It’s been a while since I’ve watched this hour, and I was very much looking forward to revisiting it. What excited me the most was the thought that maybe I would be able to see AJ more sympathetically now. During previous re-watches, this episode always put me in a predicament: I wanted to feel a greater sympathy for AJ, but the scenes that led up to his suicide attempt as well as the scenes that followed it only served to remind me what a little shyt he can be. I thought this time it would be different. I’m older now, more understanding, less prone to be judgmental of others. But when I re-watched the episode prior to starting this write-up, I realized the truth once again: AJ can be a pretty crappy person.
David Chase is much more sympathetic toward AJ. In an interview with Alan Sepinwall and Matt Zoller Seitz, Chase wondered why so many viewers disliked AJ. He felt that he himself can personally relate to the young man: “…in the case of AJ, I think I see myself as a teenager, as kind of a bumbling person. The king of most literary teenagers is Holden Caulfield, and I see a little of him in AJ.”
I think I could have been more sympathetic to AJ if he was simply going into a tailspin after losing his first love. Many of us would be able to relate, we’ve suffered that particular crisis. But that doesn’t seem to be what’s going on with him. Sure, his depression and frustration may be rooted in his romantic disappointment with Blanca, but he seems to be using that disappointment now to justify being entitled and belligerent and emotionally indulgent (even more than he usually is). Meadow tries to engage him here like a good big-sister should. She enters his bedroom and goes to turn down the music so they can have a thoughtful discussion. But he snaps at her not to touch the sound system. (The song that’s playing is “Into the Ocean” by Blue October, a track about a depressed guy who wants to drown himself.) When Meadow asks if his behavior and depression are because of Blanca, AJ can only reply, “I don’t know anymore.” He is not able to clarify the problem, even in his own mind.
As I re-watched this episode, I found myself thinking about the 3 films that James Dean made during his short life. In each of these three films, the character that Dean plays has thoughts and feelings that are hidden or that get stifled inside of him for one reason or another. But in the third act of each film, the character’s passion and insight spills out in a compelling, poetic overflow. James Dean knew how to modulate his characters’ emotions over the course of a film, reining them in or letting them loose as the script required, and the viewer could share in the emotional journey. Dean worked hard to learn how to tap into his emotions and be more expressive: he studied the Method, took voice lessons, dance lessons…
Robert Iler is a different type of actor. He doesn’t seem to have Dean’s expressive or technical abilities. But this, if anything, makes Iler even more suited to play the thankless role of “AJ Soprano.” It seems to me that David Chase shaped the role—and guided the actor—in a particular way in order to study a specific type of character: The Passive Nihilist.
I know that I’ve touched upon Kevin Stoehr’s theory of the Passive and Active Nihilist multiple times already, but I think Stoehr’s theory is particularly illuminating for this episode. Stoehr gives the following description of the paired opposites:
the Passive nihilist “flounders in his moral ambiguities and eventually refuses to rise above the negativity in his own life”
- the Active nihilist “gains clarity of purpose as he comes to view the presence of ambiguity or negativity as a creative challenge that may result in acts of self-overcoming”
Although AJ clearly fits the former description, he is trying now to fit into the latter; he tries to be more informed about global issues, be more conscious of the many injustices in the world, as his sister is. But he is unpracticed at this role, and his complaints about the state of the world end up sounding feeble and whiny. AJ doesn’t have the “clarity of purpose” that Stoehr requires the active nihilist to have. In fact, AJ doesn’t have very much clarity about
anything. AJ’s psychiatrist suggests that he write down his thoughts because “it might help clarify your feelings.” Of course, we know that AJ is not going to make the effort to do so (just like his father never made the effort to keep a log of
his thoughts and feelings as Melfi had asked him to do in Season 3). I think the reason AJ turns to W.B. Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming” with such keen interest now is because it seems to articulate ideas that he can’t express or clarify himself.
THE SECOND COMING
William Butler Yeats published “The Second Coming” in 1919, during the worst pandemic of the 20th century and not long after the end of World War I. The brutal war brought devastation to the globe on a scale that was previously unimaginable, and the ensuing years were a time of pessimism and suspicion. Even after the fighting had ended, the world remained fractured along ideological and factional lines. This dark postwar temper contributed to the apocalyptic tone of Yeats’ poem. There was a sense that the chaos and destruction that was unleashed upon the world by both the virus and the World War was still lurking around some near corner. Havoc could soon have its way again.
Perhaps we can still relate in contemporary times to that feeling. An August 2016
Wall Street Journal article, “Terror, Brexit and U.S. Election Have Made 2016 the Year of Yeats,” noted that lines and phrases from “The Second Coming” had been quoted, mentioned and referenced more times in the first seven months of 2016 than during any period in the last 30 years (according to the research tool ‘Factiva’). The
WSJ article hypothesized that the nomination of Donald Trump as the Republican candidate as well as the United Kingdom’s move toward leaving the E.U. (and, of course, the factors that led to these two events) reflected a worldwide pessimism. The world is still split along factional and ideological lines, and fear and xenophobia have gripped many societies around the planet. A month before writing this paragraph, I read that the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (BAS) recently moved the hands of the so-called “Doomsday Clock” 20 seconds closer to midnight. Standing merely 100 seconds from metaphorical midnight, the clock now stands closer to Armageddon than it ever has in its 73-year history. As for the reasons behind their grim decision, BAS cites the unchecked Iranian and North Korean weapons programs, the undermining of democracy around the world, tensions between global superpowers, the rise of disruptive technologies, deteriorating environmental conditions and climate change. On top of that, we are right now contending with the deadly COVID-19 coronavirus disease along with the chaotic social and economic disruptions the pandemic is bringing. Yeats’ poem, published almost exactly 100 years ago, was filled with ominous imagery that reflected the global mood of the time. Yeats could not have guessed that his poem might be even more representative of the international mood today:
The Second Coming
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Chase gets a lot of mileage out of Yeats’ poem, he uses it to accomplish several different things here in this second part of Season 6:
- It gives form to AJ’s shapeless thoughts
- It posits AJ as a sort of “second coming” of Tony Soprano
- It gives voice to an idea that has been implicit throughout the series, the idea that Tony is a kind of unholy “rough beast”
- Its doomsday imagery intensifies the sense of impending apocalypse that colors the endgame of The Sopranos
When we heard Nick Lowe’s “The Beast in Me” close out the Pilot, 83 episodes ago, we understood that the protagonist of this TV series was going to be a more beastly character than probably any central character we’ve ever encountered on American television. I believe that David Chase has always postulated Tony Soprano to be a uniquely American beast, a creature formed of our consumeristic excess coupled with our ruthlessly capitalist values. These troubling aspects of our culture are alluded to with the opening shot of the episode....
AJ’s very name signifies that he is the ‘junior’ version of his dad. (“Meadow,” on the other hand, invokes the regenerative, healing balm of nature.) Anthony Junior is the product and purveyor of a culture of degradation and callousness that his father is very guilty of producing and purveying.
@ the form on Tony's cannonball as he jumped into the pool
That scene always makes me laugh.
