While The Sopranos participates in multiple genres, it is first and foremost a gangster narrative, highly aware of its predecessors in that genre. Carl Freedman has noted how strongly connected The Sopranos is to the American gangster-film tradition that preceded it, arguing that the series owes “an almost incalculable empirical debt . . . to the tradition of the mob movie in general” (73). On the other hand, the exact nature of this connection is rather complex, and Dana Polan has argued that one of the themes of the series is its “ersatz relation to prior gangster stories” (6). Indeed, Freedman has speculated that The Sopranos, arriving late in the history of that tradition, might just mark the end of the gangster film as we know it, the shift from cinema to television being just one marker of that ending.[1] It is certainly the case that The Sopranos repeatedly indicates its own awareness of the belatedness of its position in American cultural history, and that a crucial element of that awareness is its dialogue with the gangster-film tradition—from its controversial beginnings in the pre-Code gangster-film cycle of the early 1930s, to the towering achievement of the first two Godfather films in the 1970s, to the gangster-film renaissance of the 1990s, led by Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990). This dialogue is itself interesting as an indication of the status of The Sopranos as a work of and within American cultural history. But it is made particularly rich by the way in which the series uses its engagement with gangster films as a vehicle for commentary on any number of the other issues addressed by the series.
For example, a crucial moment in the dialogue of The Sopranos with the gangster film occurs in episode 3.2 (“Proshai, Livushka,” March 4, 2001), in which the status of gangster films as American cultural artifacts is emphasized by the fact that Tony’s daughter Meadow is assigned to watch William Wellman’s The Public Enemy (1931) for a class at Columbia University entitled “Images of Hyper-Capitalist Self-Advancement in the Era of the Studio System.” This pretentious course title involves a certain amount of gentle academic satire, of course, but The Public Enemy, a crucial founding text in the gangster genre, is certainly a good choice for such a topic. Along with such films as Little Caesar (1931) and Scarface (1932), The Public Enemy helped to establish the gangster film as a major genre of early-Depression American cinema, expressing as it did so many anxieties of the era. 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). Like the other gangster films of its time, The Public Enemy makes it clear that gangsterism arises out of a Depression-era economic situation that leaves few legal opportunities for social and economic advancement. These early gangster films were thus emblematic of their particular historical moment, paving the way for gangster films to become a major venue for cinematic social commentary going forward. Via discussions such as Robert Warshow’s seminal figuration of the gangster as tragic urban hero, gangster films have gained a special status as allegorical artifacts, though gangsters have functioned both as emblems of capitalist ruthlessness and as populist heroes of resistance to capitalism. Such readings make the gangster genre a classic American form, while at the same time making the genre appear in retrospect more prominent in American film history than it actually was prior to the first two Godfather films, which gave gangster films an entirely new status as works of cinematic art.
In episode 1.8 (“The Legend of Tennessee Moltisanti,” February 28, 1999), psychiatrist Jennifer Melfi’s son Jason LaPenna states the status of gangster movies quite clearly when he suggests (in answer to his father’s complaints about mob movies giving Italians a bad rap) that “at this point in our cultural history, mob movies are classic American cinema, like Westerns.” Of course, gangster films are especially important in the world of Melfi’s patient Tony Soprano. The role played by The Public Enemy in “Proshai, Livushka” provides an excellent example of the use of gangster films in the series. For one thing, Meadow comes to watch the film in her family’s posh suburban New Jersey home (employing Tony’s then state-of-the-art home theater system) because “some schmuck” has stolen the VCR from the common room in her Ivy League dorm. This bit of information, delivered by Meadow without commentary and received by Tony without reaction, contains a subtle suggestion of the way in which the larcenous attitude of Tony and his crew (who seem to regard any commodity they encounter as a potential candidate for theft) is not all that different from the mainstream attitude of American society.
What Tony does react to, and rather gleefully, is his recognition of the film that Meadow is watching, The Public Enemy being one of his favorites. “Public Enemy!” he exclaims when he sees what she is watching. “This is a great movie!” Tony, however, is less gleeful at the discovery that Meadow is watching the film with “a friend from class,” Noah Tannenbaum (Patrick Tully). Immediately after introducing himself, Noah thanks Tony for the use of the hall: “I appreciate you letting us screen here. Those Bose direct reflectors make all the difference.” The pretentious Noah then follows up on his gratuitous display of technical knowledge by explaining the roots of the gangster-film genre to Tony, a man who (unbeknownst to Noah) understands that genre in a way that Noah will never be able to: “People say Hawks invented the genre with Scarface, but Cagney was modernity. Muni was not. So I give the nod to William Wellman.”
This comment, of course, is meant to display Noah’s extensive knowledge of film and cultural theory, though it really does little but indicate that he is an intellectual snob with just enough knowledge to be able to spout seemingly profound observations that are actually meaningless. Tony, whose knowledge of the gangster film and its implications is much more authentic (even if he has less access to technical jargon), ignores the air of class-based superiority that Noah exudes, which in itself would be plenty to render the young man unlikeable. Instead, Tony focuses on Noah’s dark skin and kinky hair, developing an immediate hostility to the young man that has nothing to do with his intellectual pretentiousness and has everything to do with his racial background. Noah will go on to make sure he informs Tony that his family is “in the business. I mean show business,” which is apparently supposed to be impressive, though the young man appears unaware that Tony is also in the “business” of The Public Enemy in another sense. Tony continues to ignore all this, however. Instead, with the quick eye of the American racist for even a drop of African blood, he already has Noah (despite his very Jewish name) pegged as a “moulinyan.” So, attempting to be as overtly offensive as he possibly can, he asks if the involvement of Noah’s family in show business has anything to do with the “old Tarzan movies,” envisioning Noah’s forebears as bit players portraying inarticulate spearchuckers in those notoriously racist films. This suggestion is so stunningly racist, in fact, that Noah apparently doesn’t even process it. Instead, he merely explains that his (Jewish) father is an entertainment lawyer. Tony presses the issue, continuing to go out of his way to be offensively racist (and intimidating), especially after he verifies that Noah’s mother is an African American and that Noah has apparently used his African American heritage to help him gain admission to Columbia.
Noah exits in a huff, though he will continue to be a factor in the series for several episodes to come, until he breaks up with Meadow, ostensibly because he is too busy studying and she is “too negative,” but also clearly because her father is not only a racist, but frighteningly dangerous. Many male figures will attempt to stand up to Tony over the course of the series, but all of the “civilians” (that is, all who are neither gangsters, nor G-men hunting gangsters) tend to wilt beneath the daunting pressure of his looming presence (and reputation). Tony, of course, is not as strong as he seems, and it is Tony, not Noah, who collapses to the floor unconscious after this disturbing episode, another of his periodic anxiety attacks having been triggered when the face of Uncle Ben peering at him out of his cupboard brings the recent encounter with Noah flooding back to him.
After his recovery from the panic attack, Tony will then be seen through much of the rest of this episode watching The Public Enemy, though it is not made clear whether he is watching it repeatedly or whether it is simply taking him awhile (given everything else that is going on) to get through this beloved film even once. It is not, however, until the very end of the episode that the true emotional resonance of this film for Tony is made clear. Despite the passionate intensity of Tony’s reaction to Noah, the real emotional center of this episode is the sudden death of Tony’s mother, Livia, an event written hastily into the series after the death of Nancy Marchand, the actress who had so brilliantly played the malevolent Livia in the series. Tony is haunted by a fear that he is a terrible person because of his mixed feelings over his mother’s death, feelings that arise not only from recent events (such as Livia’s involvement in Tony’s attempted murder), but also from his sense of being deprived of the genuine experience of a mother’s love during his childhood.
Though The Public Enemy has been widely noted for its frank presentation of the brutality of gangster life, it is also probably the most sentimental of the pre-Code gangster films, especially in its presentation of the death of gangster Tom Powers (Cagney’s character)—a scene that we see Tony watching in this episode of The Sopranos. One of the most notable features of Tom’s death is the impact it will clearly have on his long-suffering mother (played by Beryl Mercer). Her disapproval of Tom’s life of crime never diminishes her love for her son, in whom she believes there is a core of good beneath the rough and violent surface. Indeed, Tom’s death becomes especially poignant because we have just seen his mother happily fluffing his pillow and preparing for what she thinks will be his safe return home. In short, Ma Powers is precisely the sort of conventional nurturing mother that Tony never had, so that Tony’s viewing of this film throughout the episode meshes with the motif of Livia’s death. It is clear that, as Tony watches the film, he fantasizes about what it might be like to have such a mother, and the element of nostalgia that resides in all of Tony’s viewing of gangster films—built on a sense that the gangster business is somehow not what it used to be—is now enhanced with a longing for his mother’s love, something he never had in the first place.
Of course, the gangster business was never what it supposedly used to be either, a fact of which Tony is actually well aware. Still, though he often scoffs at the nostalgic ruminations of others, Tony himself often falls prey to nostalgic longings for the good old days of gangsterism, a sentiment to which he seems particularly susceptible when watching old gangster films. The Godfather sequence is the central example of Tony’s film-inspired nostalgia, and it is certainly the case that the most obvious gangster-film predecessor that hovers over The Sopranos (almost like some sort of sacred text) is the Godfather sequence, which the various gangster characters of the series quote (and misquote) like a televangelist wielding the Bible. This engagement has its comic aspects, as in the way Tony’s consigliere Silvio Dante repeatedly entertains the other members of Tony’s crew by enacting the well-known moment in The Godfather: Part III (1990) when Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) bemoans his inability to escape from gangsterism and move his family into legitimate business: “Just when I thought I was out . . . they pull me back in!” Mostly, though, the gangster characters of the series are serious, almost reverent, in their regard for the Godfather films, which they clearly identify as a key part of their cultural identity, the central place of these films (at least the first two) in the canon of American cinema providing them with a sort of validation and legitimation. Or, as David Pattie puts it, “Tony and his crew are men adrift, and sorely in need of the kind of comfort that only a total immersion in Coppola and Puzo’s universe can bring” (144).
A major point of the Godfather films (and of many other gangster films as well) is to suggest parallels between the activities of gangsters and “legitimate” businessmen, whose operations within the legal boundaries of mainstream capitalism often turn out to be just as ruthless and rapacious as the illegal operations of their gangster counterparts. Indeed, such parallels have often been used to critique capitalism by suggesting that business is really just another sort of crime that happens to have been declared legal. But it is clear that the gangster characters of The Sopranos read this parallel between business and crime in just the opposite direction, using it to reassure themselves that what they are doing is really no worse than (or even much different from) what legitimate businessmen do every day. The Sopranos don’t worry much about getting out or being pulled back in, because it is all pretty much the same thing.
Meanwhile, actual gangsters are not the only ones in The Sopranos who think of the Godfather films as definitive works of gangster culture. In episode 1.10 (“A Hit Is a Hit,” March 14, 1999) Tony is invited to play golf at the local country club by a group of “Medigans” (upper-class, respectable, fully assimilated Italian Americans), who treat him like an ambassador from an exotic foreign culture. Their curiosity about Tony’s life, so different from their own, naturally leads them to ask him about the authenticity of The Godfather films, to which he simply (and sensibly) responds, “I don’t know. How would I know? That was the ’50s, right?”
The Godfather films establish an important presence even as early as the pilot episode of The Sopranos, in which Tony’s wife Carmela entertains Father Phil Intintola (played in the pilot by Michael Santoro, but in later episodes by Paul Schulze) in the Soprano household. A self-proclaimed aficionado of film (and wine and various other things), the pretentious Father Phil compliments the quality of laser discs, at this point a favorite medium in the Soprano household, reminding us that DVDs were still relatively new when this episode was broadcast in January 1999 and suggesting one of the many ways in which the series appeared at a turning point in American entertainment history. Carmela responds with an acknowledgement of Tony’s penchant for watching Godfather on laser disc: “Tony watches Godfather II all the time. He says the camerawork looks just as good as in the movie theater.” The priest nods his agreement that the camerawork is special, and asks about Tony’s taste in film: “Gordon Willis. Tony prefers Two, not One?” Carmela then notes that Tony does indeed prefer the second Godfather film, but that his view of the third pretty much goes with the critical consensus: “He likes the part where Vito goes back to Sicily. Three, he was like, what happened?”
Crucial here is Carmela’s suggestion that Tony’s preference for the second Godfather film (released in 1974) has to do with the sequences in which Robert De Niro plays a young Vito Corleone, who returns to Sicily to avenge the murder of his father while Vito was still a boy there. Tony’s love of this particular aspect of the film neatly encapsulates the problematic relationship between The Sopranos and the Godfather films as a whole, a relationship made even more complex by the complexity of both of these works themselves. On the one hand, Tony’s fascination with young Vito’s return to Sicily clearly relates to his extremely nostalgic vision of Italy as a whole (though his family’s roots are in the Naples area, rather than Sicily). On the other hand, The Sopranos (as does the Godfather sequence itself, but in a different mode) undermines the nostalgia that it itself generates—in this and other ways.
Fredric Jameson describes the sense of nostalgia and longing for better, simpler times that underlies the original Godfather film in his now classic essay, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture” (Signatures). Set mostly in the 1950s (that pivotal decade for all sorts of American nostalgic visions), The Godfather presents the Corleone crime family as a literal family unit, held together by deep-seated traditions and loyalties built on generations of relationships dating back to the old times in Sicily. For Jameson, The Godfather, like much of the gangster-film genre, is centered on a utopian fantasy of collectivity via the notion of traditional family-like connections. In particular, Jameson sees the family-based fantasies of gangster films such as The Godfather as providing images of utopian fulfillment that play a cultural role similar to the one once played (but no longer by 1972, when the first Godfather film appeared) by idyllic small towns. He thus argues that The Godfather “offers a contemporary pretext for a Utopian fantasy which can no longer express itself through such outmoded paradigms and stereotypes as the image of the now extinct American small town” (Signatures, 33).
Of course, the family-based utopian fantasies of The Godfather are already ironized to a certain extent by the fact that the family connections in The Godfather are linked directly to murderous criminal activity. This activity, though, is depicted as being carried out with a certain sense of honor and respect, and Vito Corleone, the Godfather of the title, often plays the role of protector of the innocent and dispenser of justice for those who would otherwise be disenfranchised by the American system. By the time of The Godfather: Part II (1974), which begins at the end of the 1950s, Vito has been replaced by his son Michael as the Godfather of the Corleone family. The family has moved the center of its operations to Las Vegas, hardly a bastion of tradition, and Michael’s coldly calculated corporate management style makes it clear that the business of the Corleones, like that of America, is now business. This narrative of loss of tradition amid the historical movement of capitalist modernization verifies the observation by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto that capitalism, with its drive to increase profits through insistent and never-ending innovation, destroys traditional relationships of all kinds. Meanwhile, this narrative of modernization is interwoven in the film with flashback sequences that involve the childhood of Vito Corleone in Sicily, his immigration to America after the murder of his father by a Sicilian crime lord, and his initial rise to success in organized crime on the streets of New York. Crucial to these sequences is the trip (so admired by Tony) that Vito makes as a still-young man back to Italy to avenge his father’s death, while the Sicilian sequences as a whole unmask the nostalgic vision of Sicily as a birthplace of tradition and family loyalties by showing that the culture there is rooted in violence, backwardness, and the regressive social practices of an essentially still-feudal world.
In short, The Godfather and (especially) Godfather II already undermine the nostalgic/utopian vision of family that is so crucial to the first film in that sequence. Much has been lost to the Corleones between the first film and the second, but much of what was lost was highly questionable to begin with. The Sopranos, though, takes this narrative of loss to a whole new level, a motif that becomes especially clear in episode 2.4 (“Commendatori,” February 6, 2000), in which Tony himself makes a trip back to Italy. Early in the episode, Tony and his crew gather to watch a pirated DVD of Godfather II in the back room of their strip club headquarters. This tawdry setting and circumstance (made even more problematic by the fact that the disc fails to play) ironize the reverence of the gangsters for this much-respected film, though it does give Tony an opportunity to verify Carmela’s earlier observation that the scenes in which Vito visits Sicily are his favorites in the film: “Don Ciccio’s villa, when Vito goes back to Sicily. The crickets. The great old house.” Silvio endorses the choice. Then Tony acknowledges that he is particularly drawn to those scenes these days because of his own upcoming trip to his ancestral homeland of Naples (where he has never before actually been): “Maybe because I’m goin’ over there, you know?”
It should be noted that, while the music and cinematography of the Sicily scenes in Godfather II help to create an air of sentimentality and nostalgia, it is also the case that Vito returns to Sicily on a mission of bloody revenge, somewhat undermining the notion of an emotional return to childhood innocence and ancient beauty. Nevertheless, Vito’s return to avenge the death of his father is presented as a defense of his family’s honor and as an enactment of a traditional obligation, so that it still contains an element of old-fashioned virtue that Tony finds so lacking in his own postmodern gangster world. Tony’s trip, accordingly, is a matter of pure business, as he explains to the greatly disappointed Carmela when he tells her why he is not taking her with him. He is, in fact, going to Naples on the rather unromantic errand of trying to negotiate a better deal on the stolen car business he is running in conjunction with the Camorra, a Mafia-like syndicate that operates in the region.
The episode title refers to the fact that, when Tony and his entourage arrive in Naples, they are addressed as commendatori, the plural form of the Italian term of respect commendatore, a title that Michael Corleone is addressed by when he himself returns to Italy in The Godfather: Part III (1990). Tony’s trip is ultimately a success in the business sense, but Tony is no Michael Corleone, and his Godfather II–inspired romantic expectations of Naples are not met. For example, he is disturbed to find the local mob being run by a woman, and to observe the local mobsters brutally beating up a kid and his mother in the street. So much for honor and tradition. To make matters worse, Tony is accompanied on his trip to Naples by Paulie “Walnuts” Gualtieri, who is equally enthusiastic about visiting Italy, but spends most of his time there engaged in a variety of comic misadventures as he plays Ugly American, appalling his Neapolitan hosts as much as they (and their food and their plumbing) appall him.
Meanwhile, also along on Tony’s trip to Naples is Tony’s young protégé, Christopher Moltisanti (who seems completely uninterested in Naples and spends most of the time there high on heroin and largely unaware of his surroundings). Christopher’s characterization here can be read as part of the general narrative of decline that informs The Sopranos, his lack of reverence for his family’s Neapolitan past serving as an embodiment of the lack of respect for tradition that is typical of his generation of gangsters. Indeed, Christopher seems really more interested in breaking into the film business, which he eventually does by coproducing a horror film, and he horrifies Tony by expressing a willingness to try to convert his experience as a gangster into material for a screenplay, thus showing no respect for the time-honored code of silence among gangsters.
Christopher, unfortunately, will eventually learn that, by the end of the 1990s, Hollywood’s enthusiasm for gangster films has largely waned. The appearance of such gangster comedies as Mickey Blue Eyes (1999) and Made (2001) can be taken partly as a marker of the exhaustion of the gangster-film cycle of the 1990s, and the fact that The Sopranos debuted in January 1999, essentially at the end of this cycle, might also help to explain the combination of irony and eulogism that informs its attitude toward gangster films as a whole. In The Sopranos there is a sense not only that older gangster films document a time in gangster history that is largely lost, but also a sense that the genre itself—with the Godfather films serving as the central instance of a lost great past—might be beginning to recede into the dustbin of history, its customary themes and images no longer appropriate in the contemporary world. Indeed, by the time Christopher is finally (sort of) able to break into the film business, it is as a producer of Cleaver, a sort of combination of The Godfather with supernatural slasher films that shows just how far the genre of The Godfather has fallen.
It is certainly the case that, while the Godfather films loom over The Sopranos, inhabiting the consciousnesses of its characters more than any other films, it is the gangster-film cycle of the 1990s—which included such highlights as Brian De Palma’s Carlito’s Way (1993) and Mike Newell’s Donnie Brasco (1997)—to which the series itself connects most directly and resembles most closely. That cycle itself exists somewhat in the shadow of Goodfellas, which can be regarded as its founding text, so perhaps it is not surprising that Freedman identifies Scorsese’s film as the one to which The Sopranos is indebted most of all, despite the seemingly greater prominence in the series of allusions to the Godfather films. Noting that no fewer than forty-five members of the cast and crew of The Sopranos had also worked on Goodfellas, Freedman argues that David Chase clearly recruited so many individuals from Scorsese’s film as “part and parcel of his creation of a mob ambience deeply allied to that of Goodfellas” (74).
These crossover cast and crew members, incidentally, include Scorsese himself, who makes a brief cameo appearance in only the second episode of The Sopranos (“46 Long,” January 17, 1999). Here, as Christopher and others wait outside hoping to gain entry into a popular club, Scorsese shows up and is, of course, ushered right in. Christopher, apparently a big fan of Scorsese’s work, announces that fact from beyond the barrier that separates him, as an outsider, from Scorsese and the other insiders. Christopher yells out his support for the director and his work, declaring that he “liked Kundun,” the 1997 film about the Dalai Lama that was, at the time this episode was first broadcast, still Scorsese’s most recent work. It was also a departure from Scorsese’s usual subject matter, a box-office flop that many Scorsese fans ignored or disliked.
Christopher thus here declares himself a true and loyal supporter of Scorsese’s work, a status that is also supported by the fact that Christopher is also the character in The Sopranos who most often alludes to Goodfellas in his day-to-day speech.[2] Perhaps not coincidentally, he also seems to be the one among the major gangster characters who is least familiar with the Godfather films. This fact is established in the very first episode of the series, when Christopher commits his first murder via the execution-style killing of Emil Kolar, a member of a family of Czech immigrants who try to move in on the Soprano crew’s garbage collection business. Christopher then employs the help of the veteran gangster Big Pussy Bonpensiero to dispose of the body, wanting to send a message to the Kolars by ostentatiously leaving the corpse for them to discover, explaining his strategy (as characters in The Sopranos frequently do) through a reference to The Godfather. As they prepare to dump the body at a Kolar Brothers dumpster, Christopher says, “Lewis Brasi sleeps with the fishes.” Somewhat exasperated, Pussy corrects him: “Luca Brasi,” he says. And then he suggests that Christopher’s analogy might not be a good one in any case, noting that “there’s differences, Christopher, okay, from the Luca Brasi situation and this.” He convinces Christopher to dispose of the body discreetly instead of trying to send a message, Godfather-style.[3]
Just a few episodes later, in 1.4 (“Meadowlands,” January 31, 1999), The Godfather once again becomes the center of a conversation after Christopher’s smarmy friend and fellow aspiring gangster Brendan Filone (Anthony DeSando) is shot, execution-style, on the order of Uncle Junior. Christopher remarks that it was a “message job. Through the eye.” Big Pussy nods his agreement, employing a Godfather reference: “Moe Greene special.” When Paulie asks what he means, Pussy responds, “In One, Moe Greene’s eyes got too big for his stomach, so they put a small caliber in his eye.” Pussy’s reference to “One” suggests just how central the Godfather series is in his world, the mere mention of “One” or “Two” being an obvious allusion to Godfather I or II. Nevertheless, Paulie finds it necessary to add a slight correction to the reference: “In his glasses, you mean,” which draws an impatient response from Pussy: “Glasses, eyes, why are you quibbling with me?” Paulie, often a fountain of faux information, now suddenly becomes a film expert on first-name terms with Coppola: “Through the eye is just how Francis framed the shot. For the shock value.”
Given his fascination with Hollywood, the fact that Christopher seems to know the Godfather films less well than many of his older colleagues is clearly not a sign of his lack of interest in film per se so much as it indicates a generational decline in reverence for Coppola’s seminal films, a development that itself might be taken as a marker of changes in the genre as a whole. Freedman is certainly correct, for example, that the seriocomic “ambience” of The Sopranos is more similar to the sensibility of Goodfellas than to that of the Godfather films. The Godfather films have a certain gravity to them, self-consciously presenting themselves as great works of art. They have virtually no sense of humor in their presentation of the world of organized crime. Goodfellas, on the other hand, is much more down to earth, presenting its gangsters less as semimythical figures and more as rather ordinary people who just happen to be comfortable living on the wrong side of the law. It also contains a substantial amount of comedy, despite a level of graphic violence that goes well beyond that of the Godfather films.
Both of these aspects of Goodfellas are neatly captured in a scene in “A Hit Is a Hit” in which a group of pretentious Medigans gather at a dinner party and begin discussing gangster culture. Tony’s physician, Dr. Bruce Cusamano (Robert LuPone), laughingly cites a favorite moment from Goodfellas: “That scene where Pesci sticks that guy’s head in a vise and then he fuckin’ pops his eye out? I thought I was gonna die!” It would be hard to imagine The Godfather referred to in this way. Indeed, while Freedman sees Goodfellas as “the only successful attempt to make a mob movie of a stature truly comparable to that of the Godfather films,” he also argues that Goodfellas is built on an understanding that this project could not be achieved by “attempting anything profoundly similar” to Coppola’s films (49–50).
Goodfellas is, in fact, profoundly different from the Godfather films, as is The Sopranos. Much of this difference is a matter of class representation. As the very titles indicate, The Godfather and its sequels focus on higher-level bosses in the mob, on the movers and shakers whose decisions and actions have dramatic consequences for the course of organized crime in America. The eponymous “goodfellas” of Scorsese’s film, on the other hand, are very much street-level, working-class types, focusing on the day-to-day nuts-and-bolts details of crime as work. It is all, as Freedman notes, “a fairly plebeian operation” (51). The same, of course, can be said of The Sopranos. Even though Tony ultimately becomes a fairly important boss in his crime family, he is very much a working-class type, and his family’s operations, limited mostly to the mundane realm of New Jersey, lack the glamour of mob operations in New York or Las Vegas.[4]
This difference in class emphasis at the level of content is absolutely crucial in itself, but it is importantly mirrored in the overall difference between the very nature of The Godfather and Goodfellas as works of cinematic art. One could describe this difference via Northrop Frye’s now venerable theory of literary modes as a shift from the high mimetic mode of The Godfather to the low mimetic mode of Goodfellas, though it might perhaps be more telling to describe the first two Godfather films as belated attempts to create monumental works of modernist art, with Goodfellas functioning primarily as a work of postmodernism.[5]
The same, of course, can be said for the string of 1990s gangster films that followed Goodfellas. For example, Mark Fisher has identified the 1995 film Heat (which features, in a bravura act of pastiche casting, both De Niro and Pacino and thus has a built-in intertextual relationship with the Godfather films in particular) as a key example of what he calls “capitalist realism”—which is roughly synonymous with postmodernism (31–32). For Fisher, the every-man-for-himself mentality of Heat (“Don’t let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds”) is key here, setting it strongly apart from the long-term family-like loyalties shared by the gangster figures in The Godfather.[6]
The Sopranos, with the switch from film to television itself serving as a key indicator, can be regarded as the culmination of this shift from modernism to postmodernism, and a reading of the series through its dialogue with The Godfather and Goodfellas brings that aspect of the series quite clearly into focus.[7] Jameson has famously seen postmodernism as the cultural result of the completion of the historical process of capitalist modernization. If the history of gangster films can itself be seen as an allegorical embodiment of that modernization, especially in the United States, then The Sopranos can indeed be seen as the culmination of the history of the gangster film, its frequent references to earlier works in that tradition only serving to indicate its self-consciousness of that status. At the same time, the prominence of earlier gangster films in The Sopranos (whose characters treat the events and characters of fictional gangster films almost as part of the real historical past) also serves to indicate the growing hyper-reality of the series’ postmodern cultural climate.
Similarly, Steven Hayward and Andrew Biro argue that The Sopranos, though a television series, “is in some sense about the exhaustion of the gangster film” (211, their emphasis).
It is not insignificant that Michael Imperioli, the actor who plays Christopher, also appeared in Goodfellas, in which his character suffers a bullet wound to the foot. Christopher calls attention to this cross-casting when he inflicts this same wound on a pastry shop worker in “The Legend of Tennessee Moltisanti.”
In The Godfather Brasi, a key Corleone family operative, is executed by Vito Corleone’s enemies, who then send a wrapped fish to Corleone as a sign that Brasi “sleeps with the fishes.” The connection between Big Pussy and Luca Brasi is extended later in The Sopranos when Tony repeatedly has visions of Pussy reincarnated as a fish after he is executed by Tony and his minions for informing on them to the FBI.
On the figuration of class in The Sopranos, and particularly on Tony as a fundamentally working-class character, see Booker (“Tony Soprano”).
One might, incidentally, describe The Godfather: Part III, released in the same year as Goodfellas, as a postmodernist work as well, functioning as it does more as a pastiche of the earlier Godfather films than as a truly original work. Tellingly, much of the emphasis of Godfather III is on the street-level activities of Vincent Corleone (Andy Garcia), rather than on the higher-echelon maneuvers of Michael Corleone.
Fisher groups Goodfellas with The Godfather in this respect, though surely the nature of the relationships in the former is qualitatively different (more economic and less personally committed) than in the latter.
One might extend this historical narrative to suggest that the gritty pre-Code gangster films might be considered works of realism, thus completing the triad of realism-modernism-postmodernism that has informed so many narratives of cultural history.