The Sopranos

[Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema]

Joanna Bujes makes a number of good points, and, in particular, shoots down
the notion that the show is in itself sexist and an affirmation of
masculinity. As she points out, there is little in it of the
pseudo-nostalgic hankering for a past time of patriarchal authority. The
GODFATHER movies, for example, showed a man, Michael Corleone, who turns
back from modernity to a more antiquated form of masculine authority. And
his wife, despite her origins in a more advanced capitalist social milieu,
regresses with him, in the end becoming a Catholic. Obviously Catholicism
originated in laggardly modernizing European countries, with stunted
development of bourgeois institutions and  bourgeois character structure.
Significantly, GODFATHER I ends with several murders happening
simultaneously with a Catholic ritual.

By contrast, THE SOPRANOS embraces modernity, with, as Joanna points out,
Tony driving to his McMansion, which is just as much his rooted place as any
other. In THE GODFATHER, the suburban house was an adjunct to the urban
immigrant roots. The Catholicism comes across much in much more  developed
characters, like Father Phil, one of the most clearly dishonest
personalities in the show -- not violent and thuggish, but utterly phony.
There's a place where even the hapless Carmella shoots him down. Also,
another very contemporary aspect of his spuriousness is his modish new-agey
quality, giving her books on Buddhism, while at the same time making pro
forma statements about how only Catholicism is true, etc. He voices one of
the clearest forms of regressive religiosity, the notion that one can
transcend specific denominations in a search for a vague and generalized
"spirituality."

Also, there's the point where Paulie Altieri has a moment of great anxiety
when Christopher Moltisanti, (whose name, by the way, means "many saints")
has a near-death experience. (Of the typical type involving a fantasy of a
tunnel-like space -- a result of shutting down of the outer parts of brain
function). Paulie feels God may actually be against him and goes to his own
priest, who is sitting at an executive desk, and remonstrates: God hasn't
kept his side of the bargain -- after all Paulie's donations, etc. In effect
Paulie thinks Catholicism is a kind of protection racket in which the client
acquires certain ethically enforceable claims. The priest doesn't really
correct him, even though that issue was supposedly settled with the
Tridentine reforms in the 16th century. Luther, after all, criticized the
sale of indulgences, which Paulie apparently thinks he had bought, in
effect.

The anti-clerical aspect of the SOPRANOS is one of its more clearly
anti-sexist parts, inasmuch as Catholicism is much of the core of
contemporary male-dominant ideology. I'm surprised the Catholic League
hasn't had more to say about it.

Christopher Rhoades Dilemma