Sentimentality, Nostalgia, and History in The Sopranos
When Tony Soprano—in episode 1.11 (“Nobody Knows Anything,” March 21, 1999)—expresses his desire to maintain an atmosphere in his household that might have come from the year 1954, he demonstrates a nostalgia for the 1950s that is woven (though sometimes in complex ways) into the fundamental historical vision of The Sopranos. In this sense, of course, the series participates in a crucial strain of 1950s nostalgia that has run through American popular culture since at least the 1970s—the decade, not coincidentally, when postmodernism became a hegemonic force in American culture. Indeed, in Fredric Jameson’s seminal theorization of postmodernism, nostalgia is a crucial component of the weakened postmodernist vision of history, with the 1950s as a pivotal focus of that nostalgia. Postmodernism thus again provides a useful framework within which to read the significance of 1950s nostalgia in The Sopranos, while also providing an important historical context for understanding the related motif of sentimentality that also runs through the series. Meanwhile, both of these motifs are closely related to the fundamental narrative of history that underlies virtually every aspect of The Sopranos.
In episode 5.6 (April 11, 2004), tellingly entitled “A Sentimental Education,” Jennifer Melfi warns Tony Soprano that he is shifting into “high sentimentality mode” when he begins to wax poetic on how much he loves his cousin Tony Blundetto. Melfi clearly regards this sentimentality as counterproductive, and believes that it merely serves as a tactic to avoid coming to grips with reality. That this reality will soon include Tony’s murder of Blundetto would seem to suggest that she is correct, just as all of the sentimental visions expressed in The Sopranos tend to be undercut by events in the series. Then again, Melfi has special insights here. Not only does she know Tony very well by this point, but this knowledge includes her awareness of his feelings of guilt and shame with regard to Blundetto, who spent years in prison as a result of his participation in a failed heist in which Tony was supposed to participate, but failed to do so because of a panic attack that incapacitated him shortly before.[1]
That the sentimentality of various characters in The Sopranos tends to have an excessively artificial quality should come as no surprise for a series whose worldview is so thoroughly conditioned by postmodernism. After all, Jameson has convincingly argued that a “waning of affect” is a crucial characteristic of postmodern experience, and that this loss of an ability to maintain genuine intense emotions over time leaves the individual subject longing just to feel something. The subject then attempts to fill this void by manufacturing sentimental attitudes as a sort of utopian compensation that struggles toward a day when our emotional lives will not be so maimed and impoverished by our thorough immersion in the world that capitalism has wrought. Jameson, in his analysis of this phenomenon, again finds a cause in the loss of historical sense that he associates with postmodernism, the waning of affect being associated with a decline in the strength of memory that makes it impossible to maintain over time the kind of stable sense of identity required to sustain strong affective experience (Postmodernism, 16).
The loss of ability to maintain genuinely strong emotional feelings can lead the postmodern individual to attempt to compensate with an excessive sentimentality that is not genuine. The Sopranos again dramatizes this effect. In the penultimate episode of the series—6.20 (“Blue Comet,” June 3, 2007)—Jennifer Melfi becomes concerned when she learns of research that has shown that the main benefit of psychotherapy to criminal sociopaths might simply be to make them better criminals. Her further research into the characteristics of sociopaths shows that, indeed, for them therapy becomes “one more criminal operation” that helps them do their criminal work better. Perhaps more importantly, though, she reads a research summary extracted from the three-volume study The Criminal Personality by Samuel Yochelson and Stanton E. Samenow, which argues that criminals are marked by a “sentimentality” that particularly shows itself in “compassion for babies and pets.”[2]
Melfi, of course, immediately recognizes that this description fits Tony quite well, which helps move her to the decision to terminate his therapy. In any case, Tony’s own sentimentality is a key element of the emotional texture of The Sopranos. In particular, his special fondness for animals is a thread that runs throughout the series, beginning with his early reaction to the family of wild ducks that comes to visit his swimming pool. The pinnacle of Tony’s sentimental attachment to animals in the series, however, occurs in in the fourth-season sequence in which Tony becomes enamored of the racehorse Pie-O-My. In episode 4.5 (“Pie-O-My,” October 13, 2002), Tony’s fascination with the horse becomes quite clear, though it contains a number of components. For one thing, the beautiful animal is a paragon of grace and power, and Tony’s attraction to it no doubt has a certain aesthetic component as he projects onto the horse his own fantasies of grace and power. However, his attachment to the horse becomes particularly strong when it begins to suffer a series of injuries that puts its career in jeopardy. This situation gives the animal a vulnerability that allows Tony to exercise his sentimental side, and the episode tellingly ends as Tony kneels by the ailing horse, attempting to comfort it, while sentimental cowboy music plays on the sound track. This music, so excessively sentimental as to be self-parodic, is rich in connotation within the series. The very title of the song (“My Rifle, My Pony, and Me”) captures the combination of violence and sentiment that informs Tony’s life quite well. Meanwhile, the song provides a link back to the earlier Sopranos episode 4.1 (“For All Debts, Public and Private,” September 15, 2002), in which the same song is featured. In one scene of that episode, Tony watches Rio Bravo on television, the Western in which the song first appeared (performed diegetically in duet by Dean Martin and Rick Nelson, who both also appear as actors in the film). The film, of course, is carefully chosen. For one thing, it participates in a series of suggested intertextual links between Westerns and gangster narratives that runs throughout The Sopranos.[3] For another thing, the film was released in 1959, the year of Tony’s birth, and thus provides a link back to his nostalgic visions of a lost better world in the 1950s. The film is an expression of a dreamed-of utopian fullness, with the singer having all he needs to be happy through the presence of his trusty steed, his trusty weapon, and his own trusty self.
However, the film appears in this episode in a decidedly unsentimental way. “My Rifle, My Pony, and Me” begins to play, apparently nondiegetically, as Christopher Moltisanti shoots up with heroin. The utopian longings expressed in the song are thus undercut through connection to Christopher’s decidedly flawed search for utopia via drugs. The scene then quickly cuts to the Soprano home, with the music playing through the cut; there we find Tony watching the film with a bowl of ice cream propped on his prominent belly. The cut thus links Christopher’s drug use to Tony’s attempts to find fulfillment through food and watching old movies on TV, much in the mode of similar links that can be found in Darren Aronofsky’s spectacularly unsentimental (but very postmodern) film, Requiem for a Dream (2000). In any case, Tony’s quest for utopian bliss is quickly thwarted when Carmela interrupts his viewing of the film to complain about her own financial insecurity should something happen to Tony.
The use of Rio Bravo, however, has implications that go well beyond the context of The Sopranos itself. For one thing, the film, which stars right-wing he-man icon John Wayne, was overtly conceived as a sort of rebuttal to High Noon (1952), the greatest Western film of Tony’s hero Gary Cooper, itself clearly functioning as an allegory of the anticommunist purges that were going on in Hollywood at the time. Both Wayne and Cooper play strong masculine heroes in these films; both play lawmen who must battle against evil foes. But Wayne’s character works within the system, as it were, in a film that ultimately endorses traditional authority. Cooper’s character, on the other hand, must work essentially alone, following his own code without the support of his community—and leading to his rejection of his official role in that community. Little wonder, then, that Tony, who must continually operate with traditional authority hot on his trail, would identify more with Cooper than with Wayne, even though the latter might be even more important as an icon of the strong, silent type that Tony so much admires.
Tony’s engagement with Pie-O-My culminates in one of the most memorable episodes of the entire series. In episode 4.9 (“Whoever Did This,” November 10, 2002), Tony confronts Ralph Cifaretto after the horse has been horribly injured in a stable fire, so that it must be put down. When Tony tells Ralph of the horse’s death, he hints at his suspicion that Ralph might have set the fire. When Ralph merely scoffs that the fire was a stroke of luck, allowing for the collection of the insurance on a horse whose health problems made it no good, Tony flies into a rage, especially after Ralph declares, “What are you, a vegetarian? You eat beef and sausage by the carload!” What follows is one of the most brutally realistic fight scenes in television history, as Tony ultimately beats Ralph to death, much as Ralph had earlier beaten to death the Bada-Bing! stripper Tracee (Ariel Kiley), in the very episode in which Ralph first purchases Pie-O-My—3.6 (“University,” April 1, 2001). To top off the episode, Tony digs a hole to bury Ralph’s head and hands (the parts of his dismembered body most likely to identify him) using a piece of construction equipment somewhat similar to the one that had earlier in the episode dragged away Pie-O-My’s body for disposal.
In another example of the intricate construction of The Sopranos, as he bashes Ralph’s head against the floor, pounding the life from the other gangster, Tony declares, “She was a beautiful, innocent creature! What did she ever do to you?” The statement is poignant in itself, but it is made more interesting by the fact that it directly echoes what Ralph himself had earlier said to a priest about his seriously wounded son, Justin. Among other things, Ralph’s reaction to his son’s injury humanizes him for just a moment, amid a flurry of events that generally make him appear to have no humanity whatsoever. But this echo also calls attention to the clichéd nature of these seemingly powerful emotional declarations, suggesting that both Tony and Ralph are merely performing strong emotions, essentially speaking from a prepared script.
One thing that is clear in the way the series parallels the death of Ralph with that of Pie-O-My is that viewers are invited to think of the horse’s death as the more tragic of the two. After all, Ralph has been carefully constructed as a vicious psychopath throughout his appearance in the series; the callous way he shrugs off Tracee’s death (which parallels both Ralph’s and Pie-O-My’s), for example, is only one of the ways in which we are asked to despise him. Among other things, Ralph’s characterization serves to make Tony seem more likeable. It is notable, however, that while Tony does react strongly to Ralph’s killing of Tracee (whom he also regards as a beautiful, innocent creature), he reacts more strongly to the death of Pie-O-My. He seems to regard the death of an animal as more tragic than the death of a human being, even when the human was, like Tracee, relatively innocent and helpless. By making it easy for us as viewers to also regard the death of Pie-O-My as more tragic than that of Ralph, we are eased into complicity with this view.
To the extent that Tony’s love of animals is genuine, it is undoubtedly one of his more positive qualities. On the other hand, one could also see Tony’s compassion for animals as another form of utopian compensation—in this case, for the brutality with which he often treats humans. Because of the requirements of his “business,” Tony is often unable to show compassion for humans, so he redirects his desire to be compassionate onto animals—who are, after all, largely at the mercy of humans and often treated dreadfully by them. Then again, as Ralph so eloquently points out, Tony’s sympathy for animals does not appear to lessen his appetite for meat, a product of the industry that treats animals most dreadfully of all. Even Hitler, who also famously felt more compassion for animals than for many humans, was unwilling to eat meat. Indeed, as Alexander Cockburn points out,
Nazi leaders were noted for love of their pets and for certain animals, notably apex predators like the wolf and the lion. Hitler, a vegetarian and hater of hunting, adored dogs and spent some of his final hours in the company of [his dog] Blondi, whom he would take for walks outside the bunker at some danger to himself. He had a particular enthusiasm for birds and most of all for wolves. (30)
The compassion of the Nazis toward animals is a clear indication that such sentimentality might be bogus. Sentimentality has also long been recognized by Marxist critics as a key (but similarly bogus) element of bourgeois ideology, used to manipulate the masses by a capitalist system that is, in truth, thoroughly practical and unsentimental. In this sense, Tony is a paragon of bourgeois sentimentality, prone to flights of compassion when it costs him nothing, but coldly unemotional when his business demands it—though in his case this contradiction takes a terrible psychic toll, contributing to his depression and panic attacks.
This contradiction also helps to explain the vehemence with which Tony sometimes rejects the sentimentality of others. In episode 4.8 (“Mergers and Acquisitions,” November 3, 2002), Paulie begins to wax sentimental about his aging and ailing mother, to which Tony sharply (and unsentimentally) responds: “For fuck’s sake, Paulie. Everybody’s gonna get old and die.” Of course, events in the series will ultimately undermine Paulie’s sentimental attachment to his mother as well. In episode 6.4 (“The Fleshy Part of the Thigh,” April 2, 2006), Paulie learns that the mother to whom he has been so devoted throughout his life is not even his real biological mother, but simply took on that role when he was born because his real mother, her sister, had been impregnated out of wedlock by a soldier during World War II. Being married, his putative mother was able to take on and raise the child, while Paulie’s biological mother became a nun. Having learned that his Aunt Dottie is his real (illegitimate) mother, Paulie’s family sentiments take a sudden turn. “You think you got family,” he declares, “but in the end, they fuck you too.”
While Tony is not above letting his sentiments get in the way of his business decisions (he is especially prone to letting his childhood friend Artie Bucco get away with things that no stranger could), he tends to reject outright appeals to nostalgic sentiments when they conflict with his professional interests. In episode 2.9 (“From Where to Eternity,” March 12, 2000), Tony briefly reminisces with crew member Sal “Big Pussy” Bonpensiero about the night the older Bonpensiero first brought him to the restaurant where they are now eating and conversing. Tony notes: “Popped my cherry that night.”[4] Pussy responds, “Yeah, seems like old times.” It seems like a moment of genuine closeness, but the moment does not prevent Tony from killing Pussy, known to be providing evidence to the FBI, a few episodes later.
In the very next episode—2.10 (“Bust Out,” March 19, 2000), David Scatino (Robert Patrick), a friend of Tony’s from high school, has gotten deeply in debt to the mob because of his gambling addiction. Hoping that Tony will cut him a break, Scatino reminds Tony of the time in high school when he threw a rock and hit a guy in the eye to help get Tony out of trouble with some “guidos from Paterson.” Tony coldly responds, “Don’t reminisce on me, Davey.” Tony and his crew then proceed systematically to cannibalize Scatino’s sporting goods business as payment for his debt, eventually driving him to ruin.
Finally, Tony is particularly dismissive of the obviously fake plays on sentiment and nostalgia that his sister Janice often uses as a tool for manipulating others—even though she has very little use for sentimentality when it is expressed by others, as when she reacts with frustration and impatience to Bobby Baccalieri’s excessively sentimental, weepy reaction in season 4 to the death of his wife Karen, of whom he didn’t seem all that fond while she was alive, but whose death has caused him now to declare that he sees no reason to go on living. Janice’s tendency to use sentimentality as a tool for manipulation is first revealed in episode 2.2 (“Do Not Resuscitate,” January 23, 2000), in which she visits her ailing and possibly dying mother, Livia, clearly hoping to gain points that might work to her advantage when any inheritance becomes available. To that end, she plays the ultra-sentimental “Non ti Scordar di Me” by Luciano Pavarotti for Livia when visiting her. She then reminds Livia of the time they saw Mario Lanza (who recorded the same song in, of course, the 1950s) on The Ed Sullivan Show (which would have been on January 19, 1958). Nostalgia reigns supreme. In the car on the way home, however, Janice abandons her pose of 1950s nostalgia and rocks out (and smokes up) while ironically playing Paul Simon’s 1972 hit, “Mother and Child Reunion,” apparently feeling that she is on the verge of victory in her quest to win her way back into Livia’s affections.
Tony, of course, knows his sister very well, and he is not one to fall for her appeals to nostalgia and sentiment. In episode 3.4 (“Employee of the Month,” March 18, 2001) Janice deploys her fake sentimentality in a particularly overt way when she tries to retrieve her mother’s valuable record collection, which Livia has apparently given to her Ukrainian nurse, Svetlana (Alla Kliouka Schaffer).[5] Janice claims that she wants the old albums purely for their sentimental value, as they are “a window into ma’s soul.” Tony, who knows perfectly well what Janice values, merely responds, “Who the fuck are you kiddin’? You’re gonna sell them on the Internet.”
Episode 2.12 (“The Knight in White Satin Armor,” April 2, 2000) contains a particularly amusing example of Tony’s dismissal of Janice’s sentimental performances. When Janice asks what Tony and the crew did with the body of her fiancé, Richie April (whom she murdered in a domestic dispute), Tony mockingly tells her, “We buried him on a hill, overlooking a little river. With pine cones all around.” Janice, pretending to be touched by this vision, asks, “You did?” In response, Tony deflates this sentimental vision once and for all: “What do you care what we did with him, huh? Do you wanna know?”
Tony’s contradictory attitude toward sentiment typifies the self-deconstructing nature of The Sopranos, which is one of the key ways the series resists final interpretation. This characteristic of the series can perhaps be seen even more clearly in its treatment of the related theme of nostalgia: virtually every aspect of the series is pervaded by a sense that things just aren’t what they used to be—and that this decline is due at least in part to the fact that people in the present time of the series simply no longer respect the ways of the past. Yet at the same time, the series consistently asks whether the ways of the past were ever all that great to begin with.
One might consider the meeting between Tony and Paulie in episode 2.5 (“Big Girls Don’t Cry,” February 13, 2000) to be an iconic moment in the series in terms of its treatment of the theme of nostalgia. The men meet at the Lou Costello memorial, devoted to one of New Jersey’s favorite sons of the past. But the shot of Costello’s statue includes a close-up of the head that reveals it to be covered in pigeon droppings. So much for memories and respect for tradition. At the same time, one has to wonder whether a past in which a low-brow comedian is a major cultural icon really has all that much to recommend it.
In this same episode, Bonpensiero meets with Skip Lipari (Louis Lombardi), the FBI agent he is feeding information about the mob. Their discussion turns to their shared perception of a contemporary deterioration of honor and values—in the mob and in the FBI. “Forget your enemies,” says Bonpensiero; “You can’t even depend on your friends,” to which Lipari agrees. Bonpensiero turns his complaints toward the new generation of young gangsters: “The ones coming up? Half of them are on drugs. The other half are fuckin’ psychos.” Lipari once again agrees: “A world full of scumbags.” Both men seem to approach this conversation without irony, oblivious to the fact that they are themselves involved in betrayal and deception.
In a world populated by such images and attitudes, it is little wonder that the characters of the series, including Tony Soprano, so often wax nostalgic. In the pilot episode, Tony prepares to undergo an MRI scan in an attempt to identify a possible physical cause for the panic attacks he has recently experienced. Fearing the worst possible news, he turns sentimentally to his wife Carmela and tells her, “We had some good times. Had some good years.” Carmela scoffs, “Here he goes now, with the nostalgia,” suggesting that this is not the first time she has seen Tony in this mode, but also apparently attempting to reassure him that it isn’t necessary to shift to this mode now, because they will no doubt have a long future together. Things, though, quickly deteriorate from there, moving from a sentimental invocation of past pleasant memories to an indication of present tensions in the marriage. When Tony points out that he is just saying no marriage is perfect, Carmela snaps, “Well, having a gumar on the side helps.” Tony responds with equal venom, “I told you I’m not seeing her any more. How do you think I feel having that priest around all the time?”
This particular conversation is indicative of the special nature of the nostalgia that runs through The Sopranos. Rather than being legitimately sentimental and nostalgic, it is almost as if the characters in the series simply wish they could be sentimental and nostalgic, and accordingly struggle to perform those emotions. This situation is precisely the one described by Jameson in relation to postmodern nostalgia, in which he notes that “what is mourned is the memory of deep memory; what is enacted is a nostalgia for nostalgia, for the grand older extinct questions of origin and telos” (Postmodernism, 156). The postmodern subject, whose identity is fragmented and whose sense of history as a continuous narrative is shattered, would like to believe that things were once better, but has a hard time maintaining that illusion.
Tony’s particularly inconsistent sense of nostalgia provides a paradigmatic example. While often dismissing the nostalgia of others, he can be as nostalgic as anyone. In that same pilot episode, he explains to Melfi that a contemporary decline in the traditional values upheld by gangsters is destroying the whole business. “Things are trending downward,” he tells her. “Used to be a guy got pinched he took his prison jolt no matter what. Everybody upheld the code of silence. Nowadays, no values. Guys today have no room for the penal experience, so everybody turns government witness. I feel exhausted just talking about it.” Tony, however, is not the only gangster who feels this way. In fact, this nostalgic sense of a decline in the gangster business absolutely dominates the early episodes of The Sopranos.
One of the most interesting aspects of the figuration of nostalgia in The Sopranos is that it is so multigenerational. The narrative of the series involves three generations of gangsters: an older generation, represented primarily by Tony’s uncle, Junior Soprano (and, to an extent, by Paulie); the “current” generation, represented primarily by Tony; and the younger generation, represented by Tony’s “nephew,” Christopher Moltisanti. All three generations, as it turns out, are extremely nostalgic—and typically in very much the same way. Still in that first episode, Junior complains to Tony’s mother Livia, his contemporary, about Tony and his whole generation (who reached adulthood around the end of the 1970s): “Do you remember the crazy hair, and the dope? Now it’s fags in the military. . . . And I’ll tell you something else. Things are down, all across the board. A lot of friends of ours are complaining.” He then implies that the problem is Tony and others of his generation who have caused this decline with their lack of respect for tradition. It is not, of course, surprising that a member of the older generation might be especially nostalgic for the good old days of organized crime. Yet the younger generation feels the same way. In the second episode of the series (“46 Long,” January 17, 1999), Christopher grouses to his friend Brendan that the gangster business has become “fucking chaos. Nobody knows who’s running things any more. . . . I’m talking about the year 2000. The millennium. Where do we go from here?”
The transgenerational nature of this nostalgia for bygone days of gangsterdom might, of course, be attributed to the fact that the decline all three generations mourn is a real one. This fact would seem to be supported when, in this same second episode, Tony and his crew watch a news report about the contemporary decline of the mob. A mob informer, Vincent Rizzo, explains to an interviewer that “The party’s over. It’s not like it was. . . . The heyday, the golden age, or whatever of the mob, that’s gone. That’s never coming back. And they have only themselves to blame. . . . I think it’s drug trafficking. That ruined everything.”
On the other hand, The Sopranos also consistently interrogates this nostalgic vision as exaggerated, artificial, and excessively sentimental. Key here is New York gangster Johnny Sacrimoni (aka “Johnny Sack”), whose devotion to his obese wife Ginny seems more like a performance than any sort of genuine emotion, making him (and her) the objects of humor of many of the other gangsters. When Johnny gets word that Ralph Cifaretto has made a crass joke about the size of Ginny’s ass, he responds in episode 4.4 (“The Weight,” October 6, 2002) with a demand that Ralph be killed. However, when Johnny takes his complaints to Carmine Lupertazzi (Tony Lipp), the boss of his own family, Lupertazzi mostly looks at his younger colleague in disbelief, then simply explains that Ralph produces too much income to be killed over an off-color remark. Johnny responds with shock that money might be considered more important than his wife’s “honor.” Johnny presses the issue, leading to a meeting among representatives of the Lupertazzis and the Sopranos to discuss the issue. When Johnny still gets no satisfaction, he becomes furious, appealing to a nostalgic vision of older times when such an outrage would never have been tolerated: “Is nothing sacred? I mean, this is my wife we’re talking about here. If this were years ago, would I have even had to ask? I mean, what happened to this thing? For God’s sake, we bend more rules than the Catholic Church.”
Later, when Tony tells Junior about the joke that caused all the trouble, the older man verifies Johnny’s invocation of the past: “Real lack of standards, your generation,” he tells Tony. “My day, John was right. A man would never be expected to stand for a remark like that.” In this day, however, money is king, and so Tony is authorized by Lupertazzi to hit Sacrimoni before he can cause more trouble, the decision seemingly serving as an indication of the decline in standards that so many in the series complain about. Yet, when Junior recommends aging hitman Lou DiMaggio to do the job, he tells Tony a story about DiMaggio’s background that completely undermines this vision of a golden age of gangsterdom in the 1950s. DiMaggio, it turns out, gained his name (in the 1950s) from bashing in another gangster’s head with a baseball bat as a result of a betrayal involving heroin sales.
Indeed, The Sopranos often suggests that it is not clear that there ever really was a “golden age” of mob activity. In episode 2.11 (“House Arrest,” March 26, 2000), Junior complains about all the animosity among gangsters these days. “You know, back in the ’50s we worked together. Even rival families settled their differences amicably.” Tony responds with considerable skepticism: “Oh yeah, I remember that picture of Albert Anastasia lying there all amicable on the barbershop floor.” Tony thus recalls the infamous moment in mob history when the notorious hitman Anastasia (boss of what would become the Gambino crime family, one of the “five families” of the New York Mafia) was killed via a hit engineered by a rival gangster in October 1957. In short, Tony provides a stark reminder that mob life was always brief, brutal, and full of betrayal—even in the golden days of the 1950s, that key locus of Mafia nostalgia in The Sopranos. As Tony bitterly tells Paulie as he begins to wax nostalgic while they are in Florida hiding out from the FBI in episode 6.15 (“Remember When,” April 22, 2007), “Remember when is the lowest form of conversation.”
Tony operates in a similarly unsentimental mode in episode 5.4 (“All Happy Families,” March 28, 2004), in which the aging gangster Feech La Manna (Robert Loggia) joins the Soprano crew.[6] La Manna had originally joined the Mafia back in Italy, then came over to the United States during the 1950s. His memories of the old days are thus particularly focused on that key decade, though he has special trouble understanding the world of 2004 because he has just been released after a twenty-year stint in prison. In one scene, Feech joins Tony and the crew as they discuss the power struggle between Johnny Sack and Little Carmine Lupertazzi in New York after the death of Carmine’s father. Feech proclaims that, back in his day, the son of the old boss would have automatically become the new boss unless he was “actually retarded” or otherwise disabled. A skeptical Tony (no doubt thinking to himself that Little Carmine might be “actually retarded”) replies, “Oh yeah? When was that?” Then, when Feech starts to regale some young gangsters in the room with anecdotes from his younger days, Tony scoffs, “Here we go. Memory Lane.” Later, after Feech engineers the theft of some expensive autos parked at the wedding of a daughter of a Jewish doctor who is a friend of Tony’s (and sends the cars to a shop recommended by Johnny Sack), Tony is furious. When Feech again begins to protest about how it was in his day, Tony explodes: “I don’t wanna hear no more about how it was in your day. You just keep your antidotes [sic] to local color. Like Dynaflows, the McGuire Sisters, or shit like that.”
Dynaflows (a type of automatic transmission featured in Buicks from 1947 to 1963) and the McGuire Sisters (who were active in show business from 1952 to 1968) are primarily icons of the 1950s, so that Tony once again focuses his critique of nostalgia on that golden decade, as its centrality to nostalgic visions in general he seems to recognize. Here, he joins Jameson, who notes in his discussion of postmodern nostalgia that “one tends to feel, that for Americans at least, the 1950s remain the privileged lost object of desire” (Postmodernism, 19). In The Sopranos, though, the 1950s have a special significance. For one thing, Tony was born in 1959, at the end of the decade, thus giving new meaning to his complaint to Melfi in the series pilot that he feels he came in at the end of things. For another thing, the 1950s provided the key historical context for the action of The Godfather, a fact of which Tony himself is quite aware. In episode 1.10 (“A Hit Is a Hit,” March 14, 1999), when he plays golf with a group of Medigans (middle-class, fully assimilated Italian Americans), they ask him how realistic The Godfather was. “I don’t know,” Tony says. “How would I know? That was the ’50s, right?” When they misunderstand and correct him to point out that The Godfather was 1972 (the year of release of the film), all they really demonstrate is their own ignorance, while highlighting Tony’s greater engagement with and knowledge of the film.[7]
Meanwhile, the fact that the memories of the 1950s that seem so crucial to the historical vision of the gangster characters in The Sopranos are so heavily mediated through the representation of the 1950s in The Godfather serves as another indication of the particularly postmodern nature of the nostalgia that features so prominently in The Sopranos, whose characters are not nostalgic for the real 1950s so much as for the vision of the 1950s that was promulgated in subsequent popular culture, especially the culture of the 1970s. As a result, their nostalgia is more a performance of nostalgia than genuine belief in the superiority of the past, which might account for its particularly superficial nature, an aspect of the general impoverishment of affective experience under late capitalism.
In the special case of nostalgia, the impoverishment involved is particularly historical in nature, and the inability to imagine the real 1950s as the starting point of the narrative of decline and decay that underwrites the worldview of most of the characters in The Sopranos is a clear sign of their lack of historical sense. The series itself, by often deconstructing the nostalgic visions of the characters, calls attention to this failed historical sense—which becomes even more clear when the characters (usually Tony) attempt to think back before the 1950s. All history previous to the 1950s seems to exist in some sort of mythological space, absolutely anterior to the present and historically disconnected from it. It is an Edenic time, when men were men and gangsters had honor. The 1950s then represent a turning point, when this eternal paradise is shattered and historical decline begins.
Ultimately, however, the loss of historical sense that Jameson associates with the fragmented identity of the postmodern subject has less to do with an inability to imagine the real historical past than with an inability to imagine possible historical futures. For Jameson,
historicity is, in fact, neither a representation of the past nor a representation of the future (although its various forms use such representations): it can first and foremost be defined as a perception of the present as history. (Postmodernism, 284)
In short, the real key to what Jameson envisions when he speaks of thinking historically is an ability to imagine the present as the past of some potential future—which implies an ability to think of the future as something different from the present that nevertheless grows out of the present.
It is this ability that individuals living in the era of late capitalism tend to lack, a fact that for Jameson is key to many aspects of our contemporary culture, including the early-twenty-first-century fascination with postapocalyptic narratives. With regard to these narratives, Jameson notes: “Someone once said it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. We can now revise that and witness the attempt to imagine capitalism by way of imagining the end of the world” (“Future City,” 76). For Jameson, our ability to imagine a genuinely different future has become so impoverished in the postmodern era that the only way we can envision anything radically different is simply to imagine everything coming to an end, possibly in apocalyptic ways, forcing history to reboot, rather than simply to continue from the present.
Surely there is nothing in contemporary culture that better illustrates the postmodern inability to imagine a genuine historical narrative of the future than the famous cut to black that constitutes the apocalyptic ending of The Sopranos. This controversial ending, which triggered a storm of both praise and condemnation when the episode was first broadcast, is given an especially postmodern, self-referential quality by the fact that the screen goes black just as the band Journey, playing diegetically on the jukebox, demands “Don’t stop . . .” as if begging the series to go on for more episodes. But of course, in the absence of an effective narrative of movement into the future, there is nowhere to go.
The title of this episode, of course, is taken from the 1869 novel by Gustave Flaubert. Only two episodes earlier—in 4.4, “All Happy Families . . . ” (March 28, 2004)—would-be suitor Robert Wegler (David Strathairn) advises Carmela to read Flaubert’s best-known novel, Madame Bovary (1856), in which a major goal is a deflation of bourgeois sentimentality, which plagues its heroine but is typically undermined by events and by the narrator. As Booker puts it, in Madame Bovary “Flaubert is absolutely merciless in cutting through the maudlin fictions of nineteenth-century bourgeois culture, compiling a catalog of sentimental clichés” that deconstructs the sentimentalism of nineteenth-century French bourgeois society (Ulysses, 162). Madame Bovary thus provides a useful analogue to the complex treatment of sentimentality in The Sopranos.
This study was a real one (and one of some importance), published in the 1970s and 1980s. Apparently, Dr. Melfi is not necessarily up on the latest research in the field.
Slotkin notes extensive connections between the Western and the gangster film in general, arguing that the gangster genre “developed on the terrain of the Western and took over some of its mythological function” (259).
It is not entirely clear from the context whether Tony is metaphorically referring to the loss of his virginity, or whether he is even more metaphorically referring to the first time he killed someone, though it is probably the latter, because he and Pussy are just coming from a killing. Sex and violence are often interwoven in The Sopranos, however, so this moment of interpretive uncertainty is quite appropriate.
The one-legged Svetlana (a cousin of Tony’s former gumar, Irina) will be treated rather unsentimentally by Janice, who steals Svetlana’s artificial leg and holds it ransom in an attempt to retrieve the record albums.
The casting of Loggia already has nostalgic connotations of its own, his career playing tough guys and gangsters itself going back to the 1950s and including such highlights as appearances in Scarface (1983) and Prizzi’s Honor (1985). Interestingly, Loggia also appeared in the 1997 TV movie comedy The Don’s Analyst as a clinically depressed mob boss who needs psychiatric help.
The Godfather Part II, which is equally important in The Sopranos, is set primarily in 1958–1959, and so participates in this trend as well.