I am one of a group of people suffering from PSSD – Post Soprano Stress Disorder, due to the fact that it has finished. The Sopranos is a 13 part series, originally produced by HBO (Home Box Office) in the USA, which was shown in the UK at 10pm on Thursday nights on Channel 4.
As an aside, it forms one of a unique group of programmes, broadcast by Channel 4, the other two series being OZ, set in a maximum security penitentiary, and Homicide: Life on the street, about a homicide department in Maryland. Luckily, unlike these two which were broadcast at ludicrously late hours, the Sopranos was actually screened at a reasonable time, giving it more attention.
It was captivating from the first episode where we saw Tony Soprano, a ‘made man’, part of an Italian crime family, working under the ostensible cover of being a garbage collector. Tony Soprano is a tall, overweight man in his 40s, contemplating his swimming pool at the back of his house, on which float a family of ducks. He becomes preoccupied by these ducks, driving his family crazy with his blow by blow account of their daily activities. Then the ducks "grow up" and one day fly away. The sadness and apparent sense of loss produced in Tony Soprano is such that he has another of his apparently increasingly frequent, psychosomatic heart attacks, actually a panic attack. Physical investigations reveal nothing and in the end he is "forced" to consult a psychiatrist/psychotherapist.
This plot sounds familiar as it also features in "Analyse This", the recent film with Billy Crystal and Robert de Niro, where de Niro plays a mafia boss suffering from anxiety who starts to see a psychiatrist. In my view, the Sopranos is far superior.
The weekly nature of the programme echoed the weekly sessions of Tony Soprano with his female psychiatrist. She is one of the best portrayals of a psychiatrist/psychotherapist in modern film and television that I have ever seen: not sentimental, not just a fund of common sense and not laughable. There is a delicate transferential and countertransferential dance, representing the way in which the two of them work out the kind of relationship they can have when, of course, Tony Soprano is someone involved in criminal activity. Confidentiality becomes all important for both of them – she has to know enough but not too much.
Unlike British psychotherapists she also prescribes and is perhaps more didactic than we would expect and less transferential, but who said TV mirrored real life? Tony Soprano throughout the series is overwhelmed by his mother, a vindictive, malevolent woman who plays her son off against other relatives, causing harm whenever she does so. She lives under the guise of being a poor old woman stuck in a nursing home and neglected by her son. One fabulous scene between the psychiatrist and Tony Soprano, towards the end of the series, is when she reaches for the DSM4 and tells him how his mother suffers from a borderline personality disorder – directly challenging his sentimental defence of her. This provokes his one real outburst of violence against the psychiatrist and is perhaps a timely reminder of how not to manage such an interaction.
Overall, in the portrayal of the relationship, what emerges is his prickliness, his paranoia and the incredible shame that is associated with the thought of seeing a psychiatrist. It is vital to keep this knowledge from others because (a) he will be made a laughing stock and (b) there will be the suspicion that he is leaking information. However, he also learns to trust her and take in "good" interventions.
I could write at length on just this aspect of the Sopranos but this would take away from the whole. Relationships are intertwined and complex. There is the young Catholic priest who seems to specialise in providing spiritual comfort to young wives such as Mrs Soprano – not overtly sexual, nothing as crude as that, but instead playing out by means of food that the Italian wives offer to him, late night "confessions" and watching art film videos, from which the streetwise husbands are excluded. There are the teenage children just beginning to discover their father’s real occupation, and so making sense of a world for example where the younger boy never gets challenged at school, or fought by the other boys because they all know who his father is. Well shown is the mixture of pride, identification and embarrassment and the beginning of a process whereby the children are moving to the outside edges of normal life themselves: a good portrait of how ways of life are transmitted transgenerationally. There are the gang members; the somewhat "psychopathic" out of control nephew who seems to enjoy the violence, and the older, wiser men who have to endure the terrible betrayal of one who becomes an FBI informer. There is the policeman in the pay of the Italian families who treats everyone with cynicism, disrespect and violence, including himself.
I find myself in this piece, reluctant to use the word "mafia", mainly because these are not the families that we have seen portrayed previously. In "Goodfellas" and "The Godfather", much of the action takes place in earlier times and the gangsters wear pinstripe suits, hombergs and seem "cool". This is the mafia family of the 1990s, patchily organised, pretty local in influence and "leaky". They do not wear smart pinstripe suits, don’t carry machine guns; instead they tend to be fat and wear shell suits. They drive off-roaders and more ordinary cars. Neither are they portrayed as cuddly and funny as Robert de Niro is in "Analyse This". There is a clear description of the capacity for viciousness and the dynamics of a desire for vengeance, avoidance of shame and humiliation plus the complexity of family power relationships.
Tony Soprano endeavours to look after his mother. His siblings are long gone, several states away, to remove themselves from her. When the head of the family dies from cancer, Tony Soprano is next to lead but is wary about what his paternal uncle, Junior, will do and whether this will cause a split in the family, He decides, rather cunningly, to let Junior be the "Top Man" but actually to keep running the show without his uncle quite knowing. In this way he can both satisfy Junior’s honour and keep the whole system together. At one point the associates that he works with all move their elderly mothers into the old folks home where his own mother is, and much of their business is carried out there.
Uncle Junior, giddy with his new position as Boss, becomes paranoid about Tony Soprano and also wants to be totally in control. All this is fed by a steady stream of poison dripped into his ear by his sister in law, Tony’s mother. There is a final rift in the relationship in an episode involving Junior and sex. He has a younger girlfriend, with whom he has been for 18 years and she has told her beautician how wonderful he is at cunnilingus. He becomes frightened that such information would set him up for ridicule, because you do not "go down" on a woman; that makes you laughable. However, it is too late and Tony acquires this piece of gossip leading to a dinner party where he quips to Uncle Junior about his predilection for "travelling south". As Tony admits later, he shouldn’t have done that, because it is an attack on his uncle’s machismo and becomes the final straw. Eventually Junior arranges to have Soprano killed. At the point that this is happening Tony Soprano is experiencing a major depressive episode, well portrayed on film, unable to get up, not eating and not bothering about the business, thus causing great concern to all his associates. He also has a fantasy of a beautiful young Italian woman feeding a baby at his breast – well explored by the psychiatrist in relation to his own maternal experience and lack of it. The attack on his life galvanises him because, as he says to the psychiatrist "I thought I wanted to die, but at the moment when they pointed the guns at me I did my best to live".
The ending of the series was satisfyingly lifelike with its fragmented quality. The psychiatrist has to travel for a while because of the happenings around Tony. It has been discovered he is consulting her and so she becomes a threat and a target. Her outrage at this, and fury with her patient is convincing. When all mother’s tricks are finally uncovered she "conveniently" has a stroke and so cannot be challenged, leading to a scene when she is wheeled down the corridor with Tony shouting "look at her, she’s laughing, she’s laughing". His wife challenges the Catholic priest who walks off without a word.
All I can give here is some sense of a complex piece of work full of creative ideas, good writing, stunning acting, convincing characters and a complexity and subtlety that is rarely seen. I both look forward to, and dread the second series – maybe they should have left these 13 episodes to live alone – can they be bettered or even matched? I’ll have to wait and see.