Kontextmaschine

27th September 2017

Question with 21 notes

Anonymous asked: Melfi was clearly speaking with the authorial voice when passing judgment on Tony. You're just disputing her judgment because viewing peers as "rivals and / or playing pieces" appeals to your totally ludicrous sense of yourself as someone above or outside the ordinary human social matrix.

Yes, that’s the reading I mentioned going with on first viewing, and yes, that’s the unflattering comparison I lampshaded.

I can see it, the show does a lot less work to undermine the character’s consciously presented self-image than others, even other therapists (Melfi’s own, the brusque one that tells Carmela to leave, the priest Carmela was close to) or other “innocents” outside or against the organized crime dynamic (Artie Bucco, Meadow’s college bf).

But on reflection (and that late-season bit where her therapist explicitly theorizes her interest in Tony as slumming voyeurism) I started to see things, and distinguish the sessions (“sacred” as central to the mechanics of the show) from Melfi the character, and realized how much of “it doesn’t undermine her” was “it shows her as a fleshed-out totebag meritocrat” and I was just reimporting that as the standard of virtue while thinking myself above just that

I kind of understood the lesson at stake here as the reverse, that a professional, educated idiom and a training/tendency to see things in terms of larger dynamics doesn’t exempt you from, I guess, “the social matrix” or from bending your “objective” judgement to self-validation and that – as with that unflattering comparison – you should be aware of that stuff and incorporate it into your self-understanding.