What makes Tony Soprano such a compelling character?
Tony Soprano is a murderer and a thief who preys on society and exploits the system shamelessly to enrich himself. Nevertheless (despite his despair’s conclusions about him), he isn’t a sociopath. He is intelligent without being educated, successful with having a work ethics, loving without being nurturing. He is horribly selfish with women, yet he has no desire to abuse them or dominate them for the sake of being dominant. His “love life” is about need and desire, not power and ownership. He is almost shame of needing women, and of the harm it does them when he uses their bodies. Almost. But we see very clearly, he wants more than the woman’s body. He wants more than money and power, too.
He doesn’t shrink from getting blood on his hands, but takes no pleasure whatsoever in it even when furious (contrast that with a Ralph, a Ritchie Aprile, a Paulie, a Furio, or a Christopher who are all controversial sociopaths in the accepted sense, and who brutalize and kill with relish, or at least with a highly misplaced sense of entitlement). Tony sees the dirty work as dirty work, but while he never delves into the morality of it, he doesn’t glorify it. His sense of ethics is impossibly twisted… and yet he nevertheless has a sense of ethics the aforementioned accomplices utterly lacking.
You watch this series trying to understand how it is that this man does all of this (and remember, the writers never gloss over the bare reality that these characters are criminals through and through) and yet he may be less intrinsically evil than many of those who surround him. He doesn’t hold a candle to his uncle, his parents, or even his sister, whose one impulsive act of violence is far more an act of gratuitous self-serving malice than any of Tony’s various murders, which at least have the thinnest element of self-defense. Even the horrific slaughter of Ralph was more an even fight than the two shots through the heart Aprile got. (And when you see Ritchie’s last scene the first time, the pure, kick-in-the -gut malice of it overwhelms you as much as it did Aprile, who dies with your gaping, shocked stare on his face.)
Tony is the poisoned fruit from a poisoned tree… but he is still a man, and arguably not a total monster. He has a sense of disgust these others lack. He has a vision for what his “organization” is supposed to be that corresponds to neither history nor reality… and yet, it is not a vision in which enraged men murder confused young women with their bare hands or lifelong friends sell you out essentially for nothing. In short, Tony’s story carries within it the deep complexity of a real person who does all the wrong things yet could have been (indeed, necessarily would have been) a quite different man in a different household, in another zipcode. Tony was not born evil. He made evil his career, and he doesn’t always live his work.
For me personally, one characteristic of this show that places it leagues beyond most films and shows on this subculture is this: we clearly see that everyone who comes into contact with Tony absorbs corruption from him. The despair, Dr. Melfi, is the most obvious example. Artie. Adrianna. The children, Meadow and Anthony Jr. Carmela. The parish priest. All of them take on the taint of the evildoing man to whom they are drawn or bonded for whatever reason. There is no true innocent here. Anyone in Tony’s orbit is complicit, to some degree or other, in the crimes he does. The scripts don’t moralize on this point because it isn’t necessary. They allow the natural consequences of his criminality to become clear as the story unfolds , just as those consequences emerge in real life. It’s why I’m stunned by people who say this program “glorifies” Mafia crime. Anybody who thinks so clearly isn’t paying attention, or has been “taken in” by Tony for the same reasons the characters get taken in, and has been corrupted by him in a similar way.
