Gabrielle #12 – Backshots with... Tony Soprano
An over-analysis of why women want to sit on Big T’s lap and hand-feed him aubergine parm while he threatens someone down the phone.
Welcome to the first in an ongoing series that, sorry to say, I’m calling ‘Backshots.’
In it, I’ll select a sex symbol – definition: notably thirsted after celebrity or fictional character – and explain why they are hot. You would think this sort of thing would be evident. However, we’re living through a worsening epidemic of people conflating commercially-driven beauty standards with sex appeal. This has many interesting consequences, such as pickup artistry, the dominance of veneers (currently being challenged by people who keep watching films made before 2017, realising that even Jim Carrey at his million-dollar-a-movie peak had a charmingly disorganised bottom row, and barking for the return of “real teeth”), and the launch of a pharmaceutical company, which deals in erectile dysfunction and hair loss medication, called Rizz.
The loss of understanding around sex appeal is also, I imagine, both a cause and a consequence of the fact that the majority of people now meet their partners online. The trouble with image carousels, checklists of interests / requirements, and features augmented to look good Instagram being such a common first point of contact for dating is that it is, by nature, inhibited. It masks all the good stuff. The way a t-shirt hangs on someone, the way they laugh, the way they smell after sitting in the sun for three hours. I’m not saying I’m immune to the lure of the digital meat market, which isn’t a total void of intrigue (I once slept with a guy whose opening gambit, which he obviously used on everybody, was “which of Katie Price’s six autobiographies is your favourite?”), but I’m definitely saying that people can surprise you. Until you see how someone’s hand looks holding a sweating glass of something in a dimly lit room, you don’t really know what they’re capable of.
The first few instalments of Backshots will be about men, because straight men are uniquely afflicted with the disease that renders one unable to comprehend what makes their own demographic attractive – and they are, for better or worse, this newsletter’s biggest audience. I will open it up soon. For now:
Backshots with… Tony Soprano
Ever since that thing happened that killed a bunch of people and we had to be inside for a year and a half, The Sopranos has been consistent fodder for social media. Paulie Walnuts is now a tragi-cool uncle to us all; the fading life of the party who had the rug pulled out from under him by age, leaving little but his image. Michael Imperioli has broken out of the usually terminal ‘I can fix him’ mould of Christopher Moltisanti to become a cult figure, one time NTS host, and Zoom meditation coach (I took one of his classes once thinking ‘perhaps it is he who can fix me…’ – but any wisdom he had to share was obliterated by the chat box full of people either being like “what if my knee is bad” or “can I pull your underwear down with my teeth, Michael''). More recently, the ladies of New Jersey have been reinvented as contemporary style influencers – their maximalism and conspicuous signifiers of wealth informing the “Mob Wife” aesthetic. And then, there’s Tony.
Tony Soprano is where the show’s currents of sex and violence – and their pendulum swings of excess and control – most frequently meet. He spends every episode trying to shake off one of the most beautiful women you’ve ever seen in your life while at the same time seducing another; strangling men to death with his bare hands and then unpacking his moral quandaries in therapy. He is the enigmatic centrepiece of a show about masculinity. Therefore, most chat about Tony Soprano is sexual in nature and falls into one of two categories: women of all inclinations captioning a photo of him with something along the lines of “UNTIL THEY FIND ME IN A POOL OF BLOOD,” and men struggling to comprehend why.
One post I saw on r/thesopranos enquires of the DiMeo crime family: “On looks alone? Half of these guys are pushing 50. They’re balding, they’re obese, they smell like Paco Roban [sic] crawled up their asshole and died, and they don’t give a shit about the girls they toss aside. How is it Tony and his glorified crew can just magnetically pull women to them, even when their wife is right next to them?” Every month without fail, there will be a viral post on FKA Twitter from a man similarly begging for answers. He’s a serial cheater, they cry! He has a weak emotional constitution! He’s overweight! Women are so confusing, what could they possibly want?!
They want to sit on Big T’s lap and hand-feed him aubergine parm while he threatens someone down the phone, is what they want. For four simple reasons.
1. He fucks
If someone fucks, you can tell. They’ll talk to you with their chin lowered and make prolonged, unbroken eye-contact. They may appear weary, like they’ve just read a particularly devastating bit of philosophy or haven’t gone to bed at a reasonable hour since Year 9. Occasionally – and this I can’t explain, you either know what I’m talking about or you don’t – you can tell by someone’s face that they eat ass in public. And if you find it hard to pick up on vibes, you can always identify them by the way they talk about sex: bluntly, or not at all. A real fucker has nothing to prove. A real fucker moves in silence.
Tony Soprano is a real fucker.
Is he good at it? Not on your life. The sex scenes in The Sopranos are pointedly naturalistic, so whenever we see Tony doing the business – getting dome in the Bing toilets, ragging a receptionist over his desk at Barone Sanitation, chuffing cigars with Irina – it looks and sounds exactly how a 280lb mobster having sex would look and sound. He goes at it like a dog with a pillow, the most prominent noise in the mix is his heavy breathing, and more often than not he’s hitting it from behind while sitting in a desk chair with wheels. When he cums he looks like Henry VIII being tasered.
These scenes are objectively bad adverts for having sex with Tony Soprano, so I can see why someone would watch them and come away thinking: why is this Russian 10 in the dicksand over a guy who can’t go on top without an ambulance on speed dial? But they’re not supposed to be hot, because they’re not about pleasure. A few fumbles with Julianna Skiff notwithstanding (which are more erotic on account of emotional conflict), the women rarely appear to be getting anything out of it beyond the thrill of being fucked by Tony Soprano. They’re exchanges of power. Tony gets affirmation of status (and a nut, but mostly the first one), the women get affirmation of value, having been chosen. This is also why so many of them go Joker mode after he dumps them. When your worth is assigned by someone else, nothing rocks your shit more than the feeling of having lost it.
You could argue that there’s a degree of manipulation happening in some cases, because Tony is such a rock and the women are so disposable, but I personally find it more interesting to consider his sex life in terms of mutual fragility and delusion. However you want to look at it, the scenes are revelations of the gulf between fantasy and reality – what you see and what you get. There’s a sobering quality to the crass, clumsy nature of his shagging, which is also, I think, why so much of it takes place in the middle of the afternoon. With Tony, it’s all about what you see.
2. The gangster’s paradox
Sex appeal is a game of contradictions. Firstly, there are the contradictions inherent to being a person. These are usually superficial and rooted in social stereotypes that are flawed to begin with. Still, you know the tropes: the uptight girl who wears a buttoned-up cardigan in her bedroom full of soft toys but is actually deeply masochistic (Maggie Gyllenhaal in The Secretary); the sports star who plays up to type but is actually very sentimental (Taylor Kitsch in Friday Night Lights); the industrial goth who cries to Dua Lipa (Trent Reznor).
For something to be erotic, there has to be conflict – an absence created by uncertainty. Similarly, for someone to have sex appeal, there has to be a dissonance between how they present and who they actually are (social networking and modern kink culture tend to flatten this into a singular identity with no shades of confluence, which is why dating apps and 20-person polycules, despite revolving entirely around sex, feel so anaemic). Someone can be conventionally attractive, and that’s nice, but it doesn’t necessarily make them sexy. As my friend Phoebe sagely put it: “sexy has to have some ugliness.”
Tony Soprano is a big man with a murderous job. But! Plot twist: he’s having an ethical dilemma about it. Over the entire six seasons of The Sopranos, he is locked in existential crisis – over his moral failings, the slow death of his profession (“the sun is setting over the empire”) and, by implication, traditional masculinity. When the show first aired in 1999, it was revolutionary in the way it navigated masculinity and morality, establishing an ambivalence that allowed viewers to find Tony reprehensible one moment and admirable the next. As screenwriter Matthew Weiner puts it in David Bianculli’s The Platinum Age of Television: “This has never been done, that you would take this hero and father of this TV show… and he’s going to strangle this guy with his bare hands. And we’re going to have to watch him next week and act like we care about what’s going on with him.”
This ambivalence spills over into sex appeal, too. A selective reading of Tony would peg him as the strong silent type, but if anything his character pulls back the curtain and allows us to examine that for what it is. Yes, we see him holding dominion over a bloody criminal underground and being treated like the big swinging dick that he is, but we also see him having panic attacks and depression eating and appearing, in many ways, incredibly boyish. That loveability is fully down to James Gandolfini and the childlike wonder he carries behind his eyes and in the corners of his smile, and the fact that he plays the character from a place of genuine empathy. For all Tony’s brutish glares and hot-tempered threats, there are also moments of sweetness and petulance (“I like the one that says some pulp”).
He is a dominant man and a lost kid. The protector and the threat. The family guy who kills his own cousin. In other words, the things that make Tony Soprano repulsive are also the things that would make you risk it all for three underwhelming minutes of reverse cowgirl in a hideously upholstered armchair.
3. The undeniable gravity of power, obviously
I promise this will be the only time I reference theory but, according to Lacan, desire doesn’t want to be satisfied. It wants to go on desiring. For that to happen the thing it feeds on needs to be unattainable, because the pleasurable dimension of desire doesn’t come from fulfilment, it comes from the fantasy itself. Tony Soprano is desirable partly because what he signals – protection, stability, strength – are precisely the things he cannot give.
(Sidebar: If you fancy some extra-curricular activity watch ContraPoints’ three hour video essay about Twilight, which lowkey renders this entire series moot in one line: “I am begging people to learn to think psychologically instead of literally so that they're not constantly baffled and traumatised upon encountering the most common type of sexual fantasy that people have.”)
Tony Soprano can wear the shit out of a chain bracelet but he’s an annoying husband, a selfish lover, and, while not a wholly bad person, certainly couldn’t be described as a good one. In regards to his (biological) family, he is both fiercely possessive and painfully absent. He slings pipe around town while his marital sex life withers on the vine. He’s high risk high reward in that he provides for Carmella materially and without question, offering her a life of financial ease in exchange for overlooking almost every aspect of his.
Retrograde as that bargain is, it does carry an illicit appeal among younger generations for whom capitalist feminism has basically shaken out to mean ‘same domestic balance as before, only you work 50 hours a week also.’ In the current economy it would come as almost a relief to spend all day putting washes on for a guy who may well get assassinated having sex with a stripper, but nevertheless quietly handles things like contents insurance (shades of Kendall Roy, noted girlie, saying: “You know what my dad always said? He'd say he loved all his employees, but he particularly loved the guys who ate shit for him and he never even knew it.”) Relatedly, Tony is at his least attractive (but most relatable) when he’s incompetent, drifting aimlessly around the gaff and whinging about how there’s no gabagool in the fridge.
Emotionally, Tony takes care of Carmella basically never, but she clings to the hope that he can change on account of the flashes of tenderness he shows elsewhere. Mostly towards the family of ducks that have taken up residence in his backyard. Or in the aftermath of seduction, when he will hold a woman’s face in one of his big meaty hands and in that moment even the more self-possessed ones will look so small and breakable by comparison, like he could push his thumb right through her chin until it concaves like a mound of putty. Sometimes he will reach out and gently tuck a few strands of hair behind her ear, and that sort of thing is why we need astrology and Lana Del Rey.
It’s all desperately fleeting, but it’s just enough to suggest that the right woman could coax that tenderness out of him on a more permanent basis. He’s fucking miserable, clearly, because of the high pressure lifestyle he carries the burdens of alone. It is tempting, then, for his lovers to think: surely that could be assuaged by making room within his interiority for someone else. If I could just get him to open up a little bit… Unfortunately for them there’s only one woman who can compel him to do that, and that woman is his daughter.
(On that Reddit thread I mentioned earlier, one poster replied that almost all the women that get involved with Tony have “mental issues.” A valid point to consider, and one that I am in no position to argue against. A job for neuroscience, perhaps.)
4. Italian
He’s a four but his white vest reveals a thick carpet of chest hair behind a St. Anthony medal. Smash.