Sicilian Culture: The News & Views: AIDA's Statement Regarding Its Lawsuite Against the Sopranos

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Why The Sopranos May not Be About to Eclipse Shakespeare
1. It evades motivation. Its principal characters inhabit the underworld. Why? They are Italians from New Jersey -- no further reasons needed. This also adequately explains why mothers and sons will contrive to kill each other, among other pathologies. All the mechanisms that put these characters in motion and explain their actions ultimately reduce to their Italian-ness. The series appropriates a pre-existing frame-tale, blended using the Valachi Papers, The Godfather (text and film), and their antecedents -- clear back to Sherlock Holmes and Scarface.
2. The dialogue and attitudes are juvenile. Don't believe me? Get a script or transcript, delete all the <bleep> and <bleep> from the dialogue, and then read what remains. Without the Carlin Seven, it's pretty weak.
Now my friends and I talked like that on the corner of 23rd and Mifflin when we were 13 or so. But we got over it. Army recruits talk like that and they get over it. But The Sopranos do not get over it. Far from reflecting a "gritty realism"- it patronizes working-class ethnics and so allows the audience to feel superior to them.
3. The show perpetuates two corrupting stereotypes. The one, that all I-As are crooks, has been discussed on this forum at great length, and it need not be repeated.
The other stereotype, routinely ignored here and elsewhere, is a popular one- the evildoer is presented as being an Other- decidedly not like everyone else. The program continues the shopworn device of marking the criminal to differentiate him and to separate him from the norm. Dick Tracy used physical disfigurement. For the Sopranos it is ethnicity and (perhaps less obviously) class that mark the criminals. In fact, equating Soprano mobsters with The Other is exactly the device that give the audience permission to view the events with ironic detachment.
Sopranos are not Everyman, they are instead Somebody Else.
These points are sufficient to moderate enthusiasm for the show. But it can be opposed on grounds other than the artistic. The Sopranos is not simply a TV program- but a contrived Media Phenomenon. Its plot, characters, and dialogue have been promoted into a major popular culture cluster by the show's executives, abetted by a fawning pack of media shills. And as such it is no longer entitled to the shelter afforded a premium-cable show airing at an adult-appropriate time; its material can be challenged using prime-time network criteria.
One might argue that in this the show is the beneficiary of its popularity and quality. That argument was eliminated by the Harrison NJ casting call stunt perpetrated last year. As you recall, the show's keepers coolly exploited public ignorance of how TV shows hire actors. And by doing so they wallowed in a great deal of free media, while the hipsters sneered at the dumb guineas who dressed up like they were going to a wop wedding.
After that stunt, I rejected the arguments from artistry -- the program exposed itself as a corrupt engine operated, like the rest of television, to maximize its profits. And that drive for money accounts for the violence, the exploitation of women, the language... because that is what titillates, and of course titillation sells.
It is probably true, as Gardaphe' says, that irony is being overlooked here. But all the irony may not be visible from a single vantage point.
John Scocca
johnscocca@home.com

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