Tony Soprano: baby boomer

James Gandolfini, who died last week aged 51, was an average-looking character actor from New Jersey who, at age 38, became the central figure in the first and perhaps most remarkable series of what is now called television's golden age—The Sopranos. Gandolfini and his definitive character Tony Soprano both showed an acute awareness of being placed in situations that would tax them beyond their resources.

The Sopranos was an unselfconscious presentation of the first postwar generation's anxieties and disillusionments, as its members began to recognise the trade-offs between the lives they were living and the assumptions they'd grown up with. The series was the angry, authoritative statement of one near-baby boomer, the television writer David Chase (b. 1945), who'd intuited these trade-offs early thanks to his accumulated experiences growing up in a traditional Italian family and choosing a career in a quintessentially modern medium.

Chase released a statement about Gandolfini on the day after his death, calling him “one of the greatest actors of this or any time.” This may or may not be the case. But what Gandolfini undoubtedly was, through his portrayal of Tony Soprano, was an emblem. This was probably the more important and certainly the more punishing role. So The Sopranos was a presentation of hard reality, but Chase wasn't front and centre every week doing the presenting—Gandolfini was, and the burden of this position wore on him.

It also wore on Tony Soprano, the mob boss who lived in an upmarket suburban enclave in New Jersey next to doctors and investment bankers and sent his daughter to Columbia, but who confronted the numbing realisation that these totems of his success were also the symbols of his irrelevance. You can't have the suburbs and the Ivy league opened up to you while also guaranteeing the four-generation Italian deli and the submissive family. Instead you get fast food chains and a daughter who wants to specialise in human rights law. This is a hard cognitive dissonance to live with each day, especially if you don't have a way to explain it and so ease your own adaptation. Tony Soprano didn't have Adam Smith or Karl Marx or JM Keynes telling him that this is what happens in diverse commercial societies—that you trade a comfortable mental landscape for a comfortable physical one. He had comfortable old assumptions, equally comfortable new amenities, and the searing awareness of a compromised reality. So he was forced to muddle through as best he could. And so was James Gandolfini, the otherwise-normal man who became a vessel for the regrets and irritations of the masses of viewers who in 1999 and 2000, suddenly started watching HBO.

Alike as they are, both men dealt with their situations in different ways. Gandolfini's was less violent, though not necessarily toward himself. He took a cab to the first Sopranos premiere, refusing a limousine. He would scream and hit himself on set when he forgot his lines. He divorced his first wife, who reported serious drug and alcohol abuse. He gained weight at an alarming rate. And he increasingly refused to show up to work, refusals invariably followed by agonised acts of penance (“All of a sudden there'd be a sushi chef at lunch,” a crew member told GQ.) After the series ended, he happily returned to supporting roles, remarried, and made two documentaries about the experiences of veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In one of his last film appearances, as CIA Director Leon Panetta in Zero Dark Thirty, Gandolfini sounded his consistent note of depressive awareness that made Tony Soprano so erratically attractive: “She's fucking smart,” noted an agent about the analyst who'd insisted she'd tracked down Bin Laden; “Jerry, we're all fucking smart,” Gandolfini's Panetta responded, lips twisting into a comfortable grimace.

Tony Soprano, on the other hand, externalised his suffering, sometimes through breakdowns but increasingly through the violence to which he'd been programmed all his life. He had reason to be angry. Here was a man at the centre of his own world, except that this world was being increasingly marginalised. He might have lived better than his father and his grandfather, but there was less of the old ethnic solidarity to dull the brutality of his business, and there were fewer, if any, achievements to work towards. He'd proceeded along the old route past its expiry date. He could stand, as he did in the first episode, in the giant stone chapel of his church, trying to awaken in his daughter some of the awe he felt that his grandfather, her great-grandfather, had laid its first stones, knowing all the while that he would never achieve anything so durable with the life he was leading. Predictably, over time he lost the wonder—at the end of Episode 86 the screen blanked on a shuttered, coarsened face. But he still had that elusive quality of solidity, however perturbed he might feel, an unconscious confidence that came from the roots he hadn't left behind. It was this quality that kept his Italian-American therapist Jennifer Melfi persistently attracted to him: unlike her ex-husband, an occasional crusader for the rights of Italian Americans, here was someone who seemed real if often repulsive. At once trapped and enabled by his heritage, Tony showed what the boomers had gained and what they'd lost.