Sicilian Culture: News & Views

'Sopranos' Not Fit For Public Consumption
By Andrew Greeley, Chicago Sun Times

February 1, 2002 - - HBO's Sunday night soap opera ''The Sopranos'' is ''The Godfather'' every week, only with more gratuitous nudity, more filthy language and-- what's really important to its success--much more brutal violence. It's also an insult to Italian Americans!

As a Christmas present, someone gave me the DVDs of the second season. Since I purport to be a sociologist of popular culture, I figured I'd better watch some of them. I was astonished to discover that the main appeal of this highly praised series (even among intellectuals) was violence--cruel mayhem and bloody murder. Yet the Wall Street Journal hails it as ''the best TV drama of modern times.''

Well, Tony Soprano is certainly a free market entrepreneur. The appeal of the series consists of bare breasts and bloody bodies. The males are brutal psychopaths, and the women little better than weaklings who piously accept the brutality and the infidelity of their men--when they're not encouraging it, or in the case of Soprano's ineffable mother, actually engaging in the blood lust.

Soprano (I'm surprised he's not called ''Tough Tony'') is a vicious monster. The ''high concept'' that he would see a psychiatrist and that a psychiatrist would actually attempt to treat him is more fantastical than the doings of Frodo Baggins and Gandalf the Grey. The acting is terrible; the dialogue dull (unless you like hearing the ''F'' word in every other sentence); the writing is pedestrian and unimaginative. Some of the episodes would be a cure for insomnia if the viewer didn't know that the payoffs of graphic mayhem and prolonged nudity were about to happen.

''The Sopranos'' is a Western, a story written according to the paradigm established by the shoot-'em-up B movies and refined in "The Godfather" films. The only difference is that the Wild West has been moved to New Jersey, and the people whom the protagonists gun down or maim are not American Indians but mostly fellow Italians.

Violence on American television is not politically incorrect, it would seem, so long as Italians are both the perpetrators and the victims. The phony picture of Italian personality, family structure and culture, absorbed from all previous mob movies, is pushed further than in the past. The theme, the series assumes, is simply Italian family life and loyalty applied systematically to organized crime. Indeed, those who enjoy watching the program are doubtless surprised that some Italian Americans take offense.

Isn't that the way Italians are? Isn't that the way many films have portrayed Italians: as macho men and castrating women?

Can one imagine a series like this based on a Jewish, an American Indian or an African-American family involved in criminal behavior? There would be noisy protests and solemn editorial warnings. Because the Sopranos are Italian, it's all right.

It doesn't help that they are Catholics. While ''The Godfather'' had some elegant photography of Catholic celebrations, ''The Sopranos'' concentrates on Carmella's refusal to leave Tony because her wimpy priest has told her that marriage is a sacred sacrament. I suppose there are still priests in the country who would urge a woman to stay with such a goon (there are priests somewhere who are capable of almost any idiocy), but most priests would urge her to take her children as far as she can from such a father. Otherwise Tony Jr. is destined to be a sadistic mob boss just like his father or his cousin Christopher.

When Mario Cuomo was about to run for president, word spread around the country that he wouldn't dare run because there was some deep, dark family secret in his history--some secret that the media had not revealed when he was running for governor of New York. He was an Italian from Queens, wasn't he? Of course, he was connected; he had to be.

At the start of the last century, a congressional commission presided over by Rep. William Dillingham (R-New York) argued for immigration restrictions on the grounds that Italians were ''innate'' criminals (and Poles were not intelligent enough to become Americans, and the Irish drank too much). It would seem that the Italian stereotype has not changed much since then. Only now it is no longer a threat to American civility. It has become a pretext for popular culture violence--violence that wins awards from the television industry.

Email: agreel@aol.com
www.suntimes.com/output/greeley/cst-edt-greel01.html

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