{"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/179782001633/", "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.
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kontextmaschine:

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bambamramfan:

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kontextmaschine:

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

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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).

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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 (\u201csacred\u201d 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.

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This whole thing is good, but if we\u2019re talking the (rather heavy) authorial voice here, the entire last episode is about David Chase telling people to stop sympathizing with Tony. He was basically forewarning the decade of the prestige anti-hero.

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It\u2019s not like Melfi\u2019s surprise realization was that Tony was a bad person.\u00a0She had known that for six seasons. Her epiphany was that\u00a0\u201cIt\u2019s been six seasons and none of what I do is making him any better.\u201d Which you know, wasn\u2019t at all wrong.

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When I first watched it I disagreed, because no one should be given up on, but Chase is right, in that there\u2019s a difference between\u00a0\u201cgiving up\u201d and acknowledging\u00a0\u201cthis thing isn\u2019t working, even if it is really fun/making me a lot of money.\u201d

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Well that\u2019s the lesson as Melfi would take it, as a good totebagger convinced there\u2019s a totebagger inside all of us trying to get out.

But I resist the notion that that\u2019s Chase & Co.\u2019s final uncomplicated word, because they do complicate it. Think about that other therapist\u2019s critique, that she\u2019s just a slumming voyeur, think what that does.

Melfi is a good educated totebagger who makes an hour appointment every week to keep up with the Tony Soprano Story. Melfi IS the Prestige TV audience. And what\u2019s the critique amount to?

\u201cYou started following this gritty sexy violent gangster story because you liked it. Something in Tony Soprano reminded you of yourself, only he lived a more interesting, less constrained life, and it enthralled you. You loved living vicariously through him.

And what were you expecting, redemption? An AFFIRMATION of totebag values? That doesn\u2019t even fit your fig-leaf of interest in social verisimilitude \u2013 after all you\u2019ve seen that this other world is an actual whole functional culture with its own rules and norms, after all you\u2019ve seen how respected “straight\u201d culture actually relies on it, you were expecting it to just roll over to educated nonviolent passive-aggressive totebaggery because\u2026 why, exactly?

Because you were sure you\u2019re the crown of creation, and people just need your help removing the obstacles to being you? Or because pretending there was a bourgeois affirmation coming let you span the gap between your self-image and your desires, and taking its absence as a flaw lets you present as an innocent, tricked?\u201c

And Melfi, the avatar of talk-it-out, know-thyself, after coming this far just runs away and washes her hands of it.

And if that\u2019s not a critique of the Prestige TV audience

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