On Tony Soprano: Good, Evil, and the people we love.
Tony Soprano, in the parlance of our times, is problematic.
For starters, he’s a murderer, directly killing no fewer than eight people during the course of the show. He’s a criminal, a bully who hits his son, and a Republican. He also cheats on his wife, if that’s your particular brand of pearl-clutching.
Still: we love him. But why?
Critically, there’s no deeper self that we see, no redemption which lets us off the hook. Tony Soprano is not, underneath is all, a “good guy.” Despite his therapy and his near-death experiences, he has not changed in any meaningful way. He is still, as he puts it “a fat fucking crook from New Jersey.”
And that’s okay, even when it shouldn’t be. Because in knowing him and loving him, we can know and love ourselves. We gain something by gazing into someone else’s abyss, even when we can’t face our own.
There’s a reason I use a fictional character to start a discussion about acceptance. Across our screens, we have made imaginary people real, and real people imaginary.
That’s one of those annoying sentences, but it’s true. The curated nature of social media presentation is no different than the stifling suburban myth all your favorite media was rebelling against.
We’re constrained in ego, hiding our own ugliness and scorning it when we see it in others: and, in scorning it, we release it in strange ways. Everyone has a moral compass: but, to indulge our darker urges, we must find a way to distort it.
Think, for a moment, how bloodthirsty some online are to kill the pedophiles, the one moral group it’s safe to clamor for. Do they have the same passion for helping molested kids as they do for killing their abusers?
Or, alternatively, think of how pathologically furious some are online when they address the systematic evils of the world; how much joy in their righteous anger is found not in their righteousness but in anger itself?*
That’s silly, right? But it’s human. It’s lovely, even when it isn’t. And so are other people!
Part of why fiction is helpful is the stakes are both high and low: it is life and death, yet meaningless. It doesn’t really matter when Tony Soprano kills someone. But in the real world, there are killers, and there is death. Do we owe the murderers more love than the victims? Why is there such a fascination with Cain, but no love for Abel?
I am experimenting with a question, a seed of a thought: perhaps we love bad people precisely because they’re the ones who need it. Because, in the span of millennia, there is no external evil we can fight: all we can do is beat it within ourselves. And to do that, we need love.
I think it’s good that we love Tony Soprano, that love seems to cut like a knife through the questions of good and evil. That love itself is given like grace, even to the ungrateful and underserving.
We cannot change the world, only ourselves. And to avoid loving the world as it is and people as they are is to postpone happiness.
Forgiveness, acceptance, understanding, and love are warm and positive cliches, until they ask you to go deeper and dirtier into the world as it is, not as it should be.
We did it for Tony Soprano. Can we do it for strangers?
(*This is something of a false equivalency, but it’s not totally false. If you think it is, we fundamentally disagree about good, evil and the human soul.)