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EDITOR’S WARNING: Spoiler alert. If you have not seen the last episode of the season of The Sopranos, but plan to, do not read this until you have.
The primary moral conflict in the show, it turns out, is between Tony and his conscience. It was easy to miss this early on for a couple of reasons. First, his dalliance with psychoanalysis, and Dr. Melfi's apparently relativist forbearance of pretty much everything short of murder (and her tolerance of even that, implicit in her treating Tony at all), seemed mainly designed to help him function, free from his "spells," on an everyday basis. In practice, this meant such things as using Dr. Melfi's advice about "elder loved ones" as tactical assistance in stripping Uncle Junior's power. Second, Tony seemed ferociously adept at suppressing moral doubts. His conscience never gained a foothold, and, when challenged about his actions, by his wife or his daughter (or, sometimes, his therapist), he was always ready with facile, but apparently adequate, rationalizations and evasions. But something changed this season, or, more accurately, the deeper meaning of Tony's quirks became much clearer in a way that changed our understanding of the show. From the beginning, critics have referred to Tony as a sociopath, suggesting that he simply lacks the psychological armature to be a moral person — that he lacks human sympathy, is numb to conscience. But this diagnosis seems false for several reasons. First, his rationalizations are consistently vigorous and outraged, and for that reason seem aimed as much at himself as at others. Real sociopaths don't have to try that hard. Second, Tony is capable of sympathy — for his children, his wife, his therapist, various people who are already dead, and, revealingly, animals. When, in the show's very first episode, Tony got all misty about a family of ducks in his pool, and then dreamed that they flew off with his penis, it was easy to interpret this as some cheeky-ironic middle-aged castration drama. But now, after Season Four, a simpler interpretation appears more profound. Tony is capable of moral feelings, but, because of the choices he has made, he is forced to displace those feelings onto objects that are not implicated in the world he has made for himself, symbols of innocence, like children and animals. He grew so fond of a horse that he avenged its death with the human blood of his best captain. And, hilariously, he lapsed into girlish indignation when he found out that drugged-out Christopher had accidentally killed Adriana's little dog by sitting on it: "You killed little Cosette?!" Tony, in other words, is not a sociopath. He is a bad person. He recognizes at several levels the claims that morality makes on him. He has simply bought into a way of life that forces him to reject those claims — although this rejection takes a great deal of work, and it requires certain weird compensations, such as his thing for animals. The shrinks on Slate's increasingly uninteresting Sopranos dialogue make much of Tony's narcissism, and generally treat it as a cause of his misbehavior. But Tony's narcissism is not a cause of his badness. It is an effect. He has enclosed himself in an elaborate edifice of self-justification precisely because he recognizes, at some not-so-deep level, how wrong he is. This appears as sociopathic, but mainly because — though it is necessary for his livelihood — he just looks fatuous and unconvincing when he indulges in it. But just because Tony has turned his back on morality, that doesn't mean that morality is finished with Tony. A surprising feature in the moral landscape of this season's Sopranos is the stubborn persistence of the Good: Tony's rationalizations do not suffice after all, at least not fully. By the end of Season Four, he is beginning to be truly haunted by his sins, and he is finally paying for them directly. The genius of the writers' treatment of Tony's moral struggle consists in three things. First, they recognized that, as a matter of narrative logic, it was necessary in the first place. They created Tony as a robustly sympathetic bad guy. It would have been a copout to resolve his conflicts in nihilist anti-heroics. Second, they recognized that Tony was in way too deep for this to happen quickly, and they had the patience (and the luxury) to take four HBO seasons to let his struggle come to a head. Third, they realized that this could not happen without some catalyst. And this is where the other surprising feature of the Sopranos's moral landscape comes into view. While commentators on mob films often smugly compare organized crime with the hypocritical legalities of bourgeois life, the Sopranos has a profoundly different take on this relationship. Dr. Melfi may deserve some credit for nudging Tony toward his reckoning, but the real catalyst is his wife, Carmella. And this is not simply because Carmella has a more-active conscience than Tony. (Father Phil's implorings created genuine anguish for her but inspired no meaningful changes.) It is because Carmella's desire for bourgeois respectability, and that degree of autonomy and self-respect that bourgeois women expect in contemporary America, were incompatible with marriage to Tony Soprano. While Tony was scamming HUD, Carmella was getting her real-estate license. While Tony was stashing cash in bags of bird feed, Carmella was researching secure long-term investments. Writers who equate capitalism with the Mob would have overplayed these ironies, maybe turning Carmella into Tony's partner, but these parallel developments evolved into insoluble conflicts instead. The connection between Tony's festering bad conscience and Carmella's single-minded quest for bourgeois respectability appears indelibly, in the wonderful dream scene from the third-to-last episode. Tony sits in the backseat of a car alongside his dead mistress Gloria, whose suicide he blames himself for. Ralphie, whom Tony has recently murdered, sits in the front seat. A caterpillar crawling on Ralph's baldhead turns instantly into a butterfly, symbolizing (as Dr. Melfi unwittingly tells Tony in therapy) Ralphie's recent "change" into being dead. Having emblems of his guilt in front of and beside him wouldn't be so bad, except his wife, Carmella is at the wheel. As a practical matter, hiding your misdeeds, from yourself and from others, becomes a lot harder when your wife is taking you and your children headlong into middle-class life, with all its troublesome expectations of accountability, reciprocity, and honesty. And even if he hasn't absorbed these values, she has…and she's driving. Still, Tony's reckoning doesn't happen directly. For the first time in four seasons, he takes a long, hard look at himself, and becomes visibly despondent at what he sees, only when his wife kicks him out. Carmella's desire to be a respectable suburban housewife, and to have an admirable suburban family, required something else: that she have a husband who loves her and honors her in that prosaic bourgeois way, that is, by not insulting her with shameless infidelity. "Bourgeois morality," much derided in our smarter circles, insists upon such unglamorous decencies, even if, sometimes, it has to bust a few heads in order to get them. — Matt Feeney is a freelance writer in Washington, D.C. |
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