Defects of Mind: Alexander Pope, Tony Soprano, and Journey

Fri, 15 Jun 2007 02:45:34 GMT

(This post may seem a little off the path I've beaten discussing community & professionally related matters, but bear with me.)

My dad sent me one of his rare missives the other day in the aftermath of the final Sopranos episode. It's one of those things we like to dig into on occasion when we get together: insights, impressions, and questions regarding our favorite HBO show-du-saison (be it about the violence and moral equivocation of The Sopranos, the emotional and thematic depth of Six Feet Under, the vulgarity and lyricism of the denizens of Deadwood, or, for two brief and shining seasons, the picaresque adventures of the sandal-and-togafied duo Vorenus and Pullo in Rome). He sent me a link to a stimulating review on The New Republic site (registration required but gratis, btw)--for some, judging by the voluminous reader commentary that follows, an off-putting, high-brow flight of fancy; for others, an illuminating and worthy requiem on a beloved series.

Incidentally, he also mentioned in follow-up that he almost posted on the thread with a quotation from Pope's Essay on Man, but thought better of it for fear of seeming pretentious. I seem to have no such compunction in my own blog, so boldy forth go I:

Virtuous and vicious ev'ry man must be,
Few in th'extreme, but all in the degree:
The rogue and fool by fits is fair and wise,
And ev'n the best by fits what they despise.
'Tis but by parts we follow good or ill;
For Vice or Virtue, Self directs it still;
Each individual seeks a sev'ral goal;
But Heav'n's great view is one, that that the Whole.
That counterworks each folly and caprice;
That disappoints th'effect of every vice;
That, happy frailties to all ranks applied,
Shame to the virgin, to the matron pride,
Fear to the statesman, rashness to the chief,
To kings presumption, and to crowds belief:
That, virtue's ends from vanity can raise,
Which seeks no int'rest, no reward but praise;
And builds on wants, and on defects of mind,
The joy, the peace, the glory of mankind.

Now, I'm not sure this is the passage my dad had in mind, but I think it describes aptly enough some of what the protagonist Tony is about. In any event, the series finale, the article on TNR, and my dad's urge to quote Alexander Pope in response, got me thinking: what is it about The Sopranos that has made it somehow something greater than mere TV-craft and lifted it into the lofty heights of a sophisticated discourse on art and culture? To say that it has to do with the conflict of good and evil, whether it plays out on the streets of New Jersey, as the case may be, or in the "defects of mind," is to say both too much and too little. The point isn't painted out in such broad strokes and cannot be reduced to a tension of moral extremes. I don't think that's what Pope is saying, and I certainly don't think that's even half of what David Chase has in mind.

People complain, for example as they do in the thread attached to the TNR article, that all of the moral conflict that made The Sopranos such a compelling drama was bled out over the years, turning it into a disappointing caricature of itself. They think about how Meadow forgot her outrage at Tony's hypocrisy, or how Carmela put aside her shame and frustration with Tony's philandering and resumed her dysfunctional marriage with the-devil-she-knew, or more recently how AJ did an abrupt about-face from his anger with the world and his plans to join the army and took his parents up on the offer to, essentially, assume the alternate career path that surrogate son Christopher Moltisanti was on before Tony coldly, chillingly snuffed him out. Such critics may be right, but I can't help but think that as convenient and bankrupt as some of these choices may seem to us at first, we may be missing a crucial point if we get too hung up on the importance of moral consistency, whether in the characters themselves or in the ways they interact with each other.

We must remind ourselves that The Sopranos is first and foremost a drama--a contrived thing, to tease out the original Greek sense of the word--whose purpose is not to hold up a mirror to reality like a documentary might, but rather to illuminate universal truths through artful exaggeration, dramatic harmonies, and perhaps most usefully, deliberate dissonances. And the drama has something important to tell us by virtue of the accommodations the various members of the Soprano family make with their brutish lives: in various ways, whether we are aware of it or not, we also are guilty of hypocrisy, equivocation, and other morally problematic conceits. We do what we have to survive, Mr. Chase is telling us; moral consistency is an illusion. We're kidding ourselves if we think we're really any different, fundamentally, than the members of Tony's larger-than-life famiglia. We may not be narcissistic adulterers, vicious thieves, or brutal killers in any literal sense, but figuratively, we are all of those things--and so much more besides--all in varying degrees, to echo Mr. Pope.

What's really interesting I think is in the way the tensions of the show, like in life, persist, and conflicts are rarely if ever resolved; they only shift focus or evolve into something else, equally if not more conflicted and wracked with tension. Yes, there seems to be a certain dissonant harmony at the end of The Sopranos, when the family gathers at a diner for best-in-the-state onion rings and a moment of respite together. The moment is thoroughly banal, from Tony's song choice, to the lovers in the booth across the room, to the bowl of onion rings, to the pack of cub scouts in the corner. And yet, at the same time, there hangs in the air a terrific tension as to what is about to happen: is the bourgeois banality of the moment going to turn cataclysmic with Tony (and maybe even AJ, Carmela, and Meadow to boot) slaughtered mercilessly by the shifty character in a grey jacket, in a kind of what-goes-around-comes-around, live-by-the-sword-die-by-the-sword denouement? Or are they all just going to carry on with their lives, same patterns and pathologies, different day, as the Journey song "Don't Stop Believin'" seems to suggest? Here's the song's third verse before the chorus:

Working hard to get my fill,
everybody wants a thrill
Payin' anything to roll the dice,
just one more time
Some will win, some will lose
Some were born to sing the blues
Oh, the movie never ends
It goes on and on and on and on

It really doesn't matter, ultimately; we can certainly imagine whatever we want of Tony's fate, but I think Chase means for us to sit in it uncomfortably, with no easy resolution or answers, with the image of Tony en famille frozen in our minds, the Journey song abruptly stopped at "Don't stop." We have to wonder, just what the hell is important in all this, beyond the Soprano family's ability to survive despite all their betrayal, disappointment, frustration, and hypocrisy? It may just be another way for Chase to tell us just one more time that while we are living, we're indeed fortunate to have and keep any close relationships on our journey (pun intended), no matter how dysfunctional they may be, through all their comedic and tragic turns of fate.

It may be our vanity that compels us to think we should really have anything more than that. In the end, we may have the fortune to be comforted by those who are close to us, like Silvio's wife as he lay near death in his hospital bed; we may meet an abrupt and cruel fate, like Bobby or Christopher, far from the embrace of friends and family; we may be left to "die alone in our own arms," stewing in memories of the relationships we've lost or destroyed along the way, like perhaps Tony's mother Livia or Paulie's aunt-mother in their final days; or, like Junior Soprano, our "defects of mind" may overcome us and take even that away before the screen ultimately turns black. There is much to mourn in the loss of The Sopranos.

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Defects of Mind: Alexander Pope, Tony Soprano, and Journey