My Son the Mobster
Dear Judith,
Let's get down to brass tacks--I wouldn't call what I gave you a
butt-kicking. That was no butt-kicking. I don't know--maybe at
Slate
that was a butt-kicking.
Second thing--what's wrong with "Little Herring" for a nickname? No way I'm
calling you "Da Man," on account of the fact that you're a woman (that was you
in that wedding dress a couple of months ago, right?).
"Little Herring" is a great nickname. It recalls the halcyon days of Jewish
gangsterdom. I know I'm on record (in
Slate
, in fact) condemning the gauzy,
romantic view of Jewish gangsters perpetrated by certain awful writers. But, to
be fair, Jewish gangsters had excellent nicknames--Kid Twist, Pittsburgh Phil,
Little Farvel, Abbaddaba. Better nicknames than the Italians ever had.
Look, you're my friend. Would you rather be "Big Herring"? Whatever makes
you feel good--there's an associate of the Gotti crew named Steven "the Jew"
Kaplan (no kidding). Would you like to be Judith "the Jew" Shulevitz? I'm sure
we could talk to Kaplan about letting you share the name.
Now let me tell you where you're wrong (oh, how I love writing those words):
I didn't say that mobsters aren't taking their cues from The Sopranos .
What I said was that no self-respecting mobster would want to be a member of
Tony Soprano's sad-sack crew. Until you produce for me an actual mobster who
says otherwise, I'll stand by this statement. (Anyway, news reports are simply
stating that real-life mobsters caught on tape are griping that the writers of
The Sopranos are stealing their life stories; in other words, they
accuse the writers of taking their cues from the mob, not vice versa.)
Now, about you and your Culturebox. Listen, TV criticism is fine. I have no
problem with TV criticism. Some of my best friends are TV critics. You even
employed me once as a TV critic (talk about a mistake on your part). All I'm
saying is, The Sopranos is being buried under a mudslide of
over-intellectualizing hype, and it's suffering for it.
Which takes me right to the point where I actually agree with you on
something:
The first episode of the new Sopranos is a real drag: flat, sour, and
ponderous. I almost fell asleep watching it. Tony just seems mean and crazy
(and a bit more bloated than usual, don't you think?). And Livia? Good God.
Evil, and not amusing at all. It was a terrible mistake to keep her alive for
the second season (apparently, some of the writers wanted to kill her off, but
everybody on the set loves Nancy Marchand so much they kept her alive and
bitching). Imagine how clean a break it would have been to open the second
season at Livia's funeral.
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The only thing I liked about the first episode is Steven Van Zandt as Silvio
Dante imitating Michael and Kay Corleone. Alright, Van Zandt is one of
my heroes, and I think his portrayal of a low-wattage Soprano soldier is a rip,
so I'm prejudiced, but there was a kind of joy in that one scene that is
missing from the rest of the episode.
Oh, by the way, I think you're giving short-shrift to Christopher, Tony's
nephew and a wannabe made-man. Yes, he's an asshole-junkie, but, in the capable
hands of Michael Imperioli, he is not only that: He is a cursing,
bitch-slapping metaphor for the entire decline of the mob. It's all there--his
terrible work ethic, his drug use, his obsession with the mob of the distant
past, the mafia of his fantasies (of course he's writing a screenplay, and of
course he can't spell). All that's missing is the steroids (out-of-control
steroid use by the mob's young guns is what's killing the mafia as much as
anything else). Christopher is precisely the sort of mobster who turns
government witness at the thought of real jail time.
I guess I'm answering the "What happens next?" question. The mafia is over
as we know it, or think we know it. It's losing its command-and-control
structure. There will always be localized Italian-American gangs, but a wide
network of criminals who have their hooks into organized labor and adhere to a
code of silence? That's pretty much over. You can blame Rudy Giuliani, The
Sopranos ' biggest fan, for that. Of course, writers like me are always
saying the mob is dead, and we're always too early. But the main problems the
mob faces are only getting worse. One is recruitment: The old neighborhoods are
breaking up, and it's the old neighborhoods that produced the mob farm teams.
Also, no self-respecting mobster wants his son to follow in his footsteps. I
hate to refer to my own work, but an article I wrote in the New York Times
Magazine last year focused on this very subject: John Gotti's fatal
flaw--as a mobster and as a father--was that he had his son follow him into the
business. No halfway-intelligent mobster had any respect for him after
that.
My prediction: Hollywood will be making mob movies long after the mob as we
know it is gone. And that's when Italian-Americans will really have something
to bitch about (by the way, where do you stand on the "The Sopranos
isn't good for Italians" question?).
OK, enough for now. Are we good? Or are you still lining up someone from
your crew to take a shot at me?
Jeff
