After reading the analysis of last night's episode of The Sopranos on Slate, I buy what Jeff Goldberg said: that like Dr. Melfi, the viewers tricked themselves into believing that they were doing something good by analyzing this person that they knew was evil. But now, at the end, finally we wake up and realize that we need to stop, that if we’re going to be good, reasonable people, we can’t enable this person any longer.
There’s also something interesting going on in terms of the ambiguity of viewer identification with characters on The Sopranos. For me, Dr. Melfi has always been more sympathetic, if for no other reason than that she’s from a socio-economic class closer to my own than most of the other characters are. That’s probably true for a lot (but maybe not most) of the audience. We think of ourselves as superior to Tony, who isn’t terribly bright, but we think that he wants to be good. We feel his anger and his sorrow. We’re occasionally empathetic. But we also have known all along that he’s a murderer, that he’s a bad person.
In Scorsese on Scorsese, Marty talks about wanting to portray people normally thought of as bad or evil, particularly Jake Lamotta and Travis Bickle, as something more sympathetic, or perhaps more complex. This wouldn’t excuse their actions (or would it?), but would somehow be more realistic, and therefore preferable to the black-and-white unrealistic morality of traditional Hollywood. While describing the sympathy that viewers might feel for the main characters in Goodfellas, Scorsese talks about it in terms of growing up: “It raises a moral question, like a kid getting older and realizing what these people have done, but still having those first feelings for them as people.” At the conclusion of most of their narratives, Scorsese’s anti-heroes are either praised by a backwards society (Taxi Driver, King of Comedy), thus indicting society, or they’re leading undesirable, unglamorous lives (Goodfellas, Raging Bull), which, in a culture where glamour and fame are indistinguishable from respect, can only be considered a fate worse than death. None of the films really let the immoral protagonist (or the viewer who identifies with him) off the hook, but it doesn’t punish them the way the old Hays code would’ve demanded that they do. This moral gray area is defended on the grounds that it is more realistic than Hollywood’s depiction of evil.
Dr. Melfi hasn’t really played too prominently in the last few seasons of The Sopranos, so this second-to-last episode, in which Melfi recognizes that she’s been mollycoddling a murderer, seems like a bit of an unsatisfying cheat, an escape hatch for those of us who always felt uncomfortable with the prospect of a murderous protagonist. I’ve spent so much more time with Tony that I’m more inclined to identify with him, but when I take a step back, I clearly identify with Melfi more, feeling that, as Scorsese put it, its time to grow up and judge this person for his actions. What might’ve been praised by some as the realistic, gray-area depiction of evil is really just an attempt to excuse the voyeuristic pleasure of the therapist/viewer.
Because it has two points of viewer identification, the show can have it both ways. We can wash our hands of Tony and the show, giving up our vicarious addiction to the pleasures of acting selfishly, or we can believe, like Tony believes, that we're the last of a dying breed, and that there's a nobility in that.
Then there's the nascent terrorist AJ, but maybe it'll be better to write about that after the series concludes.
No comments:
Post a Comment