Sopranos - David Lavery

William C. Siska
“If all this is for nothing”:
The Sopranos as Art Cinema
For my money, the greatest praise
The Sopranos received came from Norman
Mailer, who said in so many words that
The Sopranos had fulfilled the dream of
the Great American Novel more than any
other contemporary literary work. 1 Mailer
cited the depth of characterization and
the broad social scope of the narrative,
and could have added the American
themes of lust, greed, and the
inevitability of betrayal as bases in
support of his judgment.
But to rise to the level of literature,
a television series or movie must additionally possess a dimension of
introspection that is foreign to a medium that favors action, simplicity,
and transparency in characters that nearly always turn out to be what
they seem at first sight. Unlike American television, where the
protagonist is a figure of good – on the side of law and good manners -
doing battle with evil and error, literature admits to its pantheon
contradictory figures wherein evil and good abide simultaneously and
resolutions can be ambiguous or downbeat. Finally, when we consider
literature, whether Huckleberry Finn or The Great Gatsby, War and
Peace or Crime and Punishment, we value it not solely for its
representation of the world, but for its contemplation about what that
world means. The great director Jean Renoir achieved this in cinema
twice, in The Grand Illusion and The Rules of the Game, films whose
philosophical dimensions illustrate his seminal quote, “A man is not
only what happens to him, but what happens to him and what he thinks
about it.” 2

Woody Allen, writing about Ingmar Bergman in The New York
Times on the occasion of the publication of Bergman’s autobiography,
argued that while the cinema normally confines itself to external
action, Bergman found a cinematic style to reveal a character’s inner
states and focus on a battlefield of the soul 3 . Michelangelo Antonioni,
Federico Fellini, and David Chase, in The Sopranos, have also found
ways to dramatize internal conflicts.
The most obvious method for introspection in The Sopranos is
the device of the therapist, where precisely what is paid for is a tour
of one’s own head. The preponderance of dreams in The Sopranos
offers another inroad to the mind. These are but two of the ways The
Sopranos rejects television’s standard operating practice, and locates
itself in the orbit of the European art cinema, where interior
consciousness tied to contemplation of abstract issues finds its way
onto the screen.
The genesis of this essay comes from a conversation I had with
David Chase in 1970, when we were film students together, and he
quipped, “Why should I go to a Bergman movie. If I want to get
depressed I fight with my wife.” 4 Imagine my surprise, then, when in
the third episode of The Sopranos, the key question raised by Ingmar
Bergman in The Seventh Seal is echoed by Tony Soprano in a session
with Dr. Melfi, a question which will recur throughout the six seasons
of the series.
“What if all this [i.e., our earthly life] is for nothing? And if it’s
for nothing, why do I got to think about it?” Tony remonstrates to
Melfi, in a dialogue that could be inserted into the confessional scene
in The Seventh Seal. “That’s the question, isn’t it, the question of God
or whatever you want to call it,” Melfi says, “and why we’re given the
questionable gift of knowing we’re going to die.” Without proof of
God’s existence, the Knight says, the fact of death is too heavy a
burden to bear, and “Life is a senseless horror.” Tony, like Bergman’s
Knight, is facing the unbearable.

“If all this is for nothing…” (Season One, Episode 3)
The Seventh Seal (1957)

In the seventh episode of part two of the sixth season of The
Sopranos, A.J. complains to Meadow, “Don’t you think this is all
meaningless?” While Tony’s peering into the void is treated with
seriousness, A.J. is the callow questioner and his despair is treated
with mordant humor. “Maybe you should try setting some goals for
yourself,” Meadow advises him.
In The Seventh Seal, Bergman proposes that a community of
sharing is the best life has to offer. Sharing a meal with the family of
itinerant actors who have welcomed him to their midst, the Knight
holds a bowl of milk in his hands like the chalice of the mass, and
savors his appreciation of the moment. “This will be a sign, and a
great content,” he tells his companions. “Remember the good times,”
Tony tells his assembled family in the finale of Season One, hoisting
another chalice, a glass of wine, “Times like these.” Several seasons of
The Sopranos end with a gathering around a meal, though the meal as
an attempt to affirm the positive in a negative world becomes
increasingly ineffectual as the series progresses. And, of course, the
series ends with a permanently suspended meal.

“Remember the good times. Times like these.” (Season One, Episode
13)
The Seventh Seal (1957)
The Sopranos limns even more of Bergman than the introspection
of the confessional and its correlative, the confessional of the
therapist’s office. In The Passion of Anna, the Bergman film that
occasioned Chase’s tart observation on art films and depression, the
potential for violence simmering beneath the surface of close
relationships and disturbing offenses against nature find their
expression.
Anna Fromm, played by Liv Ullmann, affirms in conversation the
success of her marriage and the happy memories it has given her in a
less satisfactory present. But, in fact, her marriage was a disaster, and
she has gained her limp by crashing a car with her husband in it,

leading to his demise. Gradually her relationship with Andreas (Max
von Sydow) falls prey to the same discontents that led to the
destruction of her first union. Bergman masterfully traces the growth
of this emotional disease beneath the rituals of their lives together,
until it bursts through in shocking, almost B-movie violence, with
Andreas burying an ax into the wall of his barn and flailing wildly at
the outraged, cowering Anna.
In the finale of Season Four of The Sopranos, which concludes
with Carmela leaving Tony, the prelude to her flight is a vicious verbal
altercation and the threat of physical violence. (A domestic quarrel
later in the series does involve Tony beating Carmela.) But through the
fifty-one episodes that preceded this one, the slow burn brought on by
repeated lies and betrayals erupts into an emotional conflagration. In
both dramas, psychic violence produces a chasm that pushes intimates
apart.
A key motif of the art cinema, one that David Chase says is also
central to understanding The Sopranos, is the presentation of
characters who lie to themselves. 5 The theme of lying to oneself and
its effect on relationships factors in almost all of Eric Rohmer’s films,
and Bergman is also obsessed with the idea of self-delusion and the
devastating consequences once the façade constructed by lies is
removed. Borg, the honored physician in Wild Strawberries, thinks of
himself as a wise and self-composed success. During a journey with his
angelic daughter-in-law, his mask of contented pride falls away, and
he must face the truth that his life has been empty labor, and, at his
advanced age, it’s too late for him to reverse it. This sense of loss with
the passage of time, that his days have been filled with false pursuits
that add up to nothing, also suffuses Tony Soprano’s experience of life.
Alma, the shallow nurse who waits on her mute but
psychologically powerful patient in Persona, thinks of her life as
settled, and, when she admits that she has lied herself into a spurious
contentment, she is left facing a void. The last word she speaks in the
movie is “nothing.”

Similarly, Carmela Soprano, who some critics saw in the early
seasons of the series as the moral center of the show, and whom they
applauded in the fourth season for leaving Tony because of his
unchecked corruption, is, like Bergman’s Anna, someone who lies to
herself, about her ethical standards, the morality of her lifestyle, and
where the money comes from. The result, Bergman says, and David
Chase seconds, is an inevitable descent into “psychological and
physical violence.”
The Passion of Anna (1969)

“Psychological and physical violence” (Season Four, Episode 13)

The Passion of Anna (1969)
Violence towards animals represents a blight in the world larger
than that contained in single characters like Anna Fromm or Tony
Soprano. In The Passion of Anna, mindless cruelty to animals is an
affront to nature. The burning of horses, which occurs after the
suspect in earlier incidents of violence to animals has committed
suicide, proves that evil haunts the landscape, and turns the act into a
metaphor for a universal corrosion in existence itself.
In The Sopranos, metaphorical incidents are forced by television
practice to carry out a plot function, and the audience knows that the
killing of Pie-O-My in episode 9 of Season Four has been arranged by
Ralph Cifaretto as an act of revenge against Tony. Yet the
metaphorical dimension in this act of killing is finally more powerful
than the sadism of Ralphie’s vengeance. The horse represents the
natural life to which Tony is drawn in the opening of the series when
he warms to the migrating ducks in his swimming pool. His affection
for the ducks and for Pie-O-My as his only attachments grow from pure
feeling, relationships with neither demands nor expectations, free of
the contractual give and take that rules his relations with people in
both his family and his business.
After the conflagration (Season Four, Episode 9)

Pie-O-My (Season Four, Episode 9)
The Passion of Anna (1969)

Violence towards animals The Passion of Anna (1969)
The defining characteristics of the European art cinema are the
overt address of abstract issues – raised problems, like “the meaning
of life” - in dialogue and by direction of the viewer to symbolic and
metaphorical images 6 . American television and movies typically avoid
the abstract to focus on lived problems: how to get across the street
but not what it means “to cross.” American moviemaking, for all its
pictorial virtuosity, tends to avoid visual symbolism, seemingly
determined to prove Andre Bazin’s contention that the cinema, with its
roots in photography, was destined to a kind of “vulgar realism,”
where the camera records and presents literally only what it sees. This
“vulgar realism” combined with the tyranny of plot practiced by
Hollywood presents a problem for Chase in fulfilling the visual aspect
of art cinema’s definition.
The solution, for Chase, is to slip in metaphorical images within the
guise of plot. Chase lamented that the dream sequences in The
Sopranos could not be done like Fellini’s, freestanding juxtapositions of
images revealing the character’s inner being without regard to plot,
but had to move the story forward. 7 Metaphor, though, lies latent in

The Sopranos’ visual motifs: the repeated scenes in hospital rooms,
the many automobile accidents and gunshot killings provide potent
arguments for the harm resulting from relentless pursuit of the dollar,
and create a milieu in which uncontrolled change and loss lie in wait
for the characters.
The influence of the art cinema on The Sopranos goes well
beyond Bergman to embrace the themes of many other prominent
directors of the genre. One may be tempted to greet with skepticism
the notion that a creator of popular American television would be
strongly shaped by a kind of movie as esoteric, intellectual, and
decidedly, over the life-cycle of The Sopranos, as unpopular as art
films. But this should come as no surprise, because in the late 1960s
when David Chase was forming his ideas about how to make movies
and what they should say, European art films were far more central to
the audience passionate about movies as an art than anything coming
out of Hollywood. Academy Award Best Picture winners from 1965 to
1968, The Sound of Music, A Man for All Seasons, In The Heat of the
Night, and Oliver were not nearly as compelling to people learning
filmmaking as movies filtering in from across the sea, Juliet of the
Spirits, The Red Desert, Persona, Weekend, and others. These were the
titles film students went out of their way to see, because that’s what
people were talking about, whether or not they would prove to be the
future of cinema.
When David Chase got to Hollywood, he found he had to learn
storytelling from a perspective different than that of Fellini and Jean-
Luc Godard. “I really didn’t know about story,” Chase said recently. “I
thought 8 1/2 was a great story.” 8 But Chase ingested the seriousness
of purpose, and the high artistic aspirations of the European art
cinema, in many ways, are manifest in The Sopranos.
The Sopranos is first and foremost a gangster saga, but, like the
best films of Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese, it draws on the
art cinema of Bergman, Fellini, and Godard. A significant part of the
pleasure that we take in The Sopranos and the meanings we assign to
it as an important achievement of American art, derive not only from

its effective reworking of gangster drama and family comedy, but also
from an engagement with the intellectual questing and cinematic style
of the European art cinema.

1 “Norman Mailer on the Medium and the Message.” www.Poynter.com. The
Poynter Institute. 2004. February 6, 2004.
2 Joseph McBride, “Interview with Jean Renoir,” Sight and Sound V. 24.4
(London: BFI Publishing, 1971).
3 Woody Allen, “Through a Life Darkly,” New York Times Book Review 12
November 1988: 14.
4 David Chase, in conversation, Palo Alto, California, February 1970.
5 Fresh Air, National Public Radio, March 2, 2004.
6 See William Siska, “Metacinema: A Modern Necessity,” Literature/Film
Quarterly 7.1 (1979): 285-289, and Siska, Modernism in the Narrative Cinema: The
Art Film as a Genre (NY: Arno Press, 1980).
7 Martha Nochimson, Dying to Belong: Gangster Movies in Hollywood and
Hong Kong (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), 241 – 242.
8 Peter Biskind, “An American Family,” Vanity Fair April 2007: 240.