Every day when he slept, he casually put on a white bathrobe and dragged his Russian brown bear-like body to cope with a few pizzas. As soon as he heard his men calling, he knew he had to go to the pork shop or strip bar to deal with the fight and arrange the work.
The rest of the time, he is either in his mistress's bed or basking in the sun on the street, which is the day when tony Seplano, the boss of the American drama "The Sopranos". Instead of the myth of elegant violence in the legendary gangsters, it is replaced by the greasy desires of middle-aged men.
However, this drama has been concluded by countless critics: it has opened up a new era of mafia film and television dramas. And the ultimate secret of its success may lie in telling the story of a gangster boss around ordinary Americans, which for the first time is not in the temple, but in the city.
Unlike classic mafia movies such as "Once Upon a Time in America" and "Good Guys", the main story of "The Sopranos" takes place in northern New Jersey, rather than in New York, where the mafia families are concentrated in the traditional sense.
Therefore, when we try to find out which of the real-life prototype of the male protagonist Tony in the play is the boss of the five major mafia families in New York, we will find that it is always difficult to match.
Of course, the more important reason lies in the original purpose of the creator David Chase. After Creating the most original script of the "Underworld Family", Chance originally intended to make it into a film with psychological problems with the mafia boss and the emotional entanglement with his mother, and this mother-son relationship was born out of the past reality of Chus himself, which naturally made it difficult for us to find the realistic prototype of Tony Boss.
However, when The Story of Chance was adopted by HBO executives and the original drama was changed to a 13-episode TV series, it meant that he had to outline more clues about mafia crime and violence in the original family ethics drama.
Mental illness, family troubles, and the mafia, these three elements make "The Sopranos Family" not only different from previous mafia film and television dramas, but also raise the family ethics drama to an unprecedented height. The series focuses on multiple aspects of mafia boss Tony Seplano.
On a personal level, he suffered from panic disorder for a long time, and would faint inexplicably from time to time, in order to cure this disease, he had to turn to a psychiatrist, and as a mafia boss, he had to bury this matter deep in his heart and not be known to the outside world, so as not to affect the majesty.
At the family level, due to Tony's endless affair, his relationship with his wife Carmela has been strained, and in the face of a pair of children who are in adolescence, he has to hide his mafia identity so as not to affect the growth of the children. In addition to this, he also cares about his selfish and indifferent mother, as well as his cunning and sinister uncle. At the mafia level, Tony has to balance the various factions within the gang while mediating with the New York mafia.
Thus, "The Sopranos" uses the character of Tony to expose the mysterious criminal organization of the Mafia. Compared to the legendary epic masterpieces such as "The Godfather" and "Once Upon a Time in America", this drama does the opposite, reflecting the most everyday and private side of mafia members.
For example, their inner fears, their ambiguous attitudes towards homosexuality, and their unique ways of getting along with their families. Even many serious literary critics value the depth of the play, comparing it to Russian novels.
If the encyclopedic mafia display has made "The Sopranos" unsurpassed in content, then using the forms of psychology and dreams to dissect the personality of the gangster boss is its unique label.
In the 6 seasons and 86 episodes of the show, there are a large number of dreams and surreal episodes, and some episodes even consist of Tony's dreams, such as the second episode of season 6. And this whimsy is thanks to creator David Chauss.
Chance suffered from depression as a teenager, and he had to sleep more than 18 hours a day in high school, and this pain has been with him throughout his life.
At the same time, Italian director Fellini's films had a profound influence on his artistic creation, especially the "Eight and a Half" full of dreams and fantasies.
So Chaus grafted his life experience onto Tony, allowing many of the unspeakable behavioral logic and motivations, as well as the fragile and sensitive side of the character, to be handled in dreams. In Season 1, Episode 12, Tony's fantasy of an Italian beauty reflects his desire for a perfect combination of sexual desire and maternal love; Christopher's dream in Season 2, Episode 9, is meant to elicit Poly's inner fear; Season 2, Episode 13, Where Tony eats bad stomach nightmares, metaphorically speaking of his inner torment before the execution of Pussie; and Season 6, Episodes 2 and 3, the dreams of the two whole episodes are different from all the previous ones.
In Tony's previous dreams, there would be dead old friends, suicidal mistresses, and, of course, familiar faces from his daily life. But in this last "dream of death", all the familiar people are gone, even Tony's identity as the mafia boss is gone, he is just an ordinary company employee, and he encounters a oolong incident in which the briefcase is taken wrong.
Therefore, the shooting that nearly killed Tony this time is not only to make Tony and his uncle Colorado completely break up, but also to use dreams to expose Tony's subconscious desires: to get rid of the real life and identity, and completely change his way of life.
This form of inserting various absurd dreams and letting Tony see a psychiatrist from beginning to end makes the show seem "sophisticated" at first glance, but it is actually the most appropriate way to tell the story of mafia members.
For the horned men in the play who flaunt a straight man of steel and cannot stand the slightest weakness of character, they can never reveal their fears or guilt to each other or their families.
Therefore, only psychotherapy can allow Tony to show his delicate and warm side, and only in the dream, he will honestly reveal those complex and contradictory subconscious.
And this technique, which has hardly appeared in previous American dramas, was pioneered by David Chans with "The Sopranos", and later "Breaking Bad" by Vince Gilligan followed this path, and the whole episode of season 3, episode 10, was playing flies.
In the chapter of the Great View Garden being copied and inspected in "Dream of the Red Chamber", Tanchun tells the secret of the jia family's decay: "A worm with a hundred legs, dead but not stiff", you must first commit suicide from home and kill yourself, in order to be defeated! This principle also applies to "The Sopranos".
In the criminal family run by Tony, he does his best to balance it, but as the plot progresses, whether it is his small family of Serprano or the mafia, every member of the family makes Tony physically and mentally exhausted.
Using the tragic development of the characters and the unstoppable social upheavals to spy on the disillusionment of gangster society is the reason why "The Underworld Family" is still lamentable. When we look at the fate of the characters in the play, we find that they are either killed or desperate. Wife Carmela went from disappointment in marriage to despair of family; son became a depressed person who attempted suicide; daughter was about to marry the son of a ghostly child; the former right and left arm were either betrayed or killed, and the remaining old and weak and disabled would only want to spend their old age and ignore the affairs of the jianghu.
Of course, what makes Tony the most chilling is his nephew Christopher, from indulging in screenwriting, to drug abuse, to devoting himself to film, which makes Tony's expectations completely disappointed.
In addition to these tragic characters, the mafia also faces great social changes. In Season 6, both the expansion of the chain mall and the acquisition of real estate companies have reduced Tony's sphere of influence.
Through these internal and external changes, "The Sopranos" disillusioned the "American Dream" of Italian immigrants from the 19th century. To some extent, this sense of disillusionment is an inevitable theme of mafia-themed film and television dramas. In the "Godfather" series, Michael Corleone's disillusionment at the end of holding his daughter's corpse, and the disillusionment of Noodles in "Once Upon a Time in America" for the passing of the jianghu righteousness, all wordlessly declare to us: the mafia has never ended well.
Unlike "The Sopranos", although Tony lost his soldiers in the battle with the New York gangsters, he and his wife and children at home were unscathed, and the end of the film even let the family of four have a warm dinner.
Until the end, it was still using the harmony of the family surface to cover the soul that had been torn apart for a long time. Tony knew that he could not end well, but he still faced this helpless world with a fearless and thoughtful lazy expression, and even though he was disillusioned, he still carried the weight forward.
Such an ending, although black, hides warmth. Perhaps, this is why we love this classic American drama.