The Legend of Tennessee Moltisanti (1.08)

The threat of Federal indictments scares several of the NJ mobsters.
Christopher is disappointed that he doesn’t appear in the news as some of his colleagues do.

Episode 8 – Originally aired Feb 28, 1999
Written by David Chase and Frank Renzulli
Directed by Tim Van Patten

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I find this episode, in some sense, to be the most significant of the first season. The hour portrays Christopher Moltisanti’s existential struggle with what it means, as Shakespeare’s Hamlet famously put it, to be or not to be. In doing so, it explicitly introduces what I believe is the series’ most fundamental philosophical concept: the idea of “regularness.” But I’ll come back to that later; first I want to look at how the episode explores what it means to be (or not to be) Italian-American.

Several episodes, including “Commendatori,” “Christopher” and “Marco Polo,” will explicitly explore various facets of being Italian-American, and the current episode pays particular attention to the question of how the existence of the Mafia affects the ways in which Italian-Americans identify themselves. The most strident criticism of The Sopranos in its early seasons came from those who believed that its focus on the Italian mob was detrimental to all Italians (and even possibly to society as a whole). When The Sopranos first began airing, strongly-worded statements denouncing the series were issued by an assortment of Italian-American groups. One group even filed a rather spurious lawsuit against HBO for its depiction of Ital-Americans. Perhaps the most notorious of the scholarly criticisms came from Italian-American English Professor Sandra Gilbert, who wrote that she was “exasperated by the bizarre American hang-up on what we might call Media Mafiosi…” OK, she does have a point—we are enthralled by Coppola’s mobsters and Scorcese’s wiseguys and the Gotti kids and mob wives that appear on their very own reality shows. But I don’t see why The Sopranos should be rejected if it is part of—and plays upon—this “hang-up.” She gets snarky describing David Chase and this particular episode: “Like God or Santa Claus, the ultra-cool creator of The Sopranos always already anticipates our responses: he sees us when we’re sleeping, knows when we’re awake, and most important, predicts the complaints some of us may level against shows like his…”

Chase did anticipate these complaints and crafted a complex and elaborate response to them in this episode. (Chase quite literally responds—he has a writing credit). I’ll focus on how he countered the criticism through his handling of two specific characters, Richard LaPenna and Chris Moltisanti.

RICHARD LaPENNA
Richard, Dr. Melfi’s pompous ex-husband, gives voice to the complaints that some like Prof. Gilbert have of the Mafia and the media’s depiction of organized crime. During a vigorous dinnertime discussion, Richard declares that there have been an estimated 5000 Mafiosi who have blackened the way that 20 million non-Mafia Italian-Americans are perceived. Dr. Melfi, perhaps due in part to her close contact with Tony Soprano, does not feel so blackened. The concept of identity, for her, is something personal and individual, it is not so dependent on identification with a group. When Melfi’s father raises a toast to “We, the 20 million,” he differentiates his ethnic group from the organized crime group. But Chase seems to take the position that such simple delineations are too shallow. Tony Soprano and other Mafiosi cannot be separated so easily from 20 million Italian-Americans; in fact, they cannot even easily be distinguished from the 300 million people that make up America itself. They are us and we are them. This idea gets reinforced through the visuals and dialogue of two dinner scenes, one at Melfi’s home and the other at the Soprano house:

The Soprano dinner is, if anything, more typically American: cans of Coca Cola rather than bottles of wine, Chinese take-out instead of homemade Italian fare, eating in the kitchen instead of the formal dining room. Both families are discussing what it means to be Italian in the United States, but the Sopranos sound more like the typical American family. Their conversation is filled with malapropisms and mistaken facts and cursing, as opposed to the statistics, pertinent references and insightful responses that we hear at Melfi’s table. The Soprano family, though very different from Melfi’s family, is as legitimate an example of The American Family as the Melfis are. To believe that Mafioso—family men, American men—categorically tarnish all Italians simply through their existence (or their depiction on TV) is to engage in an oversensitive, pig-headed groupthink which, in effect, diminishes the richness with which we should be defining ourselves as Americans. We are a motley, not monolithic, bunch.

Richard is able to surmise that his ex-wife is counseling a mobster. He has a severe opinion of her unnamed client: “After a while, you’re gonna get beyond psychotherapy, with its cheesy moral relativism.  Finally you’re going to get to Good and Evil. And he’s evil.”  Strong words, which certainly have at least a grain of truth to them. But Chase, being Chase, doesn’t countenance simplistic assessments of personality or identity. Chase cuts from Richard’s statement to one of the most incredible shots of the season:

It is virtuoso camerawork: the camera dollies across Tony, zooming into a closeup and then back out, synchronizing this movement with a train coming into the shot from one direction and Chris’ car coming in from the opposite direction. It is similar to that circling shot that opened “College” (1.05), and manifests a similar intention: it prepares us to see Tony from another side, another perspective. The roar of the train and Tony’s grim expression have a foreboding quality, and appear at first to confirm Richard’s sentiment—this is an evil man, with evil thoughts on his mind. When he climbs into the Lexus and lashes out physically and verbally at Chris, it further supports Richard’s assertion. But when Tony recognizes that Chris is seriously distressed, he softens. He listens. It’s a delicately honed scene. Tony becomes supportive and sympathetic without being touchy-feely or discussing his own battle with depression. Deeply concerned about Christopher’s mental state, he questions his nephew without using the word “suicide” (what manly man would?); he gestures a gunshot to the head instead. The scene humanizes Tony, shows that even within the limits of his upbringing and station, he is still very capable of decency. With this scene, Chase completely undercuts the simplistic, black-and-white assessment made by Richard LaPenna (who is kind of a jerkoff anyway).

Of course, we can’t gloss over the fact that Tony is a criminal and a murderer. And I have no doubt that David Chase understands as a TV producer that evil and mischief can be used to seduce viewers. Seducing viewers is an important part of running a show, particularly in its first season. But the argument that Chase and HBO were exploiting “Tony Soprano” and the Mafia just for the sake of ratings and to feather their own nests, with no concern about any possible costs to Italian-Americans or to society as a whole, is a glib and superficial argument. The Sopranos deserves better than that.  

CHRIS MOLTISANTI
Through Christopher’s storyline in this episode, Chase answers those who would criticize The Sopranos for glamorizing Organized Crime. Chris has been itching the entire season to become a Made Man, convinced that being made would inject some excitement and meaning into his life. With a sense of desperation, he tells Tony that “the fucking regularness of life is too fuckin’ hard for me.” His conversations with Paulie and Pussy, however, reveal to Christopher that even the lives of Made Men have the usual share of “regularness.” Mafia life isn’t all about guns and gals, hits and tits.

The Sopranos is not the typical shoot-’em-up gangster drama—it doesn’t glorify violence the way some critics claim. We see in this episode’s opening scene that Chris’ first murder has been taking a toll on his psyche—there is nothing glorious about the way Emil Kolar haunts his dreams. There is no major violence in this episode; the only time a gun is fired is when Chris puts a bullet in the young man’s foot at the bakery where he is sent to pick up some connoli and sfogliatella. Prof. Gilbert cites this shooting as an example of what is wrong with the show: connected guys simply resort to violence to get what they want, and we in the audience are enthralled and envious because we wish that we too could exact such simple and ferocious vengeance against anybody that has slighted us. But Gilbert seems not to notice that Tony slams Chris for behaving in this way; it is not the way that grown men—even Mafia men—should solve their problems. Tony blasts Christopher’s behavior as “cowboy-itis.” Additionally, the violent outburst doesn’t actually solve Chris’ problems: he still feels unfulfilled when he arrives with the pastries at the Bing, where he is promptly sent into the bathroom to sweep for FBI bugs. (More de-glamorization: the only scenes at the Bada Bing are in the non-titillating backroom and bathroom, and there are no sex scenes or nudity at all in this episode.)

Chris’ desire to get his button is, in the final analysis, a desire to assimilate. He wants to be a fully made member of the Mafia, whose 5000 members share the same wish for upward mobility and security as 300 million Americans. Martha Nochimson (Dying to Belong) notes that “the core films in the gangster genre manifest a wayward, tenacious desire to fight into the heart of the ever-beckoning, ever-elusive materialist social structure.” Chase’s mobsters are not romanticized as outlaw heroes—they are profoundly flawed men pursuing the American Dream in their own profoundly flawed ways.

The episode title may also point to Christopher’s desire to fully assimilate into mainstream American culture. Chris desperately wants recognition, and not necessarily only within the Mafia. If he becomes a successful screenwriter, Chris will gain recognition from the broader American public. By (humorously) comparing Chris to Tennessee Williams, an author who uses—of all things—an American state as his pen name, Chase underscores Chris’ desire to be accepted by an American public. This idea might not have been conveyed so effectively if the episode title had been “The Legend of Christopher Hemingway” or “The Legend of F. Scott Moltisanti.”

Late in the episode, a cheesy comedian at Green Grove says, “I have a few words for you. They are ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.’ Imagine yourself on a boat at Ellis Island.” He is trying to make a joke about immigration and ethnic assimilation, and tries to build his joke by referencing the lyrics of a well-known Beatles song. David Chase’s commentary on assimilation is much better constructed than the comedian’s.  Chase builds this episode upon well-established American film conventions and references. Melfi’s son, Jason, says during the family dinner that “At this point in American history, mob movies are classic American cinema. Like Westerns.” Indeed, the scene in which Chris shoots the bakery employee, which Prof. Gilbert so disapproves of, is actually an elaborate reference to both a western and a mob movie: Clint Eastwood’s Pale Rider and Martin Scorcese’s GoodFellas. Chris shoots the employee in the foot because he feels he is not being taken seriously, which is the same reason Tommy (Joe Pesci) shoots Spider in the foot in the mob movie. Tommy makes his victim “dance” by shooting at his feet, a common Western convention that TVtropes.org calls “the bullet dance” and describes as appearing in numerous Westerns—including the very first Western ever made, the 1903 film The Great Train Robbery. Chase gives us an elegant allusion that I would ruin with an inelegant explanation, so I’ll just try to diagram how it works:

Here are screenshots from each of the three scenes. If you look closely at the pic for Pale Rider, you can see where the bullet has just entered Spider’s left boot:

Chris speaks the truth when he replies, “It happens,” to his bleeding victim’s cries of disbelief—it happened to Imperioli’s character nine years earlier in GoodFellas. Know-it-all Richard had said that anyone who tries to describe Italian-Americans nowadays will “invariably reference The Godfather, GoodFellas”—Chase, with a wink, does indeed reference Scorcese’s movie with this scene. When Tony criticizes quick-draw Chris for his “cowboy-itis,” Chase is doubling down on his allusion—we have seen onscreen cowboys behave in this way since at least 1903 when The Great Train Robbery came out. Constructed on long-understood conventions, The Sopranos becomes, in the truest sense of the word, “conventional.” Though Chase’s series can often be clever and unconventional, the show is just as often a de-glorified, unromantic, conventional look at the “fucking regularness” of mob life.

REGULARNESS
In my previous write-up, I argued that Chase’s inclusion of the banal elements around the Pulaski Skyway was an example of the realism of The Sopranos. I claimed that it was part of an ethos of “regularness” that Chase is deeply committed to. I believe that this ethos of regularness is Chase’s fundamental existential position in the series, an idea that our existence is marked by—more than anything else—a sort of boring normalcy that we cannot escape or deny. We will see characters abandon momentous, life-changing decisions as they get wearied by the daily grind. We’ll see compelling storylines simply unspool into nothing. We’ll wait for conflicts, warfare, murder, and confrontations which end up never coming. We will see characters piss and fart. We’ll see The Sopranos tackle the Big Issues, such as despair and death, in decidedly un-theatrical, even mundane, ways. One example from this hour: Christopher, this episode’s olive-skinned Hamlet, is nowhere near as eloquent as Shakespeare’s man when confronting death in the form of an exhumed body. Hamlet’s words to Horatio—while holding the exhumed skull of court-jester Yorick—swell poetically in description of the vanity and transience of life:

Alas, poor Yorick!  I knew him, Horatio: a fellow
of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath
borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how
abhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge rims at
it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know
not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your
gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment,
that were wont to set the table on a roar?

Christopher, standing before  Emil Kolar’s exhumed corpse, takes no lyrical measurement of life’s beguiling impermanence as Hamlet did. Instead, he says:

Holy shit, look at that!
He was clean-shaven,
he’s got a fuckin’ beard now!

When Chris and Georgie dig up Emil Kolar’s body beneath a graffiti’d Meadowlands overpass, they’re grossed out by the fact that Emil’s hair and nails continued to grow even after his death. It’s a phenomenon that feels weird to us because we’re not normally exposed to it, but such growth is actually a normal part of the regularness of life (as well as the regularness of death).

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DAVID CHASE AT PLAY
“The Legend of Tennessee Moltisanti” responds to some of the real-world criticisms that Chase knew would be directed at his series, and through this response, the hour essentially dilutes the boundary between our real world and the Sopranos’ fictional world. Several episodes yet to come will have a similar self-conscious, meta-fictional post-modern playfulness. As we will see, David Chase likes to utilize the character of Christopher Moltisanti (and/or the actor who plays him, Michael Imperioli) in these meta-fictional adventures. Chase may have specifically chosen to use Christopher because of the ways in which he differs from the other New Jersey mobsters. Chris is younger, a member of the hyper-self-aware generation that feels more at home in the post-modern world. Also, Chris is movie-obsessed, which makes him a good cipher for Chase’s inter-textual manipulations and allusions to films within The Sopranos.

But Chase’s self-aware games only fully work if we recognize that they are being played. The scene at the bakery is the perfect example. If Prof. Gilbert didn’t recognize the shooting at the bakery to be a reference to the GoodFellas scene (which is itself a reference to countless Westerns including Pale Rider), then she would only see the shooting as an act of infantile violence rather than as any sort of deeper commentary about the gangster-genre. As Carl Wilson points out in his essay, “Christopher Moltisanti and the Development of the Gangster Genre,” this scene “appears humorously ‘natural’ within the reality of the show, but it is also a replicated and contextually modified product that has additional layers of significance that are contingent upon the viewer’s genre awareness.”

Many of the early detractors of The Sopranos didn’t recognize the extent to which the series played with—and rebelled against—the clichés, tropes and expectations we have of mob-themed works. I quoted from Glen Creeber’s essay “Television, Tarantino and the Intimate World of The Sopranos” in my write-up for episode 2, and I want to expand that quote here. Mr. Creeber writes of The Sopranos that…

…its constant self-reflexive referencing to its own generic history reveals a television narrative desperately trying to re-invent and re-examine itself; searching for the means by which it can both deconstruct and reconstruct its own narrative dynamics. By critiquing the very medium it both utilizes and exploits, the drama ironically produces a complex and sophisticated narrative structure that simultaneously denigrates and celebrates its own inherent potential and artistic possibilities. Above all, then, The Sopranos can be seen as an investigation of genre…

The Sopranos is genius in how it utilizes and exploits its genre. The mobster-genre is inherently primed to provide narratives of sex and violence and power. Highly dramatic stuff. Chase uses this inherent characteristic of the genre to meet certain basic requirements: propel the series forward and draw in viewers. Once these requirements are met, he makes a 180-degree turn to focus on decidedly undramatic stuff: the banalities and disappointments—the regularness—of everyday life.

The Sopranos is an investigation in how to transcend the limitations of genre. Looking back on the series now, from a contemporary viewpoint, we can appreciate the foresight with which Chase brought the mobster-genre to topics it had never previously explored in depth. The disagreement about definitions of identity between Melfi and her husband Richard in this hour prefigure the tensions we currently live in. It can be just as dangerous now to claim to be color-blind as it is to use language that celebrates color; everyone know too much and can challenge every statement you make. Professor Sandra Gilbert’s criticism of the series (and of this episode in particular) was published in 2002, presaging the ethnocentric/race-centered scholarship and instruction that would become a defining characteristic of academia in coming years. Another example of Chase’s prescience can be found in Chris Moltisanti’s story here. Christopher’s desperate desire to be recognized and appreciated, whether through a TV news program or a newspaper article (and perhaps eventually a film built on his screenplay) anticipates by ten years our overwhelming contemporary desire to broadcast ourselves on to public online forums and media platforms. We want to be seen. (I don’t think anyone, however, could have predicted the modern mind’s mad desire to publicly post every single aspect of our individual lives, from our breakfasts to our breakups.) Chase will continue to push the limits of genre throughout all the seasons of the series, and he will do so in a variety of ways. For example, the very next episode, “Boca,” will subvert some of the old-school expectations that we have of traditional fictional mobsters: we’ll see that Corrado has certain unexpected tastes, and Tony—ack!—allows the police to deal with an unsavory soccer coach…

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FOOD AND FIREARMS
The dream sequence that opens the episode, like so many other dreams in The Sopranos, causes an initial confusion in the viewer—we don’t realize at first that it is a dream that we are watching. The ethereal sounds and surreal imagery, however, soon make it clear that we are not witnessing something from waking life. Clocking in at almost two minutes, I believe it’s the longest dream sequence that we’ve seen so far, and it functions to prime us for some of the longer sequences that will arrive later in the series. But the greater importance of the dream may be that it strongly revisits the connection between food and violence that was established through the murder of Emil Kolar at the pork store in the Pilot episode. Human body parts are just another of the market’s meat selection within the dream:

The Food/Firearms connection is also emphasized in this hour by setting the only shooting of the episode at a bakery. Chase is again playing with conventions and stereotypes; he plays the stereotypical Italian love of food against (some) viewers’ foregone conclusion of Italian mafia violence.

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ADDITIONAL POINTS:

• The song that plays during Christopher’s dream is “You” by the Aquatones. The song will be put to use in a similar way in Season 4’s “Everybody Hurts.”
• Agent Dwight Harris makes his first appearance here, and we already see that he is a pretty decent guy.
• “Little Italy,” a Chase-produced episode of Northern Exposure, functions almost as a prototype for this Sopranos outing: it dealt with Italian-American assimilation and the vendetta-mentality. Richard Romanus (who plays Richard LaPenna here) had a major role in that episode. We see him at a sitdown with his fellow Alaskan Italian-Americans below:

• Livia displays her usual cunning here. She recognizes that her daughter-in-law’s visit to Green Grove is not as innocent as Carmela insists.  Carmela is distracting Livia while Tony hides his weapons in her closet.) More insidiously, Livia reveals to Corrado that Tony is attending psychotherapy. When she insists to Corrado that “I don’t want there to be any repercussions” against her son, she is actually setting the cornerstone of a murderous conspiracy against him.
• Some of you film buffs may notice that Tommy (Joe Pesci) actually references The Oklahoma Kid, not Pale Rider, in the GoodFellas scene I mentioned above. I think Pesci only does this because GoodFellas is set from 1955 to 1980, so it would be nonsensical for his character to allude to Pale Rider, a movie that came out in 1985.
• Wiseguy wise guy.  Pussy humorously puns to Chris (upset that his life has no arc) that Noah had an ark. It may be noteworthy that in this episode’s final scene, Chris pulls up to the newspaper dispenser (containing the Star-Ledger which has finally mentioned him by name) by making a U-turn—he literally makes an arc.
• Infinite jest.  Jeffrey Wernick appears in this hour as a mob expert. Wernick contributed much information to HBO’s tie-in book The Sopranos: A Family History. He made this literary contribution despite the fact that he doesn’t actually exist; “Jeffrey Wernick” is a fictional character, played by Timothy Nolen in this most self-reflexive episode of Season 1.

• Sam Coppola is laugh-out-loud funny as the Melfi family’s therapist. (He revels in the fact that he has some ancestral ties to the ‘kosher nostra.’) I can’t help but wonder if David Chase, TV’s supreme jester, included a “Coppola” in this episode’s cast as a nod to Richard LaPenna’s line that everyone who talks about Italian-Americans today will invariably reference GoodFellas and The Godfather.
• In retrospective viewings, we can see that this episode contains some noticeable character-continuity “errors”: Joe Gannascoli appears as “Gino” but will later play “Vito Spatafore,” and some of the mob wives will later be played by different actresses. In a weird way, though, these glitches work—they strengthen this episode’s presentation of itself as a self-aware work of fiction that wryly celebrates its own fictionality.
• Cake’s “Frank Sinatra” plays over the final credits. It may be a final jab at those critics that simplistically dismiss The Sopranos for its supposed glorification of the mob. Sinatra, after all, was the most revered and mainstream of Italian-Americans and even he had mob associations.
• The episode unfolds in a far more fluid way than my write-up suggests. My decision to split the analysis along Christopher and Richard’s storylines, for example, is not exactly warranted by the narrative, but I needed a way to slice the episode open in order to peer into it. The power of The Sopranos arises from the graceful, overlapping flow of its imagery, dialogue, music, allusions. I shudder to think that the artificial analytical grid that I place over the episodes might suppress a viewer’s own fluid engagement with the show. But I (Word)press on…

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