THE SOPRANOS
Godfather (DSM) IV
It's Friday afternoon, and my patient Mickey tells me that over the weekend he must somehow must cobble together $50,000 to cover his Superbowl losses. If he can't pay up, his shylock's goons will come to his store on Monday and play castanets on his kneecaps with hammers. Pressed to explain how he feels about this reasonably unpleasant prospect, Mickey struggles to acknowledge, let alone identify, his feelings on this, or indeed any other subject: "Well, Doc...it's, uh, geez, uh -- ya know, well -- it's sort of -- not too...good."
Several decades ago I observed that compulsive gamblers like Mickey often display that peculiar brand of emotional aphasia known as alixithymia. Past history reveals that delving into feelings or motivation wasn't a big item in the family agenda. Their alixythymia is often associated with chronically unstable affect; a taint of ADD can be thrown in for good measure. Diagnostically, these gents fall in the crack between cyclothymia and frank bipolarity: the form fruste manic personality described by Dr. Michael Stone seems about right.
Ample anecdotes of my compulsive gamblers, as well as my exposure as a player to considerable public and private poker game reportage, eventually lead me to suspect that the low level wiseguys who persecute plungers like Mickey might themselves suffer from that same curious inability to acknowledge an inner world, as well as its associated features. Well-researched Mafia histories and biographies further suggest that alixithmia may pervade mob culture entire, afflicting minor button men as well as major capos who, like Shakespeare's King Lear, have ever but slimly known themselves.
Stir the inarticulate unknowingness of these yobbos into a witches' brew of overweaning greed; defective impulse control; the glaring superego defects sanctioned by a deviant antisocial subsculture, and the results are predictably lethal, off- and onscreen. Exemplary reel life depictions of low-life alixithymia are to be found in Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather series (l972, l974, l990) and -- most notably -- throughout Martin Scorsese's Mafia oeuvre (Mean Streets [l973], Goodfellas [l990], Casino [l997]).
In Scorsese's typical absurdist
gangland scenario, a wiseguy perpetrates some vile piece of aggressive
or sexual business, which gets him into big trouble with a shark higher
on the food chain. The wrongdoer is visited by an intermediary, who tells
him to go to the shark and -- "work things out". Now how is this supposed
to be accomplished when the miscreant, the peacemaker, and the offended
capo each own the insight of a flea, wedded to a hair
trigger temper and an exquisite
willingness to take offense? Inevitably, blood must be their argument.
The typical badfella's conflation of alixithymia, macho-creep defensiveness, and exuberant paranoia would seem to make it as likely for a wiseguy to undertake therapy as for an HMO to fund Freudian analysis. But enter one does with a bidda-bang in The Sopranos, the engrossing darkest-of-comedy series created by David Chase for the HBO Cable Network. Our mobbed-up neurotic is Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini), a "waste management consultant" living in suburban affluence; actually a key player in a once powerful New Jersey crime family fallen upon hard times.
Rival ethnic gangs are springing up like weeds in the wake of relentless RICO prosecutions which have dispatched Tony's Don and his ilk to Federal slammers for the duration. Across the nation, wiseguys are rushing to rat each other out amidst writing their memoirs. In Chase's mordant vision, these ultimate smash-and-grab egomaniacs perceive themselves as hapless victims of the American dream's decline in the narcissistic Nineties ("Whatever happened to trust?...Who ever thought we were recession proof?...").
Tony's best friend, Jacky (Michael Rispoli) is acting as surrogate for the incarcerated Don. As The Sopranos opens, he's discovered to be cancer-ridden. Tony believes the illness has been brought on by stresses of a job he now stands to inherit, but which nobody -- Tony included -- really wants, since no one gets off much anymore on outmaneuvering the Feds or going to the mattresses. No one, that is, except Tony's insanely ambitious paternal uncle, the eponymous "Uncle Junior" Corrado (Dominic Chianese).
Tony shrewdly deems Uncle Junior
too old-fashioned and narrow-minded for thr top spot, but remains devoted
to the man who took second place in his childhood admiration only to his
capo dad.
The most prudent course is
to elect Uncle Junior boss. Letting him think he's in charge will satisfy
his vanity, while he draws the Federal heat. Meanwhile, Tony actually runs
the family from the shadows.
Tony's mother, Livia (Nancy Marchand, splendidly cast against upper class type), is far more cunning, intelligent, and if possible more mean-spirited than her brother-in-law. It's probably no coincidence she bears the name of Caesar Augustus' spouse, one of history's most enthusiastic conspirator/poisoners. Swamped in paralytic depression over the death of her "sainted" husband -- in life, she ruled him with an iron hand sans velvet glove -- Livia lives alone, perversely refusing to join a retirement community. Queen of the double bind, she prefers to twist a knife in Tony's guilty heart. Although he goes through the motions of offering Livia his home, he knows that her presence under his roof would wreak havoc upon his turbulent family.
Tony cherishes his feisty wife, Carmela (Edie Falco), but in classic alixithymic fashion can't marshall the emotive wherewithal to convey his tenderness. For her part, Carmela has lately begun to fear for her immortal soul because of Tony's "waste management". She's also thoroughly worn out of patience by the non-spiritual disadvantages of his racketeering -- the erratic hours he spends at his headquarters, the "Bada Bing!" topless Club; his inveterate womanizing, uneasily enjoyed as a standard wiseguy perk; and her fear his rub-out will leave her utterly unprotected.
The Sopranos are coping with the rollercoaster vicissitudes of raising two very different adolescent children: Meadow (Jamie Lynn Sigler), their brilliant college-bound daughter is wising up to -- and none too thrilled by -- the tainted wellsprings of the Soprano lifestyle. Pre-pubertal Anthony, Jr. (Robert Iler), is consciously unaware of his beloved dad's true profession, but already may be showing early warning signs of Tony's delinquent proclivities (superego lacunae, anyone?).
Tony's precarious emotional equilibrium collapses when the brood of ducks camped out in his swimming pool suddenly takes flight one bright afternoon. Their departure precipitates a series of horrific panic attacks. After the standard unreassuring negative workup, he's given referrals to three psychiatrists -- two Jews; one Italian, but female. He choses the latter, forgiving her gender because she's a paisan. He arrives at the office of Dr. Jennifer Melfi (Lorraine Bracco) in a state of monumental resistance, his truculence exceeded only by his shame.
During their first consultation the doctor is all business -- but gently so. In Ms. Bracco's nuanced performance, Melfi isn't a total naif about this obviously tough customer, despite a bespectacled, prim appearance. She reads Tony his Freudian rights, carefully tempering her guarantee of confidentiality with a warning that any current major wiseguy activity revealed in therapy must be reported to the authorities. Then she offers him hope, prozac, and the chance to plumb the hidden language of his distress.
Any prospect of self-disclosure is utterly alien, and not a little frightening to a man who prides himself on his macho immunity to fear. But minimal catharsis in the setting of Melfi's no-nonsense kindness hooks him on the spot, and he grudgingly agrees to return. Subsequent Soprano episodes devolve around the impact of treatment upon Tony's wiseguy and domestic orbits, as he wrestles inter alia with his fears of losing both his families (the ducks' desertion symbolic of his angst); his mother's extravagant insensitivity (Livia is probably a closet alixithymic herself; she certainly ); and his own generic ignorance of the heart.
Dr. Irv Schneider's elegant survey of movie therapists anatomizes three major stereotypes that have perennially resurfaced since the silent era: Dr. Evil (shrink as mad scientist), Dr. Dippy (shrink crazier than patients), and Dr. Wonderful (shrink as cornucopia of unfailing nurturing, always available, the film's hero the only patient, fee rarely mentioned). The Sopranos is blessedly free of Dr. Wonderful cliches.
For once, the quotidian work of treatment is shown, conducted by a reasonably competent caring therapist who doesnt' have to bed her client to heal his psychic wounds, or her own undramatic problems. Dr. Melfi is a divorced workaholic, with one child, and an unsatisfying social life. Her ex -- another therapist, and a strident Italian-American activist -- tries unsuccessfully to get her off the case, pompously protesting that Tony is a sociopathic animal who has sullied his heritage and doesnt deserve her attention.
At first Melfi's rather starchy professionalism seems offputting -- her objections to Tony bringing her coffee, her terse reminder that he must pay for a missed session (provoking an incongruous explosion of wrath in this arch extortionist, under his projected assumption that Melfi, like himself, is a bottom-line goniff). Since Tony resembles so many tongued-tied teenage lugs I've treated, I initially wondered if a more informal approach might overcome his vulnerable oppositionalism.
But since chronic prevarication and boundary violation is the Soprano style, I've come to see that it's better for Melfi to err on the side of starchiness. For if Tony can realize that the doctor is absolutely unexploitable, incorruptible in the smallest matters, he can grant her the necessary clout to facilitate working through larger issues: centrally, the impossible split between his unfeigned desire to be a decent husband and father, and his need to prevail in his sleazy, violent, yet still highly gratifying line of work. As Ms. Bracco told me, her identification with Dr. Melfi touchingly evident, "It's like treating Mussolini -- I can't let a guy like this roll over me, or I'm not going to stand a chance of helping him!."
Melfi's constraints against acting in escalate her client's native acting out. Incursions into the therapist's life merely fantasized by most patients are hilariously or scarily actualized by a clueless Tony. When he overhears that Melfi's car needs expensive repairs, he has it fixed overnight in a cronies' chopshop. His positive transference whipped to a lather, he attempts to persuade Carmela to dress in Melfi's staid outfits. The rogue cop he hires to gather the scoop about Melfi beats one of her few promising beaus into a post-traumatic wreck.
James Gandolfini, who has unobtrusively graced a number of films in minor tough-guy parts, achieves a well-deserved major breakout in The Sopranos. Gandolfini's invocation of Tony's inherent sweetness is exquisite, rendering Tony's baldface lies and his explosions into mayhem all the more disconcerting (e.g., the garroting of a witness-protected informer he stumbles upon while sheparding Meadow across New England to her college interviews).
Many of the actors portraying Tony's cadre, Uncle Junior, and his henchmen are familar from previous mob movies, lending added piquancy to their Soprano characters. Without diminishing the casual viciousness of these sleazy malefactors, the series wittily depicts them as cockeyed casualties of postmodernity who moan about their identity crises even as they ape Al Pacino. (Tony's nephew Chris (Michael Imperioli), incredibly dumb fledgling mobster and wannabe screenwriter, bitterly complains: ""Every character in a script has an arc. Where's my arc???") Tony's youngsters and other citizens of the legit world are as pithily observed and aptly played.
Tony's cure has recently become worse than his disease. Therapy has rendered him a gentler, kinder racketeer. He's closer to Carmela and the kids. He's acquired the grit to stand up to Livia and insist that his mother enter assisted living (he then proceeds to use her new home as a warehouse for his arsenal, as well as an Appalachia for his buddies -- who've installed their aging relatives in the residence).
Livia's depression has lifted, liberating even greater reserves of bilious energy for her byzantine conniving. She's winkled out Tony's treatment from his son and blabbed it to her confidant, Uncle Junior, wrathfully presuming that Dr. Melfi's interventions have been chiefly aimed at trashing her. (It's deliciously intimated that Livia and Uncle Junior might harbor an unconscious Gertrude/ Claudius-like yen for each other, making Tony a goodfella Hamlet).
Already suspicious that Tony covets his turf, Uncle Junior now fears his nephew has gone nuts or soft, and may be spilling family secrets, too. Whacking the doctor and Tony in the bargain becomes a viable solution, with both hilarious and horrendous results. Amongst the casualties is Dr. Melfi's carefully constructed therapeutic boundary, due to her fear for her own and her patient's life.
Will the healing continue? It appears so: Tony and Dr. Melfi have eluded Uncle Junior's vendetta, and The Sopranos has definitively taken off. HBO promises at least one more set of new episodes, a rerun of the original shows commenced in June, and there's a strong possibility of home video release.
At this writing, mobster psychoanalysis and its discontents is Hollywood's flavor of the month. The most profitable sendup of Cosa Nostra couchtime to date has been Analyse This (l999), in which a fitfully funny Billy Crystal is muscled into dropping his practise and impending marriage to become Godfather Robert DiNiro's fulltime shrink/quondam buddy. With its rote plot, cardboard characterizations, and DiNiro's repellant mugging, this crude satire is one offer I definitely could refuse.
So I plan to keep buying my
beer from The Sopranos. As for the competition -- fuhgeddaboudit.