{"version": "1.0", "type": "rich", "title": "Melfi was clearly speaking with the authorial voice when passing judgment on Tony. You're just disputing her judgment because...", "author_name": "kontextmaschine", "author_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "provider_name": "kontextmaschine", "provider_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "url": "https://kontextmaschine.com/post/165789319058/", "html": "
Anonymous asked: Melfi was clearly speaking with the authorial voice when passing judgment on Tony. You're just disputing her judgment because viewing peers as \"rivals and / or playing pieces\" appeals to your totally ludicrous sense of yourself as someone above or outside the ordinary human social matrix.
\n

Yes, that\u2019s the reading I mentioned going with on first viewing, and yes, that\u2019s the unflattering comparison I lampshaded.

\n\n

I can see it, the show does a lot less work to undermine the character\u2019s consciously presented self-image than others, even other therapists (Melfi\u2019s own, the brusque one that tells Carmela to leave, the priest Carmela was close to) or other \u201cinnocents\u201d outside or against the organized crime dynamic (Artie Bucco, Meadow\u2019s college bf).

\n\n

But on reflection (and that late-season bit where her therapist explicitly theorizes her interest in Tony as slumming voyeurism) I started to see things, and distinguish the sessions (“sacred” as central to the mechanics of the show) from Melfi the character, and realized how much of \u201cit doesn\u2019t undermine her\u201d was \u201cit shows her as a fleshed-out totebag meritocrat\u201d and I was just reimporting that as the standard of virtue while thinking myself above just that\n\n

I kind of understood the lesson at stake here as the reverse, that a professional, educated idiom and a training/tendency to see things in terms of larger dynamics doesn\u2019t exempt you from, I guess, \u201cthe social matrix\u201d or from bending your \u201cobjective\u201d judgement to self-validation and that \u2013 as with that unflattering comparison \u2013 you should be aware of that stuff and incorporate it into your self-understanding.

"}