Captain's Quarters -

I've watched The Sopranos ever since it first started, and it remains one of the two episodic shows that I refuse to miss each week (South Park is the other, when they show new episodes). While it does feature violence, sex, and very raw language, it also has had compelling characters, intelligent writing, and intriguing themes and story arcs that keep me watching to see what happens next. One person described it as a soap opera for men, and there is some truth to that, but the First Mate follows the show as closely as I do.

One sequence this season was unexpectedly disturbing, and I suspect it was for David Chase and the Sopranos team as well. The episode which aired the Sunday after the Virginia Tech massacre had a story line involving a disturbed young man of what appeared to be Korean or Chinese descent, who violently attacks Uncle Junior at the end of the hour. That created a lot of buzz on the Internet for the coinicidence -- the show was taped months before it aired -- and got Ron Rosenbaum of Slate to consider the connection between artistic violence and the real deal:

And in my simulated Abu Ghraib cell, I began to elaborate on another theory about what was going on: I began to wonder whether The Sopranos as a series was acknowledging that its casual treatment of violence could be a source of the casual violence that seems to be an increasing part of American culture.

True, Sopranos violence is not glamorized, a la The Godfather, or ironized and aestheticized a la Quentin Tarantino. It's more that it's trivialized, made quotidian and all the more accessible somehow to those like Carter Chong who see mobsters as celebrities. Not for nothing is Uncle Junior seen in the mental institution signing photos of himself for one of the orderlies to sell on eBay! Nice touch. It captures the show's complicity in commodifying violence. ...

What that outburst suggests to me is that The Sopranos' creators are acknowledging that making violent goons whose whole lives are essentially one long killing spree—they don't kill 32 at a time, but they've probably killed a comparable number in their lifetime—seem so sympathetic, even in some ways admirable ("family" values, etc.), might have real-world consequences. As Chong's mother puts it, "You're becoming a bully," and it's because of "that gangster."

Almost as if in their final season they're engaging in what I would call laudable introspection, though some might see it as admitting to feeling guilt.

The simulated Abu Ghraib cell is being used in an Errol Phillips documentary on the detention scandal -- along with fake mortar shells and a few other stage items Rosenbaum describes. I'm not sure why a documentary requires replicas; is Phillips making a drama or a documentary? That seems like a good question for a media critic.

Rosenbaum uses Abu Ghraib to make the argument that publishing the pictures of the abuse and humiliation may have desensitized Americans to the use of torture, and that The Sopranos desensitizes us to violence and gangsterism. That's why he thinks that Chase is using the last nine episodes as an apology. Jerry Seinfeld did something similar in his last episode; he made clear that the main characters were actually jerks, and rather unsympathetic ones at that. It was brilliant and courageous, and the backlash against it proved how many people Seinfeld made uncomfortable with that revelation.

So has Chase decided to do the same with Tony, Paulie, Silvio, and the gang? Absolutely not -- because he's been making Rosenbaum's point for the entire series. The whole balance between Tony's two families has to do with keeping violence of his one world from affecting the other -- and failing miserably to do so. Tony has to whack his daughter's boyfriend (and his dead friend's son) when he gets out of control. Close friends keep disappearing "into the Witness Protection Program", and everyone knows not to ask too many questions. Early on, AJ looks up a Mafia fanboy site on the Internet and discovers his whole family tree; in another episode, he has a set of trading cards that feature murderers.

Chase has overtly and subtly addressed the themes of glorified violence and criminals. The quotidian aspect of it on The Sopranos is how utterly unglamorous the lifestyle and violence is. It degrades everyone around it. Carmela knows exactly what Tony is, and she still can't bring herself to admit her own complicity -- nor to ask enough questions to see what happened to former insiders like Adriana. No one escapes its influence, not even the kids, which is why we see Little Vito this season go Goth and grow more disturbed.

Quentin Tarantino glorifies violence -- in fact, he fetishizes it, and yet Rosenbaum seems to let him off the hook because Tarantino makes it "ironic". Chase makes it realistic and shows it to be degrading and corrosive. Which one has more need of the guilt trip?