FEATURE
| The Sopranos and the End of Masculinity | |
| Six years of tough-guy posturing haven't gotten Tony anywhere | |
 by Andy Selsberg, June 7, 2007
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"My mudda didn't love me enough": The cracked masculinity of Tony SopranoIn the pilot episode of The Sopranos, mob captain Tony Soprano and his teenage daughter Meadow sit in an old, empty church. Tony marvels at the place—its grandeur, its history—and tries to get his daughter to do the same. “Your great-grandfather and his brother Frank—they built this place. Stone and marble workers,” he says with pride. Meadow is skeptical—just the two of them? “No,” Tony explains. “They were two guys on a crew of, you know, laborers. They didn’t design it, but they knew how to build it. Go out now and find me two guys that can put decent grout around your bathtub.”
In the past there were men, and these men could build things. Tony and his villainous crew are—what, exactly? A mishmash of movie gangsters? Hard to say. Ask the therapist. As much as anything, The Sopranos is about the fall of masculinity.
Tony and his crew idealize the manly virtues: loyalty, stoicism, and problem solving through brute force. Their favorite hang-outs—the pork store and the strip club—are shrines to the sacred, macho sins of gluttony and lust. The whole manly institution implodes spectacularly over six seasons.
Loyalty? Tony’s best friend, Big Pussy, becomes a rat, so Tony kills him. When Tony falls into a coma after being shot by his demented Uncle Junior, his crew is far busier jockeying for money and position than praying for his recovery. Tony loves his troubled nephew and henchman Chris like a son, he says, but when Chris is injured in a car accident, Tony suffocates him rather than call for an ambulance. When Tony’s old friend and advisor Hesh tries to collect a $200,000 loan, Tony taunts him with antisemitic insults (“Don’t be shy, Shylock.”) As much as these guys man-hug each other, it’s hard to locate any real trust. Loyalty requires affection, and a belief in a greater good. Or even a smaller good. But instead these men are guided by vengeance—the worst line in the mancode.
The characters are afraid, but not paranoid—because inevitably they are all on somebody’s to-whack list. They call themselves soldiers, and soldiers—the realest of real men—are supposed to swallow fear. But you can’t just swallow fear, or sadness, without getting sick. This is why Tony sees a psychiatrist. But discussing feelings is a violation of the code so severe that his mother and Uncle Junior try to have him killed. An inability to fix his emotions on his own makes Tony hate himself more; he beats himself for being weak. He gets it from all angles.
Slinking into a shrink’s office is a big, flashing no-no, but the world of the Sopranos is saturated with landmines of vulnerability. In the first season, Junior has a crisis because word gets out that he performs cunnilingus. As he explains to his girlfriend, “They think if you suck pussy you’ll suck anything. It’s a sign of weakness, and possibly a sign that you’re a fanook.”
Clearly, any value system that bans cunnilingus does not have a good shot at being naturally selected. Even hyper-masculine hip-hop celebrates the act in song. It doesn’t matter that a taboo on eating snatch is as ludicrous as a taboo against eating quiche. Junior, even as a capo emeritus, so fears emasculation-by-ridicule that he lets it poison the one sweet relationship he has. Then, as though trying to take back all the oral pleasure he’s given away, he ends up smashing a cream pie in his lover’s face; trying to be a man turns him into a clown.
By crook and fanook: Gay ganster Vito SpataforeThe mobsters' homophobia climaxes when Vito, one of Tony’s “best earners,” is exposed as gay. The fact that Vito was a cold-blooded mob killer wasn’t enough. His sexuality trumped all that. Hey—these are dudes who live in fear of cunnilingus.
The reaction to Vito’s homosexuality is truly phobic—irrational terror sprouting as hate. Tony has moments of compassion, but not enough to restrain him from ordering a hit on Vito. When that hit doesn't happen, Phil Leotardo, Tony’s rival and cousin to Vito’s wife, ends up supervising Vito’s fatal beating and sodomization by pool cue. It’s a horrific glimpse into the broken gears of the masculinity machine.
Vito’s surviving son responds to his father’s murder by Gothing up and causing trouble at school. Eventually, as a rebuttal to ridicule from his classmates, he takes a dump in the gym shower. His quasi-uncle Phil sits down with him and explains that his “family’s had enough shame.” Phil commands Vito Jr. to “be the kind of man [your mother] needs—strong, masculine.” This coming from the man who murdered his father! (A side lesson of The Sopranos: watch that uncle!) Tony gives a version of the same speech: “You’re the man of the house now. Start fuckin’ acting like it!” This is a typical moment of Sopranos disconnect. Tony and Phil like talking about what it means to be a man, but their handbooks are dangerously out-of-date.
Perceptions of strength and weakness are reversed. What they view as mighty and manly—driving huge SUV’s, solving arguments with muscle, having affairs—are actually signs of uncertainty and self-doubt. Their signifiers for weakness—owning up to feelings of sadness and fear, committing to a sexual relationship, being open to compromise—require confidence. These TV mobsters may be more entertainingly severe than most real men, but their standards are familiar.
In the company of men: "Manliness" author and Harvard professor, Harvey MansfieldTony’s grandfather was part of a crew that could build a church. But those stone and masonry skills have faded from the world. Like he said—try and find someone today who knows how to properly grout a tub. The humility required to be on a building crew is also in short supply—Where’s the glory? Who wants to live on an honest day’s pay?
The Sopranos shows how we have embraced the worst parts of what it means to be a man and jettisoned the most useful. Tony has a crew, sure, just like in the old days, but this crew has built nothing. It’s all pretend, a bunch of no-show jobs. This is the jarring realization as the show ends. There is nothing to marvel at. Not only is there nothing left, there was nothing to begin with. There is no real friendship. There is no solid marriage. There is no decent father. There is no esplanade. There is no church.
In the end, the show is a funeral service for our messed-up brand of masculinity. This is why the program is ultimately optimistic. Clearly, this way didn’t work. Let’s move on and try something else.
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Andy Selsberg has written for the Village Voice, the Believer and GQ. He blogs at Citizen Truth. More... |
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RebeccaD
Really Insightful
I have been trying to put my finger on why I consistently find myself so attracted to Tony--yes, sexually, even sans cunnilingus--and your piece, Andy, has given me a far more palatable explanation than I've been giving people for the past decade. It's not that I am attracted to a hulking belching sadist, but to a melancholic anachronism pining for a simpler time. Molto buono, grazie! Rebecca
Anonymous
duh
I had a professor once explain that the ganster-story is the dominant trope in american literature and pop-culture for a simple reason: it's long been the quintessential way to portray the confrontation of tradition against modernity. Obviously this has a psychological dimension, which in turn is at least partly about sexuality and gender roles (especially given a dumbed-down Freudian representation of 'psychology'). So what? Don't give a bunch of HBO writers so much credit. Its been done, and done, and done.
The problem with the Sopranos is that it was a great gangster story back when you could still see the twin towers in the background of the show's opening song. But talk about anachronistic, Rebecca says she's attracted to the "melancholic anachronism pining for a simpler time"...that's putting it mildly. In a world where 'tradition vs modernity' issues are being mitigated a global, fundamentalist, Islamic insurgency, who wouldn't pine for memories of goofy gansters in New Jersey, let alone at the Tropicana or even back in Sicily...But it's 2007 people, who gives a fuck about Italian gansters anymore, even post-modern ones. That shit is so 2000. Where's the sitcom with the Taliban leaders arguing about cell-phone plans and whether they want their kids wearing burkas or not...?
Anonymous
Re-Creating Masculinity
This was an excellent piece, and the Sopranos is, without a doubt, "a funeral service for our messed-up brand of masculinity."
The question this poses is: how do we maintain a masculinity that isn’t so messed up?
I doubt 2007 will be remembered as the end of universal gender traits that manifest themselves across societies and species...it might just be the end of an identification with violence, stoicism and sexism.
So the challenge to all modern men, but especially Jewish men (being handed an more complex gender role that the easy, Italian-tough-guy type), is to re-design an identity that is masculine but not sexist, childish or sex-destructive. Can we be a strong, assertive gender that still likes to eat pussy?
Modern feminism has been teaching women to cherish their femininity without sacrificing their agency (another HBO series, “Sex in the City,” worked on that); it's time we men catch up.
In the end, the Sopranos is as much a call to arms as it is a funeral.
Ken Krimstein
Tony Tony Tony
Your take on the fall of masculinity in the Sopranos is a valid one, but I'm not sure that's what makes the show so compelling. After all, wasn't that kind of done with "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence," like 50 years ago? But that's part of it, Tony is conflicted. So is everyone -- the women don't fare much better. Everyone in the show is equally flawed -- and equally compelling. I think it's interesting because it's the clearest picture we have of how f'd up it is to be an American paterfamilias today. Not last year. Not next year. Today. It's a fantasy, but a fantasy that shows a reality better than most realism. Tony's not Michael Corleone -- Michael was grand, large, Patton-esque in his stature. BIG. Tony is everyman, everybody -- at least in America these days. Yes, masculinity has been eroded. But so have honesty, guts, caring, mystery, awe, you name it. That's what his fight is. I think so, anyway.
abnobel
"Signifiers?"
Andy, you make some fine points, and clearly, questions of gender are often raised on this brilliant and searching show. But "[i]n the end, the show is a funeral service for our messed-up brand of masculinity?" Really? Forgive me, but only one inducted into the mysteries of gender and media studies can take that seriously. (I am myself an apostate.)
Like every work of art, "The Sopranos" far outstrips the theoretical preoccupations of its interpreters - and thank God for that. If the hoary and tendentious trope of "masculinity" occupied as large a place as you imply, its end would be a deliverance, not an occasion worthy of tribute and commemoration.
For those who missed it, David Remnick penned a fine encomium to its teeming diversity and "largeness" last week. (Below.)
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2007/06/04/070604taco_talk_remnick
Anonymous
yeah but
that Anne Leibovitz photo is really hot...
David Choe
Will Grout
That's a pretty good article. I'll put grout around your tub, and the truth is, guys who do cunilingus too much, you actually can't trust them. They're usually hiding something, they got an agenda or something
mmausner
nietzchean freedom
the odd thing is that, in a bass-ackwards way, there is a certain ideal evident in 'the Sopranos' that DOES counter all of the valid criticisms (analysis?) Selsberg levels at Tony &co. These mobsters live in the world, the real world, however much insular middle-class complacency would have it be otherwise.
Politics (esp. in McGreevey-strip club New Jersey) really IS a sleazy, corrupt, misogynistic culture with no higher morality than naked power plays. Real life, jobs, big institutions, the law itself, are all really only as pure as their bottom lines-- which more often than not are backed up by arbitrary force and with rich assholes getting away with murder.
Shakespeare would not have felt out of place watching the Sopranos, nor would Dante or even Aeschylus. Same as it ever was. We like to think we are more civilized than we were in shakespeare's verona or the Rome also portrayed on HBO. But we're not. The world still is run by people with money and muscle, who might lose a big war now and then but always win the day-to-day. And those who free themselves of the fetters of conventional morality and guilt can indeed exploit and control this world, and literally and figuratively, get away with murder. We all secretly wish we could do what Tony did, do whatever we want from moment to moment, use the aphrodisiac of power to sleep with whomever we want, keep a loyal wife and family at home too, and enjoy that moment of communion with similarly 'liberated' souls. Royalty in any dress, even that of a mob boss, is still royalty, and there is a reason why nobility is nobility from David and Batsheva to Atilla the Hun to 'droit de seigneur' to Charlie Sheen/Heidi Fleiss and Tony Soprano.
there are other ideals; but there is a hypnotic fascination to this one, and that's why we couldn't stop watching.
Jackson Dyer
boys, boys,
It's just a fricking TV show.
Cracked masculinity? What Hooey.
Check out this books which is selling like hot cakes:
The Dangerous Book for Boys:
by Conn Iggulden (Author), Hal Iggulden (Author)
Anonymous
"just" a tv show?
If you don't think popular culture is important, why read Jewcy!?
Anonymous
Paranoid American Guys
SHALOMMMMMM
I didn't see a single episode of the Sopranos- but if I had to
venture an opinion...I'd say american guys are generally
PARANOID, insecure, easily distracted in comparison to Europeans, especially Southern Euros, and avoid in-depht conversations about
just about anything except their stupid jobs, and ego-achievements.
I always laugh at how far apart Americanss stand when conversing 5-7 feet away. The territorial body bubble is HUGE...also American men hardly ever converse FACING each other, again, compared to Europeans (mainly), Latin Americans, and Middle Easterners. Even learning is affected. In most of the foreign language classes I've attended, 75-90 percent of the students are women, whereas in Europe, there is no stigma of unmanliness attached to verbal expression. I could go on, but I won't. (I'm of mixed Spanish,
Turkish, and Iranian extraction, if that means anything.)
Anonymous
Great you stole David
Great you stole David Chase's pitch to HBO and wrote it out as your own...Congratulations on a wasted website piece.
Julio
MzWrBBwbnxmq
ZwVwRd haven't I up to been anything. ,
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