The Sopranos

Warning: Complete spoiler ahead.

The Sopranos is about how the things a guy represses come back and find him.

Mafia boss Tony Soprano is seeing a therapist because his anxiety is making him faint. In these discussions, it comes up that his father was a wiseguy too, and that his parents had a miserable relationship. The therapist points out the obvious, that Soprano’s own repetitious scripts obviously began in his home life as a child; for example, his romantic preference for moody, unhappy women like his mother. After watching a series of these affairs, it becomes clear to the viewer, if not to any of the characters, that she diagnosed correctly.

Tony is like his father. He’s a highly competent boss in a violent, criminal business whose ramifications could make anybody’s head hurt, and like any right-thinking middle class guy, he copes with this by keeping his job and home separate. Home is a preserve where entirely different rules apply and in effect, he becomes another person. In fact, his strength as a boss is his ability to keep many things in his head separate — but the same quality is why as a husband and father, he’s most often a clueless Homer who gets obsessed on juvenile points and never sees the big picture.

He keeps at therapy — if only, at first, for narcissistic supply — and over the course of years comes to realize, very slowly and haltingly, that things are not so separate. People are more like each other than they seem, including perpetrators and their victims. Business always comes home, eventually. Slowly but surely, Tony’s repressed conscience rounds on him, and he has a transcendent experience during septic shock.

In Tony’s liminal consciousness, he gives himself the fantasy he wants: He’s a top salesman away on business, trying to book into a hotel. But he’s lost his wallet containing all his ID and credit cards, so he lies and books in under someone else’s name. At first, the fraud goes like a dream — he even gets along with the staff and guests! — but gradually, dissonant notes start up: he feels apprehensive when he is attracted to another guest (not his wife), and after tripping in a stairwell, doctors inform him that he likely has Alzheimer’s Disease. Finally, some Buddhist monks arrive with a lawsuit for the guy he’s pretending to be. Tony tries to explain that they have the wrong man, that the man they want is a mark, but they don’t accept that argument. The lawsuit will go ahead anyway because, as the monk says, “At some point, someone needs to take responsibility.”

Tony comes out of the coma with a change of heart. He makes up with his family, and though his solutions are largely materialist and superficial, his wife and kids are happier. His ethical crisis leads to compromises in business, which he makes even though it costs him. Peace begins to return, but it’s too late. The Soprano family are drawn — sucked, really, by their own bad karma — into a New York dynastic war, and arch-asshole Phil Leotardo has most of them killed over a grudge. The infamous “black out” ending is most likely a first-person account of Tony’s own violent death in a diner.

What Tony never grasped — what the Buddhist monks could’ve told him, but the therapists never did — is that you can lift yourself out of suffering, but that doesn’t mean you can escape responsibility. Somehow, whatever you did is going to find you, and then you’re going to get it, even if you “get it.”