Brain in a jar
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The Sopranos S1E5
At the halfway milestone in the first season we come to the episode that is universally liked and discussed. The one that Meadow asks Tony “Are you in the mafia?” and the one where Tony very graphically strangulates an older Mafia associate to death.
Probably it would not be an exaggeration to assume that we would not be seeing Vic Mackey shoot another cop in the pilot episode The Shield and we would not be seeing Walter White kill a drug dealer with U-Lock in a basement in Breaking Bad. Probably those scenes would be much softer without “The College” being so critically acclaimed.
The look on Tony’s face while he is killing the man is mixed with hatred and excitement and possibly satisfaction. And it is forced so bluntly on to us as the viewers. Afterwards we are left with conflicted feelings about feeling sort of good for Tony and Meadow when they had a ⅓ of a heart to heart about Tony’s job. How on earth did we feel so much empathy and/or sympathy for this killer sociopath?
This is the magic of The Sopranos and Tony Soprano character. We like him, we laugh at his jokes, we feel empathy for him. But then 2 scenes later. Boom. He is squeezing some wires around a guy’s neck whom also happens to have a daughter and a wife.
One thing that makes this show so special for me is the presentation of inconsistencies in the way these characters live their lives. It is pushed to extreme with Tony’s murders and violence but nevertheless all of us do some good acts and some pretty horrible ones.
Watching Tony I can maybe come close to understanding how a person can become a violent sociopath and live with himself and keep cracking jokes with his daughter.
The second storyline with Carmela and Father Phil also shows similar traits. We see the conflicts in Carmela and Father Phil and how one is always tempted to be a hypocrite and explain away the hypocrisy very easily.
I have come to accept that all people are hypocrites and that’s just the way humans are. I think watching The Sopranos multiple times helped me come to that opinion as much as books of Jonathan Haidt and Daniel Kahneman.
Notes:
- Father Phil cannot hold his wine too well. It was so funny how he did a bottoms up of the communion wine
- After some honesty both Tony and Carmela were reset to their normal factory settings at the end of the episode.