"Unhappy Wanderers: Explicitly Masculine Cycles of Abuse in The Sopranos" by Chris Morrison

Unhappy Wanderers: Explicitly Masculine Cycles of Abuse in The Sopranos

Chris Morrison, Stevenson University

Abstract: Toxic masculinity is a lot like a hereditary disease, given that in most cases it is passed from one generation to the next through a carefully orchestrated system of education and abuse, both physical and verbal, under the guise of “discipline.” Many men are constantly attempting to live up to archaic standards of masculinity, not knowing that the “good old days” were a sham, too, and taking out their dissatisfaction on everyone around them. This paradigm is depicted in great detail across all six seasons of the hit mafia drama The Sopranos, and this project seeks to use various sociological research on masculinity to explore the nuance of gender as seen in the series.

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In an episode from the first season of The Sopranos, Tony reflects in great depth and detail on his upbringing during a therapy session with Dr Melfi, as a result of his son AJ being tested for ADD at school. He thinks back on a time he watched his father being arrested for mob behavior and remembers several times he suffered physical and verbal abuse from his mother. After all of it, though, Tony can’t help but feel a little nostalgic for that time. “But I’ll tell you something,” he says to his therapist, “I was proud to be Johnny Soprano’s kid. When he beat the shit outta that guy, I went to the class, and I told them how tough my dad was.” When Dr. Melfi immediately follows up and asks if that’s how Tony thinks AJ feels about him, he says, “Probably. And I’m glad. I’m glad if he’s proud of me, but that’s the bind I’m in, because I don’t want him to be like me” (The Sopranos 1x07).

The inter-generational tensions that play out in this episode–not just Tony reconciling the circumstances of his childhood, but him coping with modern education apropos AJ’s treatment–remain at the very core of the show from start to finish. As indicated with the previous example, we see Tony struggle with the trauma he received as a result of being a mobster’s son; his fights with Uncle Junior define many of the show’s plots and subplots even after Junior is sent away to a mental facility; and even outside of Junior, Tony is constantly grappling with the mobsters who hold memories of the “good old days” and are critical of Tony’s attempts to adapt to the modern age.

Despite all the grief that the spectre of the old days gives Tony and his family, he seems like he can’t ever let it go. The obvious example would be his incredibly complex and toxic relationship with his mother until her death in the third season, or how Tony can never seem to emerge from under his father’s shadow, both in therapy and in business. This imbalance has almost prevented Tony from ever becoming his own man, and we see this become a real problem in his relationships with the men of the next generation. Between his strained relationship with his own son, AJ, and the deeply manipulative mentorship he holds over his nephew, Christopher Moltisanti, it’s evident that Tony’s many issues and hang-ups make him a poor leader for the men who come after him, and whether intentionally or not, he perpetuates the cycles of abuse. Making use of analysis on how toxic masculinity perpetuates itself across generations and scholarship on the links between patriarchy, punishment and submission, I argue that all the mob men of The Sopranos, but especially Tony, must be read as both a victim and a perpetrator of these cycles of abuse, particularly viewing the “family” of the mob as a supplement to or replacement for the nuclear family.

A similar thesis appears in Jordan Senior’s Walk Like A Man (2017), another project that, much like this one, aims to analyze the role of masculinity in The Sopranos through the lenses of gender studies and film theory. In Senior’s own words, the aim of that thesis was to “examine the degree to which the depiction of a crisis in masculinity in The Sopranos can be said to represent a patriarchal or feminist configuration of masculinity” (Senior 2), something that can also be said of this one. Where the difference lies, though, is in the specific avenues that either project takes to view these systems of masculinity. Senior utilizes “gendered processes of pleasure, unpleasure and identification,” leaning into the hedonistic nature of many of the show’s characters and looking at examples such as the Soprano family’s exclusion of the three-piece suit for joggers and bowling shirts, as well as heavy emphasis on Tony’s psychological issues and his sessions with Dr. Melfi (Senior 32). This project, by contrast, seeks to analyze masculinity, both in the mob and in society at large, as a system, a kind of perpetual motion machine that propagates itself from generation to generation, creating waves of men too broken to challenge it but just strong enough to pass it down. Furthermore, while Senior and I both interrogate in depth the effects of the mob’s rigid masculinity and the show’s explicit criticism of these identities, I take a step further by analyzing the effects of the alternative identities, or lack thereof, offered by the show. In short, Senior chose to examine the effects of masculinity on individuals both in the show and in the audience, whereas I seek to examine the effect of cycles of patriarchal abuse on entire generations both in the show and the real world.

In Taking It Like A Man, David Savran postulates that the white male identity has been subject to a lot of mythologizing in response to a perceived loss of power (when, in reality, there is merely a decrease in the gaps between white men and every other group). He constructs, in his own words, a “genealogy...beginning with [the white male victim]’s appearance on the U.S. cultural scene in the 1950s and ending with his transformation into a number of disparate but related figures (both fictional and nonfictional)” (Savran 4). This assertion fits perfectly into Tony’s perspective on masculinity, such as his frequent callbacks to the men he admires, like his father, Feech LaManna, or most famously, Gary Cooper (who I would argue belongs in the fictional category, seeing as Tony is constantly referring to his film roles). While Tony laments the loss of the strong, silent type, Savran notes “the male narcissist, in other words, is the product of an unfortunate weakening of ‘patriarchal authority’ in a feminized culture. Because he no longer has ‘loved and respected’ figures to emulate, he retreats to fantasy and develops a ‘sadistic superego’ that assaults his now masochistic ego” (Savran 90).

One shining example of a man developing a twisted sense of sadism using the old masculinities as justification is one Phil Leotardo, a frequent (and arguably the main) antagonist of the show’s latter half. In one famous scene, Phil denigrates his boss John Sacrimoni for crying after his daughter’s wedding is abruptly ruined by the feds, uttering the line “My estimation of John Sacrimoni as a man has plummeted” (The Sopranos 6x05). This is not only immediately called out by all the other men present at the event, but it’s massively hypocritical of Phil, who shed tears at the middle-of-the-street murder of his younger brother not even a full season earlier. Phil doesn’t seem to ever hold the standard against himself, but he’ll jump on any indication of non-masculine weakness to serve his own goals and feel validated in his own identity.

Another example of Phil’s masculinity-fueled sadism, and coincidentally also a great example of Tony’s decaying leadership, is the saga of Vito Spatafore, a mob man whose homosexuality is treated both narratively and metanarratively as a destructive, life-ruining secret akin to Tony’s therapy or Christopher’s addiction. When the secret is out, Phil immediately jumps into high gear with a desire to kill Vito with his own two hands, citing the fact that his cousin is Vito’s “betrayed” wife as justification. Eventually, Phil does get his wish in a certain way, when he and two goons ambush Vito in a motel room and subsequently sodomize and execute him. Phil sentences Vito to the most emasculating, horrifying, and disrespectful fate he can imagine (The Sopranos 6x11). But what the audience can accurately see is that Phil is merely a violent man-child lashing out against the loss of not just his own status but all of his idols who flourished before his incarceration, and he chooses to take it out on a lower-ranking man who is already both figuratively and literally on the ground.

Lynne Hibberd correlates the relationship between Vito’s weight loss and his gradual loss of influence and respect, noting that “the masculine man is a big man, occupying a large space both literally and figuratively” (Hibberd 181). This holds up fairly well across the series, and can be extrapolated even further to claim that when Tony’s masculinity, his authority and his size, in Hibber’s language, are threatened by men much smaller than him (which, in honesty, is most of the show’s cast), it adds an extra layer of inferiority that challenges Tony’s beliefs. In this instance, Tony is attempting to deign to and assist a “smaller” man, to no avail. Perhaps the greatest irony of this sequence of events is that, even when sympathetic to Vito’s situation and hesitant to kill him, Tony and his adherents are still spouting all kinds of profanity and homophobia about the man.

Thus, it is also relevant to introduce the concept of “hybrid masculinities” as explored by Bridges and Pascoe in their work Hybrid Masculinities: New Directions in the Sociologies of Men and Masculinities. This concept is predicated on the claim that masculinity is a performance, and just like any performance in film or on stage, the actor may make changes or borrow moves & phrases from another depending on the sort of image they wish to project to the world; the term “mix and match” comes to mind. While Bridges and Pascoe analyze the concept through the lens of straight white masculinity, replacing some of its parts, one might look at The Sopranos and see men struggling with an already outdated form of hypermasculinity, looking to jettison whatever parts of it don’t serve them at any given moment. Tony must adapt to the 21^st century in the world of business, but that doesn’t make it any easier to adapt his gender identity. And, as aforementioned, the status of both is massively complicated by the return en masse of the old guard, who have not changed one bit and expected the world to do the same while they spent twenty years in “the can,” no compromise.

Equally as vexing for Tony, or perhaps even more so, are the men of his generation who still hold tightly to the “good old days” philosophy. Most of the time, the men who hold these beliefs are framed as antagonists or major obstacles to Tony’s goals, men like Richie Aprile, Jackie Aprile Jr., or cousin Tony Blundetto, but one really got on Tony’s nerves more than the others: longtime friend Ralph Cifaretto. Despite Ralph’s earning prowess, the overarching plot of seasons three and four details Ralph repeatedly and consistently angering Tony until eventually he cannot take it anymore, and the latter kills the former, uncertain whether or not he really did it on purpose. 

One of the earliest and most consequential events that kick-started Tony’s increasing intolerance for Ralph’s antics occurs in the third season episode “University.” The bulk of the episode centers around Tracee, a twenty-year-old girl who dances at the Bada Bing, and her relationships with certain men in power. Ralph is her current boyfriend, Silvio is her boss, and naturally, Tony is the big man in charge of everything. Throughout the episode, we see her try several times to grab Tony’s attention, and in vain; he immediately assumes that she has some sort of romantic interest, but such is not the case. When she stops showing up for work, the men track her to one of Ralph’s cribs and coerce her into returning, causing Ralph to get angry. This culminates in Tracee revealing to Ralph that she’s pregnant and the child is his, causing him to lose it and, in one of the show’s most gut-wrenching moments, beat her to death behind the Bing. As aforementioned, this is meant to illustrate that Ralph, despite his great earnings, is an easily angered loose cannon who has a whole lot of complexes when it comes to women (The Sopranos 3x06).

In the greater context of the show, this is also one of countless occurrences that demonstrate that the mob as a whole, as well as the individual men within it, by and large view women as extensions of the men in their lives, or some sort of property. This is seen pretty evidently in their relationships with wives, daughters, and goomars; in fact, later episodes in this season retroactively justify Tony’s rage at Ralph by drawing parallels between Tracee and Tony’s own daughter, Meadow. Tracee has it especially bad, seeing as her boyfriend is a violent misogynist, and the other men she reaches out to merely view her as an employee, an object that generates their income. This is very evidently a reflection of one of the core tenets of harmful, misogynistic hypermasculinity, because it’s predicated entirely on the objectification and forceful subordination of women. The men of the mafia want a “good girl” to marry and be their homemaker, then in their free time they associate with the “bad girls” to have a bit of fun, but when one woman dares to step outside the rigidly defined boundaries these men have set for her (i.e. Tracee trying to form a closer bond with Tony or starting a family with Ralph), they are met with intense punishment, abuse, and sometimes even death.

These incredibly outdated views on the role of women lend themselves perfectly to the mob’s recurring vices and general hedonism, and though Tony enjoys more than his fair share of drugs, alcohol, parties, and other women, he still understands (or at least convinces himself that he understands) the value of a family. When it comes to the two younger men that Tony has raised/mentored, it seems like they are split down the middle: Christopher Moltisanti is too caught up in the hedonism, not even mentioning his struggles with addiction at the cost of his family, whereas AJ Soprano refuses to engage in any of the traditional masculinity or hedonism that is typical of the environment he grew up in.

Christoper is an intriguing subject because he is the perpetrator of some of the harshest and most graphic violence the show contains, almost always at the expense of his fiancée, Adrianna La Cerva. Though Chris’s betrayal of Adrianna and her death are tinged significantly with the concept of loyalty and ratting out to the feds, all of the violence and misfortune that befalls her is often the result of her trying to exist outside the very rigid roles of femininity that Chris and his family hold. In that way, she and him make a perfect pair, because when Tony quietly yet brutally chokes Christoper out after the almost fatal car crash, he continually uses the visual of the damaged car seat to justify the murder of his nephew and protege; Christopher wasn’t a good enough father, no matter how hard he tried, so Tony continues to tell himself that he had to go. Though the transgression is not entirely masculine, the excuse is (The Sopranos 6x18).

Personally, however, I find that AJ is a more fascinating case study for the concept of hybrid masculinities as seen in The Sopranos; he feels a lot of the possessiveness, entitlement, and drive to be a big shot, but appears to hold none of the bigotry or other dogma central to those worldviews. On the rare occasions that we see AJ engage in this behavior - going out to the Bing with his new frat friends, for instance–AJ is immediately sent back into his depression when he realizes he can’t keep up with these boys and their incredible violence or chauvinism. Through conversations with his friends, partners, and parents, we see that AJ would rather own a club and throw extravagant parties than run a sports betting ring or spend time with strippers. 

What makes this quality of his interesting is the contrast that can be drawn between what he desires and what Adriana, who again is one of the many women in the show who meet a grisly fate on the wrong end of masculinity, was able to achieve through her ownership of the Crazy Horse Club, or even Carmela’s desires to get into real estate. In the language of the show, the business of violence, indulgence, and enablement (i.e., the mob’s main sources of revenue) is seen as masculine, whereas attempts at “legitimate business” and entrepreneurship are a lesser pursuit and/or feminine. Making matters worse, AJ seems to have inherited all of his family’s backwards views on mental health, that his depression is a kind of sickness or even a moral failing, instead of a chemical imbalance, ultimately culminating in his dramatic suicide attempt in the family pool (The Sopranos 6x19).

Tony’s reaction to AJ’s struggle is the next puzzle piece in the analysis of how Tony’s attempts at fostering hybrid masculinity within his family, both of his “families,” have intensely backfired on him. The old guard, such as Uncle Junior, Phil Leotardo, and Paulie Gaultieri, are constantly hassling Tony for failing to meet their preconceived standards of what a man should be and how the mob should act. Men like Vito Spatafore and Ralph Cifaretto are punished with death for stepping out of line in either direction, meeting either the ire of the previous generation or of Tony himself. And last but not least, Tony’s attempts to raise heirs for the future also fail horribly when he becomes the “old guard,” and the young men he raises once again step out of his preconceived notions, echoing his own childhood traumas. All of this compounds into AJ’s fractured psyche and his inability to cope with not only his own depression but the chaos of what he perceives as an evil, unfailing world. For six seasons, Tony had been punishing AJ for stepping out of line beyond what is seen as typical parent-child discipline, and the former only realizes the depth of his abuse and the gravity of the situation when he nearly loses the latter. These are the fruits of raising men to be “men,” to be heirs and leaders and kings, instead of simply raising them to be human.

This, I wholeheartedly believe, is a very important idea to keep in mind in our modern world. We are almost twenty years down the line from the Sopranos finale, and if anything, the way that men are expected to behave, and especially allowed to behave in society, has gotten worse. Worse for everyone involved; men, women, and anyone who exists outside or between those distinctions. Though The Sopranos relentlessly interrogates the ill effects of these cycles of abuse and harm, it offers no recourse from the curse of toxic masculinity. There are no major characters who are ever able to escape it by any means other than death. It makes an interesting companion, then, to more recent TV from the same network that also interrogates these issues: namely, Barry and Succession. In these two concurrent shows, it is shown time and time again that the men like Connor Roy or Monroe Fuches who make conscious efforts to break and escape the toxic cycles are rewarded with their peace, whereas any man like Barry Berkman or NoHo Hank who stays within the cycle and ties to manipulate it for his own ends must watch as everything falls to pieces and he often loses his life, sharing the fate of nearly every man in The Sopranos.

Works Cited

Bridges, Tristan, and C.J. Pascoe. “Hybrid Masculinities: New Directions in the Sociologies of Men and Masculinities.” Sociology Compass, March 2014.

Chase, David, creator. The Sopranos. Chase Films, Brad Grey Television and HBO Entertainment, 1999-2007. Starring James Gandolfini, Lorraine Bracco, Edie Falco and Michael Imperioli, et al.

Hibberd, Lynne. Fucking Vito: Masculinity and Sexuality in The Sopranos. The Handbook of Gender, Sex and Media, John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2012.

Savran, David. Taking It Like a Man: White Masculinity, Masochism, and Contemporary American Culture. Princeton University Press, 1998.

Senior, Jordan. Walk Like A Man: Hegemonic Masculinity and Un-Made Men in The Sopranos. University of Huddersfield Press, 2017.