Tony Soprano’s America: Gangsters, Guns, and Money

285 Pages·2017·2.1 MB·English

by  M Keith Booker

Tony Soprano’s America
Tony Soprano’s America
Gangsters, Guns, and Money
M. Keith Booker
Isra Daraiseh
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Booker, M. Keith author. | Daraiseh, Isra, 1988– author.
Title: Tony Soprano’s America : gangsters, guns, and money / M. Keith Booker and
Isra Daraiseh.
Description: Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield, 2017. | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016039443 (print) | LCCN 2016051719 (ebook) | ISBN
9781442273221 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781442273238 (electronic)
Subjects: LCSH: Sopranos (Television program) Classification: LCC PN1992.77.S66
B66 2017 (print) | LCC PN1992.77.S66 (ebook) | DDC 791.45/72—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016039443
TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for
Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
For Isra Daraiseh, my partner in crime —M. Keith Booker
For Keith Booker, ﻢﻠﻌﺘﻧ ﻚﻨﻣ ﺎﻨﺣاو …ﻢﻠﻌﻣ ﺖﻧا
—Isra Daraiseh
Introduction
After a bean-ball incident against the St. Louis Cardinals on
September 18, 2015, Chicago Cubs manager Joe Maddon
compared the Cardinals (longtime hated rivals of the Cubs) to
gangsters: “I don’t know who put out the hit. I don’t know if
Tony Soprano was in the dugout, but I didn’t see him in there.
But we’re not going to put up with that.” References to the
gangsters of the HBO series The Sopranos do in fact abound in
contemporary American culture, making clear that, by the time
the series ended its run in 2007, it had supplanted the
Godfather saga as the best-known gangster narrative in
American popular culture. This prominence of course is not
surprising, given the almost universal critical acclaim received
by the series, including the declaration by Stephen Holden in
the New York Times (after only the first season of the series)
that the show might just be “the greatest work of American
popular culture of the last quarter century.”
The debut of The Sopranos in January 1999 helped to usher
in one of the most interesting years in American cultural history.
Much of the year, of course, was dominated by anticipation of
the coming end of the millennium—even if, strictly speaking,
the twentieth century and the millennium in which it was
situated did not technically end until the end of 2000. This
anticipation, meanwhile, included both the obligatory revving up
for the Apocalypse among certain religious sects, though in this
case the new age of computers introduced a novel element to
apocalyptic anxiety with the so-called Y2K scare.
The much-anticipated Star Wars: Episode I—The Phantom
Menace was the top film at the box office in 1999. The
undistinguished American Beauty would win the Oscar for Best
Picture of the year, though a number of more interesting films
were released during 1999, including Fight Club, Being John
Malkovich, Magnolia, and Three Kings, not to mention game-
changing genre films such as The Matrix and The Blair Witch
Project. In television, the game-show spectacle Who Wants to
Be a Millionaire? premiered in August 1999 and became the
sensation of the coming television season. For many, however,
the X-Files episode “Millennium,” broadcast on November 28
but set at the coming of the new year, was the highlight of the
season, punctuated by a first kiss between Mulder and Scully at
the stroke of midnight on December 31, 1999. Afterward,
Mulder looks around and notes that “the world didn’t end,”
referring both to the coming of the new millennium and to the
long-anticipated kiss.
That kiss might have changed The X-Files forever, but
numerous commentators have suggested that The Sopranos
changed television forever, bringing new standards of quality
and sophistication to a medium that, in the view of many, was
sorely lacking in such standards. Indeed, The Sopranos was
almost certainly the single most important series in the rise of
what came to be known as “quality TV,” part of a wave of
programs from HBO that led Robert J. Thompson to argue that
the term “HBO-style series” had, by 2007, “trumped” the term
“quality TV” as a descriptor for “high artistic achievement in the
medium” (xviii).
This volume seeks to delineate some of the key reasons
why The Sopranos is so important in television history, while
also exploring some of the most important ways in which The
Sopranos resonates with American cultural history as a whole.
Running from 1999 to 2007, The Sopranos is set in the world of
that period and engages with a number of contemporary
events, ranging from the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky scandal,
to the 9/11 bombings and subsequent war on terror, to Native
American protests over the celebration of Columbus Day. But
this involvement with specific current events is relatively
superficial and incidental. The Sopranos is less interested in a
vivid depiction of the way specific events in the larger world
affect the day-to-day lives of its characters than it is in placing
these lives within a much bigger historical narrative, and within
the context of much bigger and more fundamental issues.
The Sopranos deals in a realistic way with a number of
serious, life-or-death issues within the experiences of its
characters, but perhaps the central reason that the series has
such a sense of gravity and importance is that it addresses so
many issues that have been fundamental to the march of
modern history—and on a number of different levels. The series,
for example, is crucially informed by the struggle between
tradition and modernity that has perhaps been the central
struggle of the entire modern era of history. On a more local
scale, it engages in dialogues with the entire history of
gangsterism in America, as well as with the entire history of the
representation of gangsterism in American popular culture.
Meanwhile, the business of organized crime is set in dialogue
with American business as a whole, providing one of popular
culture’s most trenchant and detailed interrogations of the role
of capitalism in American history, even if it provides no answers
to the questions it poses and suggests no real alternatives to
the capitalist system that it questions. The series is also highly
conscious of the fraught history of race relations in the United
States, focusing on the Italian American immigrant experience
as a component of America’s multiracial and multicultural
society.
It is, of course, not surprising that a work of popular culture
such as The Sopranos should deal with such important and
fundamental issues. After all, as Richard Slotkin has noted, film
narratives describing the immigrant experience in America,
while becoming more and more prominent since the 1970s,
have been dominated by the gangster genre, which has
initiated a “cult of the Mafia” in which organized crime becomes
a locus for the attempted preservation of Old World values
presumably lost in the transition to America:
These films invest the gangster heritage of Italian, Jewish,
and Irish immigrants with nostalgia for a lost world of close
and extended family ties and with immigrant-group
solidarity in the face of poverty, displacement, and
discrimination. (634)
Further, Slotkin notes that “the lament for the loss or
Further, Slotkin notes that “the lament for the loss or
corruption of the immigrant patriarchy in these films parallels, in
both mood and ideological function,” a similar lament that can
be found in certain Westerns (639).
Slotkin here is thinking especially of the Godfather films,
though his description of the central role played by nostalgia
might apply equally well to The Sopranos—except for the fact
that everything in the latter is given an extra hyper-ironic twist
by the fundamentally postmodern nature of the series, which
tends to undermine its own nostalgia. It is certainly the case
that The Sopranos places all of the themes and issues with
which it deals within the context of a specific nostalgic narrative
of recent American history, but in this case a nostalgia for the
Old World of Italy is doubled with a nostalgia for bygone days in
America itself. In this narrative, Italy certainly functions as a
bastion of traditional values and virtues that have now been
lost. However (as is often the case in the American popular
mind as a whole), the 1950s are seen as a sort of past Golden
Age in which all aspects of life (including organized crime) were
simpler and better. The subsequent half-century is then seen as
a period of unmitigated decline, in which every aspect of life
became more complicated and less functional, and things
generally fell apart. To this extent, The Sopranos is a rather
cynical account of the failure of the American dream—and even
of the longer-term failure of the Enlightenment ideal of
continual progress toward a better (and eventually ideal) human
society. At the same time, the series posits very little in the way
of a genuine historical narrative prior to the 1950s, noting
specific events (such as the large-scale arrival of Italian
immigrants in the United States in the early years of the
twentieth century) without placing them within any coherent
model of historical change, other than to gesture repeatedly
toward an absolutely anterior past when the traditional
patriarchal structure of an essentially feudal Italy was still in
place.
To complicate matters still further, the series shows
considerable skepticism toward both of its nostalgic models of
historical decline. This undermining of its fundamental historical
narrative is part of a general resistance to final interpretation
that is a key to the vaunted complexity of The Sopranos, a
complexity that is itself crucial to the widespread acclaim of the
series as a watershed event in television (and pop cultural)
history. This complexity arises partly from the extremely
complicated structure of the program itself and partly from its
extensive interaction with its historical and cultural context. For
example, the series’ resistance to final interpretations is an
important indicator of the postmodern nature of the series, on
which numerous commentators have remarked. Indeed, it is our
contention throughout the current study that The Sopranos can
best be understood as a paradigmatic work of postmodernist
culture, an identification that not only brings into focus many
aspects of the series, but also helps to clarify the historical
position of the series as an indicator of the status of culture
within the global expansion of capitalism at the beginning of the
twenty-first century.
This phase of capitalist globalization has been widely
described as “late capitalism,” and it should be pointed out here
that our understanding of postmodernism is very much in
accord with the seminal theorization of postmodernism as the
“cultural logic of late capitalism” developed by Fredric Jameson
more than a quarter of a century ago, but more relevant (and
accurate) today than ever. For Jameson, postmodernism is the
culture of a historical climate in which the process of capitalist
modernization is nearly complete, a suggestion that is very
much in line with the vision of things coming to an end that lies
at the heart of The Sopranos. Moreover, Jameson’s description
of the characteristics of postmodernist culture (Postmodern)
illuminates The Sopranos in a number of other important ways
as well.
Of course, one might argue that television itself is largely a
postmodern phenomenon. Perry Anderson, amid a strong
endorsement of Jameson’s understanding of postmodernism,
has argued that, in the historical evolution of postmodernism,
television was “the development that changed everything. . . . If
there is any single technological watershed of the postmodern,