The Sopranos Discussion/Appreciation Thread (Renewed)

I thought the portrayal of the priest and everything else related to that was spot on. The idea that you can slip a wafer, and believe that it infuses grace into you, despite continuing to lead an unfaithful, unrepentant life is exactly the kind of religion that Tony and Carmela Soprano would take refuge in.

Tony said it best to the Evangelical Preacher: "I already got all this covered with my priest."
I think the only time I've ever seen a jew defend a Christian, even a dimly-portrayed Christian zionist, is here on this show. A work of fiction. And that defense is always self-serving in nature, never out of the goodness of their hearts which doesn't exist.



The chutzpah in this scene is off the charts even though its only in two lines of dialogue at the end.

As for the Catholic priest, they still could have shown the corrupt lackadaisical Catholic attitude of these mob types and Novus Ordo clergymen in other ways than insulting the consecration of the Eucharist and making a priest complicit in its degradation. If a show was made specifically by Protestant writers and producers, I think they would show the Catholic Church a bit more harshly in other ways, that though they may be more gratuitous in historical violence, would never even think of touching the Sacrament in such a way. What jew david chase did is no different than what jew larry david did by urinating on a picture of Christ where they make some dumb shiksa think the picture had tears later, except what chase did is more of the subtle shadowy hit.

Everything about the Sopranos is written from the jewish perspective. Most of La Cosa Nostra was historically opportunistic rural banditry before it was commercialized by jewish thugs.
 
What jew david chase did is no different than what jew larry david did by urinating on a picture of Christ where they make some dumb shiksa think the picture had tears later, except what chase did is more of the subtle shadowy hit.
I think you're going off balance with this kind of reasoning. David Chase is Italian. He had an Italian-American upbringing. People like him, Scorsese, and Coppola could never have made these kinds of films without that Italian-Catholic upbringing. For them to criticize aspects of the nominalism around them is not inherently Jewish.

The chutzpah in this scene is off the charts even though its only in two lines of dialogue at the end.
I thought Hesh's attitude towards the Evangelical was true to life, as he suggests that Evangelicals are only supportive of Jews for now, but that they will eventually turn their backs on the Jews as well. In other words, no matter how much Evangelicals support the Jews, the Jews ultimately remain ungrateful and skeptical of everyone around them.

The Evangelical was not above his share of criticism in the show either. As the other characters perceived him to be out of touch, as if what he was saying is too good to be true and not for them.

Don't forget that one of the first episodes is about Hasidic Jews making a deal with Tony, only to try and not fulfill their end of the deal after Tony comes through on his end. I don't think anyone comes out unscathed in this show.
 
I’m looking back at the show, I don’t see how Paulie even survived . He outlived everyone despite constantly starting fights, overestimating his role, and being a homicidal maniac . I was going to make the case for Paulie being the worst . But he’s protected by plot armor
 
I’m looking back at the show, I don’t see how Paulie even survived . He outlived everyone despite constantly starting fights, overestimating his role, and being a homicidal maniac . I was going to make the case for Paulie being the worst . But he’s protected by plot armor
Paulie is willing to do anything to survive. He also seems to change his ways in the last season. He makes amends with his aunt before she dies, he gets cancer, he sees the vision of Mary, he rejects Tony's offer to promote him. I don't think he redeems himself per se but I think his choices at least spare him.
 
I’m looking back at the show, I don’t see how Paulie even survived . He outlived everyone despite constantly starting fights, overestimating his role, and being a homicidal maniac . I was going to make the case for Paulie being the worst . But he’s protected by plot armor

Paulie is also paranoid (and mildly germaphobic), superstitious and also cheap to an often pointless degree. Cheapness aside, these things do benefit him. It’s often his own screwups-telling Johnny Sack about the Ginny joke-that cause him trouble and not some larger outside problem. Tony did consider killing him in “Remember When” but it’s been suggested that a big part of why Tony keeps him around is out of some sort of nostalgia and affection. Paulie is basically a relic of a bygone era that has trouble functioning in modern times, but he’s still a part of the crew and has some use so they keep him around.

Paulie is willing to do anything to survive. He also seems to change his ways in the last season. He makes amends with his aunt before she dies, he gets cancer, he sees the vision of Mary, he rejects Tony's offer to promote him. I don't think he redeems himself per se but I think his choices at least spare him.

True. He outlasted people more talented, capable, or just better at their job: Ralph, Vito, possibly Silvio etc. As I mentioned above, he’s a reminder of what Tony perceives as a “better” time-a running theme from the first episode.
At one point he claims to have survived the Colombo wars by “the skin of my nuts”. At best, this is probably him exaggerating, but it does set him up as a survivor. He’s also resourceful if not outright opportunistic. As badly as he bungled the Johnny Sack thing, it showed that he was able to consider his options and the benefits, but not smart/savvy enough to really make anything of the situation.
 
I've watched the series probably 10 times over by now. I appreciate it most as a comedy rather than a drama series. The jokes, malapropisms and whatnot are my favorite.

I started watching "The Wire" for the first time, finally. It's got the typical edgy (for the time) degeneracy shoehorned in, as it was one of HBO's first big series, but the quality of the writing and the plot is on par with the Sopranos.

It does turn into a comedy the more you watch because there arent any surprises in the drama anymore and you're fixated on the stupid little things the characters do, I also find it hilarious now.


The wire is different but also very good, before HBO became a liberal joke. Have you realized the underlying theme with the wire yet?
 
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For the wire? Addiction is the only winner.

Call heroin/cocaine/fentanyl by a new name each season

“Yellow top! WMD! Pandemic!” It’s all the same thing.

The murder rate doesn’t change much

The cops are crooked

The criminals are crooked

The only winner is addiction. I could easily be missing a bigger message but I recently did a rewatch. There’s always going to be a new gangster to sell and distribute the heroin.

But the game essentially stays the same even if the people playing are changing

Edit it’s unrelated, last night I tried to change one of my horses name to “jews” on rdr2 and it wouldn’t let me because of profanity filters. One of my other horses is “Webey” the stable master said it’s a weird name but ok
 
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Everything about the Sopranos is written from the jewish perspective...

It seems that this opinion is the outcome of having an 'a priori' conclusion (e.g., "(((their))) influence is everywhere"), whereby one tries to find any evidence to support a pre-existing conclusion, rather than considering the evidence first, before drawing a conclusion. This may be a hard message to swallow, but ultimately if one thinks of himself as a truly critical thinker, it's congruent to direct this general approach inwards, not just outwards.

For instance, the use of this label is peculiar - "jew david chase". I see no evidence for this claim. Early life doesn't check out.

Chase was born into a working-class Italian American family in Mount Vernon, New York, as an only child to Norma (née Bucco) and Enrico "Henry" Chase, both born in 1908. Norma was born in Essex County, New Jersey, as one of eleven children to Marian D'Agostino and Vito Bucco, who immigrated from Fossacesia, Abruzzo.[3][4] Henry was born in Providence, Rhode Island, as one of seven children, the son of Teresa Melfi, who was married to Giovanni DeCesare, 17 years her senior. Henry and his sister Evelina (Evelyn), however, were the biological children of Giuseppe "Joseph" Fusco, a 23-year-old Italian immigrant who was lodging with the DeCesares since 1904. Following Evelyn's birth in 1910, Melfi and Fusco eloped to Newark, New Jersey, with their two biological children, whose surnames Melfi subsequently changed from DeCesare to Chase to obscure their background; the couple kept their own surnames and raised another five children under Fusco's name (although the 1940 census lists both their surnames as "Fusca").[5][6][7]

HBO just came out with a two part documentary on The Sopranos. It is very good, anybody who liked the show should be interested. Much of David Chase's life was breathed into the show's story.

Great recommendation. Watching it gave me a whole new perspective and appreciation of the show, and even makes me want to watch it again. It's currently rated at 8.4 / 10 on IMDB:

In episode 1, David says that his favourite dialogue of the entire show is from the following scene (embedded with a timestamp) -

> "...and the Romans, where are they now?"
> "You're looking at em a**hole"



In episode 2, David tears up during his eulogy for James Gandolfini, when he calls upon a memory of James on set, and its link to his Italian father and grandfather. David speaks from his heart, reflecting his emotional connection to James and his pride in his Italian heritage.

It's hard to see how these examples -- among many others which show how much David brought his own personal experience into the script -- fit into the theory that one of the GOAT shows is just another alien subversion.

...I don't think anyone comes out unscathed in this show.

Bingo.

And to the man who embodied the show above all others - salute.

los-angeles-california-september-10-emmy-winner-james-gandolfini-backstage-at-the-52nd-emmy.jpg
 
It seems that this opinion is the outcome of having an 'a priori' conclusion (e.g., "(((their))) influence is everywhere"), whereby one tries to find any evidence to support a pre-existing conclusion, rather than considering the evidence first, before drawing a conclusion. This may be a hard message to swallow, but ultimately if one thinks of himself as a truly critical thinker, it's congruent to direct this general approach inwards, not just outwards.

For instance, the use of this label is peculiar - "jew david chase". I see no evidence for this claim. Early life doesn't check out.


In the words of Tony Soprano himself, Italians are simply "jews with better food."



Chase is not an Italian surname. He likely is of patrilineal descent from a Converso family. I don't know if I'm the only one seeing this but there has been some significant manipulation being done on the early life sections of the usual suspects. Even if Chase really is not jewish, his co-writers were. There is significant jewwy Freudian psychobabble in the writing of the show, in the characters behavior and actions. The mob itself is heavily jewish in real life. Art imitates life.

https://forward.com/culture/476084/the-secret-jewish-history-of-the-sopranos/

For a better show on Italians, watch HBO's Rome. That one was made mostly by Roman Italians and it pulls no stops when it comes to making the jews look like a dirty untrustworthy conniving scheming people. It also took some liberties with pre-Christian Rome a bit too unrealistic but still if escapism is what you're looking for I don't know a better one.

I'm not denying the influence the Sopranos had on people. It's well made, but it's not free of jewish influence.
 
The show makes the Catholic priest look like a weak-willed struggling sinner
Where's the mistake here? My Orthodox priest outright admitted to me that he was a weak-willed, struggling sinner, but at least that way he could still stand by the teachings he wanted me to live by, regardless of whether he failed to set a good example or not in certain situations (namely the Coof).

The depiction of the Sopranos is actually very accurate in terms of the decline of the Catholic family, the intentions of Chase notwithstanding. I don't think it's a dogmatically accurate instruction of the faith, but that's not what it was meant to be. It's probably the product of Chase's honest inquiry of his own experience and perception of Italian Americans and their development within a greater American context.

My very first experience with a Catholic priest in my hometown was him scolding me for not buying into feminism and trans-BS, so compared to that, Chase's depiction has been very mild. The ugly truth is that the moral corruption of Roman clergy is not a mere consequence of moral decline in the West, but the very cause of it.

You often make your case about the goodness/badness of an actor based on whether they seem to conform to a certain standard, but what I think you don't realize is that your standard and worldview are very idiosyncratic. Point me to the Roman Catholic community that shares your precise worldview. It simply doesn't exist, least of all within the context of a Papal ecclesiology.

I don't mean to turn this into another theology debate, but with you it seems to happen every time because you are very stuck in a holistic way of perceiving cultural phenomena (which isn't bad in itself and I can empathize with it), without seeing the nuances. I do enjoy many of your posts, but I don't think you can deny that that's a recurring theme. There seems to be some sort of individual standard that no one can satisfy.

If we look at art, movies and series in particular, we're mostly confronted with the product of minds that aren't dogmatically Christian. That doesn't necessarily imply that the product itself was meant to be manipulative in that way. Lapsed Catholics and atheists are still able to bring forth honest pieces of art and profound aphorisms, the caveat being that they aren't geared towards strengthening Christian morality (although they sometimes do).

Both Chase and Scorsese (and Franzese) are philosemitic boomers and therefore hardly critical of Jewish dogma, but that doesn't mean that they explicitly intended to promote it. Yeah, the divorce psychologist thing was kinda cringe, but that doesn't invalidate the many other ideas explored in the show.

It's impossible for Christians to exist in the modern world without a nuanced understanding of it. Sin, heterodoxy and blasphemy are ubiquitous, yes, but that doesn't mean that there aren't positive aspects that should be taken seriously. Being a Christian doesn't necessitate becoming the "the world has fallen" chud meme.

The Sopranos is a flawed series regardless of the Christian angle. It's very interesting because of its core themes, but there are easily recognizable writing problems and inconsistencies. That being said, it does open up some great conversations about morality and family, which, I think, is one of the hallmarks of great art.
 
What jew david chase did is no different than what jew larry david did by urinating on a picture of Christ
David Chase is not Jewish. The Brave AI will tell you he his Jewish, but only confusing him with David T. Chase, founder of Chase Enterprises, who is some sort of Jew, rich by inheritance.

I had accidentally skipped this comment, but I think it's worth responding to. Boomers are the most "West"-pilled people among the European people and they haven't been presented with any sort of credible orthodoxy in Catholicism. I almost have more respect for Irish-Americans who turned against the Church than Gaffigan-type guys who remain in it and simply ignore incongruent aspects because they like the aesthetic and think that Jesus, overall, was sort of a good guy. That doesn't imply they are being double-faced or maliciously spreading Antichristian propaganda. They behave like people who feel back-stabbed and disappointed by the Church, which I think is a genuine feeling they have. My German, Catholic-worker granddad left the Church in the aftermath of Vat II excesses and the abuse scandals. Whether or not the position he ended up with is besides the point, but that's how he genuinely felt.

I also don't like the comparison between DiCesare, who created a great drama about the collapse of family by the loss of the values they received by tradition, and Larry David, who has never been funny, will never be funny, and only boomers and pretentious millennials like his comedy.
Larry David's output is obnoxious and show why, by and large, Jews aren't very popular comedians, contrary to popular opinion
(the only top one you could name would be Louis CK, who grew up with his Irish Catholic mom in Boston and only started leaning into his Judaism after getting "cancelled". His Madison Square Garden appearance was a complete mess, and it seemed as if he had suddenly turned into an out-of-touch Jewish boomer from Brooklyn who absolutely doesn't understand how the goyim think, so he has to go back to his old material from when he still lived with them. His best time was when he played the depressed, lapsed-Catholic 40+ divored Dad, which is a topic only Christians feel broken up about).

All David (and Seinfeld and multiple other) does is present a socially awkward situation from a dissociated perspective, then comment on it with what I call "destructive analysis" ( a term I think people would find enlightening when discussing Jewish cultural phenomena, it's seemingly regular analysis but only serves to destroy what's there, akin to Talmudic dialectics aka pilpul) and then superimposes his own hateful, selfish attitude on it. That's it. That's every single episode of it and dumb pretentious goyim gobble it up uncritically because they've been taught that it's part of their urbanite pop-culture education. I wouldn't be surprised if Chinese universities were already looking and Seinfeld and Larry David in order to educate themselves as to the quirks of the Talmudic mind. Anyway, the point is, that's a far cry from the Sopranos.

Chase's work stands on its own feet. It has depth, it has honestly, and it's not afraid of leaving ambivalence in a scene, for the benefit of the thinking audience. Most importantly, it has love. Tony's decline leads to his more than deserved end. Compare that to an actual purely Jewish series like Californication, where yes, bad deeds have consequences, but the consequences are usually more about being misunderstood and in the end, the halfbreed rides into the sunset with the schickse he ruined for years.

Chase does have a tendency of including pretentious intellectual excursions in the series, but as opposed to Seinfeld, David or Kubrick, he never completely descends into nihilist bragging, which would be the Talmudic way to go.. I liked the way he dealt with religion very much, because it's a thoughtful illustration of how boomers, most likely including himself, feel in the aftermath of Vat II and Global Americanism.

Boomers aren't knowingly pushing propaganda for the most part, they just drank the cool aid.
 
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One of my favorite characters from season one was Tony's mom, she had some great one-liners but my favorite is:

"Psychiatry is a racket invented by the jews."
Nancy Marchand played that role to perfection. I hated her character (as you're supposed to) the first time viewing but she cracks me up everytime I watch her now. I would've liked to see the plot line they had in store for her play out. I love the contrast between her freaking out over Tony taking her to the nursing home and causing him to have a panic attack and Paulie's mom crying in gratitude when Paulie takes her to the same retirement community.
 
I'm from Italian origin. One oversight in the thread is the big divide between northern and southern Italians.
The north is industrialised (think Ferrari, Lamborghini, Milan fashion, the way the language is spoken and of course
northern food). While south is the opposite. At one point there was talk of splitting the country in two. The
classic mafia type you're seeing in Sopranos's is southern. Rome is also considered to be too far south.
I'm sure there are southerners who don't consider themselves lumped with Soprano's as
I've discovered. I would also be wary of an American Hollywood made TV series.
 
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I'm from Italian origin. One oversight in the thread is the big divide between northern and southern Italians.
The north is industrialised (think Ferrari, Lamborghini, Milan fashion, the way the language is spoken and of course
northern food). While south is the opposite. At one point there was talk of splitting the country in two. The
classic mafia type you're seeing in Sopranos's is southern. Rome is also considered to be too far south.
The funny thing is, they actually make a point of that in the series when discussing Columbus.






Another thing I like about the show. They repeatedly discuss cultural grievances people have, but also show their ridiculousness. Hesh Rabkin, in several situations, poses as the ethnocentric, self-defending Jew who gets angry at stereotypes, but at the same time he is a loan shark who made is money from queer deals in the music industry. The series never paints stereotypes as fundamentally wrong, but also shows how people evolve beyond the stereotypical cultures they come from.
The Italians make a big fuss about mafioso stereotypes, while being involved murderous mafioso activities. Academic Italians like to act Black/Jewish by constantly droning on about how they are being mistreated because of superficial characteristics, while their own behavior completely justifies the dreaded distrust, mostly without people actually antagonizing them for it. That, or, they aren't being stereotyped at all, but lean into their perceived persecution because it ingratiates them with 20th century identity politics.

This is turning into another rant about aspects I like about the show, but one core aspect of it is that Chase, being a smart and honest boomer, constantly tried to put his finger on the facets of life people are being hypocritical about. Be it ethnic identity, religious identity, family roles etc, but he also shows the likable sides. He doesn't commit to a position, he just shows where the conflicts are, and allows them to play out in some authentic manner, without forcing any conclusion down the audience's throat.
 
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