By Brendan Ulmer
Ulmer Uninterrupted
Have you been having an unshakeable sense that things are getting worse?
Sometimes it is a vague feeling, going to the story, browsing, and being pretty sure things didn’t used to cost this much, then paying at the checkout counter and being certain. Has it been the nonstop acts of violence, some random, some targeted, that have plagued this country my whole life? Do you ever feel like these things are connected somehow, maybe cosmically, as part of a broad, sinking, often slow but sometimes accelerated decline?
For David Chase, creator of HBO’s The Sopranos, he has been attuned to this feeling since at least the 1990s.
The Sopranos is a show about many things: the mafia, family, and a satire on upper-middle-class life. It succeeds on all these fronts with novelistic storytelling and richly textured, evolving characters. What takes the show from merely great to prophetic is its themes of decline and degradation.
Some light spoilers ahead, so skip to paragraph 16 if you’re not into that stuff.
The theme of decline is almost like a virus to the characters in the show, one they just can’t shake, like it’s airborne and constantly present. Take A.J. Soprano, for example, the son of New Jersey crime boss Tony Soprano, who starts the show as a mischievous scamp in the mold of Bart Simpson. A.J. lives in a canyon of contradiction, he lacks the fortitude and will to join his dad’s enterprise, but he’s also deeply reliant on the comforts its income provides him. Thus, he fails to launch, that little rascal grows up to be an aimless, computer-addicted young man, who is constantly at war with his parents, while still dependent on them.
A.J. is not alone, every character takes their own unique route down into the pit. However, it’s not just the characters in the show, it is the world and milieu they inhabit. The show tends to be subtle and artful about this, I promise, but the writers do tip their hand with one of the very first lines of the show.
“It’s good to be in something from the ground floor,” Tony Soprano says. “I came too late for that, I know, but lately I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over.”
His therapist, Dr. Melfi, responds.
“Many Americans, I think, feel that way.”
The rise and fall of organized crime in the United States is a very interesting lens with which to view the evolution, or degradation, of the U.S. economy. Organized crime thrived in bustling immigrant communities, where these new Americans would be able to open family businesses, which the mafia could then extort through protection rackets. Now, all over the country, family-owned storefronts are disappearing. The most unsympathetic victims of this economic trend are the mafia, because it’s much harder to shake down a Starbucks than a family-owned coffee shop. I use this example because that actually happens in the show.
“How do you think corporate would feel if, for the sake of argument, someone threw a brick through your window?” mafia member Bert Gervasi asked.
“They’ve got like 10,000 stores in North America, I don’t think they’d feel anything,” the coffee shop manager said.
When they walk out of the Starbucks stand-in store empty-handed, mafia member Patsy Parisi laments the death of small business.
“It’s over for the little guy,” Parisi says.
The show is quite grim, but it also has a great sense of humor, which makes the whole thing more palatable.
The show is quite cynical, so if you’re looking to induce feelings of hope and optimism, it probably isn’t the show to throw on. However, if you ever feel you are in the right place for it, it is a show that, more than any other, perfectly captures a feeling that I think is often felt but rarely expressed.
To sum it up, I’ll use the words of television critic Felix Biederman, who I think articulates it flawlessly.
“The Sopranos is a show about decline. Decline not as a romantic, singular, aesthetically breathtaking act of destruction, but as a slow, funny, sad, and limp slide down a hill,” Biederman said. “You don’t flee a burning Rome with your beloved in your arms, barely escaping a murderous horde of barbarians. You sit down for 18 hours a day, and enjoy fewer things than you used to.”
That is The Sopranos. Man, I really didn’t set out to be this depressing, that’s on me.
Brendan Ulmer is a reporter with The Hutchinson Tribune. He can be reached at brendan@hutchtribune.com.