father’s “classy” goomar -- and, by extension, his father -- who actually killed the dog.
The false mythology Tony erected around his father is explored in the mid season 5 episode In Camelot. The title refers to another false mythology, the one developed around the John F. Kennedy presidency and epitomized by the widespread metaphorical reference to the Kennedy White House as “Camelot” in further evocation of the nobility, chivalry, and idealism of medieval Arthurian legend.
JFK as an elevated parallel to a Soprano mobster had seeds in the very first episode of the series. Recall that Tony was proud owner of a captain’s hat allegedly once-owned by Kennedy and that he chased his naked goomar down on the deck of the Stugots to make sure she was handling it with proper care. In season 3, Junior displays a true case of JFK hero worship by viewing his arrogant, negligent oncologist as an infallible miracle-worker largely because he shared the president’s name.
In Camelot introduces Tony to his father’s old goomar, Fran, who first impresses Tony as a classy woman that must have provided his father with love and support sorely lacking in his marital relationship. Tony gradually realizes, however, that she is a vacuous, glorified whore, unalterably intoxicated by money and material things and by the whiff of powerful men; unable, even with the ravages of age, to quell her vanity. Her selfishness manifests in several ways throughout the episode, none more telling than the fact that she had continued to smoke around Johnny even when emphysema was starving his lungs for oxygen. She glories in reliving past sexual conquests, the greatest of which was JFK, who bedded her and countless other women while president and while simultaneously enjoying the carefully cultivated public image of a devoted husband and family man.
If her status as a shared mistress weren’t enough, Fran puts the finishing touches on the Johnny Boy/JFK parallel by sharing her big-game trolling secrets (“when you’re with a powerful man, you better damn well make him feel like a powerful man”) and by donning Tony’s JFK captain’s hat and singing “Happy Birthday” in Tony’s face in a creepy re-enactment of Marilyn Monroe’s famously lascivious rendition to JFK (which seemed even more tawdry after it became known that Monroe was one of his many mistresses.)
While much of In Camelot spoke to Fran’s character, much of it also spoke very poorly of Johnny’s. First, he had given Fran’s son a beautiful Golden Retriever that belonged to the Soprano kids, ostensibly because Livia bytched incessantly about the dog’s fleas. He told Tony that the dog had retired to a farm but neglected also to mention that, when Fran’s son left home a few years later, Fran had the dog “put to sleep” (obviously with no intervention from Johnny) because she simply didn’t want to be bothered caring for it.
By the end of the episode, Tony was clearly disturbed that his father’s idea of a goomar was considerably different from his own, noting that Johnny even left a pair of slippers at Fran’s apartment (symbolic of the idea that this was really his father’s second home and a place where he gave much of his divided loyalties.) Feeling for the first time a tiny fraction of the betrayal that his mother must have felt, Tony recalled a particularly ugly instance of that betrayal, the time Livia was hospitalized for a miscarriage with heavy bleeding that could have taken her life. When Johnny finally made contact in response to urgent efforts to reach him, he sounded more put upon than concerned and didn’t go to the hospital until the next day, preferring to finish his dinner and roll in the sack with Fran and to get a good night’s rest. What’s more, when Livia accused him of having been with his goomar the night before, he said he’d spent the night at a cousin’s house and pressured Tony into repeating that lie to Livia.
Nearing tears and for the first time exhibiting not only some compassion for his mother but some fledgling appreciation for his father’s many faults, Melfi made her most direct effort yet to get him to confront and articulate those feelings. “Was there any blame for this man you emulate? The lies, the betrayals with other women? . . . Your mother had her faults, but, after all this time, what should we do with the old woman? Burn her at the stake? You need to forgive her and move on.”
It didn’t take long for him to recoil into a familiar pattern. “fukk her. My dad gave my dog away. Big deal. If it was up to her, she would have had it killed.” Of course Tony conveniently forgets here that it was his father’s “classy” goomar -- and, by extension, his father -- who actually killed the dog.
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Tony’s Depression as “Rage Turned Inward”
Three episodes later (Cold Cuts), and while discussing the recent return of Tony’s panic attacks and depression, Melfi seizes the opportunity to discuss rage. Tony wonders why. “Because depression is rage turned inward,” she replies. There’s a pregnant pause and a closeup of each of them for emphasis (and Melfi even recites the line a second time at the end of the scene.)
She asks where the Soprano temper comes from. He assumes she’s going right back to Livia again, but she stops him cold. “What about your father? You never saw [your mother] chop off someone’s finger.”
The regret of having shared that anecdote is all over Tony’s face and in his words:
Tony: I told you about that, didn’t I?
Melfi: Yes.
Tony: Jesus, I wish I hadn’t.
Melfi: Why?
Tony: I mean I dress up nice and everything when I come here . . .
Unfortunately she cuts him off there to stay on the topic of rage, but this scene is an important clue to his deepest feelings about that finger-chopping incident.
First recall that season 5 began with Tony separated from Carmela, the person who, by virtue of her “respectable” background and persona, came closest to providing him with some semblance of mainstream moral acceptability, not just in terms of public image but in terms of self image. The loss of that support certainly factored into his romantic pursuit of Melfi, a pursuit almost as relentless as it was futile. When Melfi points out that there are plenty of other women available to him, the crux of his fixation on her at that particular time of crisis emerges: she’s “different from what’s out there,” at least from what would be available to a man like Tony. A personal relationship with her could validate, in a measure extending well beyond that ever obtained through marriage to Carmela, his sense that he possesses innate goodness or respectability.
However even in the early stage of his courting efforts, he intuitively understands the real barrier to any relationship when he volunteers, “Forget about how Tony Soprano makes his way in the world. That’s just to feed his children.” He eventually forces Melfi to articulate why she won’t even consider dating him, and she euphemistically tells him that she couldn’t date a man who steals from, kills, and maims others and treats women like whores. In other words, she couldn’t date a gangster.
Though Livia indirectly contributed to that destiny for Tony, his father was clearly the driving influence, at least in Tony’s unconscious mind, which is why the two most important pure dream sequences in the series (Calling All Cars and Test Dream) have Tony riding in his father's 1959 black Cadillac, accompanied by copious symbols of the doom and detritus of gangster life.
So this is the context of rejection in which Tony is reminded of having once willingly shared with Melfi the cleaver story. His regret for that prior openness betrays how personally soiled he now feels by the incident in her eyes, soiled in a way that nice clothes and a respectable appearance can’t cover.
Why the change? Why in the world would he only now feel so ashamed of something he didn’t do himself, something he only witnessed? Why would he only now fear that this very bright, compassionate, fair-minded doctor -- who makes her living exploring the troubled backgrounds of patients – might impute to an 11 year-old bystander all the malice of another adult’s brutal actions?
The answer, it seems to me, is that Tony must subconsciously recognize the chopped finger epoch as the turning point in his evolution into the kind of man his father would respect as opposed to the kind that Melfi would respect. He himself feels inexorably stained by the experience and, having forced Melfi to burst the coc00n of complete non-judgment in the therapist’s office, is now projecting that perception of stain onto her.
Recall further that in this very same discussion, Melfi invokes the lines, “The center cannot hold. The falcon cannot hear the falconer.” I think it entirely not coincidental that the revival of the cleaver incident occurs (after laying dormant for two and a half seasons) in an episode soon after the first cracks in Tony’s idolatry of his father have been exposed (In Camelot); where Melfi describes depression as “rage turned inward,” suggesting an unconscious, unacknowledged source of rage in Tony’s psyche; and where she further introduces the Yeats poem “The Second Coming” that resonates so symbolically with Christopher’s murder and for which the episode following Kennedy and Heidi is named.
Three episodes later (Cold Cuts), and while discussing the recent return of Tony’s panic attacks and depression, Melfi seizes the opportunity to discuss rage. Tony wonders why. “Because depression is rage turned inward,” she replies. There’s a pregnant pause and a closeup of each of them for emphasis (and Melfi even recites the line a second time at the end of the scene.)
She asks where the Soprano temper comes from. He assumes she’s going right back to Livia again, but she stops him cold. “What about your father? You never saw [your mother] chop off someone’s finger.”
The regret of having shared that anecdote is all over Tony’s face and in his words:
Tony: I told you about that, didn’t I?
Melfi: Yes.
Tony: Jesus, I wish I hadn’t.
Melfi: Why?
Tony: I mean I dress up nice and everything when I come here . . .
Unfortunately she cuts him off there to stay on the topic of rage, but this scene is an important clue to his deepest feelings about that finger-chopping incident.
First recall that season 5 began with Tony separated from Carmela, the person who, by virtue of her “respectable” background and persona, came closest to providing him with some semblance of mainstream moral acceptability, not just in terms of public image but in terms of self image. The loss of that support certainly factored into his romantic pursuit of Melfi, a pursuit almost as relentless as it was futile. When Melfi points out that there are plenty of other women available to him, the crux of his fixation on her at that particular time of crisis emerges: she’s “different from what’s out there,” at least from what would be available to a man like Tony. A personal relationship with her could validate, in a measure extending well beyond that ever obtained through marriage to Carmela, his sense that he possesses innate goodness or respectability.
However even in the early stage of his courting efforts, he intuitively understands the real barrier to any relationship when he volunteers, “Forget about how Tony Soprano makes his way in the world. That’s just to feed his children.” He eventually forces Melfi to articulate why she won’t even consider dating him, and she euphemistically tells him that she couldn’t date a man who steals from, kills, and maims others and treats women like whores. In other words, she couldn’t date a gangster.
Though Livia indirectly contributed to that destiny for Tony, his father was clearly the driving influence, at least in Tony’s unconscious mind, which is why the two most important pure dream sequences in the series (Calling All Cars and Test Dream) have Tony riding in his father's 1959 black Cadillac, accompanied by copious symbols of the doom and detritus of gangster life.
So this is the context of rejection in which Tony is reminded of having once willingly shared with Melfi the cleaver story. His regret for that prior openness betrays how personally soiled he now feels by the incident in her eyes, soiled in a way that nice clothes and a respectable appearance can’t cover.
Why the change? Why in the world would he only now feel so ashamed of something he didn’t do himself, something he only witnessed? Why would he only now fear that this very bright, compassionate, fair-minded doctor -- who makes her living exploring the troubled backgrounds of patients – might impute to an 11 year-old bystander all the malice of another adult’s brutal actions?
The answer, it seems to me, is that Tony must subconsciously recognize the chopped finger epoch as the turning point in his evolution into the kind of man his father would respect as opposed to the kind that Melfi would respect. He himself feels inexorably stained by the experience and, having forced Melfi to burst the coc00n of complete non-judgment in the therapist’s office, is now projecting that perception of stain onto her.
Recall further that in this very same discussion, Melfi invokes the lines, “The center cannot hold. The falcon cannot hear the falconer.” I think it entirely not coincidental that the revival of the cleaver incident occurs (after laying dormant for two and a half seasons) in an episode soon after the first cracks in Tony’s idolatry of his father have been exposed (In Camelot); where Melfi describes depression as “rage turned inward,” suggesting an unconscious, unacknowledged source of rage in Tony’s psyche; and where she further introduces the Yeats poem “The Second Coming” that resonates so symbolically with Christopher’s murder and for which the episode following Kennedy and Heidi is named.
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The Test Dream: Tony Is Unprepared . . . to “Kill” his Father
Test Dream was certainly prompted in large measure by Tony’s anxiety at the emerging prospect of having to kill his cousin. But the dream has many fascinating layers or subplots, and, as far as I can tell, they all suggest a subconscious lust on Tony’s part for respectability, both in terms of his occupation, his marriage, and his upbringing. I hope to get away without thoroughly arguing these points here, as I’ve offered lengthy treatments of Test Dream before.
I do want to hilight the Johnny Boy/JFK connection that arises again briefly in the dream. It’s prefaced by the voice of “God”/David Chase telling Tony over the phone that “our friend” has to go. In Mafia circles, “our friend” is widely understood code for “made guy”, which indicates Tony’s real dream mission is not the obvious one of killing Tony Blundetto (who, as the audience was pointedly reminded that season, was not made.) Rather the “two Tonys” theme of season 5 plays out on the street when the black man asks if Tony B was actually “the” Tony that he (Tony Soprano) was supposed to cap. “I guess not,” an unarmed-Tony replies, clearly realizing in that moment that his mission from “God” is to kill that other Tony, the made Tony. In other words, he is to kill himself, or at least the gangster part of himself.
That mission resonates perfectly with the imagery ending the season’s first episode, Two Tonys, when Tony literally takes up arms against the bear in his own back yard – his inner thug – shortly after provoking his therapist into admitting that his inner thug is precisely the reason he’s unfit for a personal relationship with her. Additionally, the three people in the dream that seem to be offering Tony advice or guidance on what he is to do – Artie, Gloria, and Vin Makazian – are all people who either tried or succeeded in committing suicide.
Once the Tony of the Test Dream grasps his true mission, he literally flees “the mob” of people around him. During that flight, a man resembling Johnny Boy shoots at Tony with a scoped rifle from a school book depository-looking building in evocation of the JFK assassination. Tony follows a gesturing Artie to safety in his father’s car, driven for the first time in the dream not by Johnny Boy but by Artie. Inside the car, the necktie around Tony’s neck that had been full length just moments before is now cut very short.
To me, this part of the dream indicates that Tony subconsciously wishes to leave or “cut ties” with the mob and wishes that he’d had a father like Artie. That in itself virtually guarantees that Tony also unconsciously harbors some degree of resentment, blame, disaffection, or even rage towards his father.
The allusion to the JFK assassination is susceptible to several interpretations, including an obvious one: a certain hit on him if he left the mob, especially by flipping (a strategy suggested in the dream by The Valachi Papers reference and by an image that is suddenly “flipped” 180 degrees). Inhabiting a JFK role in the dream could also indicate an inflated self-concept on Tony’s part. But in the full context of longing to “go straight”, and especially considering the explicit parallel between JFK and Johnny Boy made just a few episodes before this, the more compelling interpretation to me is that Tony is repressing a murderous rage towards his own father with the roles being reversed and disguised by his subconscious: a vague Johnny look-alike as Oswald and Tony as JFK.
Test Dream was certainly prompted in large measure by Tony’s anxiety at the emerging prospect of having to kill his cousin. But the dream has many fascinating layers or subplots, and, as far as I can tell, they all suggest a subconscious lust on Tony’s part for respectability, both in terms of his occupation, his marriage, and his upbringing. I hope to get away without thoroughly arguing these points here, as I’ve offered lengthy treatments of Test Dream before.
I do want to hilight the Johnny Boy/JFK connection that arises again briefly in the dream. It’s prefaced by the voice of “God”/David Chase telling Tony over the phone that “our friend” has to go. In Mafia circles, “our friend” is widely understood code for “made guy”, which indicates Tony’s real dream mission is not the obvious one of killing Tony Blundetto (who, as the audience was pointedly reminded that season, was not made.) Rather the “two Tonys” theme of season 5 plays out on the street when the black man asks if Tony B was actually “the” Tony that he (Tony Soprano) was supposed to cap. “I guess not,” an unarmed-Tony replies, clearly realizing in that moment that his mission from “God” is to kill that other Tony, the made Tony. In other words, he is to kill himself, or at least the gangster part of himself.
That mission resonates perfectly with the imagery ending the season’s first episode, Two Tonys, when Tony literally takes up arms against the bear in his own back yard – his inner thug – shortly after provoking his therapist into admitting that his inner thug is precisely the reason he’s unfit for a personal relationship with her. Additionally, the three people in the dream that seem to be offering Tony advice or guidance on what he is to do – Artie, Gloria, and Vin Makazian – are all people who either tried or succeeded in committing suicide.
Once the Tony of the Test Dream grasps his true mission, he literally flees “the mob” of people around him. During that flight, a man resembling Johnny Boy shoots at Tony with a scoped rifle from a school book depository-looking building in evocation of the JFK assassination. Tony follows a gesturing Artie to safety in his father’s car, driven for the first time in the dream not by Johnny Boy but by Artie. Inside the car, the necktie around Tony’s neck that had been full length just moments before is now cut very short.
To me, this part of the dream indicates that Tony subconsciously wishes to leave or “cut ties” with the mob and wishes that he’d had a father like Artie. That in itself virtually guarantees that Tony also unconsciously harbors some degree of resentment, blame, disaffection, or even rage towards his father.
The allusion to the JFK assassination is susceptible to several interpretations, including an obvious one: a certain hit on him if he left the mob, especially by flipping (a strategy suggested in the dream by The Valachi Papers reference and by an image that is suddenly “flipped” 180 degrees). Inhabiting a JFK role in the dream could also indicate an inflated self-concept on Tony’s part. But in the full context of longing to “go straight”, and especially considering the explicit parallel between JFK and Johnny Boy made just a few episodes before this, the more compelling interpretation to me is that Tony is repressing a murderous rage towards his own father with the roles being reversed and disguised by his subconscious: a vague Johnny look-alike as Oswald and Tony as JFK.
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First articulated by Freud, “reversal into the opposite” is a concept with obvious relevance to this thesis. From answers.com:
The expression ‘reversal into the opposite’ refers to the transformation of an idea, a representation, a logical figure, a dream image, a symptom, an affect, or the like into its opposite. It is a process that affects the fate of the instincts, notably in the transformation of love into hate . . .
Freud first described this type of transformation with regard to dream images. Such reversals are used to create the disguises that enable the translation of latent thoughts into acceptable thoughts (which are thus able to cross the barrier of censorship). He gave numerous examples of this in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). This process can affect characteristics of objects or people; thus, a small object can appear to be very large in a dream; someone whose intelligence is envied appears stupid in the dream, and so forth. Often a reversal of actions into their opposite is involved: Climbing a staircase expresses the idea of descending or falling; . . .
Reversals of the dream protagonists' roles may occur, such as the hare chasing the hunter, or the dreamer punishing his father.(emphasis added)
The idea of this kind of disguise explains very well another aspect of the dream that never made complete sense to me before. Coach Molinaro was unquestionably a “good” role model in Tony’s life and apparently the one who did the most to build his self esteem and guide him toward a legitimate vocation. Yet he had a disturbing duality in the dream. He was in a nasty, damp, dark, color-less locker room that looked something like a dungeon. The monochrome environment was starkly broken by his bright red jacket and hat and by the red jerseys he was putting into lockers, making for devilish overtones.
He said some things that actually or superficially comported with his real identity and with things Tony revealed about him in waking conversations. For example, he tells Tony, “You had brains, leadership skills, all the prerequisites to lead young men onto the field of sport.” Other things he said are the very opposite of what he would have presumably thought or said.
At one point in the dream the coach scolds, “How many times did I tell you to cleave yourself away from those bums you hung with?” (“Cleave” is certainly an interesting word choice for the idea of “separation” here, given the significance of a meat cleaver in Tony’s psyche.) Yet when Tony throws back at him that Artie is a great success as owner of a restaurant, his reply is puzzling. “Bucco? He was the worst of the bunch.”
Why in the world would a guy like Coach Molinaro, who was trying to steer Tony away from the bad influences around him, have felt Artie was the “worst of the bunch”? That bunch presumably included the likes of dikkie Moltisanti, Tony Blundetto, and “Uncle” Paulie. Artie was a 3rd generation chef and, by all indications, from a good family. He would have been the very kind of kid that the coach would have been glad to see Tony hang with in high school. Johnny, on the other hand, would likely have thought of Artie as – forgive me – a “p*ssy” or as something affirmatively less manly than the likes of Paulie and dikkie.
There are other examples of these puzzling dichotomies. When Tony first approaches, the coach laughingly gestures to Tony’s pistol and asks, “What you got there? A bigger dingus than the one God gave you?” Tony responds by warning that he’s “not some kid anymore” and deserves respect. Now is the coach here sarcastically decrying the notion that true manhood derives from wielding a deadly weapon, or is it Johnny Boy making another “small hands”/inadequate manhood joke at Tony’s expense? In other words, is this Tony projecting his doubt that he ever lived up to Coach Molinaro’s idea of manhood or doubt that he ever lived up to his father’s?
Shortly afterward, the coach says it’s a “damn shame” that Tony is in therapy, not something you’d associate with a man that had Tony’s best interests at heart but which would very accurately reflect Johnny’s opinion had he lived to see the day. The coach disapprovingly offers, “I bet you blame everything on your father.” When Tony corrects him, “No, more my mother,” the coach smiles an ambiguous smile. “Even better,” he replies. In context, you’re not sure whether this is derisive reproach for Tony failing to take personal responsibility for his life choices (presumably consistent with the coach’s identity) or actual approval that Tony is shifting blame away from Johnny onto Livia (presumably consistent with Johnny’s identity).
"The reversal concept again seems relevant in deciphering the coach’s dual identity, per the following excerpt from the previously cited treatise:
Certain logical relationships can also be expressed in this way. Contradiction, for example, may lead in a dream to a condensation in which opposites are blended together in a depiction marked by a sense of absurdity."
It’s vital, of course, to remember what Tony is doing in the Molinaro part of the dream. He is hunting the coach down with the aim of killing, or at least silencing, him. He aims a handgun, conspicuously fitted with a big silencer, and pulls the trigger, but his bullets literally disintegrate into shyt. At that moment, the coach says, “You’re unprepared. You’ll never shut me up.”
I read this as Tony acknowledging the deeply buried part of himself that knows he chose the wrong path in life, that regrets he didn’t model himself on the football coach who tried to intervene in his life instead of on the gangsters that lived in and around his home. I also read it as indicating a latent, murderous rage by Tony against his father that his subconscious censored and fashioned into acceptable dream imagery by giving Johnny the guise of Tony’s “anti” Johnny, his old football coach.
The expression ‘reversal into the opposite’ refers to the transformation of an idea, a representation, a logical figure, a dream image, a symptom, an affect, or the like into its opposite. It is a process that affects the fate of the instincts, notably in the transformation of love into hate . . .
Freud first described this type of transformation with regard to dream images. Such reversals are used to create the disguises that enable the translation of latent thoughts into acceptable thoughts (which are thus able to cross the barrier of censorship). He gave numerous examples of this in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). This process can affect characteristics of objects or people; thus, a small object can appear to be very large in a dream; someone whose intelligence is envied appears stupid in the dream, and so forth. Often a reversal of actions into their opposite is involved: Climbing a staircase expresses the idea of descending or falling; . . .
Reversals of the dream protagonists' roles may occur, such as the hare chasing the hunter, or the dreamer punishing his father.(emphasis added)
The idea of this kind of disguise explains very well another aspect of the dream that never made complete sense to me before. Coach Molinaro was unquestionably a “good” role model in Tony’s life and apparently the one who did the most to build his self esteem and guide him toward a legitimate vocation. Yet he had a disturbing duality in the dream. He was in a nasty, damp, dark, color-less locker room that looked something like a dungeon. The monochrome environment was starkly broken by his bright red jacket and hat and by the red jerseys he was putting into lockers, making for devilish overtones.
He said some things that actually or superficially comported with his real identity and with things Tony revealed about him in waking conversations. For example, he tells Tony, “You had brains, leadership skills, all the prerequisites to lead young men onto the field of sport.” Other things he said are the very opposite of what he would have presumably thought or said.
At one point in the dream the coach scolds, “How many times did I tell you to cleave yourself away from those bums you hung with?” (“Cleave” is certainly an interesting word choice for the idea of “separation” here, given the significance of a meat cleaver in Tony’s psyche.) Yet when Tony throws back at him that Artie is a great success as owner of a restaurant, his reply is puzzling. “Bucco? He was the worst of the bunch.”
Why in the world would a guy like Coach Molinaro, who was trying to steer Tony away from the bad influences around him, have felt Artie was the “worst of the bunch”? That bunch presumably included the likes of dikkie Moltisanti, Tony Blundetto, and “Uncle” Paulie. Artie was a 3rd generation chef and, by all indications, from a good family. He would have been the very kind of kid that the coach would have been glad to see Tony hang with in high school. Johnny, on the other hand, would likely have thought of Artie as – forgive me – a “p*ssy” or as something affirmatively less manly than the likes of Paulie and dikkie.
There are other examples of these puzzling dichotomies. When Tony first approaches, the coach laughingly gestures to Tony’s pistol and asks, “What you got there? A bigger dingus than the one God gave you?” Tony responds by warning that he’s “not some kid anymore” and deserves respect. Now is the coach here sarcastically decrying the notion that true manhood derives from wielding a deadly weapon, or is it Johnny Boy making another “small hands”/inadequate manhood joke at Tony’s expense? In other words, is this Tony projecting his doubt that he ever lived up to Coach Molinaro’s idea of manhood or doubt that he ever lived up to his father’s?
Shortly afterward, the coach says it’s a “damn shame” that Tony is in therapy, not something you’d associate with a man that had Tony’s best interests at heart but which would very accurately reflect Johnny’s opinion had he lived to see the day. The coach disapprovingly offers, “I bet you blame everything on your father.” When Tony corrects him, “No, more my mother,” the coach smiles an ambiguous smile. “Even better,” he replies. In context, you’re not sure whether this is derisive reproach for Tony failing to take personal responsibility for his life choices (presumably consistent with the coach’s identity) or actual approval that Tony is shifting blame away from Johnny onto Livia (presumably consistent with Johnny’s identity).
"The reversal concept again seems relevant in deciphering the coach’s dual identity, per the following excerpt from the previously cited treatise:
Certain logical relationships can also be expressed in this way. Contradiction, for example, may lead in a dream to a condensation in which opposites are blended together in a depiction marked by a sense of absurdity."
It’s vital, of course, to remember what Tony is doing in the Molinaro part of the dream. He is hunting the coach down with the aim of killing, or at least silencing, him. He aims a handgun, conspicuously fitted with a big silencer, and pulls the trigger, but his bullets literally disintegrate into shyt. At that moment, the coach says, “You’re unprepared. You’ll never shut me up.”
I read this as Tony acknowledging the deeply buried part of himself that knows he chose the wrong path in life, that regrets he didn’t model himself on the football coach who tried to intervene in his life instead of on the gangsters that lived in and around his home. I also read it as indicating a latent, murderous rage by Tony against his father that his subconscious censored and fashioned into acceptable dream imagery by giving Johnny the guise of Tony’s “anti” Johnny, his old football coach.
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III. Season 6, Part 1: Junior Ignites Tony’s Paternal Rage
The sixth and final season of the Sopranos was originally tabbed to last 12 episodes. Eventually it was expanded into one mammoth, 21-episode season separated into two parts. That’s of some significance since seasons have always had some degree of internal, thematic cohesion and we could therefore expect episodes in the second part to thematically relate to episodes in the first part.
The seismic event starting season six was a quasi-demented Junior shooting Tony out of the blue. Even without viewing any episode after that, one could safely assume that the culmination of season six, and therefore the series, would in some way have to account for the natural shock wave of that quake. And in case we couldn’t figure that out, Melfi tells us as much.
Melfi Warns of Tony’s Inevitable “Decompensation”
In his very first therapy session after the event, Tony informs Melfi that he has cut off all contact with Junior, will not discuss him or the shooting, and claims his only feelings are of gratitude. “Every day is a gift,” he tells her. Yet when Melfi probes to see if he’s experiencing night terrors or is having trouble sleeping – symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder – his answer is an indirect “yes” to both. Even his refusal to talk about the trauma is itself a symptom of PTSD.
By the 8th episode of season 6, Johnny Cakes, Melfi expresses concern over this repression to Elliot, who attributes it to “omerta”. “This isn’t omerta. It’s something else,” she replies, with absolute self-assurance. Elliot asks if Tony has cried or reported crying. “No,” she disappointedly answers, adding that she believes it’s only a matter of time before Tony “totally decompensates.”
In psychiatric vernacular, “decompensation” describes:
We see nothing from Tony in season 6, part 1, that fulfills Melfi’s prediction. On the contrary, Tony gives signs, for a short period, that he might be seriously readjusting his values. However there are two episodes concerning Tony’s experiences as a father that notably contrast with his experiences as a son and help frame the parameters of the displaced paternal hatred that explodes in the second set of season 6 episodes.
The sixth and final season of the Sopranos was originally tabbed to last 12 episodes. Eventually it was expanded into one mammoth, 21-episode season separated into two parts. That’s of some significance since seasons have always had some degree of internal, thematic cohesion and we could therefore expect episodes in the second part to thematically relate to episodes in the first part.
The seismic event starting season six was a quasi-demented Junior shooting Tony out of the blue. Even without viewing any episode after that, one could safely assume that the culmination of season six, and therefore the series, would in some way have to account for the natural shock wave of that quake. And in case we couldn’t figure that out, Melfi tells us as much.
Melfi Warns of Tony’s Inevitable “Decompensation”
In his very first therapy session after the event, Tony informs Melfi that he has cut off all contact with Junior, will not discuss him or the shooting, and claims his only feelings are of gratitude. “Every day is a gift,” he tells her. Yet when Melfi probes to see if he’s experiencing night terrors or is having trouble sleeping – symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder – his answer is an indirect “yes” to both. Even his refusal to talk about the trauma is itself a symptom of PTSD.
By the 8th episode of season 6, Johnny Cakes, Melfi expresses concern over this repression to Elliot, who attributes it to “omerta”. “This isn’t omerta. It’s something else,” she replies, with absolute self-assurance. Elliot asks if Tony has cried or reported crying. “No,” she disappointedly answers, adding that she believes it’s only a matter of time before Tony “totally decompensates.”
In psychiatric vernacular, “decompensation” describes:
Another source describes it as “the deterioration of existing defenses, leading to an exacerbation of pathologic behavior.”
We see nothing from Tony in season 6, part 1, that fulfills Melfi’s prediction. On the contrary, Tony gives signs, for a short period, that he might be seriously readjusting his values. However there are two episodes concerning Tony’s experiences as a father that notably contrast with his experiences as a son and help frame the parameters of the displaced paternal hatred that explodes in the second set of season 6 episodes.
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A Tale of Two Interventions
In Johnny Cakes, Tony continues to utilize most of his therapy time to talk about AJ: his flunking out of college; his general irresponsibility and questionable choice of friends; his habit of staying out late at expensive New York night clubs, sleeping until noon, and working a couple of token hours a day at Blockbuster. Melfi asks if Tony can empathize with what AJ might be experiencing as a 19 year-old, then argues that the incessant informational bombardment of young people in modern times has caused a delay in the attainment of adulthood. “Sociologists say that 26 is in fact the new 21,” she reports.
While acknowledging that he had his own problems in school, Tony adds that he didn’t just “vegetate”, like AJ, and that, if he had, his father would have “kicked [his] lazy ass out of the house.” “Really?” Melfi asks. He responds, “It’s the chopping off of the guy’s finger, right? I never should have told you cause that’s all you fixate on with him.”
Tony’s non sequitir response is a humorous, perhaps even accurate, assessment of the learned doctor by her unlearned patient. But more importantly, it also depicts Tony’s own psychological projection, the degree to which that event imprinted him. The topic of the chopped finger had been raised by Melfi exactly once since the story was first shared, and that was in the context of the Cold Cuts discussion about Tony’s “rage turned inward” and what the origins of that rage might be. One mention in five years hardly justifies that she is the one fixated on the incident.
It’s no coincidence that this particular episode resurrects the cleaver history or that it features Melfi essentially placing AJ’s developmental/psychological age at around 14. That’s because Johnny Cakes places Tony and AJ in roughly analogous positions to those occupied by Johnny and Tony all those years before in the Fortunate Son flashbacks. Indeed, as Sopranos titles almost always have at least a double meaning, I think “Johnny Cakes” is less about the overt but comparatively unimportant Vito storyline and much more about a subtle evocation of the “Johnny"/Tony/AJ parallel.
The dominant action of the episode occurs when AJ, moved by what he believes to be his duty as a son and by the expectations of his shallow, infantile “friends”, acts out on a half-hearted plot to kill Junior in retribution for Tony’s shooting. At the moment of truth, as the doddering old man approaches him expecting a warm embrace, AJ drops the large knife he’d intended to stick in Junior’s gut and flees in terror before being caught and subdued by hospital staff.
After using his connections to ensure that AJ would not be charged with a crime, Tony confronts him outside the police station and performs an “intervention” that is very different from the one Johnny performed with him when he was 11. It is the only moment of profound moral triumph for Tony in the entire series.
He’s livid that AJ would involve himself in something that could have cost him his freedom or even his life had he succeeded. But he also expresses something far more meaningful: that murdering Junior is flat out “wrong” and that he is grateful AJ doesn’t have what it takes to be a killer. There’s a brief moment of mixed signals when Tony mocks AJ’s failed revenge as “nothing, a big fat zero,” betraying that Tony’s ego wishes for a son that’s exactly like him even as his heart is grateful he has a son who is not. But the overwhelming message he delivers that night is that he is glad AJ is innately, naturally a “good guy”, striking also because it betrays that Tony feels he himself is innately not a good guy.
Tony also tells him it’s time to “grow up”, a prospect that has frightened AJ because of what he came to believe it entails: fulfilling Tony’s example of manhood. AJ’s fear manifests in many ways, from the dry-heaving immediately after Tony says the words to his prolonged adolescent behavior to his fainting panic attack in the nightclub when his “friends” tell him “You the man!” in deference to the power they impute to him as, presumably, a man made in his father’s image. Though 8 years older than Tony was after the cleaver incident, AJ’s stress reaction to the thought of Soprano manhood is the same.
Cold Stones is the companion episode to Johnny Cakes. In it, Tony completes his intervention by crashing AJ’s fraternity of spoiled, rich brats and his cycle of irresponsible partying and demands that he report early the next morning for an honest construction job procured on his behalf . . . or else. He smashes AJ’s windshield in a thinly veiled gesture of what he’d like to do to AJ’s face, something he reminds AJ would have happened long ago had Carmela not prevented it all these years. (Carmela’s protection of AJ from Tony’s violent side is beautifully symbolized in Two Tonys when she uses the quintessential tools of a housewife – pots and pans taken from a dishwasher – to scare the bear away from AJ.)
Though Tony clearly has AJ’s best interests at heart in threatening to cut him off financially if he doesn’t report for work, he is startlingly frank with Melfi about his other, contradictory feelings, namely that he “hates his son.” The exchange that follows that admission is one of the more important therapy scenes in the entire series and merits a full transcription:
Melfi’s last statement also inverts an idea that she first tried to impress upon Tony in season 2, that his father bore some responsibility for the psychological damage wrought by Livia because he failed to intervene in her treatment of the children. All these years later, Melfi is trying to make Tony see that part of his hatred towards his mother owed to her corollary failure to intervene in Johnny’s brutal inculcation of Tony into Soprano-style “manhood.”
This marks a 180-degree shift in the background focus of Tony’s therapy: from Livia to Johnny for action and from Johnny to Livia for inaction.
In Johnny Cakes, Tony continues to utilize most of his therapy time to talk about AJ: his flunking out of college; his general irresponsibility and questionable choice of friends; his habit of staying out late at expensive New York night clubs, sleeping until noon, and working a couple of token hours a day at Blockbuster. Melfi asks if Tony can empathize with what AJ might be experiencing as a 19 year-old, then argues that the incessant informational bombardment of young people in modern times has caused a delay in the attainment of adulthood. “Sociologists say that 26 is in fact the new 21,” she reports.
While acknowledging that he had his own problems in school, Tony adds that he didn’t just “vegetate”, like AJ, and that, if he had, his father would have “kicked [his] lazy ass out of the house.” “Really?” Melfi asks. He responds, “It’s the chopping off of the guy’s finger, right? I never should have told you cause that’s all you fixate on with him.”
Tony’s non sequitir response is a humorous, perhaps even accurate, assessment of the learned doctor by her unlearned patient. But more importantly, it also depicts Tony’s own psychological projection, the degree to which that event imprinted him. The topic of the chopped finger had been raised by Melfi exactly once since the story was first shared, and that was in the context of the Cold Cuts discussion about Tony’s “rage turned inward” and what the origins of that rage might be. One mention in five years hardly justifies that she is the one fixated on the incident.
It’s no coincidence that this particular episode resurrects the cleaver history or that it features Melfi essentially placing AJ’s developmental/psychological age at around 14. That’s because Johnny Cakes places Tony and AJ in roughly analogous positions to those occupied by Johnny and Tony all those years before in the Fortunate Son flashbacks. Indeed, as Sopranos titles almost always have at least a double meaning, I think “Johnny Cakes” is less about the overt but comparatively unimportant Vito storyline and much more about a subtle evocation of the “Johnny"/Tony/AJ parallel.
The dominant action of the episode occurs when AJ, moved by what he believes to be his duty as a son and by the expectations of his shallow, infantile “friends”, acts out on a half-hearted plot to kill Junior in retribution for Tony’s shooting. At the moment of truth, as the doddering old man approaches him expecting a warm embrace, AJ drops the large knife he’d intended to stick in Junior’s gut and flees in terror before being caught and subdued by hospital staff.
After using his connections to ensure that AJ would not be charged with a crime, Tony confronts him outside the police station and performs an “intervention” that is very different from the one Johnny performed with him when he was 11. It is the only moment of profound moral triumph for Tony in the entire series.
He’s livid that AJ would involve himself in something that could have cost him his freedom or even his life had he succeeded. But he also expresses something far more meaningful: that murdering Junior is flat out “wrong” and that he is grateful AJ doesn’t have what it takes to be a killer. There’s a brief moment of mixed signals when Tony mocks AJ’s failed revenge as “nothing, a big fat zero,” betraying that Tony’s ego wishes for a son that’s exactly like him even as his heart is grateful he has a son who is not. But the overwhelming message he delivers that night is that he is glad AJ is innately, naturally a “good guy”, striking also because it betrays that Tony feels he himself is innately not a good guy.
Tony also tells him it’s time to “grow up”, a prospect that has frightened AJ because of what he came to believe it entails: fulfilling Tony’s example of manhood. AJ’s fear manifests in many ways, from the dry-heaving immediately after Tony says the words to his prolonged adolescent behavior to his fainting panic attack in the nightclub when his “friends” tell him “You the man!” in deference to the power they impute to him as, presumably, a man made in his father’s image. Though 8 years older than Tony was after the cleaver incident, AJ’s stress reaction to the thought of Soprano manhood is the same.
Cold Stones is the companion episode to Johnny Cakes. In it, Tony completes his intervention by crashing AJ’s fraternity of spoiled, rich brats and his cycle of irresponsible partying and demands that he report early the next morning for an honest construction job procured on his behalf . . . or else. He smashes AJ’s windshield in a thinly veiled gesture of what he’d like to do to AJ’s face, something he reminds AJ would have happened long ago had Carmela not prevented it all these years. (Carmela’s protection of AJ from Tony’s violent side is beautifully symbolized in Two Tonys when she uses the quintessential tools of a housewife – pots and pans taken from a dishwasher – to scare the bear away from AJ.)
Though Tony clearly has AJ’s best interests at heart in threatening to cut him off financially if he doesn’t report for work, he is startlingly frank with Melfi about his other, contradictory feelings, namely that he “hates his son.” The exchange that follows that admission is one of the more important therapy scenes in the entire series and merits a full transcription:
This passage bears obvious relevance to the issue of Tony harboring unconscious rage against his father and displacing it onto others, especially because Melfi is uncharacteristically articulating the insight for Tony rather than gently nudging him to make it on his own. That indicates the urgency she attaches to it as well as the importance the audience should attach to it.
Melfi’s last statement also inverts an idea that she first tried to impress upon Tony in season 2, that his father bore some responsibility for the psychological damage wrought by Livia because he failed to intervene in her treatment of the children. All these years later, Melfi is trying to make Tony see that part of his hatred towards his mother owed to her corollary failure to intervene in Johnny’s brutal inculcation of Tony into Soprano-style “manhood.”
This marks a 180-degree shift in the background focus of Tony’s therapy: from Livia to Johnny for action and from Johnny to Livia for inaction.
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IV. Early Season 6, Part 2: Tony’s Paternal Rage Intensifies
Soprano Home Movies
The first 5 episodes of season 6, part 2, establish a parabolic crescendo of subplots dealing with violent fathers and sons – real and surrogate -- and the repression of guilt, hatred, and rage between them. Soprano Home Movies starts things off when Tony asks Bobby if he ever “popped his cherry” (killed anyone). “Nah,” Bobby replies. This puzzles Tony since Bobby got made anyway and had a notorious mob hitman for a father. “I come close. I done other shyt, but no. . . . My pop never wanted it for me.” (emphasis added) Bobby goes on to observe that modern DNA and other evidence make legal complications for murder much more problematic than in years past.
Tony salutes him for having avoided the act. “It’s a big, fat pain in the balls.” His tone of voice and introspective expression betray that his statement has little to do with the legal complications of murder and everything to do with the psychological complications.
His choice of words also suggests an important association in Tony’s subconscious: murder is a pain literally in the source of his masculinity, a pain resulting from his effort to fulfill his father’s expectations and ideas of manhood. (If this association isn’t clear from Soprano Home Movies alone, it becomes abundantly clear in Remember When two episodes later.)
As is typical in the Sopranos, and in life, events rarely have one cause. The monopoly fight in this episode is a good example. Contributory causes included inebriation and a dispute over the free parking rule. But the biggest impetus came when Janice told the story of Johnny Boy shooting a hole through Livia’s hairdo, despite Tony’s vociferous objection. Tony’s vindictiveness immediately kicked in, and things went precipitously downhill afterward.
Similar to the finger chopping incident, the hair story was so shameful to Tony that he never even told Carmela, a fact that shocks her because of the ostensible hilarity of a bullet hole in the middle of a beehive bun. While everyone else laughs, he seems ashamed not only because the act is blatantly violent but because the victim was a spouse, not some loanshark debtor. He growls at Janice, “It makes us look like a fukkin’ dysfunctional family,” then warns Carmela, “Don’t you ever tell the kids that about their grandfather.” He still protects Johnny to the core because his maternal blame/paternal hero worship is his defense mechanism to personal responsibility and regret for his lifestyle.
However losing the fight to Bobby on the heels of the discussion about murder stirred a cauldron of unconscious hatred in Tony towards the father whose example and imparted value system factored indirectly into both the fight and Tony’s severe humiliation at defeat as well as into his envy for a peer whose father loved him enough to shield him from the ultimate crime. I could rarely ever predict what was about to happen on The Sopranos, but as soon as I saw Tony brooding with his black eye and swollen jaw by that lake, I felt he would be shortly ordering Bobby to perform his first hit. It was perfect, hideous retribution for someone who has often sought to sabotage another’s personal growth, stability, happiness, or moral superiority, especially when he’s feeling the narrow limits of his own.
When Bobby returns home to the strains of “This Magic Moment” after committing his first murder, the subtext is clear. He has lost forever what modicum of innocence he could claim as a made guy. He will never be the same again, his psyche irrevocably scarred in a way that Tony understands all too well since, as we soon learn, he committed his first murder at age 22 . . . on orders of his own father.
There are a few other notable scenes in Soprano Home Movies. The first occurs by the lake when Tony urges Carmela to share the story of the three year-old that was left with severe brain damage after nearly drowning in a swimming pool amid a party full of adults. Tony doesn’t know why but proclaims, “I can’t get that story out of my mind.”
In a scene after the fight, he hones in on the nanny singing the nursery song “Five Little Ducks” with toddler Domenica. The first stanza of that song goes:
These two anecdotes speak in concert to the issue of parental (and especially maternal) neglect, of a mother not properly protecting or keeping account of her children in view of the risks around them. They are especially apposite as Sopranos subtext because Tony’s subconscious, and the show as a whole, have used ducks and pools as symbols for Tony’s own family and sense of homelife throughout. Moreover Tony’s admitted fixation on the toddler drowning story reinforces the vicarious insight Melfi was trying to get Tony to absorb two episodes earlier, that part of his unrelenting grudge against Livia owes to her failure to protect him from his father.
The whole theme is poignantly symbolized near the episode’s close as Tony watches the old 8mm film transfers of him and Janice, around ages 4-6, respectively. They were “two little ducks” playing with a hose on the sidewalk, an inflatable pool nearby. They are strikingly alone in the film. There is no sign of Livia, or any other adult in front of the camera, only the prominence of their father’s black, 1959 Cadillac, symbolically equivalent, as we know, to the gangster lifestyle of Johnny Soprano.
The upshot of these “Soprano home movies” is that the children were left prey to the dangers of a gangster father by a self-absorbed, unloving mother. Yet that’s a source of anger he can’t possibly confront and safely discharge because he still can’t confront the bigger truth that his father was the kind of man from whom he needed protection.
Soprano Home Movies
The first 5 episodes of season 6, part 2, establish a parabolic crescendo of subplots dealing with violent fathers and sons – real and surrogate -- and the repression of guilt, hatred, and rage between them. Soprano Home Movies starts things off when Tony asks Bobby if he ever “popped his cherry” (killed anyone). “Nah,” Bobby replies. This puzzles Tony since Bobby got made anyway and had a notorious mob hitman for a father. “I come close. I done other shyt, but no. . . . My pop never wanted it for me.” (emphasis added) Bobby goes on to observe that modern DNA and other evidence make legal complications for murder much more problematic than in years past.
Tony salutes him for having avoided the act. “It’s a big, fat pain in the balls.” His tone of voice and introspective expression betray that his statement has little to do with the legal complications of murder and everything to do with the psychological complications.
His choice of words also suggests an important association in Tony’s subconscious: murder is a pain literally in the source of his masculinity, a pain resulting from his effort to fulfill his father’s expectations and ideas of manhood. (If this association isn’t clear from Soprano Home Movies alone, it becomes abundantly clear in Remember When two episodes later.)
As is typical in the Sopranos, and in life, events rarely have one cause. The monopoly fight in this episode is a good example. Contributory causes included inebriation and a dispute over the free parking rule. But the biggest impetus came when Janice told the story of Johnny Boy shooting a hole through Livia’s hairdo, despite Tony’s vociferous objection. Tony’s vindictiveness immediately kicked in, and things went precipitously downhill afterward.
Similar to the finger chopping incident, the hair story was so shameful to Tony that he never even told Carmela, a fact that shocks her because of the ostensible hilarity of a bullet hole in the middle of a beehive bun. While everyone else laughs, he seems ashamed not only because the act is blatantly violent but because the victim was a spouse, not some loanshark debtor. He growls at Janice, “It makes us look like a fukkin’ dysfunctional family,” then warns Carmela, “Don’t you ever tell the kids that about their grandfather.” He still protects Johnny to the core because his maternal blame/paternal hero worship is his defense mechanism to personal responsibility and regret for his lifestyle.
However losing the fight to Bobby on the heels of the discussion about murder stirred a cauldron of unconscious hatred in Tony towards the father whose example and imparted value system factored indirectly into both the fight and Tony’s severe humiliation at defeat as well as into his envy for a peer whose father loved him enough to shield him from the ultimate crime. I could rarely ever predict what was about to happen on The Sopranos, but as soon as I saw Tony brooding with his black eye and swollen jaw by that lake, I felt he would be shortly ordering Bobby to perform his first hit. It was perfect, hideous retribution for someone who has often sought to sabotage another’s personal growth, stability, happiness, or moral superiority, especially when he’s feeling the narrow limits of his own.
When Bobby returns home to the strains of “This Magic Moment” after committing his first murder, the subtext is clear. He has lost forever what modicum of innocence he could claim as a made guy. He will never be the same again, his psyche irrevocably scarred in a way that Tony understands all too well since, as we soon learn, he committed his first murder at age 22 . . . on orders of his own father.
There are a few other notable scenes in Soprano Home Movies. The first occurs by the lake when Tony urges Carmela to share the story of the three year-old that was left with severe brain damage after nearly drowning in a swimming pool amid a party full of adults. Tony doesn’t know why but proclaims, “I can’t get that story out of my mind.”
In a scene after the fight, he hones in on the nanny singing the nursery song “Five Little Ducks” with toddler Domenica. The first stanza of that song goes:
The remaining stanzas build in a pattern on this one, each time with one fewer ducks going out and one fewer returning. The excerpt in the episode is edited so that it abruptly cuts off after the nanny and child sing “Mother duck”, leaving those words most prominent.
These two anecdotes speak in concert to the issue of parental (and especially maternal) neglect, of a mother not properly protecting or keeping account of her children in view of the risks around them. They are especially apposite as Sopranos subtext because Tony’s subconscious, and the show as a whole, have used ducks and pools as symbols for Tony’s own family and sense of homelife throughout. Moreover Tony’s admitted fixation on the toddler drowning story reinforces the vicarious insight Melfi was trying to get Tony to absorb two episodes earlier, that part of his unrelenting grudge against Livia owes to her failure to protect him from his father.
The whole theme is poignantly symbolized near the episode’s close as Tony watches the old 8mm film transfers of him and Janice, around ages 4-6, respectively. They were “two little ducks” playing with a hose on the sidewalk, an inflatable pool nearby. They are strikingly alone in the film. There is no sign of Livia, or any other adult in front of the camera, only the prominence of their father’s black, 1959 Cadillac, symbolically equivalent, as we know, to the gangster lifestyle of Johnny Soprano.
The upshot of these “Soprano home movies” is that the children were left prey to the dangers of a gangster father by a self-absorbed, unloving mother. Yet that’s a source of anger he can’t possibly confront and safely discharge because he still can’t confront the bigger truth that his father was the kind of man from whom he needed protection.
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Cleaver Forces Tony to Confront Christopher's “Paternal” Hatred
Chris' secret hatred towards Tony is expressed in his Cleaver horror movie via its parallel tale of a mid-40s mob boss named "Sally Boy" and his mob protégé, Michael. Like Tony, Sally Boy is ill-tempered, physically imposing, foul-mouthed, and wears a white robe while conducting important business in his basement. Like Chris, Michael is 30-something and described in the movie as being “like a son” to Sally Boy.
In the key plot points, Sally Boy incorrectly concludes Michael is a rat and whacks him. Later he seduces Michael's fiancé in clear reflection of Chris’ persistent belief – shared by many others – that Tony seduced and had sex with Adriana. Michael's dismembered body somehow reassembles, but with a cleaver in place of one of his missing hands. He exacts his murderous revenge on Sally Boy by repeatedly slamming the cleaver through Sally Boy's skull.
What remains undepicted in the movie, for obvious reasons, is the crucial element of the real story, that after learning of Adriana’s cooperation with the FBI, Chris came to Tony rather than flip and apparently maintained some very faint hope that his loyalty would spare her life. When that didn’t happen, his hatred towards Tony was surely cemented, even though it took the next 18 episodes for it to fully manifest.
During the movie’s premiere, Silvio, Ro, and Carmela, among others, all recognize that Sally Boy is based on Tony. Carmela even whispers to him in the theatre, “That’s you,” as Sally Boy, played by Daniel Baldwin, angrily smashes a jar in the basement clad in his boxers, wife beater T-shirt, and white robe. “No,” Tony smiles, oblivious at first to the obvious parallels. By the end, however, he sees the truth of it and is, incredibly, quite pleased.
Tony pours his coffee the next morning into a mug conspicuously shown in closeup emblazoned with the word “CLEAVER” and the movie’s logo: a meat cleaver dripping with blood. Carmela confronts him with her concerns about the depiction of Sally Boy. “Imitation’s a form of flattery,” he chirps. “You think that was flattering?” she asks incredulously. “It was okay,” he replies defensively. “He’s a tough prick, that Baldwin.”
When Carm mentions “the girlfriend” and “the cleaver guy’s entire motive for revenge,” Tony is genuinely ignorant. “I don’t know. You lost me Carm.” “Sally Boy, the boss, he fukked the guy’s fiancé,” she exclaims. Only then does the Ade parallel even occur to him. He reminds Carm that he never had sex with Ade. “Apparently your nephew feels otherwise,” she explains. “Ro pointed it out to me, but if she saw it, that means other people did.” “It’s a movie; it’s fictional,” he notes, dismissing the coincidence. Carmela has to spoon feed him the truth: “It’s a revenge fantasy, Tony, which ends with the boss’ head split open by a meat cleaver.”
Finally her words appear to make an impression. Silvio’s reaction to pointed questions by Tony a short time later, as well as JT Dolan’s transparently coerced effort to take credit for originating the movie’s plot, support her theory.
In therapy, Tony tearfully admits to Melfi the truth that the film reveals: Christopher hates him with a passion and would like to see him dead. He revisits with Melfi the origins of his paternal feelings towards Chris, holding him as an infant and riding him around in the basket of his bicycle a few years later. He painfully recounts that Christopher’s father had been for him what he hoped to be for Chris, not just a mentor but “a friend, a fukkin’ guy you could look up to” and that he hoped to “pass that shyt down, the respect and the love.”
Melfi asks Tony if it’s at all possible that he is reading too much into Chris’ feelings from the Cleaver story, prompting a reply that would be purely hilarious if Tony weren’t so sincere. “I’ve been coming here for years,” he replies. “I know too much about the subconscious now.”
That is a big, huge, wildly waving red flag to the audience, one of those moments where we are to appreciate that the real truth is the exact opposite of what we just heard. Tony’s entire reaction at the screening and in the kitchen with Carmela the next morning shows just how incredibly, unusually oblivious he is to the subconscious.
He is especially oblivious to his own. For that reason, Cleaver’s subtle symbols and parallels to Tony’s life, along with its story of a son’s hatred and revenge against his “father”, could heat Tony’s repressed paternal hatred to magma and still leave him completely unaware of the pre-volcanic processes inside him. And I believe that’s exactly what happened.
Chris' secret hatred towards Tony is expressed in his Cleaver horror movie via its parallel tale of a mid-40s mob boss named "Sally Boy" and his mob protégé, Michael. Like Tony, Sally Boy is ill-tempered, physically imposing, foul-mouthed, and wears a white robe while conducting important business in his basement. Like Chris, Michael is 30-something and described in the movie as being “like a son” to Sally Boy.
In the key plot points, Sally Boy incorrectly concludes Michael is a rat and whacks him. Later he seduces Michael's fiancé in clear reflection of Chris’ persistent belief – shared by many others – that Tony seduced and had sex with Adriana. Michael's dismembered body somehow reassembles, but with a cleaver in place of one of his missing hands. He exacts his murderous revenge on Sally Boy by repeatedly slamming the cleaver through Sally Boy's skull.
What remains undepicted in the movie, for obvious reasons, is the crucial element of the real story, that after learning of Adriana’s cooperation with the FBI, Chris came to Tony rather than flip and apparently maintained some very faint hope that his loyalty would spare her life. When that didn’t happen, his hatred towards Tony was surely cemented, even though it took the next 18 episodes for it to fully manifest.
During the movie’s premiere, Silvio, Ro, and Carmela, among others, all recognize that Sally Boy is based on Tony. Carmela even whispers to him in the theatre, “That’s you,” as Sally Boy, played by Daniel Baldwin, angrily smashes a jar in the basement clad in his boxers, wife beater T-shirt, and white robe. “No,” Tony smiles, oblivious at first to the obvious parallels. By the end, however, he sees the truth of it and is, incredibly, quite pleased.
Tony pours his coffee the next morning into a mug conspicuously shown in closeup emblazoned with the word “CLEAVER” and the movie’s logo: a meat cleaver dripping with blood. Carmela confronts him with her concerns about the depiction of Sally Boy. “Imitation’s a form of flattery,” he chirps. “You think that was flattering?” she asks incredulously. “It was okay,” he replies defensively. “He’s a tough prick, that Baldwin.”
When Carm mentions “the girlfriend” and “the cleaver guy’s entire motive for revenge,” Tony is genuinely ignorant. “I don’t know. You lost me Carm.” “Sally Boy, the boss, he fukked the guy’s fiancé,” she exclaims. Only then does the Ade parallel even occur to him. He reminds Carm that he never had sex with Ade. “Apparently your nephew feels otherwise,” she explains. “Ro pointed it out to me, but if she saw it, that means other people did.” “It’s a movie; it’s fictional,” he notes, dismissing the coincidence. Carmela has to spoon feed him the truth: “It’s a revenge fantasy, Tony, which ends with the boss’ head split open by a meat cleaver.”
Finally her words appear to make an impression. Silvio’s reaction to pointed questions by Tony a short time later, as well as JT Dolan’s transparently coerced effort to take credit for originating the movie’s plot, support her theory.
In therapy, Tony tearfully admits to Melfi the truth that the film reveals: Christopher hates him with a passion and would like to see him dead. He revisits with Melfi the origins of his paternal feelings towards Chris, holding him as an infant and riding him around in the basket of his bicycle a few years later. He painfully recounts that Christopher’s father had been for him what he hoped to be for Chris, not just a mentor but “a friend, a fukkin’ guy you could look up to” and that he hoped to “pass that shyt down, the respect and the love.”
Melfi asks Tony if it’s at all possible that he is reading too much into Chris’ feelings from the Cleaver story, prompting a reply that would be purely hilarious if Tony weren’t so sincere. “I’ve been coming here for years,” he replies. “I know too much about the subconscious now.”
That is a big, huge, wildly waving red flag to the audience, one of those moments where we are to appreciate that the real truth is the exact opposite of what we just heard. Tony’s entire reaction at the screening and in the kitchen with Carmela the next morning shows just how incredibly, unusually oblivious he is to the subconscious.
He is especially oblivious to his own. For that reason, Cleaver’s subtle symbols and parallels to Tony’s life, along with its story of a son’s hatred and revenge against his “father”, could heat Tony’s repressed paternal hatred to magma and still leave him completely unaware of the pre-volcanic processes inside him. And I believe that’s exactly what happened.
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The Importance of the Cleaver Symbolism
The first and most important of the Cleaver symbols is the cleaver itself. As previously noted, a bloody meat cleaver is the emblem for Tony’s lost childhood innocence, a symbol of the epoch most influential in shaping him into the kind of man his father wanted and expected him to be. Accordingly, it carries tremendous psychological weight with Tony, even if that weight is deeply submerged in his consciousness.
In contrast, a cleaver has no particular significance for Christopher, a point subtly made in a scene with his AA sponsor when he reports that the “inspiration” for the cleaver idea came when he was watching Edward Scissorhands and suddenly imagined his screen alter ego wielding a cleaverhand in place of the scissorhand. He then immediately corrects himself, saying he first imagined a ball peen hammer but then decided a cleaver was better. Scissors, a hammer, a cleaver, it’s six of one, half a dozen of the other to Chris. None of them means anything in particular to him, but the cleaver means everything in particular to Tony.
Another important parallel is the name of the Tony character in the movie. Yes, he dresses like, talks like, and acts like Tony, but his name bears a striking resemblance to the name “Johnny Boy”. Obviously that gives Cleaver the potential to subtextually evoke Johnny Boy as the object of a son’s murderous rage and to stir latent feelings of paternal hatred in Tony’s subconscious. In effect the movie serves as a transgenerational mirror for paternal hatred, from Tony towards Johnny reflected in Christopher’s hatred towards Tony.
The first and most important of the Cleaver symbols is the cleaver itself. As previously noted, a bloody meat cleaver is the emblem for Tony’s lost childhood innocence, a symbol of the epoch most influential in shaping him into the kind of man his father wanted and expected him to be. Accordingly, it carries tremendous psychological weight with Tony, even if that weight is deeply submerged in his consciousness.
In contrast, a cleaver has no particular significance for Christopher, a point subtly made in a scene with his AA sponsor when he reports that the “inspiration” for the cleaver idea came when he was watching Edward Scissorhands and suddenly imagined his screen alter ego wielding a cleaverhand in place of the scissorhand. He then immediately corrects himself, saying he first imagined a ball peen hammer but then decided a cleaver was better. Scissors, a hammer, a cleaver, it’s six of one, half a dozen of the other to Chris. None of them means anything in particular to him, but the cleaver means everything in particular to Tony.
Another important parallel is the name of the Tony character in the movie. Yes, he dresses like, talks like, and acts like Tony, but his name bears a striking resemblance to the name “Johnny Boy”. Obviously that gives Cleaver the potential to subtextually evoke Johnny Boy as the object of a son’s murderous rage and to stir latent feelings of paternal hatred in Tony’s subconscious. In effect the movie serves as a transgenerational mirror for paternal hatred, from Tony towards Johnny reflected in Christopher’s hatred towards Tony.
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