On the Set of The Sopranos
On the Set of The Sopranos
“Inside” a Fan’s Construction of Nearness
Introduction: The Paradox of Fandom Research
When people use up a great deal of time and energy in interpreting a specific text, their subsequent actions oriented to that text pose interesting problems for social scientific interpretation. While the early history of fandom research was dominated by deconstructing fans’ subordination in an outdated taste hierarchy, one challenge for current research is to gain a clearer, more inclusive view of the underlying interpretative problem that fan practices pose.
This is a problem in which unwittingly I have found myself entangled. My book The Place of Media Power: Pilgrims and Witnesses of the Media Age (Couldry 2000) was not intended as part of fandom research, and its emphasis was on questions of media, power, and space more generally. But it could not avoid the link, because one of its case studies involved making sense of what fans and others did when they visited the set of the UK soap Coronation Street in Manchester. However, the anger I felt at the frequent pathologizing of fans’ perfectly legitimate interpretative practice was one reason I avoided all trace of individual psychology in my analysis. I was trying to avoid what I saw as a reduction of such practice to the “defects” of individual psyches, and so set off in the opposite direction to see how far one could go in understanding an (admittedly) highly specific fan practice—journeys to the location where a media text is produced—relying only on a sociology that had excised psychology.1 This was clearly too limited a solution to the interpretative problem of fandom, and in any case the emergence since of sensitive treatments of fan psychology that simultaneously deconstruct and move beyond the old taste hierarchy (Hills 2002; Sandvoss 2005a) removes any justification for my rhetorical exclusion of psychological perspectives.
Another criticism has been made of my earlier treatment of fans that I want to mention as a jumping-off point for some reflections on the wider difficulties inherent in interpreting fan practice, reflections that I hope will be appropriately self-critical. I have been accused in my reading of fan journeys to the set of Coronation Street of overemphasizing questions of power—that is, the power relations between those outside media and those within media institutions, and the social power of media generally—or at least of operating with an oversimplified and binary division between media and audiences (Sandvoss 2005a).2 There is no space here to debate the wider question of media power,3 but in any case there were other dimensions of my interpretation that were not about power but emphasized memory, pilgrimage, and the paradoxes of getting close to the production site of fiction. So this criticism, while rightly pointing out my earlier (and deliberate) neglect of individual psychology, is in turn a reduction. I am not complaining (far from it), since my point is that the multi-layered complexity of fans’ actions in relation to texts they love makes any account liable to charges of reductionism: there is always more to say, and more perspectives from which to say it. Sandvoss’s overall analysis of fandom (2005a) offers a very interesting resolution of the sociology/psychology binary by showing, along the lines of the Frankfurt School, how a sociology of late capitalism that does not pass through the psychological dynamics of individual investments in particular texts and commodities is incomplete. This is clearly right—and a valid criticism of my earlier sociological reduction—but that does not mean an account that corrects for this automatically, in turn, offers a complete interpretative framework of what fans do. There is the separate, and independently difficult, issue of how we take sufficient account of the space of the text, and fans’ relatively underdetermined activities as interpreters within that space. There is a great deal to be learned from models drawn primarily from literary theory (Gray 2006); indeed, studying fans’ “interpretative communities” (in Stanley Fish’s sense) is a route back to a sociological interpretation, even if one that considers power in a very different light from my earlier account.
My point then is that reductionism is not a fatal interpretative flaw that distinguishes good from bad accounts of fandom, but something endemic to all accounts that aspire to offer a total model of what fans do. Maybe it’s that aspiration that has to be abandoned. After a period when various rival models of fan practices have emerged in competition with each other, we may now be on the threshold of a different phase where the interpretative challenge is different: how to find the right mix (from the range of sociological, psychological, sociological/psychological, and literary models available) for interpreting this particular fan practice? In which case, fandom research is best seen as an open, cross-disciplinary space for grappling with the highly various consequences of being a more than casual interpreter of a text.
Against that background, I would still want to defend my own emphasis on power and space, but only as one strand that sometimes is more salient than others but cannot yield an overall model. I agree with Sandvoss that “in fandom […] place remains a fundamental point of reference” (2005a: 66), but this, I would add, is difficult to separate from questions of power that do not necessarily pass through individual psychology. Even if these can never provide the whole picture, they should not be ignored either.
I want to develop these thoughts in a spirit that is explicitly self-critical and reflexive, by recalling a visit I made in May 2005 to “The Original Locations for The Sopranos” run in New York by On Location Tours, Inc.4 When writing about the Coronation Street set, what I shared with the program’s fans was not fandom of the program (beyond a basic level of interest) but an excitement and fascination with places featured in media, and the rich meaning of such places. But here my situation was different: I am a fan of The Sopranos, a fandom I share with family and friends. With my wife Louise I have cooked meals from The Sopranos cookbook for evenings of Sopranos video watching with friends! I was keen to visit The Sopranos locations, and knew of the tour well in advance from fellow Sopranos fan and film and television scholar Dana Polan. We shared photos of our visits, as would any friends who were also fans. But how would my “internal” account of my visit fit, if at all, with any “external” sociological interpretation (let alone deconstruction) I might imagine myself making of the same experience?
The dialectic of internal/external is inherent, of course, to any attempt at general interpretation of what people do and think; it cannot ever fully be resolved. What I want to argue, however, is that this interpretative tension, far from being artificially imposed on “real life” by the curious and privileged practice of sociology5 (or psychology or literary theory for that matter) is in fact integral to this particular fan tour in ways that connect interestingly with the text that is its origin.
Media—as a highly centralized mechanism for distributing narratives that are themselves produced in quite specific places—generate many paradoxes of place. There is the paradox of a phenomenological “nearness” (to a news event, a character, a story line, or the excitement of a game show studio) that is inseparable from a practical and material distance from its production. Martin Heidegger was one of the first writers to pick up on this contradictory feature of broadcasting (1962: 141): radio, he argued, bring us existentially “near” to places that are distant. In relation to media news, this feature has generated contrasting assessments: some argue that media events remain too distant for moral engagement, while others fear news brings those events trivially close (see, respectively, Robins 1995; Silverstone 2003). Media fictions, of course, raise completely different issues: we know they never happened, even if they encourage us to imagine a not-so-different world where we are told they did (notably with The X-Files, for example). Sometimes a narrative relies upon, and allows its readers to develop, a sense of place that is validated by a general belief that a very specific place exists where such things might have happened. In this respect, fictions like The Sopranos, that rely on a highly specific sense of situated historical events, differ markedly from soaps such as Coronation Street where the associated sense of place is always, from the beginning, based on a generality (life as it once was in the north of England). In the case of The Sopranos, visiting New Jersey would already, for a fan of the program, mean entering the space of the real events that the fiction models and reworks—and this would be true without us ever discovering locations where particular shots were filmed.
The Sopranos tour I did therefore doubled for those on the day (who disclosed themselves as coming from the United States including Alaska, Canada, and Norway, as well as Liverpool and London in the UK) as an introduction to a real region (New Jersey) and a journey to real sites of television production. Neither journey by itself was in the least problematic. Everyone is familiar with the experience of tourism, and most people are fairly familiar also with the experience of media tourism, visiting sites specifically and only because they have featured in a media narrative. It is commonplace now for the second type of journey to be used to market the first (Couldry 2000: 65). We are familiar, also, as part of the second type of tourism, with being taken “inside” the fiction, even if many media tourist sites offer this only minimally, with that experience being limited to a basic moment of recognition (“Oh, that’s where it was filmed”). The explorations of X-Files sites in Vancouver that Matt Hills describes (2002: chapter 7) would appear however to involve more than just noting where something was filmed: the uncertainties of exact location feed into the spatial ambiguities and uncertainties of the X-Files narrative itself, generating the possibility of imagining, for a moment, that you are a character exploring the narrative space of the program.
The Sopranos tour then combined three spaces that by themselves are unproblematic: (1) the space of general tourism, (2) the space of media tourism, and (3) the imaginary action-space “within” the fictional narrative that (2) sometimes generates. I will return to the contradictions between (3) and (1)/(2) later on, for it is the contradictions that may be problematic. First, however, let’s consider the interaction between spaces (1) and (2).
Unlike many tourist guides, the tour guide for the Sopranos tour could assume considerable shared knowledge among those paying on the day. Everyone might be dressed pretty much the same with no obvious signs of expertise or interest, but anyone who in a city as packed with tourist opportunities as New York considered this bus tour a good use of his or her time could safely be assumed to have watched with enthusiasm at least one series of The Sopranos. The main feature of the witty tour commentary was to acknowledge this knowledge and indeed flatter the participants: quiz questions were opportunities to display special levels of fan knowledge, but a considerable basic level of familiarity with the show, its character and ethos, was generally assumed in any jokes and patter. There was virtually nothing on the tour, after the initial “housekeeping” announcements, that was not reflexive to this extent, right down to the snack of cannoli delivered to us midtour (a recipe for “Carmela’s” cannoli recipe was included in the tour booklet). The knowing sophistication of those on the tour was consistently primed—not just sophistication about the quirks of television production (the hidden nepotism and sheer chance that lie behind any complex cultural production) but also sophistication about the meaning of the program, with its story of a mafia culture in steady decline. The guide, acknowledging some people’s concerns about the program, asked the party whether the show defamed Italians or was it “just television.” “Just television” came the reply. On the tour one learned a lot about the real functions of the buildings used as backdrops, and I won’t reveal any secrets here so as not to spoil the fun of future visitors! The guide was in a strong position to share minor “secrets” of the business, since he had been an actor and extra in many Sopranos episodes. From the point of view of the space of media tourism, those of us on the bus could reflect at some distance on the less knowledgeable space of general tourism, even though for most of us I suspect we were in both spaces, since this was our first trip specifically to New Jersey.
Indeed, what we saw of New Jersey—from the famous Turnpike onwards—was shot through with memories, prompted by the guide, of narrative moments from the series. The Turnpike is where the show’s opening sequence was filmed. With the theme tune playing, we watched on the video monitors the sequence where Tony Soprano inserts his ticket into the entry barrier, and looks in vain for the view and the light shown on the program sequence. There were many other such moments, not spoiled by the irony sensed by both guide and tourists of the mismatch between the extreme banality of many locations (a one-room diner by a parking lot under a bridge, for example) and the narrative significance of the fictional locations they embodied. Here we were looking back on the space of media tourism, from the space of the narrative. We could laugh at the same relation in reverse, as when we were told that the owner of the tiny “Pizza Land” outlet on Belleville turnpike (shown in the opening credits) gets real orders to send pizzas by Fedex from addresses all over the world (he smiled and waved at us as our bus drove past).
Negative Aura?
“Just think, within two hours we’ll be at the Bada Bing,” I said to Louise as we entered the lift from a drab hotel landing, to walk down to Thirty-ninth Street where we were to pick up the bus for The Sopranos tour.
It’s no secret that a Sopranos tour culminates at the Bada Bing, a strip joint that provides the “glamorous” end of Tony Soprano’s chain of business interests (their core is “waste management” and building site racketeering). Many scenes are set around the Bada Bing dance floor and bar, or in the office where members of Tony’s crew relax, playing pool or cards, and Tony takes important business calls and visitors. Along with Satriale’s “meat market” and Tony and Carmela’s kitchen and pool, the Bada Bing is one of the consistent spatial reference points in the Sopranos narrative.
Our bus pulled up behind the building and we were shown the guard rail where in series 3 Ralphie committed a particularly gruesome assault on a stripper who had annoyed him, earning Tony’s retribution. We were also given very strict instructions about what we could and could not do once inside, instructions that we were told came from its owner. For “the Bada Bing” is not a set made for television, but a real strip club called Satin Dolls on Route 17, South Lodi, New Jersey.
As we entered the club at 4:30 P.M., after touring the car park to get a good view of its outside, I was still recalling incidents from the plot that had occurred there. I was still thinking, in other words, within the narrative space of the program. By entering the dance space, and like most of the rest of the tour party edging nervously along the wall while looking in towards the raised dance floor beyond the bar counter, I had of course entered a space of media tourism as well. There was no doubt this was the actual place where all those scenes had been filmed: the lighting rig, we had been told, was now permanently installed to save time putting it up and taking it down for each shoot. But in the fifteen or twenty minutes allotted for our tour stop, there was nowhere else to go apart from the dance floor or the club’s perfectly ordinary toilets; everywhere leading off from the club area was backstage for its staff, and not part of the set, let alone part of the narrative space of the series. Around the edge of the room, the three tourism spaces (the space of tourism, the space of media tourism, and the space of the narrative) became fused in the club’s marketing strategy; the club sold itself as “Satin Dolls aka the Bada Bing Club,” with club-type merchandise (tank tops, thongs, g-strings, and the like) that marketed both the real and fictional location. A Sopranos pinball machine jokily used the mafia hierarchy (from “Associate” to “Boss”) to customize the path of the pinball around the table. But this was the only spot where one could lose oneself in the show’s narrative (or at least a commodified reworking of one of its terms). For, as my eyes got used to the light, the sound levels, and the social scene (three or four men sat hunched around the bar, looking up occasionally at the sole dancer on the stage), it became obvious that the only space we were in was the commercial space where this sex club on a bleak transit route marketed itself.
A fascination with the narrative of The Sopranos had led me, and thousands of others, by a simple commercial logic into looking on as a tourist in a New Jersey strip joint on a grey Saturday afternoon. For sure, the club is entitled to conduct its business, although I personally am uncomfortable with the sour patriarchy that I sense saturates such places. The morality of all this is less interesting than the meaning. What did my act of standing there by the dance floor communicate? Clearly not ironic distance: there is no way of standing ironically. Clearly not anger or moral distance, since neither I nor any other visitor had, as it were, locus standi to complain: we had paid to see Sopranos locations, and this was what we were being allowed to do, and the club was carrying on its lawful business. In any case, it was clear from the weary contempt with which the off-floor dancing staff looked at us that we had no moral standing in their eyes: not customers (although a few on the tour bought a drink at the bar), not enforcement authorities with a power to interfere, just tourists who had come to “see” the fiction with which their real working lives were for commercial benefit incidentally associated.
As tourists we were in a “nonplace,” but in a sense rather different from Augé’s (Augé 1995). For this was not so much a place without “place-like” features, a mere route of passage, like a freeway, although as it happens the club’s location was a bleak spot by a freeway (interestingly this is not something the program emphasizes about the fictional location, as far as I recall). It was a real place with many place-like features, yet a nonplace to us because it was somewhere we had not wanted to visit as such (under this description, as a philosopher might say), a place where we had no ability or right to act.
So we said and did nothing—until we were back on the bus, on the return trip to Manhattan with old Sopranos clips for entertainment. This climax to our tour had unexpectedly brought a melancholia at which Adorno might have grimaced. Blithely at play in the space of the series’ large and tangled narrative and enjoying the chance to map that narrative space onto the array of New Jersey streets, retail outlets, and parking lots, we had stumbled into the material reality of an all-too-ordinary place of capitalist work from which our narrative engagement had distracted us. While many such media tourist sites have an “aura” in Benjamin’s sense (1968), as a place of actual filming (see Couldry 2000: 81), aura depends on a particular type of encounter—touching the place where the actual thing was/happened/happens—and it was just this possibility of encounter with the fiction and its filming that had been occluded by our uneasy realization of where it was we were standing.
Concluding Thoughts
The Sopranos tour carried many of the auratic expectations that a media location conventionally has, but it culminated, I have suggested, in a site of negative aura, a site whose different reality effaced any aura associated with the fiction and its process of production.
But this contradiction is, perhaps, not so foreign to the narrative offered by The Sopranos. For, from its outset, the series has been distinctive for a double narrative: the “public” story of the outer edges of a New York Italian mafia “family” in terminal decline, and the “private” story of Tony Soprano’s health and psychological problems and imperfectly managed family life. This doubleness is more than a narrative conceit, since at various levels The Sopranos shows it at work in characters’ lives, and the painful contradictions that flow from this. In this sense, and this has always been part of its attraction to me as a fan, The Sopranos addresses on a large scale some of the contradictions between “work” and “life” that are central issues in late modernity. That the Sopranos tour should have generated its own contradictions between “play” and “life” seemed, on reflection, somehow appropriate, whether or not those contradictions were intended by the tour’s organizers. What emerged was at the same time a contradiction, between different levels of narrative absorption, in my own experience as a fan.
Where do these recollections take us in terms of the choice from which this chapter started—the puzzle over the disciplinary space in which we should locate our academic accounts of what fans, ourselves included, do. In one way, they might seem to confirm Sandvoss’s argument that our psychological investments in narrative commodities are an essential part of how we are entrenched within capitalism’s order. A complication is that one attraction of The Sopranos’s narrative is its implicitly critical exploration of the linkages among exploitation, violence, and everyday comfort in contemporary society; but a Frankfurt School reading would have us ensnared within capitalism’s order, whether or not the narratives that are the objects of our passion are critical. A further complication is that, as visitors, our entanglement with the reality of a New Jersey strip joint was not shaped in any way by the specificities of our individual psychological investment in The Sopranos’s narrative; one might just as well say that it was shaped by the social pleasures afforded by The Sopranos as a complex, evolving narrative that provokes discussion based on the deep generic foundations of mafia narratives. On the other hand, I would happily acknowledge that, on this tour at least, issues of symbolic power (while present at some level throughout) were outweighed in terms of analytic interest by the spatial and narrative ambiguities into which the tour drew its participants.
The only safe conclusion, I suggest, is to acknowledge that fandom research needs a theoretical flexibility to match the phenomenological complexity of much fan experience. Instead of a “unified” model that privileges one framework of interpretation (psychological, sociological, economic, textual, spatial), we need perhaps a toolkit from which, when faced with particular fan experiences, we can draw on any or all of these frameworks. Indeed, it is in part just this complexity—this sense at times of moving uncertainly between different levels, and perspectives, of inter-pretation—that gives the practice of fandom its rich fascination.
NOTES
1. I realized a little later that some sociologists (but against the grain) have argued that sociology needs to integrate psychology into its regular discourse (Craib 1998), but that remains a minority position. I was also aware of sociological approaches that emphasized different dimensions from my account: Abercrombie and Longhurst (1998), Harrington and Bielby (1995).
2. See Corner (2003).
3. Key here, and relied on in part by Sandvoss at this point, is the argument of Abercrombie and Longhurst (1998); for a discussion of what I see as weaknesses in that latter position, see Couldry (2005).
4. For details see www.screentours.com.
5. See Bourdieu (1998).