The newspaper is fluttering in the driveway. In any other episode of The Sopranos, Mafia patriarch Tony (James Gandolfini) would come flapping out in his bathrobe to pick it up. But at the beginning of the HBO drama's fifth season, Tony's long gone, thrown out by his wife Carmela (Edie Falco) at the end of the fourth season. He's not around to bring in the paper or to deal with the animal intrusion that once again opens the season premiere. In the past, the Sopranos have had ducks in the swimming pool and squirrels in the bird feed. This time, a marauding black bear has taken over the back yard.
There's always been a sort of fugal structure to The Sopranos, motifs working in point and counterpoint. The main conceit is the tale of two families: Tony's male-dominated mob Family and his female-centered family. But there are smaller themes as well, such as these increasingly ominous animal invasions. The ducks of the first season represented Tony's dream of an idyllic home life; later on, squirrels reflected his anxiety over familial and financial disintegration. As for this season's bear? Perhaps it symbolizes the ways in which Tony's wild Mafia life -- the violence, the continual lies, the infidelity -- is menacing his domestic realm.
“Damp and aromatic,” says the local wild-game official of the bird feed that has attracted the bear. Tony had been squirreling away spare cash in the sacks; what he has done to feed his family has begun to rip it apart. There was always an unspoken devil's bargain at the heart of Tony and Carmela's marriage: his blood money funding her bourgeois dreams, her decency tempering his brutish life. At the end of last season, a distraught Carmela -- lovesick over an unconsummated infatuation with one of Tony's henchmen, enraged over Tony's compulsive infidelity, and unable to turn away from the consequences of her husband's choices -- finally whacked her marriage. “I am here! I have things to say!” she howled, in a scene worthy of the imploding marriage in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. It was hard to breathe, watching her -- Carmela blazed so fiercely, she seemed to burn all the oxygen out of her hermetic little world.
Despite that inferno of an ending, last season drew criticisms that it was slow and uninspired, winding over itself again and again with rehashed dialogue and recycled symbolism. But I'd argue that the series gained a certain weight, a doughy middle-aged quality that reflected both the intractability of the characters' neuroses and the season's central question: What will we leave to our children? Will it be the best of us, or something far darker?
Carmela and Tony each sought to answer that question in their own ways. Carmela reached for respectability with talk of an estate and legitimate investing. Tony became ever more ruthless in his business dealings, then attempted to soothe Carmela's depression with plans to buy a house on the waterfront, where they'd dreamed of owning property as poor newlyweds. “You'll inherit all this,” he said to daughter Meadow (Jamie Lynn DiScala), but after Carmela demanded a separation he backed out of buying the property.
What Meadow inherited instead was her mother's frustration. Envious of Meadow's cosmopolitan college life, her chances at love with a non-mob young man, and her independence, Carmela lashed out in the midst of their annual mother-daughter tea party. Tony recognized the tension: “She's becoming a smart, beautiful, independent woman that you created. Isn't that what you dreamed about?" Carmela sighed, “Yes.” It sounded like “no.”
We've never seen anyone wrench away from the Mafia orbit, and Meadow seems more likely to achieve that than anyone else in the series. Even the series' civilians -- Tony's former therapist Dr. Melfi (Lorraine Bracco), childhood friend and restauranteur Artie Bucco (John Ventimiglia), son A.J.'s old-money girlfriend Devin Pillsbury (Jessica Dunphy) -- are drawn to the dark pull of mob life, the power, the menace. For some, it's a sexual attraction. In this season's premiere, Tony tries to woo Dr. Melfi now that he's no longer her patient. He pretends he wants to resume therapy and then says, “I want to confront you in a positive way,” a line reminiscent of last season's brutal (and brutally funny) intervention staged for the benefit of Tony's heroin-addled nephew. In a way, Melfi is addicted to Tony just as he is addicted to her. The “good” people are unwilling to let go of the “bad” people in this series. In past episodes, Melfi dreamt of raunchy sex with Tony and barely restrained herself from siccing him on the man who raped her; Carmela once came bearing ricotta pie and threats of bodily harm to get a college recommendation for Meadow.
It seems that getting rid of Tony is easier said than done. In a way, it's no surprise that the bear has come around the Soprano homestead now that Tony's been kicked out. The lumbering gait, the destructive carnal appetite, the Pagliacci face -- what is that bear but Tony Soprano himself, his ursine doppelganger? “There's two Tony Sopranos,” Tony says in his effort to seduce Dr. Melfi, “and you've never seen that other one.” He means his loving, protective side, the Tony who sits in his old backyard with an automatic to ward off the wild bear terrorizing his family. But that Tony is far less reassuring than he knows: he's a half-ridiculous, half-heroic figure brooding in a lawn chair, a man unaware that he may be no match for the beast in the end.
Noy Thrupkaew is a Prospect senior correspondent.
