Yes, yes, you hit the nail.....
Let's see, where to start?
It seems to me this show is at the confluence of two gangster trends: the first, is illustrated by the thirties gangster movies which were nominally about gangsters but really about their (implied) capitalist counterparts, whose greed/business-as-usual had led to social disaster. (That is, it was OK to make movies showing the gangsters as thugs, whereas it was not OK to make movies showing the businessmen as thugs....so they made movies about gangsters.) The second trend started in the 70s with the Godfather movies, which, if you watch again should really impress you for their nostalgic/elegaic mood. "Godfather" is about a time when men were men, women raised families and were protected, and loyalty to family was more important then individualistic self interest. The "Godfather" films functioned as a critique of capitalism, revealing that it is NOT possible to separate the public from the private. That those actions men undertook to "protect" their families....would, in the end, destroy those very families. The "Godfather" exposed the illusion of the "protected" bourgeois family if you will. It is no accident that Godfather became the huge popular hit it was in the seventies, when women had to go out and work to enable their families to get by.
Every show of The Sopranos opens with the credits sequence, during which Tony (the mafia boss) drives his SUV from the murkiest bowels of the New Jersey industrialized zone, through the white trash neighborhoods, through the middle-class neighborhoods, and winds up, pulling into his driveway in an upper class neighborhood. A newly minted very nouveaux riche house awaits him. During his upwardly mobile trekk (??), a fairly haunting Bob Springstee kind of song, murmurs behind him "got up this morning....got myself a gun." Tony's ride home is the American dream personified, and the question this show asks is this: is it possible to accomplish this dream without a gun? And the answer is No.
Tony Soprano is a "good family man" and a "good catholic." All the neighbors and all the straight professionals he and his family deal with are perfectly aware of who he is and what he does. My absolute favorite part of the show is when some trouble arises...some crisis of conscience...Mrs Soprano going to confession...and these stalwart representatives of respectablity bend over backwards to reassure the Sopranos that there's nothing really wrong with what they're doing....provided they give that donation to Columbia University, contribute to the church, become more sensitive, etc.
I don't want to go on and on. Those of you who have seen the show don't need any preaching. Those who haven't...the first, second, and third (?) season are on video at your video store. Check out a couple and have a look-see. You can't beat the acting, the dialog, the humor, and the critique. Fourth season starts in September; make friends with someone who subscribes to HBO!
(P.S. to anticipate the "what you're a feminist and you bewail women working" comment. I don't believe that women were "liberated' into shit jobs in the seventies; I think they were forced into them by economic necessity. Some small percentage of women (like myself) were able to get jobs that paid well, but that was the exception, not the rule. Suffice it to say that when I had to leave my three-month old son and go back to work, it felt like I was cutting my arm off. I eagerly await the time when the work of "reproduction" is seen on an equal level with the work of "production" -- until then, it is all shite.)
Joanna