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Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Failure on HBO

People have been getting all valedictory about The Sopranos lately, most recently David Remnick in The New Yorker. I honestly don't find Remnick's take on it to be that interesting: it's a good show, with good characters; lots of stuff happens, which the characters have trouble talking about; etc.

I figured out recently that the thing that I find most interesting about The Sopranos is that it looks at selfishness in a really distilled way. The thing that's interesting about Tony, and that makes him different from any other upper-middle-class New Jersey dad is that he's completely, almost Platonically self-interested: a true rational maximizer. Of course, self-interest is a big part of most people's motivation, but it's typically tempered by other things: commitment to family, religious or other morality, etc. Seeing it taken to extremes in Tony can help us understand how it works, albeit in a more tempered way, in people like ourselves.

So what does The Sopranos think about self-interest? To simplify really radically, I think that two big things that the show says are that other institutions and values that are around today can't really compete with it, and that it ultimately fails.

One thing about Tony is that he doesn't change (or, at least, I've never been able to see how he changes). I think that one of the reasons for that is that there's no institution in his life that has any kind of persuasive power to convince him to change--or, indeed, any particular interest in changing him. His family are all also deeply selfish, although not as perfectly as he is. The Mob is the one institution in the world that's really based on nothing more than the common selfishness of its members, so having Tony be a part of it is perfect. The Church, ably represented by Father Rintintola, is a joke. The government, we see from its cold treatment of Adriana, isn't really any less selfish than the Mob. And therapy can't really do anything to redeem him as a person (apropos of not much, I think that the relationship between Tony and the therapeutic process is one of the most interesting things about the show; I wish I knew more about psychology so I could understand it better).

This season, so far, has been about the ultimate failure of Tony's self-interest: his ultimate inability to get what he wants. We start the season at Janice's idyllic lake house; even there, Tony is deeply troubled by the realization that he's getting old. As the season continues, Tony's seen seen so many things slip away: his power vis-a-vis New York, his relationships with his old friends, Christopher...it seems clear that even if he gets out alive, and even if he gets out with his position intact, he'll be deeply diminished. It seems like if anything is the message of the show, it's that you can do whatever you want to get ahead, but you will get fucked in the end--not by karma, or some other sort of cosmic justice, but by life, because that's how it works. And you had better be prepared for it.

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