What I Talk About When I Talk About The Sopranos

The ultimate warning against toxic masculinity

Like a lot of millennials, I love this show, and I've seen it more than once. Everyone has their own story of when they first saw it, be it as it released on HBO or after its conclusion on DVD, or maybe as something to fill the void via streaming at the start of 2020.

Swathes of fans young and old cropped up online after finally relenting to the You haven't seen The Sopranos? pressure they'd spent years resisting as a countercultural badge of honour. Truth be told, I get the reluctance.

Sopranos fans are like Radiohead fans, Busquets fans, fans of microbreweries — annoying, smug, superior, whether justified or not. In short, they don't shut the fuck up about it, and of course I'm no different.

Cards on the table: I'm writing this for myself, and I'm also writing it out of embarrassment. I've been acutely aware for years now that I've become one of those guys that goes on and on and on about something, inviting eyerolls and sighs, imagined or otherwise. I say to myself, I simply can't help it. But I think it's time to ask why, if only to see if the fleshed out answer matches the abstract feeling in my head.

A recentish realisation came in the form of consciously accepting that I churn over old information in a new light in the hopes of elucidating meaning, forming thoughts into words and speaking them aloud in an attempt to pull conclusions from my subconscious.

Conclusions about what though? And why about this and not something else?

In essence I'm sitting in Dr. Melfi's office. That's where Tony comes in.

***

My first time was on DVD. I wish I could remember more of the particulars but I know I was in my very early twenties and I'd borrowed the boxset from a friend. I was just off the back of going through the typical rite of passage for budding HBO fanbois everywhere, aka watching The Wire, and I wanted more of that. This was before the 2010s got going, so (legal) streaming wasn't really a thing yet, and I was still quite dubious about torrenting things, so all I can say is thanks John, I'm glad you had a copy.

I can't tell you what I made of it beyond the fact that I obviously really liked it, but there's no chance I got it, not really. What I can tell you is that a few years prior I had gone through the worst mental health crisis of my life and I was still feeling its effects. I had never really addressed it, nor had I ever been to therapy. I didn't need hindsight at the time to know that it was depression; I was just glad it wasn't as bad as it was before.

This guy, though. This Tony.

At that age I was about as lost as I'd ever been. I barely ever knew what I wanted and when I did I didn't know how to get it. It would have made more sense for me to have identified more with the son of the Soprano family than his dad, but I guess no one ever wants to admit that they're an annoying, hypersensitive little bitch boy the way AJ seems to come across to most upon first viewing, too ill-equipped to function in the world.

No, of course I was the big man, the alpha male. Of course! The central character, the troubled soul, capable but incapable. He might be a multimillionaire murderer from New Jersey and I'm this depressed and anxious kid whose emotional age probably lags behind my actual age by five or six years, so I'm twenty-one going on sixteen. No, I thought. On some level, this fucking guy is me.

To be clear, I never idolised Tony. I was never that stupid. I knew he was a bad guy - the show never shies away from that - but I also knew he needed help. I guess one of the great things about The Sopranos is how it handles the idea of personal responsibility, that people are indeed products of their environments, but that doesn't necessarily mean there aren't options beyond that. Time and time again, through a multitude of characters, you see people with a clear path to redemption that the majority never choose to take, at least not before it's too late.

The notion that people can't change is often tacked onto the show as some kind of central thesis, but it's not one I subscribe to, and I certainly didn't back then. I don't know if that was David Chase's intent as he made the show, and to an extent that really doesn't matter. I just remember thinking that therapy did Tony some good, that he did learn things about himself that helped him along the way, but... well, go watch it.

The point is that I figured I could do with some of that, so I thought fuck it, let's give it a shot.

***

I'm fortunate enough to live somewhere that so happens to have a fairly large (and free) counselling service available to people in the area, otherwise I would have been on a waiting list for God-knows how long to see someone for a maximum of eight sessions before being sent on my merry way.

In fact, as I was typing that, I remembered I actually did spend time on one of those waiting lists in my late teens before I found out about this other place, but by time my appointment rolled round several months later, I cancelled it, because I basically no longer felt as if dying would be a tremendous solution to all my problems, therefore I was "fine". What a fucking idiot.

Anyway, therapy. I actually never really know what to call it. Is there a difference between counselling and therapy? I don't know. Probably. What I do know is that it was largely nothing like what I saw on The Sopranos, but I kinda knew that going in.

What Tony receives from Jennifer Melfi is full-on psychoanalytic psychotherapy for upwards of $200 an hour: he talks, she listens, she speaks, he takes it or leaves it, consciously or otherwise. She has the power to prescribe powerful medications and can provide dream analysis and all the other bells and whistles. She also isn't real, nor are his problems.

What I was offered was cognitive behavioural therapy, free of charge, roughly once every three to four weeks, somehow for more than three years.

To oversimplify, the difference between psychoanalysis and CBT is that the former deals with the cause and the latter deals with the symptoms. A cynic might say the latter on its own never truly helps anyone in the longrun, but that's a discussion for another day.

The principle is the same though - I talked, they listened, etc and so on - and I was lucky enough to see the same person the entire time I went there, so we built up a good rapport. Eventually it was like having a friend that knows all the names, so I never had to explain who so-and-so was or what such-and-such means. They just knew. They were also the one person in my entire life I could be 100% honest with. I never had to worry about scaring them away or that they wouldn't know what to say. They wouldn't make fun of me or tell me I'm overreacting. I wouldn't hurt their feelings and they wouldn't make it about them. I could be vulnerable there.

I think that's what convinced me it would be different for me, the 100% honesty part. Different compared to Tony, I mean — the scripted fictional character from that thing I like. The fact he can never truly be honest about a lot of things is one of the main conceits of the show: he can tell Dr. Melfi that he's a gangster, but he can't tell her about the specifics of his criminal acts, not without horrifying her and potentially putting himself in legal trouble. Outside of that, he repeatedly proves himself to be an unreliable narrator of his own life, reframing his actions or sanitising them to such a degree that they become outright lies rather than convenient euphemisms. He's also reluctant to place blame on his upbringing because he doesn't want to feel abnormal, nor does he want to feel like a crybaby.

Intentions aside, I didn't really realise it at the time, my own dishonesty in therapy. I never lied about how I felt or what I did, nor did I shy away from talking about myself - if reading this has taught you anything, it's probably about my ego - but... well, put it this way:

I'm pretty sure CBT (especially free CBT) isn't supposed to last that long. You kinda go in with a goal in mind - for example, "stop doing X" or "be able to cope with Y" - and you get a crash course on how to do or not do that particular thing, then off you go back to your life. I think that works pretty well if you don't know how the sausage is made and you're happy enough to leave it at that.

I kept shifting the goalposts though. My goal would be one thing for a while and then it'd be another. But I wasn't alone in that. Every few months we'd have a review about my progress and whether or not it was beneficial for me to be kept on, and a third party would be crucial in approving our conclusion. By time I was done there it was my decision to go.

You can make up your own mind about whether or not I was bullshitting or even exploiting my time there - I'm not here to defend myself - but looking back I'm pretty sure my therapist was in on the act too, be it because they're incompetent or because they knew I had stuff I needed to say and things I needed to learn, and they helped me game the system in order to do so.

Either way, I owe them a lot. But I'm not going to cover every facet of what did and didn't change in my life during that period. All I'll say is that by the end of my time there I felt much better, much more able to understand how and why certain things were happening and where these things were coming from. In short, it helped me cope.

This newfound self-awareness came at a cost though: that I couldn't just act on impulse without knowing full-well what I was up to. I had to reassess what it meant to be me, which is partly why I stopped going. I kinda ran out of things to say, and I didn't want therapy to be "the oasis in my week" that it was becoming, completely defeating the purpose.

But fuck it, maybe that's not entirely true and I'm assigning meaning after the fact. Maybe I'm being too neat because I'm writing something.

What's indisputable though is that playtime was over and I had to face what it meant to be a man if I ever wanted to make something of my life. I know that's true because it still is to this day.

***

It's been said that The Sopranos captures post-9/11 and early 21st century anxiety perfectly. The death of the American Dream, late-stage capitalism, all that shit. The notion of coming "in at the end" of something. Of course, when the show started, it was still the 20th century, and 9/11 hadn't happened yet, but the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan entered the writers' minds every bit as much as the minds of the viewers at home. 

It's hard to know what a time means when you're in the time in question; history, by definition, needs to be decided at a certain remove. The legacy of The Sopranos only became clear as we moved through the 2010s, as things like #MeToo and discussions around toxic masculinity, the patriarchy, race, gender, sexuality and mental health came to the fore of public discourse, thanks in part to the rise of social media. All these topics are addressed in various ways in the show, which no doubt plays a role in its enduring popularity.

At the same time, I was getting older and wiser somewhat against my will, also thanks in part to the rise of social media. I entered and exited a few serious relationships and botched attempts at living a normal life, and before I knew it I landed here, embroiled in my mid-thirties.

While I may have changed in the intervening decade, a fair few constants remain: I've had a couple of extra experiences with therapy and a desire to return one day if need be; I have a propensity to overthink and hyperfocus and potentially catastrophise if I'm not careful; I rewatch, reread and reexperience things at the expense of something new to a frankly preposterous degree; and I still have a bullshit temper.

Not to draw a straight line between what John Sacrimoni describes as "a certain Italian-American subculture" and growing up as a kid in the 90s in the West of Scotland, but to say there's no overlap at all would be farcical. Barely repressed anger that trickled down through generations of post-war hardship is a hallmark of both camps and camps the world over. Speaking of which:

One of my earliest memories is of standing with my older brother and watching my newly-single mother have what, in hindsight, was clearly a mental breakdown, which involved her smashing a rideable Thomas the Tank Engine off the wall in a fit of desperate rage. We laugh about it now, and it truly doesn't bother me to discuss it in the correct company, which apparently I've deemed this to be.

I must have been around five, which would mean that a year or so before, my father - who I never remember living with us - decided that married life wasn't for him, so he fucked off, leaving my brother (who is five years older than me) to be the man of the house.

That's just one memory out of countless others, a great many of which are good. My mother is a good person that was dealt a shitty hand, and she did the best she could. I trace any and all empathy and values I may have back to her. My brother was just a kid but old enough to know what was going on, and he took on a tremendous load from an early age, so no wonder he was pissed off a lot of the time.

My father was still present in my life, a sporadic visitor that became far more regular as the years went by. I loved him more than he probably deserved, but he was good fun. He died suddenly when I was thirteen. My mum never remarried.

I guess I mention all this as a way of saying that anger runs in the family, so all that shit and a thousand things besides is probably where my tendency towards it comes from. Like a lot of people, it's my default response to frustration. Mix all that with a bit of being On The Spectrum and being raised in the midst of a wider culture that says Talking About Your Feelings Is Gay And For Pussies, then yeah, I've had some stuff to work out.

None of which is to say I'm passing the buck. Explanations and excuses are not the same thing. While I may understand what causes the thing, the thing is still there, and there's definite room for improvement on that front.

The Sopranos is littered with a certain type of man, with varying degrees of subtlety. There are violent misogynists who view women as nothing more than subservient receptacles, unafraid to murder them at the first sign of resistance. There's Tony smacking his bowl of cereal across the room in front of his daughter and smashing his phone to pieces in front of his son as soon as his own grown-up sister pisses him off. There's Christopher violently assaulting his loving fiancée as soon as she expresses concern about his addiction problems. There's also Christopher being beaten mercilessly by his "friends" at the very intervention that was arranged to save him from his recent behaviour. Men that are victims of a mindset that ensures the mindset continues in perpetuity, unable to change and express themselves differently because they're unwilling or unable to do so.

So it's just as well I'm not a mafioso then, that I'm in an environment that allows for something other than constant displays of aggression, because there are people in my life that have survived prior domestic abuse that don't benefit from having a large man around that has the default tendency to bang things and shout. The fact I might do so because I can't find my keys as opposed to being a rampant misogynist is frankly immaterial. Their trauma simply does not give a shit.

Similarly, there are those that look to me as an example, and I have no say in whether they do or don't, so it's probably best if I avoid teaching them the same lessons that I was accidentally taught as a child: that channelling your frustrations through explosive acts of violence is Good Actually, and fuck it, let's just scream and shout because we completely lack the capacity to realise what the fuck's going on in our heads without learning about it in therapy decades after the fact. Better yet, let's just abandon everything when it's deemed inconvenient to whatever future we had in mind, shall we? If people get hurt by that, well, fuck em.

The cards are still on the table though, aren't they? I put them there at the start. So I'd may as well stay honest here and tell you the most obvious thing in the world: I don't always succeed in what I set out to do. I know as well as anyone that I’m a far from perfect person, but at least I can look at myself in the mirror and know I'm trying to be a better man. I think so, anyway.

So I guess it makes sense that I keep coming back to this show about dysfunctional families filled with dysfunctional people. It's the ultimate warning against toxic masculinity and the consequences of self-deception. It used to concern me that I saw myself in people like Tony Soprano, but that's just good writing. Men like that are in all men if men aren't careful.

And it's probably worth noting that I've barely scratched the surface of what the show means to me: that above all it's just fucking good TV. Believe it or not, I don't think it needs to be a catalyst for exploring past trauma in order to be enjoyed. It's grounded and absurdist in equal measure, as funny as it is unflinching, as concerned with small moments as it is with grand existential themes.

Sadly I’m not a TV show; I can never be a finished product. I will never be analysed by millions or revered as a cultural icon, but my presence will be felt all the same. I will leave an imprint on others whether I want to or not, so it's probably important that I try to make as good an impression as possible while not leaving others flailing in my wake. To those I may have thrown overboard down the years, I am truly sorry.

Years ago I asked someone what it's like to return to therapy with a different therapist. They said it can be weird building that relationship again, but you'll end up with a fresh perspective, and that even if you tread over old ground again, it's a bit like reading a book that you haven't read in years — you come back to it as a different person, and you take things from it that you never could before. I only wish they said it was like rewatching a TV show; it would've made this ending neater.