Profile Tony Soprano - TV mafioso on the verge of meltdown, who will bid farewell to viewers next weekViolent, sociopathic, neurotic, murderous. There is so much to dislike about Tony Soprano that only a mother could love him. She didn't, but many of us do, writes Shane Hegarty
Tony Soprano is racist, adulterous, emotionally crippled, violent, manipulative and neurotic. He is paranoid, but that's because people are out to get him. He is hypocritical, homophobic, sociopathic, bordering on psychopathic and obsessed with ducks. He loves animals - but so did Hitler. His friends are killers, most of whom have killed on his orders. And he's a killer himself, with at least eight victims that include his best friend, his closest cousin and the second cousin he treated as a son. He once interrupted a day out with his daughter so that he could garrotte a man.
We will miss him dearly.
On Thursday night Tony will finally leave us, after eight years and six series of The Sopranos. Americans found out exactly how he'll bow out when the last episode was shown last month, since which Irish viewers have had to avoid the outcome by engaging in evasive tactics normally confined to those entering a witness protection programme.
The greatness or otherwise of the series will long be debated. But there is no doubt that by leaving us, it takes with it one of the most brilliantly realised characters ever to have shuffled onto the television screen.
Tony Soprano has become an American icon. Not simply because he joins the ranks of the fictional gangsters who regularly captivate the public, but because he managed to be a hell of a lot more than just a 21st-century Michael Corleone. He came to represent the loneliness of the alpha male; the erosion of masculinity; the demise of tradition; the uncertainties of a US at war; a population in therapy. And, as the show has examined, a nuclear family always on the verge of meltdown, Tony has become the most unlikely of TV dads. The Sopranos, after all, is named after the family - not the gang.
Anthony John Soprano Sr was born on August 22nd, 1960, the second of three children and only boy, to John and Livia Soprano of New Jersey. The family roots, of course, are Italian. Avellino in Campania, to be precise, to where Tony also traces the "rotten putrid gene" that he blames for his depression: his great-grandfather who drove the donkey cart off the road in Avellino.
His was a normal childhood, aside from the fact that his father was a Mafia captain and his mother's constant criticism and inability to display love would later have her plot to have him assassinated.
He met his future wife, Carmela DeAngelis, at high school, when he was "the happy-go-lucky rascal, the comedian, the rapscallion," as Carmela explained recently, before clarifying: "but all of that was bulls**t". They have two children, Meadow and Anthony jnr. Tony, who dropped out of college, has never wanted his children to follow his path, but has nevertheless been left disgusted at his "whiny" son AJ, whose attempted suicide has not dissuaded Tony from yelling at him to "be a man". This has been a constant theme in Tony's life, this question of "whatever happened to the strong silent type?". He often asks it. Just before throwing a plate across the room.
Tony earned his status in the New Jersey gang through the raiding of a poker game. His first murder was of a bookie, Willie Overall, in 1982. It was carried out on the orders of his father, who died in 1986 of emphysema, after which Tony was guided by his uncle Corrado "Junior" Soprano.
The Sopranos first aired in 1999, as Tony's rise to the head of the family was imminent. He is, by the way, head of the DiMeo crime family - the DiMeo in question serving a life sentence unseen by the cameras. And Tony is officially only acting head, directing operations on behalf of his ageing Uncle Junior, who is in a nursing home as he suffers from creeping dementia and a paralysing bitterness.
As a boy he watched his father settle a debt by chopping off the finger of the owner of Satriali's pork store, and when they returned home his mother greeted the meat put on the table with rare gratitude. It is considered a pivotal moment in Tony's life for two reasons. Firstly, it taught young Tony a valuable lesson in how blunt violence could put food on the table. And secondly, it brought him his first panic attack.
The panic attacks are ultimately what brought him to his therapist, Dr Jennifer Melfi. Her measured probing of his psyche has acted both as a straight moral line through the series and a window through which we can squint. Just as Dr Melfi's own therapist and her husband thrill to their vicarious closeness to a criminal godfather, Tony's visits to the therapist have always given an intellectual fig leaf to our basic fascination with criminals. It's also allowed us to humanise him, to justify our sympathy for him. He is not merely a violent crime boss and killer - he's a killer whose mother never loved him.
Eight years of therapy have ultimately brought him little. As the drama concludes, the viewer has come to realise that he lacks true self-awareness, that he has hardly changed, apart from the gradual lessening in his panic attacks. This hasn't stopped the rest of the world psychoanalysing him. "He wants to be Don Corleone but keeps finding himself Homer Simpson," as one academic has observed.
AS IT HAPPENS, there are interesting parallels between Tony and the only television character to outrank him in the army of modern television icons. Both he and Homer are overweight, balding men with voracious appetites for things that are not good for their physical or mental health - beer, television, meat, gambling. Neither can truly relate to his bookish daughter or rebellious son. They are constantly falling out, and back in, with their wives. Both spend much time shambling about the house in their underwear, railing against the apparent cosmic unfairness raining down upon them, while refusing to acknowledge that they might have brought those misfortunes upon themselves.
Yet, if every man is Homer Simpson, most men quietly wish to be Tony Soprano. Or parts of him, at least. He is confident, decisive, respected. He is wealthy without having truly earned it. His office is at the rear of a strip club.
HE OPERATES IN an extended boys' club, in which men are expected to be loyal, quiet, and to take a good slagging, and he is an alpha male in the most competitive world of all. He stays out late and sleeps in later, while his success with the ladies belies his paunch. And, most importantly, he is not meek. Tony can settle an argument with the brutal full stop of a fist.
Although, if Tony carries something of what every man is and what they want to be, to truly dissect him you don't need to go much farther than the drama's creator David Chase. As he told Vanity Fair in March, his father was an angry guy who belittled him at every opportunity, and his mother was "a nervous woman who dominated any situation she was in by being so needy and always on the verge of hysteria". She threatened to put the 12-year-old Chase's eye out with a fork. Not surprisingly, he ended up in therapy. Did he contemplate suicide, asked Vanity Fair. "Well, doesn't everybody?" And in the actor James Gandolfini, Chase found someone who could truly make Tony real. Who brought with him his own scowling anger. "Some of that turmoil that's inside of Jim, that pain and sadness, is what he uses to bring that guy to the screen," explained Chase. "He'd complain, 'These things I have to do [ as Tony], I behave in such a terrible way.' I'd say to him, 'It says in the script, "He slammed the refrigerator door." It didn't say, "He destroys the entire refrigerator."'
Gandolfini gives Tony an intense, simmering physicality to everything he does. The way he eats, speaks, sits, walks. The exaggerated hand gestures and laboured nasal breathing. Gandolfini helped Chase to turn Tony Soprano into a giant presence not just on the small screen, but on pop culture. When he goes, it will be impossible not to miss him.
TheTonySopranoFile
Who is he?
Fictional head of a New Jersey mob in The
Sopranos
Why is he in the news?
This week Irish viewers will finally get to see for
themselves how the series ends, and what exactly happens to
Tony.
Most appealing characteristic:
For an imposing, threatening and violent man, he
carries a certain vulnerability.
Least appealing characteristic:
Has killed a few people in his time
Most likely to say:
"You f***ing kiddin' me." He has said this in most
episodes.
Least likely to say:
"Boy, am I sick of fulfilling an Italian-American
stereotype."