THOUGHTS: On 'Wise Guy: David Chase and the Sopranos', by Adam Lehrer

Inspired by Alex Gibney's recent documentary on David Chase, Adam finally tries to communicate what 'The Sopranos" means to him

On Wise Guy: Alex Gibney’s David Chase/The Sopranos documentary was, for the most part, good. A little hoaky in the way it was formatted to echo Chase’s own flourishes from the series and overly serious in that way that all big-budget Gibney documentaries are, I nevertheless appreciated how DEEP the show went into David Chase’s artistic PROCESS. It’s an artist documentary, and treats its subject as the kind of visionary master of fine arts that other docs have treated the likes of Picasso and Francis Bacon.

One of the most interesting revelations of the doc, for me, was not just that David Chase heavily drew from his own experiences as the son of a borderline personality stricken mother and the patient of psychoanalysis and a background as an Italian American to sculpt and give form and meaning to both the series and the character of Tony specifically, but also the way that the cast members’ personality affectations also fundamentally altered their characters’ personas. The casting process for The Sopranos was monumental. HUNDREDS of actors read for, sometimes, multiple characters. All that extreme work ethic resulted in, of course, the best casted series of all time. Every actor completely inhabited the character that they played, to the point that Chase himself had difficulty distinguishing between the characters he wrote and the ones that ended up on the screen as interpreted by the actor.

The best example that I can instantly recall of this is Michael Imperioli’s portrayal of Christopher Moltisanti. Initially, Christopher is a low-IQ, low impulse control, violent maniac of a guinea. But over the show, we also see a sensitive nature to “Christophah” that borders on sweetness: his deep need for approval (from Tony or whoever), his total love of Adriana, and, of course, his artistic ambitions to be a screenwriter. All of these character flourishes unfold as the show plays out, they weren’t written there to begin with. In the documentary, we see Imperioli’s audition tapes. In them, he has long hair and is dressed like Lou Reed. He looks nothing like a gangster, more like the kind of avant-garde film nerd who'd hang out peripherally to the ‘90s art world. Because that’s exactly who he was, a hipster with fanciful artistic ambitions. And yet, his portrayal of Christopher was so perfect, that it ended up informing and shaping Chase’s writing of the character. The Sopranos casting couch was a total hyperstition. The character is written. The actor is found. The character is re-written to align with the personality traits of the actor that Chase found most interesting or compelling (Drea de Matteo is only an extra in the pilot, but Chase thought she was so mesmerically beautiful and sexually alluring that he only wrote the character of Adriana after the show had already started and he’d seen her on screen for the first time.) This kind of artistic process is as close to real magic as it gets.

“The purpose of consciousness is to illuminate reality,” says philosopher Colin Wilson in his text The Occult. “To reach into its recesses and this allows us to act upon to reach it.”

Magic and art making are similar in that they both derive potency from the subconscious mind, and the reason The Sopranos feels so MAGICAL is because Chase is completely in tune with both reality, his observations of it (from his own life to the people around him to the war on terror to the nature of crime, etc) and his deepest inner consciousness.

Another striking aspect of Gibney’s documentary is that it shows basically everyone, meaning Chase, the show’s producers, and the cast, involved with The Sopranos seems acutely aware that they made the greatest show of all time and, perhaps, something even far more special and precious than just a great TV show. They also unanimously, however, feel condemned by the show. Chase himself openly admits that the show took everything he had from him creatively, that he has little left to offer. Drea de Matteo says that she was so aware of her typecasting that she ended up just feeding into her own typecasting to pay the bills once Adriana was killed off the show (in horrific manner.) There is also much attention paid to the heavy toll that the show held not just over Chase as the show’s creator and de facto manager (“In the end, you’re completely alone with it,” said Tony to Silvio as code for Chase speaking to us, the show’s fans who demanded so much of him,) but also the top set extremely heavy burden carried by James Gandolfini.

Towards the end of the show, Gandolfini was drinking like a fish. Sleep was hard to come by. His health plummeted. He would disappear from the set, sometimes for days on end. Steven Van Zandt, Springsteen’s bass player who memorably portrayed Tony’s consigliere Silvio Dante, also coincidentally functioned as James’ “consigliere” on set.

“I’m done,” James would say. “I can’t do this anymore” The pressure of not just a hit series but a monumental work of culture asphyxiated him.

“I’d say go ahead” Van Zandt would reply, “But you have about 100 people over here relying on you.”

And James would soldier on. But the show inevitably took years of his life off of him, and he died young. 51-years-old. Is art really worth dying for? The ones who could tell us can’t, they are dead.

Indeed, every new artistic medium must have its revolutionizing artist. Marshall McLuhan says that a “strange bond” forms amongst “artists” who, he says, are “rarely well-adjusted”
The strange bond “exists between antisocial types in their power to see environments as they really are,” says McLuhan.

Chase and Gandolfini formed that kind of bond as they revolutionized the relatively new “art form” that was prestige, cable television. I think of them as the Lord Byron and Percy Shelley of TV. Television, five decades into its ascent, was finally revolutionized into a seismic narrative art form in the relationship between these two men. The Sopranos is to television what Dante’s Inferno was to literature. It is a journey to the dregs of hell that simultaneously illuminates us upon the state of mankind from whence it emerged. Totally uncompromising in its vision, Chase stubbornly refused to make artistic choices that would betray this world he created. From Adriana getting killed, to the iconic ending that simply faded to black, the auteur never bucked. He never capitulated. He never surrendered to audience capture. This was an artist in full command of his art, and his art was a fucking behemoth. Hundreds of crew members, 24-7 work weeks, and seven years.

The Sopranos is a revolution unto itself. In my opinion, it will never be topped. There have been other shows that I adore — Deadwood, Better Call Saul, Girls — and that I consider to be masterpieces of an artistic format. The Sopranos, however, just hits different. It’s gesamtkunstwerk. A perfect artistic product at the perfect time of its medium’s development; a radical blending of disparate elements; when everyone was ready for it and no one was looking.
The Sopranos is such a huge influence on the way that I think that I’ve seldom written about it. It’s almost too much for me to be objective or reasonable about. When it aired, my dad and I bonded over it, every Sunday during its run. I’ve shown it to the girlfriends I had long enough to make it through the series. My wife and I have watched it alone at least six times during the seven year tenure of my love. Thoughts of The Sopranos echo nostalgia of my childhood and beautiful erotic dreams of the woman I built my life with. Maybe I shouldn’t have written about it, but now I can’t stop.

Chase seems relaxed during his interview with Gibney over the course of the documentary. He can now clearly reflect upon the formal masterpiece that almost compelled him to madness, and condemned his chief collaborator to death. “It’s about money, and it’s about death,” he says, confidently. Yes, The Sopranos is the classic “death and taxes” dictum at its core, and only Houellebecq has come as close to giving artistic form to the 21st Century alienation and malaise that Tony embodies. And a FUCK OF A LOT more people have seen The Sopranos than they have read Houellebecq. I hope Chase takes comfort in having created a literary work so original, so radical, and so perpetually important that it regains relevance almost every two years. Finding The Sopranos now is like stumbling upon Francis Bacon’s Three Studies for a Figure or a copy of the Velvet Underground and Nico. Once digested, it completely renews your lust for art, for life, for THE TRUTH. I’m so glad it exists.