In episode 4.4 (“The Weight,” October 6, 2002), uxorious New York gangster John (“Johnny Sack”) Sacrimoni wants to have Ralph Cifaretto killed for making a rude joke about the size of Sacrimoni’s wife’s ass. When his boss, Carmine Lupertazzi, refuses and suggests that Ralph be financially “taxed” instead, Sacrimoni responds with exasperation: “Is it all just about money?” Sacrimoni here echoes the concerns expressed only one episode earlier—in episode 4.3 (“Christopher,” September 29, 2002)—by Silvio Dante when he feels that his mob boss, Tony Soprano, is only concerned about money, even at the expense of the ethnic honor of Italian Americans. When Sil wants to take action against a group of Native Americans who are protesting against an upcoming Columbus Day celebration, Tony cautions him to back off because of the bad PR that might ensue. “We’re runnin’ a business here,” Tony reminds him. We are, in fact, reminded repeatedly in The Sopranos that organized crime is a business, designed primarily to generate profits. In The Sopranos, in fact, everything is a business, which is as it should be in a late capitalist world in which the ideology of the market has penetrated every aspect of daily life. The Sopranos presents us with a world in which everyone is motivated primarily by self-interest and in which everyone, thoroughly immersed in the ideology of late capitalism, ultimately has a price. As Steven Hayward and Andrew Biro put it, “The Sopranos presents a world in which the logic of the market is everywhere triumphant, and where loyalty (whether corporate or familial or, in the case of the Mafia, both of these at once) is increasingly treated as a commodity to be bought or sold” (206). The question, in terms of The Sopranos, is just how we are to interpret this aspect of the series: as a mere acknowledgement of the way things are, or as a critique that points toward a world not thoroughly dominated by economic interests. The Sopranos is thoroughly situated within postmodernism, so of course it is the former.
That the world of The Sopranos is dominated by economic interests is quite clear. Tony Soprano’s organized crime family might be the central example of this phenomenon, but government institutions, educational institutions, the Catholic Church, and even the family (so seemingly sacred to many of the characters) all seem to operate according to profit-based models throughout the series. Even the FBI, presumably the antagonist of organized crime, seems to operate according to a similar business-based model. In episode 2.11 (“House Arrest,” March 26, 2000), for example, Tony consults his lawyer, Neil Mink (David Margulies), about the ongoing FBI investigation that has been dogging him throughout the series. Mink, who well understands how the system works, explains that the Feds are not likely to let up on their pursuit of him because they already have so much invested in it: “The Feds are a business, Anthony. Millions of tax dollars invested in watching your ass. Sooner or later they’re gonna want a return on that investment.” In short, the battle between the FBI and organized crime is presented not as a struggle between polar moral opposites, but one between competing corporations, each seeking to succeed at the expense of the other. Meanwhile, other government organizations and projects are cynically viewed in the series merely as a potential target of graft and source of income for organized crime. The notion of a private–public separation, in which the government operates for the public good free of special interests or profit motives, is virtually nonexistent.
The most overt example of the conversion of education into economics occurs in the third-season sequence, in which a dean from Columbia University attempts to extract a $50,000 donation from Carmela, who has been led to believe that such a donation will significantly increase daughter Meadow’s chances of being admitted to the Ivy League school. She floats the idea of the donation with Tony, arguing that it is necessary to make sure Meadow is “protected.” Tony, though, knows protection rackets all too well, and initially balks at the idea: “I won’t pay,” he says. “I know too much about extortion.” Later he refers to the people at Columbia as those “Morningside Heights gangsters,” though eventually he gives in, just to placate Carmela.
One of the markers of Tony’s success is his ability to send his children to expensive private schools, and (while he might complain about the cost) he is clearly pleased to have the status associated with having children in such schools, which he largely values precisely because they are so expensive. This requires, of course, not only the payment of exorbitant tuition, but extra donations as well, especially in the case of Tony’s son A. J., whose misbehavior eventually leads to his expulsion from Verbum Dei, the elite Catholic high school he has been attending. Then, after a brief flirtation with sending A. J. to an expensive military academy, Tony and Carmela enroll their son in another expensive private school, but only after Tony “pulls some strings,” which no doubt involves a financial transaction or two. Indeed, this information is revealed at the beginning of episode 4.1 (“For All Debts Public and Private,” September 15, 2002), the very title of which (taken from an inscription on U.S. currency) indicates the importance of money throughout the episode. Moreover, in an interesting example of the careful construction of scenes in The Sopranos, the moment in which Tony complains of having had to pull these strings occurs immediately after Carmela has been reading in a newspaper about the traditional Italian practice of influence peddling (raccomandazione), which had just been ruled legal by an Italian high court as a normal part of Italian culture.
Carmela is also involved in the most overt example in this episode of the commodification of everything under late capitalism, in particular of the completion of the process described long ago by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto by which capitalism, while continuing to employ sentimental rhetoric about the family to further its own purposes, has in reality “torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation into a mere money relation” (Tucker, 476). As Tony attempts to watch the 1959 Western Rio Bravo on television, Carmela interrupts him to complain that she is feeling financially insecure, afraid that she will not be able to continue to live in the style to which she has become accustomed should something happen to Tony. After all, most of Tony’s resources are hidden from her “for her own protection,” and most of his resources are hidden in a complex network of offshore bank accounts, dummy companies, and bird feed, so she is feeling a bit nervous, especially after seeing what her friend Angie Bonpensiero has been reduced to after the death of her own gangster husband (at the hands of Tony, Sil, and Paulie, though Carmela doesn’t know that).
When Carmela suggests that they begin to put aside some of Tony’s income so that they can start a portfolio to give her greater financial security, Tony dismisses the idea: “Stocks? You gotta be high up in the corporate structure to make that shit work for you. We don’t have those Enron-type connections.” Tony here once again reveals his class-based antagonism toward the rich, while his reference to the then-recent Enron scandal shows his cynical belief that “legitimate” business is every bit as dishonest as his own. But this encounter will initiate a major subplot in the series, which involves Carmela’s ongoing attempts to gain greater independence, maneuvering (often directly against Tony) to put herself in a better financial position.
Indeed, the financial struggle between the two of them will be a constant source of tension in their marriage through most of the rest of the series. Tony has a point about shielding Carmela from information about his business dealings, an awareness of which would legally make her his accomplice. But of course Carmela is perfectly well aware of what Tony does for a living, and—while she nominally disapproves of his criminal activities—she is more than happy to enjoy the benefits of the income that Tony’s crimes produce. In episode 3.7 (“Second Opinion,” April 8, 2001), Carmela consults a crusty old Jewish psychiatrist who refuses to blame her current unhappiness on events from her childhood and instead advises her to deal with the source of any guilt she might be feeling directly by leaving Tony and refusing to continue to serve as his accomplice and enabler, profiting from his crimes. Carmela, of course, ultimately declines to accept this advice, though it does probably contribute to tensions that lead to her separation from Tony later in the series.[1] In general, however, those tensions are due not to the fact that Carmela does not wish to profit from Tony’s crimes so much as from the fact that she wants a bigger piece of the pie.
In episode 4.8 (“Mergers and Acquisitions,” November 3, 2002), the title making clear the economic nature of the episode, all human relationships are clearly reduced to the status of economic transactions. The episode features Tony’s “acquisition” of new mistress Valentina La Paz (Leslie Bega) from Ralph Cifaretto, though Tony initially turns Valentina down, because “for one thing, I already took his horse.” She slaps him and leaves, enraged at being put in the same category of commodity as the racehorse Pie-O-My. Meanwhile, Ralph’s former lover, Janice, demands three thousand dollars from her brother Tony in return for information about Ralph’s sex life. She then verifies Ralph’s weird sexual proclivities, which helps Tony to justify taking Valentina from Ralph after all. Tony seems a more promising investment of her energies than Ralph, so Valentina returns, despite her earlier indignation.
In this same episode Carmela continues to struggle to learn more about the family finances so that she can make sure she gets her fair share. As she puts it, “women are supposed to be partners nowadays. I’m not a feminist, I’m not saying 50–50, but Jesus. I put up with his gumar shit, pardon my French. Well, I made my peace with it.” She is not, however, at peace with finding Valentina’s fake fingernail (which she assumes belongs to Irina, Tony’s former mistress) amid Tony’s things, and in retribution she absconds with tens of thousands of dollars in Tony’s hidden cash. Carmela then shows that she has learned a few things from her husband when she deposits the money in several different accounts, so each deposit can stay under $10K and not have to be reported to the IRS. However, her financial savvy only extends so far. We learn in episode 6.16 (“Chasing It,” April 29, 2007), during a violent confrontation between Tony and Carmela (over, of course, money), that he knows she took the cash—and that she subsequently invested it in stocks, losing it all, as Tony would have predicted.
The ongoing financial struggle between Tony and Carmela is not the only example in The Sopranos of family relations being reduced to economic ones. As Livia Soprano declines in health, she begins to give away her things, including giving some expensive jewelry to a distant cousin in episode 1.2 (“46 Long,” January 17, 1999). This event causes Tony to explode in anger at the way she is dissipating the inheritance that she could otherwise have left for her surviving family members. But, of course, it is Janice who circles most buzzard-like of all as she greedily awaits the possible death of her mother, for whom she pretends an affection she obviously does not feel just because she can smell cash.
Priests such as Father Phil Intintola also seem rather buzzard-like as they circle the Sopranos and other families in search of donations. Father Phil always seems open to receiving free meals and personal gifts, especially from women constituents, while he and the other priests seen in the series are often quite overt in following the example of both the Soprano crime family and Columbia University in seeking protection money. Paulie, for example, seems to have made especially large donations to the church over the years, but increasingly feels in the series that he is not getting his money’s worth. In episode 2.9 (“From Where to Eternity,” March 12, 2000), he suffers from nightmares and feels haunted by the ghosts of those he has killed. He complains to his priest that he should have immunity from such things because of all his donations to the church. He then declares that he is cutting them off because they have failed to protect him from supernatural malice, thus not delivering on their end of the bargain.
In episode 6.9 (“The Ride,” May 7, 2006), Paulie is in charge of organizing a local Catholic festival devoted to Saint Elzéar of Sabran. The festival features carnival-like rides and booths, as well as a procession in which a statue of the saint, wearing a gold hat purportedly once worn by the saint himself and now held by the local Catholic church, is carried through the streets. Traditionally, the festival (a profit-making enterprise more than a spiritual one, of course) has donated $10,000 to the church for the annual use of the hat, but when Paulie goes to collect the hat he finds that the new priest, Father José, demands $50,000 instead. Paulie angrily decides to let the statue go hatless during its procession through the streets (a procession in which it is, tellingly, wearing a cloak covered with dollar bills pinned on by devotees seeking the favor of the saint). Then, when an accident on one of the carnival rides causes injuries (including a fake injury to Janice, who hopes to collect insurance money), some wonder whether Paulie should have paid the protection money to the church after all.
In The Sopranos, the government, the educational system, families, and the church all operate essentially as businesses, motivated by their own particular quest for profits. Little wonder, then, that the Soprano crime family is presented in the same light. Indeed, while Tony likes to imagine that his business is held together by bonds of honor and loyalty, and that the gangsters who make up his organization constitute a sort of family, the fact is that they are held together primarily by common economic interests—and by fear. In episode 5.4 (“All Happy Families,” March 28, 2004), Carmela grouses that Tony has no friends and that the gangsters who make up his crew are only flunkies who kiss up to him because he’s the boss and they’re scared of him. Tony defends himself by once again appealing to his role as a businessman: “What do I give a shit if they’re scared or whatever? I’m running a fucking business here, not a popularity contest.”
Indeed, while the methods employed by Tony and his ilk might be unconventional and extralegal, there are implications that these methods are not necessarily all that different (or even less ruthless) than the methods employed by more “legitimate” businesses. They are also not necessarily less harmful, as when Tony justifies his own activities in episode 1.7 (“Down Neck,” February 21, 1999) by asking, “What about chemical companies dumping all that shit in the river and they got deformed babies poppin’ up all over the place?”
Similarly, in “From Where to Eternity” (episode 2.9), Tony attempts to convince Jennifer Melfi that, for Italian Americans, organized crime is an agent of cultural preservation and working-class self-defense. He tells her that America only let “all us Italians” in to begin with so that they could provide cheap labor to make the more mainstream “Carnegies and the Rockefellers” richer. Tony then suggests that organized crime is just an extension of American business by other means, though his description suggests his consistent hostility toward those whose business efforts are more respected by mainstream Americans than are his own:
But some of us didn’t want to swarm around their hive and lose who we were. We wanted to stay Italian and preserve the things that meant something to us: honor, family, and loyalty. And some of us wanted a piece of the action. We weren’t educated like the Americans, but we had the balls to take what we wanted. And those other fucks, the J. P. Morgans, they were crooks and killers, too, but that was their business, right? The American Way.
Of course, Tony is here partly just trying to justify himself, but he is not the only one in the series to make this connection between capitalism and crime. In episode 1.10 (“A Hit Is a Hit,” March 14, 1999), a group of cultured, upper-crust “Medigans” (Italian Americans who have fully assimilated and thus feel entirely at home living the American dream) gather for a dinner party at the home of Dr. Bruce Cusamano, Tony’s personal physician and next-door neighbor. Cusamano tries to impress his guests (who include Melfi) by discussing what it is like to have a notorious gangster as a neighbor, instead of the expected upper-middle-class businessmen and professionals. One of the guests, however, intones, “Some of the shit I see in the boardroom, I don’t know if I’d make a distinction.” Cusamano, showing the linguistic influence of his colorful neighbor, responds, “Sometimes I think the only thing separating American business from the mobs is fuckin’ whackin’ somebody.”
Because of its criminal nature (which includes avoiding the kind of record-keeping that ordinary businesses employ) we are never quite sure just how big Tony’s business is, though it certainly is big enough to allow him to pursue a lavish lifestyle, marked by a posh suburban home, a string of luxury cars, an expensive boat, and so on. Moreover, while at times his business seems almost to be limited to relatively banal, even small-time crimes in northern New Jersey, at other times his criminal empire seems to have nearly global reach. For example, in episode 6.10 (“Moe n’ Joe,” May 14, 2006), we learn that Tony’s business interests extend at least as far as New Orleans. Here, Sacrimoni, arrested on charges of racketeering, scrambles to find cash after the government freezes his assets while he is in the midst of negotiating a plea agreement with them. He tries to arrange the sale of a New Orleans heavy equipment leasing company in which he is a silent partner so that he can collect some cash that the government doesn’t know about. He sends his brother-in-law to ask Tony to help broker the deal because of Tony’s post-Katrina “knowledge of business in the area.” Indeed, Tony has apparently gained considerable income from government-funded reconstruction efforts in New Orleans. As he himself puts it, “FEMA’s down there handing out Krugerrands in buckets. . . . Let me say this. Dick Cheney for president—of the fuckin’ universe.” Tony reluctantly agrees to help broker the deal, but one of the two brothers who are the main partners in the company refuses to sell because he envisions big profits going forward thanks to all the post-Katrina reconstruction.
Even farther afield, Tony maintains extensive business contacts in his Italian homeland, especially in the Naples region where his family has its roots. Not only does he occasionally bring “cousins” over to do hits that will thus be hard to trace back to his New Jersey family, he also maintains a number of ongoing business relations with criminal organizations in the area. For example, in episode 2.4 (“Commendatori,” February 6, 2000), Tony travels (with Paulie and Christopher Moltisanti) to Naples to negotiate a sweeter deal on the international car theft operation that he is running with them. Tony’s crew steals autos in the United States, then ships them to Naples for further distribution in Eastern Europe, indicating that the globalization so central to late capitalism extends to Tony’s business as well.
To an extent, Tony has realized Michael Corleone’s dream of moving beyond the largely medieval structure of Vito Corleone’s empire into the modern era of capitalist business, though (like Michael) Tony has been unable to find a way to build his empire within the world of legal enterprise. This movement into modernity is not, however, envisioned as a good thing by Tony and most of his associates, who tend to agree with Sacrimoni that something valuable has been lost in a transition that has made honor and family loyalty less important than the bottom line. Indeed, this transition is a key element of the historical narrative of loss and decline that underwrites the entire series. This transition can also be described as part of the completion of the process of capitalist modernization that Fredric Jameson sees as the crucial historical background for the rise of postmodernism as a hegemonic force in global culture.
Granted, The Sopranos consistently presents the growing penetration of capitalist ideologies and methodologies into the gangster business as a sort of contamination, and to this extent the series is clearly critical of capitalism, which might seem to contradict Jameson’s belief that postmodernist culture is fully complicit with the ideology of late capitalism. The Sopranos does, in fact, conduct a thoroughgoing critique of capitalism, though this fact does not in itself imply that the series is fundamentally anticapitalist. After all, HBO (like Tony Soprano) is running a business here. Indeed, capitalism itself depends on self-critique to drive the innovation and change on which it depends, so that a critique of capitalism is already built in.[2] In addition, the surface content of any cultural artifact does not convey the whole message of that artifact, and Jameson himself has been foremost among the cultural theorists who have argued that there is a “political unconscious” that underlies all works of culture, providing an ideological underpinning that may or may not be consistent with the surface content—or with the attitudes and opinions of the authors of those works.
In the Marxist tradition within which Jameson works, of course, the key figure in this sense is probably the nineteenth-century French realist novelist Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850), a favorite of Marxist critics since at least Friedrich Engels, who have seen him as perhaps the greatest of all bourgeois realist writers—despite the fact that Balzac himself was thoroughly antibourgeois in his own thinking, a nostalgic advocate of France’s ancien régime who was horrified by the historical advent of capitalism. For Balzac, the French Revolution (and the historical advance of bourgeois rule that followed it) destroyed a more genteel world based on traditional, commonly held values and respect for human relationships, replacing that world with a new, materialist one driven by greed and a never-ending quest for money. Yet Balzac also understood that the historical victory of European capitalism over its feudal predecessor was, by the early nineteenth century, a foregone conclusion. Indeed, what Balzac’s novels collectively represent is nothing less than this ongoing historical process, which Jameson has labeled the “bourgeois cultural revolution,” arguing that it can be regarded as “the only true Event of history,” meaning “history” as described via the scientific historiography pioneered by bourgeois historians in the nineteenth century and developed into a more sophisticated and theoretically coherent form by Marx himself (Signatures, 227). Balzac’s critique of capitalism, in fact, quite closely resembles the similar critique that is leveled within The Sopranos (though he is looking at a much earlier stage in the process), and the fact that his nominally antibourgeois novels are among the most effective carriers of bourgeois ideology in all of literature should give us pause before declaring The Sopranos to be an effective work of anticapitalist critique.
While Balzac is not among the numerous authors to whom The Sopranos makes specific reference, his work does, in fact, provide an important point of comparison with what is going on in the series. In addition to the parallel noted above, for example, the sinister Vautrin, a crucial character in Balzac’s 1835 novel Le Père Goriot (and who appeared in two later novels as well), is probably the first mob boss to be featured in all of world literature. Inspired by famous real-world criminal—and later criminologist—Eugène François Vidocq, Vautrin is a mastermind who is so adept that he is able to continue to run his vast criminal empire from prison even after he is incarcerated (though, like Vidocq, he eventually goes straight). In any case, Balzac’s inclusion of Vautrin in his novels serves the clear purpose of suggesting that Vautrin’s criminal activities are not really all that different from “legitimate” business, which is, for Balzac, little more than crime carried out under the cloak of the law.
This parallel between capitalism and crime might explain why Vautrin (aka Jacques Collin) is still able to succeed after he leaves his life of crime behind him, though his story has the inadvertent effect of suggesting that capitalism is a meritocracy that offers multiple opportunities for the talented and hardworking to do well. In any case, Balzac’s use of crime as a motif for critiquing capitalism is one that would later be picked up by numerous critics of the system, including the gangster film tradition that forms such an important part of the background of The Sopranos. On the other hand, whereas Balzac presented organized crime as simply another version of capitalist enterprise, the gangster film cycle that arose at the beginning of the 1930s—including such works as Little Caesar (1931), Public Enemy (1931), and Scarface (1932)—tended to present gangsterism as a reaction against the dehumanizing consequences of capitalism. As Robert Sklar notes, “Gangster films set the character of the first golden age of Depression-era movies. . . . Hollywood’s gangsters stood at the very center of their society’s disorder—they were created by it, took their revenge on it, and ended finally as its victims” (179). In this way, early film gangsters such as Rico Bandello and Tom Powers became populist heroes, little guys who were driven to extreme measures by the operations of a heartless capitalist system that made them outcasts.
Tony Soprano, of course, sometimes likes to see himself this way (Tom Powers of Public Enemy seems to be a particular hero of his), and his rise from the working class through criminal means has clearly left him feeling less than comfortable in his new upper-middle-class milieu.[3] Even the fronts that he uses to justify his lifestyle with the IRS (a garbage-collection business and a strip club) are on the fringes of legitimacy. Meanwhile, Tony’s interactions with the highly respectable Medigans leave him feeling like he is on the outside looking in. Thus, when he is invited to play golf with a group of his Medigan neighbors, they treat him like an anthropological specimen who, they hope, can provide them with lurid details about the gangster business, which clearly fascinates them.
In general, however, Ingrid Walker Fields is surely correct when she declares that The Sopranos presents a “portrait of a mob fully entrenched in American capitalism,” an observation that is borne out by Tony’s own repeated claims that his criminal activities are just a “business” (614). Indeed, with the advent of the Godfather films, especially Godfather II, the Balzacian sense that organized crime was aligned with, rather than against, corporate capitalism was back in full force. Moreover, if the narrative arc that runs through the first two Godfather films describes the growing corporatization of organized crime, it clearly describes this process as a loss, directly anticipating the similar sense of decline that runs through The Sopranos.
This sense of decline figures throughout the series. In episode 3.3 (“Fortunate Son,” March 11, 2001), we are treated to an insider’s view of the “making” ceremony through which Christopher Moltisanti is initiated as a full-fledged member of the Mafia. The ceremony itself has clearly medieval intonations, including a moment when Tony draws blood from Christopher’s hand to symbolize the fact that Christopher is now a member of the crime family, joined to the other members as if they were blood relations.[4] Tony, presiding over the proceedings, announces, “Once you enter this family, there’s no getting out. . . . It’s a thing of honor.” Then the initiates repeat an oath, proclaiming their loyalty to the gangster code of omerta: “May I burn in hell if I betray my friends.” The ceremony is meant to have solemnity and to link Christopher and the other initiate to a long line of their forebears. The only problem is that the ceremony is being held in a tawdry basement, so that the surroundings somewhat detract from the intended gravity of the occasion, suggesting instead the extent to which the gangster tradition is in decay. It also doesn’t help that the time-honored ceremony is immediately followed by a drunken celebration involving strippers from the Bada Bing!
Given the fallen nature of the ceremony, it should come as no surprise that Christopher’s dream of gaining prestige and respect as a made man quickly descends into a mad scramble for cash. Assigned to Paulie’s crew, Christopher finds that the older man is interested not in camaraderie and blood ties, but in the money Christopher can make for him in the gambling operation he is given to run. When Christopher loses money instead, he falls into debt and must frantically try to generate more income so that he can pay Paulie, with whom he nearly comes to blows. Far from being drawn closer by Christopher’s new status, Christopher and Paulie find that their friendship has been replaced by a business relationship. The respect and brotherhood promised by the making ceremony are replaced by animosity and greed as modern capitalism displaces medieval bonds of loyalty. Money changes everything.
It is not, however, exactly clear just how critical of capitalism The Sopranos is meant to be, especially as it fails to present anything in the way of a preferable alternative. Tony Soprano is certainly no Robin Hood, stealing from the rich to give to the poor. Nor is he a socialist warrior, battling for justice for the poor in an attempt to correct the inequities of the capitalist system. Indeed, despite a vaguely Republican leaning (exemplified by his expressed admiration for Dick Cheney), Tony is largely apolitical. Unlike the Corleones, who rub shoulders with U.S. senators and diplomats (and can dream of making one of their own president), Tony lacks connections in high places, his dealings with politicians being limited to sleazy, small-time operations such as his interactions with New Jersey State Assemblyman Ronald Zellman (though these interactions can be part of scams that are quite lucrative).
In a similar way, The Sopranos as a series has no particular political axe to grind, and its critique of capitalism is halfhearted at best, partly because it suggests so little in the way of an alternative. Indeed, in The Sopranos the main alternative to capitalism is a medieval system of blood loyalty, and the series unequivocally declares that system to be dead and gone. The series, in this sense, is completely in accord with late capitalism, one of the principal maneuvers of which is to declare that there is no alternative to capitalism. Indeed, while fundamentally agreeing with Jameson’s theorization of postmodernism, Mark Fisher has declared that this sense of a lack of an alternative is central to what he calls “capitalist realism,” which is essentially the same phenomenon that Jameson was calling “postmodernism” at the beginning of the 1990s, only more so, having had more time to develop by the time Fisher was writing two decades later. In particular, Fisher argues that “some of the processes which Jameson described and analyzed have now become so aggravated and chronic that they have gone through a change in kind” (7).
Importantly, Fisher sees recent gangster films and gangster rap as key symptoms of this aggravated postmodern worldview in contemporary culture, in that
the affinity between hip hop and gangster movies such as Scarface, The Godfather films, Reservoir Dogs, Goodfellas and Pulp Fiction arises from their common claim to have stripped the world of sentimental illusions and seen it for “what it really is”: a Hobbesian war of all against all, a system of perpetual exploitation and generalized criminality. (10–11)
In short, both of these cultural forms cynically view capitalist competition as somehow embedded in the very fabric of reality, making any attempt to think beyond this view of the world unrealistic, naïve, and doomed to failure.
One could quibble that at least the first Godfather film, more modernist than postmodernist, does not really belong on this list, retaining as it does vestiges of older forms that might suggest alternative social and economic structures to those of late capitalism. But Fisher is surely right that, beginning with Godfather II, the gangster film has become increasingly cynical about the possibilities of a world outside of capitalism, with the world of organized crime serving essentially as a microcosm of this larger world of cutthroat competition. The Sopranos clearly participates in this trend, even as it vaguely tries to criticize it. However, the case of the original Godfather film demonstrates that the gangster narrative need not give in entirely to the defeatist dictates of capitalist realism. Indeed, one of the best-known and most effective critiques of capitalism in all of literature appears in a gangster narrative in the form of Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera (1928), which famously suggests in its story of the English gangster McHeath that founding a bank is a far greater crime than robbing one. Brecht’s work, both Marxist and modernist in its inclinations, differs from Balzac’s and from The Sopranos, however, in that it is informed by a strong socialist perspective that offers a genuine alternative to capitalism rather than looking nostalgically to a past that is clearly not coming back.
Brecht returned to the gangster narrative in 1941 with The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, which moves its setting to the United States (Chicago) and features Italian American gangsters. In this sense (and in the way it features strong comic elements), Arturo Ui has more in common with The Sopranos than does The Threepenny Opera. However, between 1928 and 1941, the Nazis had risen to power in Brecht’s native Germany, and the later gangster play functions specifically as an allegorical critique of fascism—among other things demythologizing Hitler via the eponymous Ui, a small-time hood whose success is largely due to the fact that his mediocrity and banality perfectly match the mediocrity and banality of the capitalist system that produced him. The Threepenny Opera had focused its critique on capitalism in general, but in both cases the critique is made more powerful by the underlying suggestion of a socialist alternative. No such alternative exists in The Sopranos or in other capitalist realist works, which are so immersed within the world of late capitalism that they have no place to stand where they can launch an effective critique of that system.
Tony’s series of mistresses, or “gumars,” obviously contributes to these tensions as well. It is part of Italian gangster culture as presented in The Sopranos unofficially to endorse this practice, with wives looking the other way while their husbands supplement the sexual capital provided by the wives with that provided by the mistresses—in return for substantial financial support. The gumars are, then, virtual prostitutes, and highly paid ones at that.
Citing Slavoj Žižek’s elaboration of this notion, Mark Fisher notes that “anti-capitalism is widely disseminated in capitalism” and that a “gestural anti-capitalism” actually reinforces capitalism, rather than undermining it (12).
On Tony’s status as an insecure middle-class Everyman, see Toscano.
The importance of this symbolic drawing of blood in Mafia tradition is made clear in episode 6.20 (“Blue Comet,” June 3, 2007), in which rival gangster Phil Leotardo argues that Tony should be killed partly because he poses a threat to the traditions of the mob. As evidence, he claims (falsely) that the Sopranos do not conduct the making ceremony properly, and do not include the pricking of the finger in the ceremony.