More Gandolfini

As you would expect, his untimely passing has produced a lot of excellent writing.   See Carson, Nussbaum, Winter, Geier, and MZS for starters.  Not only was he by all accounts an excellent person, it’s pretty clear that the real Gandolfini was much more like the quiet family man with a conscience he played in A Civil Action than like the role that defined him.

While we’re speaking of this, Nussbaum’s famously good essay about The Sopranos is worth revisiting. I happened to recently finish watching the whole series as viewing on the elliptical, and I think it holds up extremely well. And while Nussbaum is right about the “rubbing the audience’s nose in it” vibe that got a little much towards the end, I also have a sympathy for Chase. In the wake of Gandolfini’s death I’m still reading some people claiming that Tony Soprano was a “heroic” figure. IIRC, some of the reviews in the wake of the superb “University” episode seemed to confuse the misogyny of the characters with the show being misogynist. (For people who haven’t seen it, the critical aspects are not ambiguous; not only is the most horrific act of violence perpetrated by someone considered to be a bad guy even by the other criminally violent characters, it’s clearly linked to the more routinized forms of exploitation at her place of employment — peonage, routinized sexual harassment. Not only do silly “codes” prevent Tony from doing anything about the murder, the characters on the show are the direct beneficiaries of the latter forms of exploitation.) There seems to be a significant percentage of the middlebrow audience from whom you can’t dramatize anything — if there isn’t 20 minutes of didactic dialogue explaining the creator’s perspective it can just be assumed that the characters represent the point of view of the writers and/or the showrunner. I blame Aaron Sorkin…