This week we’re doing a Sopranos trivia challenge for a chance to win a copy of Franco Ricci’s The Sopranos: Born Under a Bad Sign. In honour of the book and the contest, here’s an excerpt from the Introduction to The Sopranos!
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“Though I began this book thinking I would write about a popular mob series, I soon realized that my attention was constantly drawn to issues of identity. Despite the intricate embroidery of the myriad themes and motifs that resonate through the arc of the story, questions of divided and unstable identity are the subtending template that clarifies the many complex currents that would otherwise have remained murky. From the very first episode, characters are in search of a stable sense of place in a consumer- and media-driven society. More specifically, they crave a public identity of salacious visual consumerism. From Tony Soprano to Paulie “Walnuts” Gualtieri, Carmela Soprano to Janice Soprano to Dr. Melfi , to the panoply of goomahs, capos, aunts and uncles, thugs and wanna-be wiseguys, all dispend significant energy seeking to create a public personality that finalizes their often feeble sense of personal worth and popular celebrity. Christopher Moltisanti is one of the most taxed of characters, for example, because he realizes that he has no public face, or at least the notoriety he so desperately pretends to deserve. In an age of cell phones and social networking, Christopher bemoans his invisibility to the point of envying gangster rappers: “The moolies, they got it goin’ on. And they’re on TV. The Soprano crew is always secret this, omertà that; fuckin’ gets on my nerves” (“A Hit Is a Hit” I.10). Times they are indeed a-changin’ as questions of private self worth are juggled with visions of public celebrity, a torment for all the characters. Hence Christopher’s inextricable tendency to fancy both an ideal and popular spiritual self through writing while simultaneously destroying his real mobster-infested body with drugs and alcohol.
Uncle Corrado “Junior” Soprano (referred to as Uncle Junior or Corrado), on the other hand, is so dependent upon the monolithic facade of his secretive mob image that he terminates a profound love relationship with a lifelong partner lest he be publicly harpooned as weak by his insensitive cohorts for a perceived sexual proclivity. Dementia eventually robs him of his constructed masculine identity. Mamma Livia Soprano’s feigning of the loss of her polarized identity momentarily gains her the family’s indemnity while conveniently providing her troubled self a viable excuse for attempted filicide. Both Carmela Soprano and Dr. Jennifer Melfi question the resolve of their career choices. One attempts to save her tainted soul from the fires of hell with episodic forays into her Catholic catechism. The other wades through the open wounds of her pained ethnicity armed with the intellectually appealing canon of psychiatry. Both seek uneasy comfort in their oft-chafing skin. Carmela may imperiously (though sarcastically cognizant and impotent)quip to flighty sister-in-law Janice: “A woman has to keep her sense of identity” (“Toodle-Fucking-oo” II.3), but in this murky world of shadowy ethnic origins, everyone’s identity is at risk, everyone’s name is susceptible to the erroneous stroke of a distracted clerk’s (or fate’s) pen. The corruption of one’s name is an aberration suffered by Phil Leotardo whose family name, he despondently reveals to his grandchildren, is really Leonardo (“Stage 5” VI.2). In Sopranoland, genetic endowments are often corrupted for public consumption by a chronic lack of cultural certainty and the deforming forces of social convention, overbearing prejudice, and geographical happenstance.
But schizophrenic identities are not relegated solely to the I-Am [Italian-American] main characters. Cannoli I-Ams (hard-shelled on the outside, soft on the inside), Uncle Tom Blacks, opportunistic Eastern Europeans, moneycrazed Russians, overzealous Hasidic Jews, even morally conflicted FBI agents abound. All appear confused, compromised, their questionable social success priced with the fear of engulfment, implosion, and mistaken identity. For those I-Ams like Silvio Dante who maintain a protracted and false identification with the equally false ethnic myths of America, the public derision by Native Americans of Christopher Columbus in “Christopher” IV.3 speaks eloquently about the charade of popular image culture and the renewed reliance upon self and independent selfhood. FBI Agent Dwight Harris’s overseas assignments may broadcast him to the Middle Eastern Terrorist Squad but his heart strings remain pulled by a Satriale panino, preferably eaten next to the mob perpetrators he once hunted but whose lifestyle he envies and, at least when it comes to adultery, he lustfully emulates (“Made in America” VI.21). The ultimate loss of identity in this parallelepiped realm is death. This fate is reserved for those whose betrayal of group association condemns the perpetrator to exclusion and tribal retribution. There is. indeed, a morbid narrative logic to this protracted voyage of personal growth that is muddied by the competitive impossibility of realizing one’s true nature in an I-Am and/or other ethnic American landscape that is not tinged with corruption and greed” (Ricci, 6-7).
