Sectionalism Reviews: The Sopranos, and some other stuff

My review of The Sopranos, my thoughts on Mafia flicks and the Mob, and my shorter reviews of other stuff I've watched semi-recently.

It’s been a hot minute since I wrote a TV/Movie review on here. Sorry, the only movie I have watched recently was the Hunger Games prequel. It was alright, sort of flat. Not much to write about. The Hunger Games is a really unrealistic franchise but it seems a little bit more realistic when it is very early after the war. Some people seem to interpret it as a criticism of the effete and hypocritical liberal elite in modern America, since the book really is centered around the extremely poor, rural, white, and conservative region of Appalachia (despite the attempts to diversify the most recent movie). Meanwhile the villains are metrosexual consumerists cheering for what is in reality a sociopathic regime (kind of reminds me of “Disney Adults”). As someone who read all the books as a kid, I can see why. But also it’s worth noting that it has up until only very recently been normal to depict villains as effeminate, flamboyant, or gender-ambiguous. I’m sure you can think of a few from cartoons, movies, and anime. It’s a sign of wickedness.

Hmm, what other movies did I see… Over break I watched Escape from New York. Was pretty good. Again, nothing really to say. I saw part of Maestro. I didn’t care about it because I just don’t care about Leonard Bernstein. Looking at pictures of him though, Bradley Cooper was completely in the right putting on that prosthetic nose as it made him look much more like him. Not that I would care if he didn’t, we should actually just start depicting all Jewish characters with prosthetic noses.

Anyways… The main event over break for me was watching The Sopranos. I know how it ends, but unfortunately I haven’t finished every episode yet. But, yes it’s a very good show. I was glued to it for a good week or two. I think the best comparison to the Sopranos is Breaking Bad, as they have somewhat similar themes. I think The Sopranos does a better job of portraying organized crime. Tony Soprano is actually an extremely intelligent person, he canonically has a self-proclaimed IQ of 136. Considering that his grandfather was an artisan carver and his daughter goes to an Ivy League school, this isn’t unbelievable. He might be even smarter than Walt. Walt is just extremely obsessive about creating a good product and has a formal education. Often times people with outlier-high IQs like 136 are ostensibly very normal people. Not autists, not walking encyclopedias, and not obsessed with intellectual pursuits. Cognitive tasks just come very easy to them.

That being said, Tony Soprano is portrayed as acting much dumber and more like a realistic mobster than Walter White and Gustavo Fring are as drug dealers. One thing I enjoyed about the show was that sometimes, not too much, the show-runners would throw in a word being used wrongly by the gangsters. It’s just a subtle hint of realism, that sometimes these uneducated criminals with a great deal of bravado would use big words wrong. Tony Soprano is also a violent, sociopathic, and thuggish person. Compared to some of his comrades, Tony does distinguish himself as less impulsive. Ralphie, Johnny Sack, and Richie Aprile (not to diss these characters. Ralphie is one of the funniest!). The show goes far enough to show that mobsters are not the clean-cut, cunning Machiavellians with feudal gravitas that they are portrayed as in the Godfather, but that the stupider and more impulsive people don’t tend to rise to the top before getting “whacked”.

Meanwhile, in Breaking Bad, people in power are portrayed as either especially cunning and dead-serious, like Mike and Gus, or they’re portrayed as comically insane like Tuco. The most realistic character is probably Saul Goodman, ironically. I don’t really blame the show for this, it’s a dramatization. But, I doubt the meth scene has such sophisticated kingpins.

The Sopranos has a large following among the e-right, because its characters are blatantly racist, sexist, and homophobic. They are at least nominally catholic (although if you watch the show, it does become apparent that some mobsters really are religiously faithful and simply misguided in their justifications). I enjoyed the episodes surrounding the attempt on Christopher’s life, where Paulie was extremely concerned about Christopher’s vision in hell. Clips like their conversations about Columbus, Tony telling off Meadow’s Blewish boyfriend, and Tony’s famous “you’re looking at ‘em, asshole” comment, are widespread in online right meme circles. It makes the show more enjoyable, definitely, first of all because they drop some TRVTHNVKES. Secondly because why would career criminals give a shit about offending certain groups of people?

However, ultimately these tropes are there so that the show writers can deconstruct them and basically treat them as a strawman to knock down, primarily “toxic masculinity” and skepticism towards “mental health” bugaboos. Breaking Bad is also sort of like this, albeit it’s in a very different way. The entire show basically revolves around Tony Soprano trying to balance his machismo with the fact that he has panic attacks and goes to a therapist and takes pills. In therapy his machismo is deconstructed as well as his “bigoted” preconceived notions about the world. However, Tony regularly choses his machismo, which results in his downward spiral. He is shown as being reliant on therapy and on his medications. Even some of the race rhetoric is meant to subvert traditional conceptions of race. I mean, mob flicks in general have made a lot of people think Italians were much more mobbed up than in reality, but they also sometimes try and point out how Italians like Tony Soprano don’t have any reason to identify with the WASPy types.

And let me get something straight about “toxic masculinity”. The Liberals are right that masculinity is toxic… It is toxic to their pool floatie HR mammy state longhouse! Sometimes the trad crowd tries to mischaracterize masculinity as being a good dad. Marrying some 30 year old hagraven and changing diapers and going to church and whatever. I’m not saying that these things are bad, but this is an obviously unproductive mischaracterization of the argument being made. Masculinity is not the same as being a “good man”, if it was then it would be cyclical. Masculinity is traits associated, on some innate level, with men as opposed to women. Masculinity is extremely destructive but it is also extremely creative, in fact it is this cycle of “creative destruction” which is the bedrock of human civilization. In fact, this is the purpose of human civilization. Not “chilling and vibing” or whatever. Yes, we all like to chill and vibe, but civilization only very recently allowed human beings to chill and vibe in a way significantly more comfortable than that of nomads and cavemen.

The aforementioned shows, of course, suggest creativity is actually a feminine attribute while destruction is the product of masculinity in its unkempt form. This is a very archaic value! Going back to the times when people were so stupid they thought women produced babies alone. Well, it’s possible only the least intelligent of peoples ever believed this. I’ll get more into this, but another major feature of the show is using Tony Soprano as a strawman to knock down for pro-psychiatry arguments.

Yes, basically when Tony goes to therapy it helps him, and when he avoids therapy it hurts him. The show makes the message that Tony is reliant on therapy, and that there’s nothing wrong with being reliant on therapy and on top of that on pills. This is entangles in the masculinity issue because one of Tony’s masculine vices is viewing reliance on antidepressants and therapy (psychology is a female-dominated field) as a form of weakness (it is). This is just… Silliness. social psychology and psychiatry have abysmal replication rates. They are barely real sciences, they do not belong on the same campus as math, physics, and engineering. The reason people like going to therapy is because they are lonely and don’t have people to talk about their problems with. You’re just as good if not better off going to confession or talking to a priest, and you don’t have to pay. The good thing about confession is that you actually are forced to accept that your problems are your own and reconcile with them. And yes, I would say as someone with family members who take anti-anxiety medication, that permanent reliance on antidepressants and the like actually is bad and that it is at least a little bit pathetic to surrender your own happiness to some manufactured pill. Does it make you happier? Maybe for some people, therapy and antidepressants make them happier. For flies a big pile of poop on Deflated’s dad’s head makes them happy. Is there any point in being happy if it means entangling yourself so heavily with glazing and pills? In my opinion, this is a stepping stone towards arguing you should just shoot up dope until you croak. It is a form of self-denial.

Anyways, let’s talk about the Mafia… Because that’s what this show is about, and it’s what makes this show great even though it has these subtle hints of shitlibbery. Luckily, both The Sopranos and Breaking Bad leave the shitlibbery somewhat open ended. Most modern shows don’t. I’m not so concerned about liberal authors leaving their stories with open-ended liberal questions.

Tony Soprano said something with regards to the Mafia which really stood out to me, and I think it was a very good point. Albeit, maybe a bit misguided in the context of this particular mafia.

“We’re soldiers, you know. Soldiers don’t go to hell. It’s war. Soldiers, they kill other soldiers. We’re in a situation where everybody involved knows the stakes. And if you’re gonna accept those stakes, you gotta do certain things. It’s business. We’re soldiers. We follow codes. Orders.”

This is ultimately quite a fair thing to say about Mafias. Because organized crime often operates in a way similar to the embryonic state. All states begin as protection rackets. Basically, “pay us money and we will protect you from attackers”, and in a similar vein, “pay us money and we’ll make sure not to attack you”. Taxation is a form of clientship on an individual level. The state’s power over people is eventually ritualized, which is a good thing and not “phony”, but it does emerge as a sort of post-hoc legitimization of these protection rackets.

Organized crime, specifically the Italian Mafia, got its start in a similar way, and comes when there is a vacuum in legitimized political power. When the Aristocracy of Sicily sold their land off to farmers, these farmers suddenly found themselves in a precarious situation. Unlike the old Aristocracy, who were themselves something of a military elite, these farmers had no way to defend their land from bandits. So they would pay the Mafia to protect their fruit and cattle.

The Mafia was, in this sense, simply replacing the old aristocrats of Sicily. The Mafia did adopt a sort of aristocratic chutzpah and emphasis on lineage. For example, becoming a member of the 'Ndrangheta (the Calabrese mafia) still generally relies on being patrilineally related to other members. The humble knife took the place of the sword. During the springtime of the mafia in Southern Italy, they were not really that different in praxis than the ducal warlords of Northern Italy during the Renaissance.

This gets me back to my point of creative destruction. Renaissance Italy was extremely war torn and dominated by feuding nobles and roaming armies. The Italian Wars, a series of conflicts in Northern Italy during the High Renaissance, had a death toll of 300,000-400,000. Many of the men who generated the Renaissance with their patronage were men of the sword, some of them were rather thuggish as well. Pope Julius II, Cesare Borgia, Sigismund Malatesta, and Federico da Montefeltro to name a few. Greece during antiquity was also regularly at war within itself. I’ve always said here, that if we saw Ancient Greece today, it would seem sort of like contemporary Afghanistan. Minus the Islamism, of course. And I guess this comparison is a bit outdated now that the Taliban has consolidated power.

The Mafia, however, was a little bit different for a few reasons, and it’s why the American mafia and especially things like drug cartels are not enriching environments…

Firstly, the mafia in America was an urban phenomenon. There were no fruit orchards or cattle herds to protect. The mafia was either protecting its members in the inner city, simply pooling in income from illegal activity, or it was protecting their wages through organized labor. During prohibition, the mafia became heavily engrossed in the alcohol trade, although I would hesitate to call it a cartel as it was still very reliant on more sophisticated criminal activity like corrupt labor business and other types of extortion. Gambling, like shown in the Sopranos, was also a major domain of mobs. It’s hard to enforce gambling debts through legal means if someone, say, files for bankruptcy. It’s easy through illegal means. Don’t pay your debts, and we’ll break your legs.

As time went on, and the state became more and more powerful, the mafia became less and less of a challenge to it for the monopoly on violence. Demand for mafias also diminished on the labor front. Organized labor declined. Another major difference between America and Italy, is that the mafia had to compete and negotiate with other mobs. The Irish, Jews, and Russians all had their own mobs. The drug trade became the most lucrative form of criminal enterprise during prohibition, and then again with the rise of the international illicit drug trade in the late 20th century. All of these factors led to the organized crime being reduced from a sort of “alt-state” within the liminal zones of state authority, to what would more aptly be described as an “anti-state”. In shithole countries like Mexico you see some elements of the older “alt-state” model with ex-military filled brutal cartels like the Zetas basically just force people in their turf to give them money or else they’ll shoot them. Obviously the mafia still exists in Italy as well.

Now… There is something of a glorification of the Mafia especially among people on the right, who consider it much superior to “hip hop gangs” primarily comprised of black people. And, this is debatable. The mafia, let’s get it straight, is bad. It’s full of very criminally inclined, usually not very intelligent people, except in cases where being involved in the mafia is actually more lucrative and efficient than gaining status through the books, especially when the mafia has enough power to form itself as somewhat of a legitimate institution outside the law. However, as The Sopranos illustrates, the mafia is not above the law and really there wasn’t a point in American history where it was successfully competing for power with the government. All that being said, the values held by the characters. Criminality really is a combination of pathology and circumstance, not society being more promoting of masculine values. There was a great study I once saw, showing that among low IQ cohorts testosterone (or a proxy for it, like fWHr) is associated with higher criminality, but among high IQ cohorts it is associated with lower criminality. Sadly, I can’t find it these days, so if anyone is also familiar with it and knows where it is, please let me know. But I digress…

Just because members of organized crime are largely criminal, does not mean that organized crime increases total crime. There is limited evidence that organized crime actually reduced crime rates, because organized criminal enterprises regulate crime in their own right and lower the total amount. And again, organized crime often takes the form of protection rackets. People who aren’t afraid of the Sheriff might be afraid of the Capo. I’ve seen this claim spread often about the Japanese Yakuza, but Italy also has surprisingly low crime rates. Other factors like relatively homogeneous, high IQ, and old populations may be the real reason for low crime, but there’s no reason to assume that organized crime increases overall crime rates when you think about it. More competent criminals, maybe.

On an ending note, the popularity of mob flicks has unfortunately damaged the reputation of Italian-Americans. A very small proportion of Italian-Americans were ever in the Mafia, and Italian-Americans are actually probably of good stock despite being from the “bad stock” part of Italy. This was not the product of assimilation, it was a product of the “great pasta strainer” bringing 1/3 to 1/2 of Italian immigrants back to Italy during the zenith of Italian immigration. Albeit, many of these immigrants never actually intended to stay in America, and were just here for temporary work. But it created an effect where those who stayed tended to be more successful. Many were also deported for criminal behavior. So basically, brain drain. European immigrants in general, despite the popular image of them being very poor, were actually wealthier than average in the places they hailed from. There was only a very slight process of assimilation, but there was a heavy process of selection.

Hmm. What else. Tony’s daughter is a gyatt gyatt. Christopher’s girlfriend is a gyatt gyatt but she was an idiot for informing the feds, and she had to go! It was sad though, when Big Pussy had to go. He was a good character. Tony’s wife is likeable unlike Walt’s bitch ass annoying ass wife. Ultimately I think even doe it is very subtly having a shitlibby element to it, The Sopranos is now one of my favorite shows and better than Breaking Bad even. It’s just more relatable to me, as I also live in the northeast as some of you know. So the scenery is more relatable.