Excerpted from Kevin Kallaugher’s article in the 7 June 2007 issue of The Economist.
Concluding questions by NWI. Comments and insight are sought.
“The day of mourning is at hand. On June 10th, after eight years, 86 episodes and innumerable garrottings, gougings, beatings, decapitations and chain-assisted drownings, “The Sopranos” comes to an end, and with it arguably the best hour on American television.
“There are lots of little things that made it so good. The sharp-eyed observation of dozens of different worlds, not just the mob-land of north-eastern New Jersey but also the smug little worlds of Columbia University, bohemian New York and psychiatrists’ dinner parties. The extraordinary characters like “Paulie Walnuts” Gualtieri, with his weird wings of hair, who hover in the no-man’s-land between cartoons and nightmares. The willingness to break with television conventions, not least the convention that everything has to be neatly tied up.
“The most important reason, however, was the central conceit: that gangsters are human beings just like the rest of us. Mr Soprano is a mob boss who makes his living skimming city contracts, hijacking lorries full of booze and cigarettes, running illicit gambling. His office is in the backroom of a strip club, the Bada Bing; he enforces his business deals with beatings and murder. But Mr Soprano is also a regular McMansion-dwelling guy. His money never quite goes far enough. He worries about his children’s upbringing. Above all, he has what Americans call “issues”. His mother was a monster, the black dog follows him wherever he goes and he sees a shrink.
“. . . The Sopranos” says a lot of positive things about America—that it can pour out remarkably gripping and innovative drama and can elevate pop culture to the level of art. But it also says something worrying: that American culture is always likely to set people’s teeth on edge, particularly in the world’s more conservative corners; not just because it is so full of animal spirits, but also because it revels in overturning moral certitudes.
“Many people mistrust America not so much because they have not been wooed by its soft power but because they believe that they and their children are over-entangled in it. And many people are up in arms not simply because they are anti-American but because they are bipolar about America—simultaneously attracted and repulsed by what they see going on in the Bada Bing.
“This is not to endorse Dinesh D’Souza, a writer who calls for an alliance between American conservatives and Islamists against Western liberalism. The cultural excesses of liberalism are a small price to pay for its benefits. And, besides, Sayyid Qutb, the intellectual godfather of al-Qaeda, fashioned his hatred of America while watching church dances in rural Colorado. Still, it is one thing for Western sophisticates, with a life-time’s immersion in pop culture, to watch Mr Soprano at work; quite another for people in more traditional places.
“American culture has always had a weakness for sex and violence. But since the 1960s it has gleefully eliminated conventional distinctions between good and bad, and since the 1990s it has been supercharged by the dramatic increase in the power of mass communications that are bringing America’s cultural offerings to every corner of the world. The success of “The Sopranos”, both commercially and critically, can only serve to reinforce this trend. The tensions created by the growing global reach of shows like “The Sopranos” may prove far more difficult to manage in the long run than the tensions created by the passing neoconservative moment.”
As a preface to our questions, please note we’ve never seen an episode of “The Sopranos”. Please don’t take it out on us, Tony.
Questions:
- Does the viewing public from outside the United States realize “The Sopranos” is a work of fiction?
- Is America the only nation which “can pour out remarkably gripping and innovative drama and can elevate pop culture to the level of art”?
- How is the stuck-up, straight-laced, U.S. of A., which attracts so much criticism for being resolute and immovable on so many issues, be the same U.S. of A. whose “culture is always likely to set people’s teeth on edge” because it is “so full of animal spirits” and revelling in “overturning moral certitudes”?
- Since when has the rest of the world become “over-entangled” in anything American?
- Mustn’t global audiences accept “America’s cultural offerings” in “every corner of the world” in order for the offerings to have impact?
Staying with the north-eastern New Jersey, and by implication, American, reference, the Bada Bing Club is neither indicative of Bergen County, Boston, Massachusetts, Bakersfield, California, nor any other city or state.
And we’ll whack anyone who says otherwise.
NotedWithInterest@gmail.com
- NWI staff
“Finding New Business from Open-source Intelligence”
