The Sopranos and Philosophy: I Kill Therefore I Am Free

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To browse Academia. Skip to main content. Log In Sign Up. Download Free PDF. The Sopranos: An American Existentialism? Majda Gh. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. Alex Schulman In fact, a disillusionment that used to be the prerogative of the few has become common property; and what exhilarated Socrates and Shakespeare, who The Sopranos and Philosophy: I Kill Therefore I am in a sense sufficient to themselves, is found depressing by men who lack the power to find meaning in themselves. To the extent that the series has been 'read' by academics, it has come expectedly under two of the optics it invites: either various strains of postmodernism, which note its playful self-referentiality, viz. Most of these works limit their analysis to the first three or four seasons, which is perhaps one reason why the series' existentialism is not a major focus. All rights reserved. For permissions please email: journals. A Dr found amidst contemporary middle-class p improvement, life strategies, or just a quick P eagerly obliges Tony as to the last. Kupferberg constantly taunts Melfi, in her professional conscience, that she is only inter he fulfils a desire she has for excitement, a sort of boy. Of course he, like every other Citizen' on the mob universe at a tabloid level. Fellow fans of the se report that Melfi is one of their least favourite of t think it is telling that the writers portray her as, t and shoulders above the other representatives of psy time to time. This content downloaded from With scarcely an exception, the rest of the arts, and philosophy as well, suffered a split between elite and popular forms from which they never recovered. Few, aside from those who have been extensively trained in its appreciation, any longer find their aesthetic trans- cendence in 'high' art of the sort that fills the contemporary wings of museums or enjoys occasional impulse acquisition by the hyper-wealthy. More likely they tarry about the museum's other wings, or enjoy the latest in special effects onscreen. The same is true of music, where the disappearance of the composer after modernism's assault on traditional sensi- bilities, and the investment of the public's emotion in new popular forms, has been even more total. Philosophy, too, has mostly turned, in its 'high' form, into a hermetic genre where only those trained in its methods and assumptions are expected to contribute to it or have any interest in it - on the popular level, most ground has been ceded to the vague but lucra- tive DIY mode of self-help or Deepak Chopra-brand 'spirituality'. The novel has avoided this fork in the road - why? It is certainly beyond the scope of this essay to answer such broad questions about the trajectory of the arts in the West, or to give praise or blame. But 'high- brow' authors like Jonathan Franzen, even against their will, seem to fit comfortably into the populist matrix of middle-class The Sopranos and Philosophy: I Kill Therefore I am exem- plified by the Oprah Winfrey machine. Something about the investment of meaning in recognisably human characters, and thus the production of human narrative - even when non-linear or fragmentary - resists the This content downloaded from But I do not seek to replay the taun art of the social novel variety is truly relevant thing about the popularity of the novelistic So concerns are despite its formal accessibility depths, civilisation versus savagery, the collap split nature of the self, and so forth. And if, flagellation about the decline of reading, the n by the movie altogether, this has something to porality of novel-reading as opposed to film characters over a longer period of time, one's l one feels - if the work is any good, of course disappearance. This is harder for a two-hour n Yet the television series had rarely until now adulatory sense rightly accorded to HBO's b commerce and censorship, and the stultifying advertising breaks, held television back to an ex s and s made clear. HBO's producti apes novel-consumption far more than the pro television. Though it remains to be seen if qua slogan 'It's not TV; it's HBO' has resonance bey However enjoyable the programming on co model of timed advertising breaks and twenty produces a creative product different from subscription service, no commercial interrupt thirteen-episode seasons that are not requir same point on each successive calendar. Story less arbitrary; less like what they often feel lik fill time. But the model of e does not pay for directl a daily comic strip in a per than as a novel bo months. Thus it is no terstrokes of network t dies, from I Love Lucy exigent circumstances, infinitum, are more fr To follow on the above one's morning newspape a post-theological cult enjoying sitcoms, whe utterly rote and familia emony. The great dram uncanny, the unfamilia wth midnight mass. If the promise of the rently looks unlikely if scripted yet decidedly n culture may have richer sion had produced great produce half-hour-long never come close to a Si imagine a character wi network series The Sopranos and Philosophy: I Kill Therefore I am and no censors. Attachment to existentialist social novel Encounters with philos culture on The Soprano twist. But they signal t issues as the texts and i relief, a chuckle at the most entertaining is the 5 Chase discusscs this in plays Dr Eliot Kupferbcrg set. But that's th your other choice is suffering! Later, in Dr Melfi's office, Tony frets over what his therapist calls A. Perhaps 'the kid's onto something',' he mutters, when the void at the centre of a Sartrean existence is explained. Perhaps, indeed, Tony had originally protested too much. The reduction of life to, and endless see-sawing between, boredom and suffering that his daughter has used to display her teenage Ivy League-bound cynicism should have already been apparent to Tony himself. And while Tony can only tell A. Like Milton's Satan, perhaps the first of modern literature's existential heroes, Tony has determined, though not without considerable doses of depression and doubt, that it is better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven. Hell, in his case, is considerably more attractive than Milton's roasted, miasmic land- scape - it is upper-middle-class wealthy, highly sexualised, and sometimes warmly familial, equal parts exciting and dangerous. Tony likes to excuse himself by complaining that he was 'born into' the Mafia, but this is never particularly convincing. He would shrivel in different circumstances, and he knows it. If then why exult in bein become extinct? The s why Camus proposed tion. The Mafia is similar to the United States here: its members seem to have a grand, inflated, even mystical notion of its meaningfulness, of the order and purpose it provides in The Sopranos and Philosophy: I Kill Therefore I am might otherwise be a purposeless world. At Tony's first The Sopranos and Philosophy: I Kill Therefore I am session he reports feeling 'like I came in at the end' - he means of the Mafia, beset by vigorous prosecutors and widespread disloyalty, but when Melfi responds that 'a lot of Americans are feeling that way', it is not merely a misinterpretation: her confusion signals that Tony is really talking about both. Interestingly, the alter ago is introduced as someone who used to be a patio furniture salesman but has switched careers and become some sort of weapons contractor. This reaches its climax in AJ. The strong silent type. But the show's audience knows t something else here: the process of being 'ma monial by which one becomes a fully fledge and thus a full participant in the Mafia. Consider the scene w which parallels in interesting ways the final sce 1 episode 13 ends as Tony and his family flee refuge at childhood friend Artie Buco's rest associates are already inside eating and drinkin an assassination attempt staged by his Uncle Ju Livia, probably colluded after a dispute ov leaders of their New Jersey crime family. He family with a rather touching speech about h the good times like this one when they move their own - the loss of nuclear family war concern of Tony's, symbolised from episode 1 ance of a family of mallards that briefly lived pool. The setting is cosy, an island of safety i idealised home and family themselves - and Italian music plays, Italian dishes are served, t paintings of the Old World. The series' final episode no. But now they patronise a diner American in its decor, nor sound more Americ on the jukebox - Journey's hit 'Don't Sto ringly Midwestern of power ballads. Similarly, that our protagonist flips past Tony Bennett Heart and Journey. The Catholic Mass is repla a group ingestion of onion rings, placed wh Communion wafers. Instead of toasting with h This content downloaded from We have seen their daughter Meadow the full reunion of his n Water-cooler debaters s final scenes if they arg ending coming just as the series did stop was but its metaphorical a further. On the basic p one could argue differ counter, who heads off lel parks and crosses th see Meadow enter the incidentally, be yet anot the end of Tony's con more; the assassin in qu jacket'. That should tak Season 6 no. Wheth clearly 'membership' he one is allowed to remain conscious in the world. To the extent that an indefinite and pleasurable extension of that consciousness is a post-Hobbesian age's highest aspiration, its unheroic hubris, the man in the members only jacket represents its nemesis. He negates - as something does, eventually, for everyone who ever lives - the 'longing of ours never to die' that 'is our actual essence'. Pop doggerel though its lyrics might be, the song playing in the final scene also has significance within the series beyond the neat trick of 8 Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nationstrans. Anthony Kerrigan Princeton p. Some will win Some will lose Some are born to sing the blues Oh the movie never ends, it goes on and on and on and on. But of course the 'movie' has just ended - at least it has for its protagonist. The fact that it goes 'on and on and on and on' for others in this context inverts the pop anthem's forcefully optimistic spirit; rather, this fact is supposed to be painful, a crowning insult. Part of the pain of con- templating nothingness, as existentialists like Camus and Unamuno argued, is a sort of resentment towards all the lives to be lived, all the pleasures and desires to be had, that will not be one's own. Even more sardonically insulting is the chasm between people as to the respective cast list of their 'movies': we are invariably the main character in our own, very rarely an important piece of supporting cast, almost always a bit player or extra. As in much of existentialism, death is always at the centre of life in The Sopranos. In many ways this series is more honestly death-obsessed than HBO's mostly contemporaneous drama Six Feet Underwhich pitched itself as aggressively willing to look mortality in the face it was set in a family- run funeral parlour. Partly this is due, in the one as in the other, to the protagonists' line of work; but to view The Sopranos through too restrictive a Mafia-genre optic would be to ignore its more universal philosophical aspirations. Tony dies in the circumstances he dies in because of his Mafia status; but other than the specific narrative behind the final trigger-pull he is nothing more, in the final scene, than a person, feebly grasping onto those few to whom his existence is meaningful his family and presented with the greatest levelling force there is, at which point all anyone can plead is 'Don't stop'. The abrupt soundl echo that comment of actually seem to be of the sudden end of The Sopranos and Philosophy: I Kill Therefore I am living death of Uncle J between him and Tony, clear. Christopher, all told one of the show's most pathetic characters, flips his car off the road while driving intoxicated. Tony is in the car but escapes with only minor injuries; he finishes Christopher's life on the spot, ostensi- bly to punish him for falling off the wagon one too many times. The episode is entitled 'Kennedy and Heidi' - the names of the two girls in the other car whose approach causes the accident, and whose reaction we briefly cut to after Christopher's car crashes. The point, again, is to show the abruptness with which one's 'movie' can end, after which one is simply an incidental player in The Sopranos and Philosophy: I Kill Therefore I am lives of others. There has been another episode going on the whole time, that of Kennedy and Heidi, an episode in which Christopher's appearance is just a brief The Sopranos and Philosophy: I Kill Therefore I am of light, followed by sighs of nervous relief. Eliot having Prufrock declare he is not Hamlet - as well as its more comedic postmodern appropriation by Tom Stoppard, is a distant cousin here: but the men and women of The Sopranos as well as those of The Wire, do not accede to this as resignedly as Eliot's antihero. Here The Sopranos and The Wire converge. In episode 58 of the latter, Detective Jimmy McNulty says: 'You start to tell the story, you think you're The Sopranos and Philosophy: I Kill Therefore I am hero, and then when you get done talking. But the thought is finished elsewhere in the same episode, with the tawdry death of the outlaw Omar. Omar was a common 'favourite character' in The Wire because, among other reasons, he was so brilliantly out of step with the rest of the show's milieu: a sort of sassy urban version of the Gary Cooper Tony Soprano is always looking for. His sudden death This content downloaded from Junior always loomed large to Tony tential problem: first, literally, as a rival for power who plots Season 1 and whose allegiance is never entirely The Sopranos and Philosophy: I Kill Therefore I am there second, and in a sense more importantly, as a standing exam eventual decline of life into meaninglessness. Tony often tells that he sees Junior as a warning - an ageing, mediocre, childl whose money has all gone to lawyers. But then, through his d Junior becomes a warning about something else - and it is tell context, that Junior's second attempt on Tony's life comes from rather than any Mafia power struggle. In the final scene between Tony and Junior it is revealed that has basically no memory of what he has done in his life. Tony that once upon a time he and his brother 'ran North Jersey', The Sopranos and Philosophy: I Kill Therefore I am can only look away and droolingly intone 'that's n Considering the frequent attempts of Sopranos gangsters to sh of enduring reputation against their The Sopranos and Philosophy: I Kill Therefore I am - 'How will I be rem asks Johnny 'Sack' nervously as he enters terminal stages o prison episode 79 - Junior's pathetic interaction with Tony's n life story, such as it is, should have warned the latter against t investment in living for history. Perhaps it does: in any case, T out of the hospital and into his final scene. (PDF) The Sopranos: An American Existentialism? | Majda Gh -

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