The Sopranos. It’s a show which has had many a thinkpiece, essay, cultural analysis, and countless other scholarly or amateur critique written on it. Despite having ended it’s run in 2007, this show based on the simple premise of following the daily trappings of a New Jersey mob boss as he negotiates the issues of family (in both the criminal and domestic senses) and therapy, has managed to maintain a staggering level of cultural relevance. In the era of COVID-19, when everyone is stuck at home on their asses, this show is now being revisited by an entirely new age group of people who were far too young to truly watch or appreciate the show but now with the benefit of streaming services and time, have been able to enjoy this tall glass of Newark vino with the appreciation it deserves. So much so has there been a renewed fascination with the series that new podcasts have been created to analyze it. The creme de la creme of these podcasts being Talking Sopranos co-hosted by Michael Imperioli and Steven Schirripa, which benefits from the two hosts being reversals of the characters they played on TV. Imperioli who played the brash and boorish Christopher Moltisanti is introspective, calm, and almost encyclopedic in his knowledge of the artistic world, while Schirripa who played the soft-spoken Bobby “Baccala” Baccalieri is the loud and boisterous New Jersey uncle you never knew you needed. As they go through each episode one-by-one with writers, actors, directors, and other crew members from the show you get a great picture of what happened behind the scenes. But the reason this show came about, came from that demand for a re-watch from this new slate of fans. Not the old. The new. Why is that? Why did this show which first premiered on HBO in 1999, get the re-appraisal? It’s not like HBO doesn’t have a slate of other great drama and comedy series deserving of it like The Larry Sanders Show, Six Feet Under, Rome, and the criminally underrated The Wire. Why do we keep coming back to Tony Soprano and the family? Perhaps it lies in it’s relatability, which might seem outwardly strange as most human beings don’t largely fit in the demographic of Italian American “waste management” professionals living in the New Jersey suburbs. It is undeniable that despite being about very particular people, the Sopranos creates a surprisingly relatable family dynamic about an unconventional nuclear family in the post-nuclear era. But it’s not that which I think keeps us watching. It’s the culturally relevant subtext. A subtext which gets often ignored outside of the realms of cultural studies. The thing is the vast majority of us people who come from lands of immigrants like the US, Canada, Australia, etc., are the Sopranos.

If your first response is “get the fuck outta here“, control your Calabrese for a moment so I can lay it down for you.

When the Sopranos was airing in it’s heyday, it was a show which came under a lot of flak. That flak coming from the self-appointed guardians of Italian-American sensitivity. The National Italian American Foundation, UNICO National, the Order Sons of Italy in America, amongst others, all felt that the show trafficked in the negative stereotype of Italians as boorish gangsters. And you know what… they’re right. The show actually wants us to go in with that expectation and even gives us a taste of it. But then it subverts it entirely. The fat hairy guy with chains and a cigar in perpetuity in his jaw it turns out loves ducks, comes from a broken home in a culture which reveres the family, and suffers from panic attacks despite having to put on a brave face. Every character is introduced to us a stereotype, but comes out as something else. David Chase (the show’s creator) doesn’t try to sweep the stereotypes under the rug, he engages us with them, but then shows us the other side of the coin. We’re let into who these people are and by the end they come out humanized, one-dimensional malapropism machines like Chris Moltisanti are revealed to be sensitive men who use drugs and macho-ness as defense mechanisms to perpetually roadblock facing who they really are. Mob wives, long stereotyped as dolled up and pampered firebrands are turned into a dark inversion of the stereotypical American housewife. Carmella Soprano is as much a fully realized and humanized caricature of a mob wife as she is an American housewife trapped amidst a patriarchal mainstream culture as she is a criminal subculture. We are also shown the “respectable”, “honest”, and obliviously “Americanized” Italians through the lens of Tony’s shrink, Dr. Jennifer Melfi and her family. They criticize and despise how their culture is depicted, and rightfully so, but forget that they have been so culturally whitewashed and integrated that their difference from the average White American is indistinguishable. It’s not that organizations like UNICO are entirely wrong that The Sopranos deals in stereotypes, it’s that they misunderstand what the creator of the show is trying to do with them. He’s trying to reflect a lens on the Italian-American community and on American society as a whole.

The Mafia as the last bastions of Italian-ness amid the rising tide of American assimilation seems like an absurd and offensive premise. But it actually isn’t. The Sopranos makes a strange case for it and while the show doesn’t outright endorse it, the argument is given it’s day in the sun. In the episode “A Hit Is A Hit” we are shown the character of Dr. Bruce Cusamano, the Sopranos’ next-door-neighbor. A straight-laced all-American with an Italian last name, Cusamano is absolutely disconnected with his culture. He invites Tony to hang out with his WASP-y golfing buddies only for them to parrot Tony with questions about the mob life and to treat him like a “dancing bear”. For them Tony is a walking stereotype a peephole into that “authentic Italian-American-ness” which they want a taste of. Tony tries to fit into the “meddigan” or “straight-laced” white-washed world, but quickly realizes he can’t do it and retreats into his ethnic enclave. Tony realizes he is an object of curiosity and not seen as anything other than his ethnicity. In a later episode, Tony exhorts the idea of the Mafia as a way by which some Italians wanted to live a life of honor and respect akin to the rural parts of Sicily and Calabria, instead of be Americanized as a whole. He presents an argument about America’s use of Italian labour and lack of appreciation of the culture that in the modern-day you might hear from the son of Mexican or Chinese immigrants: “When America opened the floodgates, and let all us Italians in, what do you think they were doing it for? Because they were trying to save us from poverty? No, they did it because they needed us. They needed us to build their cities, and dig their subways, and to make them richer.” Tony Soprano sees himself and his circle of friends as the last holdout of Italian-ness in a society where Italians are so integrated into the cultural fabric that the once “dark, dirty hordes” from places such as Sicily, Calabria, and Naples, which US Congressmen and KKK members alike railed against in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, seems an almost incredulous and laughable proposition to the contemporary White American.

“White ethnics” are a dying breed in the world of The Sopranos if not an already dead breed which can’t face-the-facts of what it is. Other non-Italian “white ethnics” appear in the show including Hesh Rabkin the Soprano family’s long-time Jewish associate, Irina Pelitsin Tony’s fresh-off-the-boat Russian mistress, and the family’s Polish housemaid and her husband. But these people are of a dying breed amid the country’s new minorities who come from Latin America, Asia, the Middle East, etc. The Sopranos and their associates hold White American prejudices as firmly as the “meddigans” they claim to resent. In “Christopher” we watch as Silvio Dante leads an almost fanatical crusade against Native American activists who want to protest the Columbus Day parade, and engaging in what can only be called “oppression Olympics” by stating the woes of Italians despite not acknowledging the fact they have moved up the ladder in America while the indigenous people have not. Likewise African Americans on the show are regularly called “moulignans” (the Sicilian version of the n-word) by Tony and co. Tony is especially bothered when Meadow briefly dates the bi-racial Noah Tannenbaum in the third season, stating she should be with her own kind (which ironically leads to her dating Jackie Aprile, Jr. who cheats on Meadow and meets a tragic end due to his criminal ways.) As much as Tony positions himself as in opposition to White American society and thinks of himself as one of the “white ethnics”, that category has essentially lost all relevancy in America’s racial caste system beyond the criminal subculture of the Mafia.

The meditation on ethnicity and identity at the core of the Sopranos reflects on many ethnic groups both past discriminated against and those currently discriminated against in the United States. The story of the Sopranos could easily be told about an Irish American, Polish American, Jewish American or Greek American family. Asian immigrants who are increasingly being assimilated into the American fabric and who are rapidly entering the upper income bracket might find themselves in similar situations as the Italians of North New Jersey, albeit in places like San Francisco’s Chinatown or LA’s Koreatown. And post-2045 when America becomes a majority minority nation, we could even see Hispanic immigrants similarly embraced into the fabric of quintessential Americans aside from small enclave like holdouts. The truth of America as shown by the Sopranos, is that immigrant communities once seen as the outsider can suffer discrimination but by the end are usually embraced into the fabric of American life. America is always good at finding a new foreign pariah when convenient. And if not one that is foreign, than the age-old domestic pariahs that are Black and Indigenous Americans will suffice.

“People of color” the nebulous term referred to non-whites in the 2010s is already out of vogue and being replaced by “BIPOC”. While I am woefully misinformed as to why this term has now been substituted, I have a lingering suspicion it is becoming increasingly clear that Black and Indigenous people face a unique challenge that descendants of immigrants from places like Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East have a possible chance of eventually being assimilated away from. I remember having a conversation with a good friend of mine and fellow fan of the Sopranos who happens to be an Indian Muslim, about the nature of “ethnic identity” and “whiteness” as discussed on the show. I suggested “Indians” could one day be seen as “White” in American society and he thought I was joking, before dismissing the idea as impossible. I pointed out that many in that first wave of Southern Italians who came to the shores of North America via Ellis Island had darker skin tones than some of India’s northernmost populations in states such as Gujarat or Rajasthan. Despite my friend dismissing my proposition as impossible, Indian Americans are slowly going from being a reliable Democratic voting bloc to a toss-up like many “white ethnic” demographics which also used to be locks for the Democratic Party. This is particularly the case with Indian American Hindus who turned out in droves for Donald Trump’s “Howdy Modi” event this year in Houston, Texas. While Kamala Harris’ VP slot might lock in Indian Americans to majority vote Democrats again, there is no denying Republicans are making inroads into that community. What does this mean? Well I’ll borrow the words of another friend of mine once famously told me: “Any ethnic group which votes 50% Democrat and 50% Republican, is for all intensive purposes a White American”.

Immigrants, settlers, whatever term you wish to use, might be a more honest category going forward than people of color. After all our ancestors came here by-and-large to reap the benefits of a land to which they had no ties, while the Indigenous people and African slaves brought over received nothing but horrifying violence, repression, and segregation. The descendants of these same people continue to face these barriers. While it is undeniably true that certain immigrant groups do face discrimination, for them lies the promise of climbing up the ladder or “up the guinea gulch” as Tony Soprano would say. This promise is almost always deferred or denied to African and Indigenous Americans.

The Sopranos tells the story of every immigrant group in America that faces assimilation into the mainstream. You might not know all the lingo or be familiar with the culture, but the reason it hits you is because it is you. My paternal grandfather was born in Meran, in the German-speaking regions of Northern Italy near the Dolomites. He too faced discrimination when he arrived in Canada in the aftermath of WWII. He eked out a living and prayed that all his descendants after him would be seen as a part of this new world which he called home. His wish was granted. As much as I have tries to re-connect and assert my ethnic roots, I must admit that I much like Tony Soprano or Paulie Walnuts or Silvio Dante have become assimilated into the fold. The question of whether I maintain some sort of subversive holdout that is essentially an inaccurate caricature of an ethnicity to which I am woefully unconnected or accept my status as one of the many “meddigans”, is one that I have meditated on ever since watching the show. It’s a question for all of us children of immigrants and how we relate to the settler societies into which we are assimilated. Even though we aren’t all wiseguys in therapy, every single one of us is a Soprano in some way or another and it is that incredibly relatable aspect of the show which keeps so many people of a multitude of different ethnic backgrounds coming back to it. So if you haven’t seen it, sit down with your favorite ethnic cuisine peculiar to your culture and turn on the first episode. Be entertained, be enlightened and mangiare!

Categories: UncategorizedTags: Cultural Analysis, Italian, Mafia, Sopranos