I like Tony Soprano; I can't help it.  I like him despite the fact that I recognize that he's a vicious and dangerous criminal.  I don't particularly want to like him, and I certainly don't think I would like him if he were a real person who lived down the street from me.  If he was really my neighbor, I think I'd feel for him what the Cusamanos do: a mixture of fear, fascination, and disgust.  Nonetheless, recognizing that he is fictional, I like him.  I find myself sympathizing with him: when he is depressed, I pity him; when he is wronged, I feel anger towards those who have betrayed him; and when he is successful, I share in his happiness.  I want him to do well.  I root for him to defeat his opponents, and, at the end of season four, for him to win back his wife Carmela.

Is there anything morally wrong with caring about Tony Soprano in this way?  If Tony Soprano was a real person, then most people would agree that liking him is a least a little bit morally unsavory.  This is Charmaine Bucco's opinion, for example, especially with regard to her husband Artie's friendship with Tony, and it's also the view of the most of the other non-mafia related characters on the show, such as Dr. Melfi's friends and family, the Cusamanos, and so on.  But Tony Soprano isn't real, he's fictional, and I know that even if the Cusamonos don't.  So what could be wrong with my liking Tony Soprano, given that I know that The Sopranos is a work of fiction?

From time to time, as political winds change, politicians, including, for example, Tipper Gore, Joseph Lieberman, and Bob Dole, have weighed in against various artworks in popular culture on the grounds that these artworks are morally dangerous.  The Sopranos has attracted its fair share of this kind of criticism.  Usually these criticisms are answered by proponents of freedom of expression, and the discussion turns to censorship and the necessity of toleration and diversity of viewpoints.  What often gets left behind in these debates is the crucial issue of whether or not there really is any reason to think that a series like The Sopranos can be morally corrupting.  It is often unclear exactly how artworks like The Sopranos are supposed to be bad for us.  One of the things that worries some of us is that television shows like The Sopranos make very bad people seem, well, likeable.

 

When is Art Dangerous?

The first Western philosopher to worry seriously about the moral effects of fiction on its audience was Plato.  Plato worried about the way that the dramatic poets, like Homer, played on the emotions of audience members in ways that could be dangerous and manipulative.  Poetry, Plato believed, evokes strong emotion in ways that could undermine social stability.  In Plato's time, a dramatic poem like The Odyssey would be read aloud or sung in a public performance, and so poetry, for Plato, is more like theater for us.  An ideal society, Plato thought, would be governed by principles of reason, and our willingness to follow through on these rational principles could be weakened by desires arising from strong emotion -- the province of poetry.  Poetry was supposed to be dangerous because it can lead us to sympathize with fictional characters and thus the feelings of the fictional characters come to infect the audience.  Plato wrote:

When even the best of us hear Homer or one of the other tragedians imitating one of the heroes sorrowing and making a long lamenting speech or singing and beating his breast, you know that we enjoy it, give ourselves up to following it, sympathize with the hero, take his sufferings seriously, and praise as a good poet the one who affects us most in this way. [1]

 

In the end, the feelings of the audience and the feelings of the character are the same, and the audience may feel pity, or grief, even when it's not appropriate to do so.  Further, we may carry these inappropriate emotions home with us, and they can become part of our character, and affect the way we act.  Plato recognized how strongly we can feel about poetry, and the power that this passion can have: sympathetic attention to art, he said "nurtures and waters them and establishes them as rulers in us." [2]   These passions can become so strong that we can no longer control them in our everyday lives.  Plato's example is of a man who enjoys comic plays and who then comes to act like a buffoon at home; but someone who enjoyed a show like The Sopranos could well be possessed by more dangerous emotions, like rage, revenge, or contempt for ordinary people.  If you are inclined to think that Plato's arguments don't apply to modern audiences, consider the following quote, taken from a fan website discussion of "University," which speaks to just this kind of worry.

When my boyfriend and I watch The Sopranos, he gets so caught up, you would think it was happening to him.  This gentle man, who wouldn't harm a fly.  It's strange phenomena [sic], and not unlike soap addicts who confuse tv with reality. [3]

In the 19^th century, Leo Tolstoy expressed similar concerns about art (including much of his own writing) in his book What is Art?  Tolstoy had undergone a deep religious experience late in his life and he came to believe that most art was morally corrupt.   Like Plato, he held that art evoked strong emotions in its audience, and he believed that many such emotions are, in his view, morally corrupting.  Only art motivated by true Christian feeling, according to Tolstoy, could be morally acceptable.  Tolstoy therefore rejected virtually all art, except popular Christian peasant art, which, he believed, conveyed only simple Christian love.  Other artworks transmitted corrupt feelings to their audiences -- feelings of unjust pride or lust, for example. [4]   These feelings make people worse morally, because the feelings are selfish, and they alienate people from one another.

Plato and Tolstoy are separated by thousands of years, but their views share certain features in common: they both hold that art corrupts its audience by playing on emotion; they both hold that some art is worse than others in doing so; they believe that the emotional impact of art is great enough to influence how we act and what kind of people we become, so that art can make us bad people; they were both particularly critical of the most popular artists of their day.  There is little doubt that both of them would have disapproved of The Sopranos.  Should we, like Plato and Tolstoy, be worried that we might be infected by watching The Sopranos, and caring about the immoral protagonists?

Plato and Tolstoy have their present-day counterparts, too.  Some cognitive scientists believe that when we watch a television show like The Sopranos, we simulate the feelings of the characters portrayed on screen.  That is, we use our own minds to imitate what we imagine is going on in the minds of characters, and we feel an emotion that is in some ways like the emotion that the character feels.  This emotion can then affect us in a number of ways.  We sometimes call this "sympathizing" or "identifying" with a character onscreen.  Though in many cases, we are able to separate the character's emotion from our own feelings, sometimes our imaginings of the fictional character's emotions infect and affect our own. [5]

Tony Soprano does this himself in "Proshai, Livushka."  After the death of his mother, Tony watches his favorite film, Public Enemy.  In this movie, Jimmy Cagney's character is a gangster with a gentle, loving mother.  As Tony watches, he sympathizes with the Cagney character, and imagines having a loving, trusting relationship with his mother.  This makes him smile, at first, and then cry, as he compares this imagined mother-son relationship with his own experience.  We understand why Tony is so deeply affected by this film, because we can also be affected by works of fiction.  Tony is moved by identifying with the Cagney character, and we are moved by identifying with Tony.

A key feature of this view is that we pick out a character to identity with, and we focus on that person's feelings and emotions.  It is this character that we identify with; he or she is the one that we know the best, and often, he or she is the one that we like the most.  In the case of The Sopranos, despite a large, strong ensemble cast, the primary character with whom audiences identify is Tony himself.  This is how I come to care about Tony, and why I feel relief when he is successful, even when his "success" consists in murder, as when he strangles the mob informant Febby Petrulio in "College."

The problem with this sympathetic identification is that sometimes the character with whom we identify has thoughts and feelings which are morally reprehensible, and by identifying with that character, we risk being infected by these vicious sentiments.  We might start to think that Tony's views about violence and vengeance are reasonable, or we might come to share his propensity for anger, jealousy, rage, and suspicion.  If imagining these feelings leads us to share them (even to a small extent) then liking Tony could make a person morally worse.

 

Why The Sopranos?

There are so many works of popular art that feature gangsters -- not to mention other kinds of vicious people -- as protagonists that it hardly seems fair to pick on The Sopranos.  Godfather Parts I, II, and III, Goodfellas, Carlito's Way, Scarface, Casino, and Public Enemy are just a few examples of films that feature gangsters as main characters.  (Most of these movies are referenced and discussed by the characters in The Sopranos, especially by Silvio Dante, who loves to imitate Al Pacino's character from The Godfather).  But The Sopranos distinguishes itself from these other works in three ways.  First, The Sopranos is an ongoing television series, not a two-hour movie.  As of this writing, four seasons comprising fifty-two episodes have been shown, and at least two more seasons are planned.  That will make more than three days worth of material if one were to sit down and watch them all back-to-back.  By contrast, all the films of the Godfather series, taken together, would take fewer than ten hours to watch.  So loyal viewers of The Sopranos spend a long time with these characters, getting to know much more about them, and potentially, to care much more about them than viewers ever could with a film character.  Not surprisingly, we are more deeply affected by characters we spend more time with and get to know better, and we get to spend a lot of time with Tony and friends.

Second, the gangsters in The Sopranos, especially Tony, are portrayed in deeply psychological and often quite intimate ways.  We often get to see Tony's dreams (occasionally we see other character's dreams, such as Christopher's and Dr. Melfi's, but not often).  Through Tony's sessions with Dr. Melfi, we get to know Tony's feelings much better than we could otherwise.  In those sessions, we get to understand his childhood (through flashbacks), his hopes and concerns, and his fears.  We get a very strong picture of Tony as a complete human being.  The character himself is a rich and complex one.  In addition to being a gangster (with all that implies) we also learn that Tony tries, in his own way, to be a good father and husband, that he cares deeply about his children and wants them to do well.  We learn that he loves his friends deeply, even those (like Big Pussy) that he ends up killing.  He has a strong sense of responsibility, and when he says he will do something, he feels bound to do it.  Despite (perhaps because of) his evil, vicious qualities, Tony has some good features, as well.  Tony Soprano is a more fully-developed character than any other fictional gangster ever created, and we get to know him intimately.

Third, The Sopranos strives for verisimilitude.  It does not have the ironic stylishness of Goodfellas, nor is it an idealized period piece like The Godfather.  With one major exception -- the number of gang killings [6] – the show is strikingly realistic.  Virtually every element, including the psychoanalysis, the New Jersey settings, the language used by the characters, Tony and Carmela's family dynamics, the FBI surveillance techniques, and the mob structure and organization are very close to what is found in the real world.  The show is set in our own time and many of the phenomena that the characters deal with --  for example, Prozac, 9/11, Attention Deficit Disorder, coaches sexually assaulting student athletes, the competitiveness of college acceptance, teen drug use -- are phenomena that we deal with as well.  The characters on The Sopranos are aware of the fictional portrayals of gangsters and they discuss these.  In "Christopher," Carmela and her friends attend a lecture about the portrayal of Italian-Americans women as mob wives; Dr. Melfi's ex-husband Richard complains over and over again about the stereotyped portrayal of Italian-Americans in gangster films.  The psychiatrist who Tony consults when Dr. Melfi won't see him makes a reference to the Robert DeNiro comedy Analyze This.  The Sopranos thus continues the tradition of gangster fictions, but in a deeper, more reflective way than most do: like us, the characters on The Sopranos know that these other stories are fictional.

All of these features conspire to make Tony Soprano a very sympathetic character.  When Plato says "we enjoy it, give ourselves up to following it, sympathize with the hero, take his sufferings seriously," the hero he describes could be Tony.  But sympathizing with Tony is not like sympathizing with Artie Bucco; Tony is a terribly vicious and violent man.  Tony personally commits five murders that we see on screen: he strangles Febby Petrulio in "College"; he shoots one of Junior's hired killers in "I Dream of Jeanie Cusamano" (this one, at least, is self-defense); in "From Where to Eternity," he kills Matt Bevilaqua with Big Pussy; and then he, Paulie, and Silvio turn around and shoot Big Pussy in "Funhouse"; finally, he kills Ralph Cifaretto in "Whoever Did This."  On top of these five, he orders many, many other killings which are carried out by other members of his gang (some shown onscreen and some off).  He loses his temper continually, administering beatings to girlfriends (Irina, Gloria) and business associates (Mikey Palmice, Georgie the bartender, Ralphie Cifaretto, Assemblyman Zellman).  He doesn't ever hit Dr. Melfi, but he comes quite close.  On top of his propensity for personal violence, we have his virulent racism and homophobia, his profiting from corruption, gambling, drugs, and other enterprises that presumably ruin the lives of people we never see on screen.  There is no doubt that Tony Soprano is evil, vicious, and morally bankrupt.  Yet we like him.

 

Is it Morally Wrong to Watch The Sopranos?

The Sopranos leads its audience to identify with a terrible person.  Is it then wrong to watch the show?  Could identifying with Tony make us worse people too?  In the end, I doubt it.  There are a number of reasons why The Sopranos as a whole does more than just make bad people look good.  First, although Tony Soprano is the main character on the show, some of the main characters of The Sopranos who are quite sympathetic are not gangsters and are pretty good people, particularly Dr. Melfi and Meadow Soprano.  Many other characters are, if not good, at least suffer pangs of conscience for the evil they do (or the evil men they love), and they try to do good from time to time: Carmela, Artie Bucco [7] , and Adriana, for example.  These characters struggle continually with their moral positions, and their complicity in the crimes being committed all around them.  Even some thoroughly bad characters like Christopher and Paulie are forced from time to time to reflect on the moral consequences of what they do (in "From Where to Eternity").

But the primary moral center of the show, which serves to balance out the immoral facets of these attractive characters, is Jennifer Melfi's psychiatrist's office.  It is here that the viewer is most often led to identify not just with Tony, but with his victims, and to see Tony's life in a richer, more morally sophisticated way.  In a long-running series like The Sopranos, we see things from more than just one point of view.  Tony's psychoanalysis sessions with Dr. Melfi afford us an opportunity to see Tony from the outside as well as from the inside, and to remind us of the self-deception and flimsy justifications that Tony uses in order to continue his life of crime and violence.  Tony likes to compare himself to a soldier at war, or a "captain of industry," but he doesn't convince anyone with these analogies (perhaps not even himself).  Dr. Melfi's facial expressions make clear her contempt for these facile attempts at justification.

Consider the episode entitled "House Arrest."  In this episode, on the advice of his lawyer, Tony has decided to distance himself from criminal activity and spend his time with his legitimate businesses.  He grows increasingly restless and agitated; he develops a serious rash; he becomes irritable and frustrated, and he complains of this to Dr. Melfi.  Dr. Melfi asks him: "Do you know why a shark keeps moving? There's a psychological condition known as alexithymia [8] , common in certain personalities.  The individual craves almost ceaseless action, which enables them to avoid acknowledging the abhorrent things they do."  When Tony asks what happens when such people are forced to stop and reflect, she answers, "They have time to think about their behavior. How what they do affects other people. About feelings of emptiness and self-loathing, haunting them since childhood. And they crash."  Tony gets her point, but he chooses to respond to this lesson not by reflecting, but by returning to Satriale's with the other mobsters and get back into action -- thus, the shark gets back in motion rather than think about the ethical consequences of how he lives.

Jennifer Melfi continually reminds us as an audience of the dangers of seeing things exclusively from Tony's point of view, and her character provides an alternative point of view on Tony's life and actions.  When she complains to her psychiatrist, Elliot Kupferberg, that she is in a "moral never-never land" with Tony Soprano, "always trying to sympathize and trying never to judge," we know exactly how she feels.  Dr. Melfi, and sometimes other characters such as the Bucco's, Meadow, or even Carmela, provide us with an alternative moral center which allows us to see Tony and his actions from the outside, and they remind us of the moral consequences of what Tony does.  After Dr. Melfi's rapist goes free, she realizes that she could tell Tony about her rapist, and be revenged on him, but she does not do so ("Employee of the Month").  During this sequence, we sympathize with Melfi, and her moral choice, not with Tony.  The finale of the second season ("Funhouse") concludes with one of the few montage sequences ever used in the series. [9]   We see alternating shots of the Soprano family celebrating Meadow's graduation, and various shots of the criminal activities that will be paying Meadow's tuition.  By juxtaposing these two scenes, the producers of The Sopranos remind us that what we like about Tony cannot be separated from the evil he does.

The problem with Plato's and Tolstoy's moral criticism of art is that their emotional theories of artistic identification are too simplistic.  We do not just take on one character or one point of view, and we do not respond emotionally in only one way.  The Sopranos provides us with many different ways of seeing the life of a gangster, and it also invites us to feel in a variety of ways about it.  Sometimes the show does make look Tony and his crew look quite sympathetic; but it also provides us with other perspectives, and permits us, if we try, to formulate a complex and sophisticated personal moral response to gangster life, and not merely to imitate Tony.

This does not mean that Plato's and Tolstoy's concerns about art should be dismissed lightly.  They are right that artworks can affect us deeply, and sometimes audiences with identify with immoral characters.  But whether or not these artworks are morally corrupting depends on other factors as well  Television shows, like The Sopranos, which provide multiple moral perspectives on evil characters, and which offer room for moral reflection, might even be good for us, rather than evil.