Kontextmaschine

28th September 2017

Question reblogged from three masks 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.

bambamramfan:

kontextmaschine:

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.

This whole thing is good, but if we’re talking the (rather heavy) authorial voice here, the entire last episode is about David Chase telling people to stop sympathizing with Tony. He was basically forewarning the decade of the prestige anti-hero.

It’s not like Melfi’s surprise realization was that Tony was a bad person. She had known that for six seasons. Her epiphany was that “It’s been six seasons and none of what I do is making him any better.” Which you know, wasn’t at all wrong.

When I first watched it I disagreed, because no one should be given up on, but Chase is right, in that there’s a difference between “giving up” and acknowledging “this thing isn’t working, even if it is really fun/making me a lot of money.”

Well that’s the lesson as Melfi would take it, as a good totebagger convinced there’s a totebagger inside all of us trying to get out.

But I resist the notion that that’s Chase & Co.’s final uncomplicated word, because they do complicate it. Think about that other therapist’s critique, that she’s just a slumming voyeur, think what that does.

Melfi is a good educated totebagger who makes an hour appointment every week to keep up with the Tony Soprano Story. Melfi IS the Prestige TV audience. And what’s the critique amount to?

“You started following this gritty sexy violent gangster story because you liked it. Something in Tony Soprano reminded you of yourself, only he lived a more interesting, less constrained life, and it enthralled you. You loved living vicariously through him.

And what were you expecting, redemption? An AFFIRMATION of totebag values? That doesn’t even fit your fig-leaf of interest in social verisimilitude – after all you’ve seen that this other world is an actual whole functional culture with its own rules and norms, after all you’ve seen how respected "straight” culture actually relies on it, you were expecting it to just roll over to educated nonviolent passive-aggressive totebaggery because… why, exactly?

Because you were sure you’re the crown of creation, and people just need your help removing the obstacles to being you? Or because pretending there was a bourgeois affirmation coming let you span the gap between your self-image and your desires, and taking its absence as a flaw lets you present as an innocent, tricked?“

And Melfi, the avatar of talk-it-out, know-thyself, after coming this far just runs away and washes her hands of it.

And if that’s not a critique of the Prestige TV audience

Tagged: prestige tv