Mob Movies & Self-Awareness¶
Just when I thought I was out… they pull me back in. Silvio Dante, doing Pacino, on request, badly, for years
The show's defining formal move: its characters have seen the films it's descended from, and are consciously imitating them.
The premise¶
Every previous mob fiction assumed its characters didn't know they were in one. The Sopranos assumes the opposite, and builds everything on it.
These men have all seen The Godfather. They quote it, argue about it, rank the installments, and measure themselves against it. Tony prefers Part II. Silvio does the Part III line on request. Paulie and Big Pussy debate the films' details as though they were scripture.
They have also seen Goodfellas, and behave accordingly.
The consequence is corrosive. These are men whose sense of what a gangster is comes from fiction about gangsters, which was itself romanticized. They are performing a copy of a copy, and falling short of it, and know they're falling short.
Tony's opening line — that he came in at the end and the best is over — is partly a statement about the business and partly a statement about the movies. He's comparing his life to The Godfather and finding it wanting.
The casting argument¶
Twenty-seven actors appear in both Goodfellas and The Sopranos, including three regulars.
This isn't budget. It's a claim.
| Actor | Goodfellas | The Sopranos |
|---|---|---|
| Lorraine Bracco | Karen Hill, the mob wife | Dr. Melfi, the psychiatrist |
| Michael Imperioli | Spider — shot in the foot | Christopher — shoots a man in the foot |
| Frank Vincent | Billy Batts | Phil Leotardo |
| Tony Sirico | Tony Stacks | Paulie |
| Suzanne Shepherd | Karen's mother | Carmela's mother |
Bracco's is the pointed one: she asked for Melfi because she'd played the wife, and the show gets to have the woman from Goodfellas sit across from the gangster and diagnose him.
Imperioli's is the joke: Spider gets shot in the foot by Joe Pesci for being slow; Christopher shoots a bakery clerk in the foot for being slow. Imperioli has confirmed it's deliberate.
Dominic Chianese was Johnny Ola in The Godfather Part II. Casting him as Junior does the same work in the other direction.
Cleaver¶
The most complete statement of the theme.
Christopher, an aspiring screenwriter who has read a book about story structure and wants an arc, eventually makes Cleaver — a slasher film in which a mob boss is murdered by his protégé, who then rises.
Tony watches it and understands exactly what it is: a confession, a threat, and a wish, dressed as genre.
And he can say nothing, because it's a movie. The show has arrived at the position where its characters use fiction to say things they can't say directly — which is what The Sopranos itself is doing about the genre it belongs to.
"D-Girl" and Hollywood¶
"D-Girl" (S2E20) sends Christopher to meet a development executive and discover that people like him are content — raw material for other people's careers.
It's the show's first sustained joke at the expense of its own industry, and it's uncomfortable on purpose: the audience watching this is doing exactly what the D-girl does.
The argument with Goodfellas¶
The Sopranos is often called Goodfellas on television, and Scorsese's film is unquestionably its formal parent — the voiceover-free naturalism, the comedy, the sudden violence, the cast.
But the show is also arguing with it.
Goodfellas is about the seduction and the crash: it makes the life look wonderful for two hours so the ending lands. The Sopranos never makes it look wonderful. Nobody in it is having a good time. The money is spent on bad furniture. The restaurants are mediocre. The men are unhappy, medicated, and bored.
That's the correction: the genre had spent seventy years insisting these lives were operatic, and Chase's answer is that they're suburban. See America in Decline.
The audience in the trap¶
The last turn of the screw.
The show's characters romanticize gangsters via movies. The show's audience is romanticizing gangsters via a television series. The structure is identical, and the series knows it — which is why it keeps making Tony charming and then making you watch what he does.
Chase's contempt for viewers who wanted "justice" at the end comes from here: the demand for a satisfying punishment is the demand for the genre's traditional absolution, and he refused to supply it. See Reading the Ending.