Thread by @zunguzungu

In my opinion, the Sopranos movie had lots of smart touches and moments and as a fan of the show, I enjoyed the fan service; I was well-served. However, so many of the things that made the Sopranos show work were glaringly absent, and the decision to Take On Race was a mistake.

The original show was so consistently clumsy about race that it feels like this writing choice was a penance of some kind, but after you've watched the movie, I challenge you to come up with what it's actually saying other than "also this stuff with Black people was happening?"

For me, the show was about dragging mafia mythology down to earth, about turning all of that cosa nostra mystique into the grotty compensatory fantasies of stupid lazy and vain men, and its core was the scene of psychoanalysis (even when Tony is in flight from self-knowledge)

It's a show about talking, about long scenes--and long seasons--in which we delve into the psyche of The American Masculine Ego and discover what's there (and what isn't) and what they invent and do to mask their deep, gaping, wounded insecurities

So it's not *necessarily* bad but it is very strange to turn to the late 60s and early 70s--the golden era when things were still great!--and make such an *outside* portrait of Tony, just a radically different narrative setting and mode from the thing that made the sopranos work.

The thing about the Sopranos is that it has a "high" and "low" side, that it has the dopamine-rush mafia gangster show aspect (where we root for our guy, Tony) AND it has the deconstruction of the gangster show thing (where we understand that Tony is a sociopath, as is America).

(high culture defenses of the show tend to emphasize the latter, but the former was easily as important and is sometimes dominant; there is a lot of straight-up gangster show in the sopranos, a show about how cool Tony is)

Anyway, for me, the show managed the tension between these two aspects through comedy, by drawing you into Tony's Ego-world and then puncturing it. The Sopranos is very funny. This was not funny, and wasn't trying to be.

The show does its critique of America's attraction to violence by giving you fun attractive violence; its characters are dumb and vain and ugly so it can show you how dumb and ugly and vain the American masculinity that you desire actually is

One of my favorite things about the Sopranos is that you could always tell, a little, that Chase was fucking with you, that he wanted to punish the viewer for enjoying it all too much. Has any beloved show ever slapped its fans in the face as hard as "Don't Stop Believing"?

It can't be overstated what a wildly different beast Many Saints is. It lacks humor because it lacks the critical distance Chase had from his Bush-era protagonists; everyone is young and strong and in place of neurotic compulsion and self-deception we have Dramatic Backdrops.

I liked the "orange sky" sequences--that sense of mysterious distance from The Thing that's happening--and I liked the way the beach scene was shot, it was beautiful. Neither had any business in The Sopranos.

But that's what we got: instead of exploring the interiority of reactionary middle-aged suburban American man, it was a show about "what if the sopranos, but mad men"

Instead of David Chase exercising (and exorcising) his own self-loathing and mystifications--as an American man roughly Tony's age, who had similar mother issues, etc--the movie gets lost in those very mystifications, in nostalgia, in fetishizing the past

The reason it ultimately fails, however, is that it's both NOT the Sopranos--in tone, in history, in execution, in spirit--and also has to keep constantly reminding you that this is A Sopranos Story

So it can't go off and be its own thing. Many Saints is, perversely, stuck with The Sopranos as *its* fetish object, its formative scene.

in summary:

But really, given what happens in The Climactic Whacking of A Major Character, and what is revealed thereafter, it is simply hard to overstate how strangely unrelated all of the race stuff turns out to have been from the rest of the movie's plot

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