A couple of weeks ago, I was re-watching "The Sopranos" -- people leaving doors open, and saying "irregardless"...addressing problems with a baseball bat....
... The soaringly perfect, funny, absurdist, riveting "Pine Barrens" episode.
(On the phone, talking about the Russian who Paulie and Christopher are searching for, Tony says to Paulie, "He killed 16 Chechen rebels, single-handed." Paulie gets off the phone, says to Christopher, "He killed 16 Czechoslovakians"...)
Like the last time I watched the series all through, again I start wondering / contemplating -- Why do people live like this? It's crazy. It's horrible. Why?
Because it's their tradition -- it's what they know. They feel like part of a group, it's a community, they feel they are upholding and celebrating their Italian heritage -- within that framework they can feel pride and a sense of identity.
Toward the end of the last season, the thought came to me -- what these people are searching for and creating for themselves, emotionally, is meaning.
Not long after I thought that, Phil Leotardo, speaking about the oath they take, says -- "It either has meaning, or it doesn't have meaning."
The characters are almost all personality-types where they have anger management issues, they get frustrated easily, take offense easily, and don't handle it like a grown-up -- they throw things. It's ridiculous. (In real life, if you threw things and smashed them on such a regular basis, you'd be always cleaning up -- it's crazy.)
On You Tube is posted the clip where Tony Soprano and Christopher Moltisanti "clean up after Ralph" -- in the Comments:
~ The Sopranos make it seem like it's easy to get away with murder.
~ It's at least a lot easier in their position
~ nobody cries for people like ralph...
~ In New York City, in the early '70s, one of the five families had a civil war that actually lasted a couple of years. The press, who gave it the title of "The Colombo Shoot Outs," was enjoying it because it sold copy like pulp fiction.
The NYPD sat back and let it all happen, acting more like the Department of Sanitation than anything else, just getting rid of bodies and mopping up. They looked at it more as the scum killing itself and were glad that it saved them the trouble of arrests, trials and prosecution.
Their only concern was regular people getting caught in the crossfire as some of the hits happened on the city streets in broad daylight.
Publicly, Mayor Lindsay had to act incensed, but he wasn't. No one was. When you say that no one cries for people like Ralph, you have no idea how right you are.
I was just a little boy at the time, but there was so much mob activity in New York -- Luccheses with Lufthansa, the Genovese running the porn industry right on 42nd Street, et. al. -- that it couldn't be ignored....
Throw in films like the Godfather and the French Connection, not to mention blaxploitation and it was all pretty ubiquitous, even for a kid.
It was only when those pieces of garbage started really shaking down big business that law enforcement started to move in. Hence, all the real task forces came into being only in the mid and late '70s. Even the original twin towers construction had to grease those bastards.
-30-
No comments:
Post a Comment