Sample Reality

Irregular around the Margins

I’ve been a devoted follower of The Sopranos ever since I borrowed the entire first and second seasons on VHS from a friend, back in 2000. I’ve managed to see every episode since, even without having HBO, by begging, borrowing, and sometimes just showing up unannounced, uninvited at the right place at the right time. At times my desperation to see the show bordered on mania. Before Season Four began I even had a nightmare in which Tony Soprano came to me, snarling in my face, spit flying everywhere, yelling, Why the f**k don’t you have HBO? You better get it, you sad little freeloading f**k.

Ah, gotta love the sinner and hate the sin.

Now, with the fifth season in full swing, I’ve been thinking, is it really all that? Would the world end if I never saw the show again? Up until last Sunday’s episode I would have said yes.

But the episode—Irregular around the Margins—aired and blew me away. Without a doubt, it was the best episode this season and possibly the best of the past couple seasons.

There are two reasons for this. The first is that the show was back to focusing on family rather than crime. After all, The Sopranos is ultimately a family drama. The rest is just window dressing. Too often this season ancillary tensions between ancillary characters have been competing with the more compelling storylines. The brewing war between Johnny Sack and Little Carmine, the sociopath Feech and his territorial piss-posts—these plots are at best distracting and at worse like watching a bunch of local villagers squabble over a goat while outside the village gates the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse silently annihilate entire civilizations.

Face it, Tony and his troubling familial relationships—the civilization of Tony—are what we come to watch: Tony’s disintegrating relationship with his wife, his distant relationship with his children, his antagonistic relationship with his sister and uncle, and now, with this episode, his uneasy reconciliation with his own nephew, Christopher, whose fiancee, Adriana, Tony had nearly slept with.

The writing of this episode was so hewn, the symbolism and allegory so finely wrought, that I think it brings into relief why cultural critics should pay attention to The Sopranos. And this depth and richness is the second reason why the show blew me away. Its incest plot and the struggle between generations—Tony versus Christopher, whom Tony is grooming to be his successor—transforms the show into something reminiscent of a Greek or Roman tragedy.

In fact, I am reminded of Goya’s disturbing masterpiece Saturn—a haunting painting of the Roman titan Saturn devouring one of his children. According to one myth, Saturn was later thrown from the heavens by Jupiter, another one of his children. No wonder Saturn wanted to devour them. But myth aside, the painting is of course allegorical. It doesn’t seem to be about war in the heavens so much as an awakening of primal savagery, the collapse of civilization and the rise of nothing but rage, revenge, and unrepressed urges.

Tony Soprano embodies this struggle between savagery and civilization—and the rise and fall of one or the other is inextricably linked to the destruction or rejuvenation of his own family. Tony recognizes this at some level and even seeks Dr. Melfi’s help. It’s a “breakthrough,” Melfi tells Tony, to recognize this struggle and even attempt to avert it.

But can he? One aspect of David Chase’s (the creator of The Sopranos) worldview crystalized in this episode, namely that we cannot control our bodies. Our bodies betray us. We see this repeatedly in “Irregular Around the Margins” in the three principle characters of the episode, Tony, Adriana, and Christopher.

Consider each character separately:

Tony
Tony has some sort of cancerous cyst removed from his scalp; this melanoma, unpredictable and unsettling, is what makes him feel “irregular around the margins.” It’s as if he cannot trust his body anymore. There’s also Tony’s casual drug use, which he could control if he tried, but he doesn’t. When Adriana offers him a line of cocaine, he smiles and says, “I won’t say no.” And finally, there’s his libidinal urge, his bodily lust for Adriana that he only keeps in check by luck. They’re interrupted right at the moment when they could kiss for the first time.

Adriana
Like Tony, Adriana is a casual drug user. Well, probably more than casual. The reason she and Tony are in a car accident in the middle of the night in Dover, New Jersey, is because that’s where her dealer is. More significantly, Adriana is diagnosed in the episode with IBS—Irritable Bowel Syndrome. Meaning, she can’t control her bowels and she’s beset with painful diarrhea. Her body, quite literally, is a pile of shit.

Christopher
Last season Christopher made an admirable recovery from a destructive heroin habit. The first four episodes of the fifth season Christopher had been stone cold sober. On edge and quarrelsome, but sober—no booze, no drugs, nothing but cigarettes. It doesn’t last. Hearing the rumor that Adriana had been out in Dover having sex with Tony when the accident occurred—a false rumor, it turns out, although maybe the car wreck was the only thing that stopped the liaison from happening—hearing this rumor, Christopher throws Adriana out and quickly grabs the nearest alcohol he can find, a bottle of Stolichnaya vodka Adriana had hidden in the freezer. Once again, in Christopher’s relapse we find a body that cannot control itself, an urge that cannot bear repression.

Alongside Goya’s Saturn, there is another cultural reference this episode calls to mind. It’s the car wreck—I can’t help but think of the last lines of William Carlos William’s damning critique of American postwar culture, the poem “To Elsie.” The poem begins with the ambiguous line,

The pure products of America
go crazy…

And it ends with these despairing verses:

the stifling heat of September
Somehow
it seems to destroy us

It is only in isolate flecks that
something
is given off

No one
to witness
and adjust, no one to drive the car

No one to drive the car, Williams says. No one is in control, The Sopranos says.

Some notes on the Last Samurai

Some notes on The Last Samurai: first, beware of any work of popular culture that has “Last” in the title. It is usually used to conjure up a mythic past, and it signals a strong nostalgic longing for “the good old days” or “the way things used to be.” Any such cultural production is bound to conceal a conservative view of contemporary society.

Second, The Last Samurai is essentially Dances with Wolves transplanted to Japan. Instead of the noble Native Americans fighting for their disappearing way of life, it is the noble samurai fighting for their disappearing way of life. In both cases the enemy is a disease called modernity, and Western culture (which is paradoxically validated by the end of the movie in the form of the triumphant rugged individual) is the carrier. Modernity is characterized by a disregard for the past, for tradition, for ancestors. Modernity focuses on style, not simplicity; machinery and steel, rather than nature and the body. The past in The Last Samurai is exemplified by Katsumoto, the leader of the samurai. He possesses a wisdom and insight that the rest of us can only find in Chicken Soup for the Soul. The fact that this mystical Japanese warrior-philosopher speaks perfect English only slightly undercuts his credibility.

Third, apparently the last samurai turns out to an American, which is supposed to make us feel good, I guess. You could argue that Katsumoto is the last samurai. He is, after all, the one leading the fight against the Japanese emperor’s flirtation with European and American culture. But he dies. Who is left in his place is Nathan Algren (Tom Cruise), an American soldier of fortune hired by the emperor to train the royal troops. The emperor’s goal? To crush the rebellious samurai. Algren, however, is captured by the samurai in his first battle against them, and he slowly adopts their way of life (a la Dances with Wolves). He winds up becoming Katsumoto’s right-hand man. Katsumoto dies in the final battle and Algren lives. The film ends with Algren returning to Katsumoto’s village, where he is bound to fall in love with Katsumoto’s sister and become a surrogate father to her little sons. This makes Tom Cruise, with his indomitable fighting spirit, the de facto last samurai, in my eye at least.

Fourth, all throughout the film’s extended battle sequences, something that the novelist Don DeLillo wrote in White Noise, his brilliant dissection of American violence and culture, ran through my head: “Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage….War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country.” This made me wonder: the glorification of war in The Last Samurai — and it is glorified to a troubling degree — what nostalgia gives rise to it?

If the movie had been made for a Japanese audience, I can see how the nostalgia would be for the samurai. But this movie is intended for an American audience, and the closest thing we have in modern America to the samurai are, well, nothing we have is even close.

The answer, I think, lies in the two images of America presented in The Last Samurai: on one hand, there is the hero Tom Cruise, a nearly broken man at the start of the film, haunted by his participation in the massacre of an Indian village. One the other hand, there is his commanding officer, Colonel Bagley, who, from his very first sneer you know is the bad guy. He is the one who ordered the massacre (shown in bits and pieces in stylized overexposed flashbacks). Bagley is a humanitarian of the lowest order, one step away from General Custer himself, the foolhardy white soldier who lurks on the margins of the film as a symbol of the arrogant swaggering American. Colonel Bagley is such a disagreeable figure that the audience is forced into identifying with Tom Cruise — who is really not such a likable character either, once you think about it. Yes, he does redeem himself, but only through the stereotypically orientalized mysticism of the East.

So, there are two types of soldiers of fortune in The Last Samurai, one bad, one good. And this is the main point I want to make: even if we only identify with the good soldier of fortune, we are still identifying with a soldier of fortune — someone who kills for money. When Tom Cruise joins the cause of the samurai he learns that honor is the more important thing to fight for, but in his case this is only because he has nothing left to fight for. And it isn’t even his own honor he fights for, but someone else’s. The American is so morally impoverished that he even has to steal someone else’s honor.

This is the kind of American we’re nostalgic for at the turn of the new millennium.

Closer to Reagan

Today I discovered that I am two people away from knowing Jodie Foster, which, technically, because of John Hinckley, Jr., puts me ever closer to Ronald Reagan. A friend in Philadelphia studied for a time under John Douglas, the former FBI profiler who was a consultant for Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs. Douglas gave Foster tips on how exactly one gets into the mind of a serial killer. The tips worked. Jodie Foster even thanked Douglas in her acceptance speech for the 1992 Best Actress Academy Award.

Incidentally, Douglas told my friend that the morning Hinckley shot Reagan in 1981 he (Hinckley) woke up with two plans in his head. The first plan was to assassinate Reagan in order to impress Foster, then a student at Yale University. The alternative plan was to head to National Airport (ironically, now known as Reagan National), hijack a plane, land it on the green at Yale and exchange all his hostages for Jodie. Then they’d fly off into the sunset. Hinckley was weighing both plans equally, but finally chose the first plan, simply because it was more convenient.