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gin-and-luce · 4 years

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You killed our dog! Adriana of The Sopranos gave me strength to navigate life after a breakup during a global pandemic lockdown

I’m going through a breakup. It’s come at the worst time but also the best time. He ended things with me (more on that later) after three years in the most Beta-Male way...but this is what happens when your type can be boiled down to softboi. I can’t see my friends in the conventional way, so I made some new ones on screen to help me navigate the end during quarantine.

Over ten weeks ago I started watching The Sopranos. It doesn’t need justifying, everyone knows it’s the best television series of all time, but I’d never seen it, and I knew a global pandemic induced lockdown would provide optimum viewing circumstances. My favourite thing to do is completely throw myself into the female narrative and experience I’m watching on screen. I prefer a long deep drama over a film. I like being able to see my girls every night.

People have said to me before “you should start a blog”, but I could never escape the feeling that doing so is massively narcissistic because it *is*, unless you have something actually relevant to write about. Alternatively, the image of Gretchen Weiners leaning in and going “you let it out honey, put it in the book” floats across my conscience, and everything embarrassing that I’ve ever done, plays in a montage in my mind.

Who gives a fuck what I have to say about anything…….. especially about a cultural phenomena that is quite literally regarded as the best TV show of all time?

I’d been wanting to write this after I watched Long Term Parking. I lay in the dark for 45 minutes after the episode ended. I’d never felt like that watching a television show or film before. My throat had seized up but I didn’t cry, even though I felt like it. I knew it was coming from the moment Adriana met the agent. I wasn’t surprised, but I was heartbroken and absolutely fuming. I still am.

I’m not angry with Christopher, Tony, or Silvio, but just the general unbalance I’ve felt when I’m in a relationship. The loss of self, relationships being a series of compromises. From what I have found from my own experiences and my girlfriends’, women are just much more willing to compromise, but don’t consider it to be a compromise. Men can only take into consideration their own reality, an evolutionary selfishness that just doesn’t translate.

Just as lockdown began I texted my boyfriend to say I loved him and I missed him. He responded with “Can’t say I feel the same”. Nearly 3 years were over just like that. We had the obligatory phone call, where I was hysterical and he was smarmy and smug. Yet when it was over, I felt nothing. It’s allllll a big nothing.

My personal Gospel is Sex and The City (shout out to HBO!). This was my Berger moment. He essentially scribbled “I’m sorry, I can’t. Don’t hate me” on a post-it. The irony of the whole thing is that when we watched it together, he himself said he was most like Berger. Thinking about it makes me wince.

My life opened up in front of me, I was exposed to his weakness regarding the situation in full when his sister-in-law messaged me on Instagram a few days ago. He hadn’t told his family, nor had he told his flatmates (another shout out to my sleuths at the back, you know who you are!).

The Sopranos is a show about life. The Mafia structure provides a vehicle for us to question morality and mortality. You take what you get from it. When I watch it again at a different stage of my life, I will get something else out of it.

For me now, while I stew in my own emotion during quarantine, Adriana represents emotional labour and the expectation for women to behave in a certain way in relationships.

At first when my ex’s family members were messaging me, I was confused. It is frankly humiliating to smile as if everything is normal, so as to protect someone that in the end would not do the same for me. I know he wouldn’t do the same because there was just no courtesy in what happened weeks ago. I am trying to move on but things like this stunt your personal growth.

The struggle with emotional labour hones a guilt that someday I’ll regret giving my early 20s to something that didn’t work out. I felt like I was on borrowed time.

These are obviously my own insecurities spurred on by the fact that I’ve read enough “10 things I wish I knew in my 20s” blogs to know that these are my selfish years. Still, it is ultimately devastating to see the last 3 years of your life conclude via a text that displays a failure to realise that there is no real clean cut for a long-term relationship.

I respect him for the blunt statement because it means I get to reference the Berger SATC breakup and say “casually cruel in the name of being honest” (Taylor Swift, 2012) a LOT, which softens the pity in the social scenarios that I invent in my head in the shower.

When Tony calls Adriana to tell her Christopher has tried to kill himself, that was like my final phone call too. This is the end. Her youthfulness was why I related to her most in the show, but at the same time having nothing to lose made her easily expendable. Youth makes you put 100% into something knowing it is a gamble.

I’m not comparing my ‘borrowed time’ to Adriana because she ends up dead, but there was a disregard for her life that was so harrowing because she did nothing but try and do the right thing. I watched Adriana put Christopher first willingly for 5 series. He supported her music management dreams but ultimately ended up making it all about him. He gave her the Crazy Horse but this ultimately was just another mob hangout. He sat on her dog, he continued to use heroin, shag other people, and so on.

“You could start writing again,” she tells him in her last episode, to which he responds “I could do my memoirs, finally,”. Here is Adriana still!! STILL!! catering to Christopher’s ego to give herself some confidence. Very me.

All the way through she was just too good for him. Her ties to the Famiglia aren’t as tight as Carmela and Co. No children, still young, there’s chance for Adriana to get out if she wanted to. Of course this makes her prime FBl bait, but shows she sticks by Christopher through everything purely out of love. In the end she dies on her knees, subservient, with Heart’s Barracuda the last song she hears. I know Adriana had to go. That’s the way it is in the Famiglia because Christopher took an oath. But in a way she also had the carpet ripped from underneath her, just like me.

There are lots of men writing on the internet about how Adriana is greedy and hypocritical. I just don’t understand where this reading is coming from other than obvious misogyny. I’ve read others that say if she was really that strong she would have simply left the relationship years ago. I believe that she believed things would improve for both of them, and that most people are just slut shaming her for her past.

Still, Drea DeMatteo won a Best Supporting Actress Emmy for the episode. Fuckin’ A.

I rooted for the woman. Before I was made redundant while working from home, I would spend half my life at my desk willing it to be 5:30pm, so I could slither back to the settee and spend the other half of my life in New Jersey. I’d phone my mum to discuss the episodes. She loves the show too, it’s always been a favourite in my household. We’d talk about the women like they were our friends and how we relate to them. The Sopranos is like a big mirror urging you to question everything. The answer to life is simply what are ya gonna do?

Men love making things black and white so it is easier for them, when really women are in the background sorting out the shades of grey.

Don’t get me wrong, Adriana’s significance is massive, albeit more so because of her death. You watch Christopher and Tony’s relationship start to crumble afterwards. It's shattering to see the disregard for Christopher’s sobriety and how despite his loyalty, he still sees him as a liability and weak.

On the other hand, for Adriana’s sake, I am still enraged that he couldn’t see the bigger picture at the time. She is collateral damage in his path to finding his precious arc - “Wives, girlfriends, they can complicate life in a major way” Tony expresses to Jennifer as he runs from his own guilt.

Christopher is desperate for Tony’s approval but is more than happy to use his blood connection as a protective leeway whenever he steps out of line. Again the irony is that he comes to tell Tony about Adriana first, just as the old Famiglia values say he should, but there is no real personal reward for doing so despite the personal sacrifice.

I think Christopher regretted it in the end, and rightly so. When he is faced with his potential alternate life at the gas station, we assume that this was what made him go to Tony. It’s a family with loads of kids. Adriana probably can’t even have kids??? What kind of male logic?! #justiceforadriana

I can’t help but feel for him when JT screams “Chris, you’re in the MAFIA!”. It’s the same kind of reality check that Chief Cubitoso gives Adriana, it’s an ultimatum and it’s the realisation that they are trapped in this life. Just ask Gene.

Carmela knew. I read her dreams as a testament to a woman’s intuition. She knows her friend isn’t what everyone is describing, she knows Adriana wouldn’t just disappear. She is all too aware of the emotional labour Mob women carry. When she sees Adriana with Cosette on the banks of the Seine, it is as sad as it is when we dream about people who have died.

There is a scene in an early episode where Carmela says “Don’t we all?” in response to Meadow squealing “She’s MARRYING a BABY?” at a painting of The Marriage of Saint Catherine. I thought about this again when Christopher dies. Carmela passes her instinct off as hysteria, she isn’t to know. “So quick to blame, what is the attraction in that?” she cries during the aftermath of the car crash. There is a critique in her own femininity here that just makes you want to shout “NO CARM!!!!!!!”. As she believes she mothers Tony, there is the double-edged sword whereby he protects her through keeping her in the dark. “Heaven only ever sees my love making a fool of me” sings Emmylou Harris at the start of season 5. Carm’s power is taken away but she doesn’t even know.

Carmela dedicates her life to being a mother but it’s not enough to save Meadow from her surname. We get some sense that AJ ‘Break Stuff by Limp Bizkit’ Soprano might be on a new path when he feels like the burning of his car among the autumn leaves of death was cathartic. As a man, he just has more freedom anyway.

Miss Meadow gained her independence by getting her driving license, but in the end we see that she is still held back in the final scene by her inability to parallel park. She slots right in, eventually. As she does, she slots into the Soprano cycle after years of doing the most to get out and pave her own way. After every breakup with someone without links to the Famiglia, no scrubs, she returns and dates someone closer to home. Her career path is left tenuous to us, it would be all too easy for her to become a kept woman, which feels like it is the only real option should she settle down into the lifestyle with Patrick Parisi. It isn’t what she envisioned for herself, so part of me wants to hope that her story ends up a little bit more like Elle Woods. Legally Italian.

I probably wouldn’t even have remembered her saying anything about parallel parking if I wasn’t terrible at parallel parking myself. It’s the pepperings of these subtle callbacks that make the show so beautiful. As the guitar solo plays on during the frustration, you’re invited to reminisce over Meadow’s journey. I fully wept watching her struggle to get the damn car parked because I’m trying to get my car parked too. Don’t stop believing, Meadow.

I admire all the women in The Sopranos. The show is feminist, and that is a hill I am prepared to die on. It’s definitely up for debate as it is obviously littered with gratuitous nudity and women are commoditised. We have to allow this for cultural context for the show, but real life is basically exactly the same too?

I read a post on Reddit where a dude is asking whether he should watch the show with his girlfriend. He types ‘“It’s a masterpiece of film but she probably wouldn’t get into it as I am”, and you don’t have to look much further to find more comments about how women and their puny minds just won’t get it. It’s an odd perspective to take given that Tony’s psychiatrist is a woman, but of course women could never grasp something so complex. It’s bullshit if you ask me, the female narrative prevails throughout all scenarios.

The Pine Barrens seems to be everyone’s favourite episode. It’s not my favourite but there are two major elements that resonated with me. The first is Meadow looking down at the three letter words Jackie Aprile Jr had placed on the Scrabble board, and the second is when Gloria says to Tony:

“What you said was that you didn’t wanna piss me off..which implies that you’d have to deal with me, which is more about sparing YOU than my fucking feelings”. Don’t need to elaborate on that. Rest in power, Gloria. Legend.

Of course I could write pages and pages of hot feminist takes on all of the women - Jennifer, Janice, Livia, Angie, Svetlana, Charmaine. Lord knows I could probably write a book on Tracee.“ 20 years old, this girl”, I bashed Living on a Thin Line by The Kinks for about a week after that episode. It is the male gaze of the show made me love the women more. Carmela is my mother and I’ll probably name my first born Meadow.

Carmela is the powerhouse and backbone of The Soprano household even though Tony provides. She represents stability, emotional labour, and putting on a brave face regardless. In some ways, it is as if Carmela represents the human emotion side and the fragility of organised crime. She is secure, but not enough, and her lack of ability to stand on her own two feet plagues her conscience through time. She is totally complicit, but must be to ensure her future with Tony as he pays anything to roll the dice just one more time. At the end of Long Term Parking, she and Tony stand looking at where she will build her spec-house. The forest looks the same as where we lost Ade, it’s a grim reflection that Carmela wouldn’t have this life if it wasn’t for the quick disposal of those like Adriana.

Yeah okay, what the hell is a show with a feminist underpinning trying to say about wider society about a woman who exercises her beauty, loyalty and ambition?? Is it that she is not to be trusted?? Adriana’s a rat, but before this she is already deemed “damaged goods” anyway. She dresses provocatively, but that’s because she just looks MINT always. You would dress like THAT if you looked like THAT. When you Google her, ‘Adriana Sopranos Tennis’ comes up. I roll my eyes. Fucking men, eh? To take it down to a basic Sixth-Form-Poet reading, Adriana is Curley’s Wife and Daisy Buchanan all in one. She loves a red manicure too, and it might have worked out better for her if she had played the complicit beautiful little fool.

This isn’t ‘Why The Sopranos is good!’, but a love letter to Adriana and her strength, because there is basically little or no content written on the women of the show when I have Googled. I needed there to be more things written about her that isn’t just “bitch had it coming” when in fact she is a martyr.

When Adriana was on screen, there was my mate. I knew her, she wanted what I wanted, but she sacrificed so much of herself for others and it was heartbreaking to watch. She barely gets a look-in in early episodes, but when she does she is usually wearing something animal print, which automatically made her the number one character on my radar. I am choosing to believe the theory that she is the cat in the final episode too.

Still, I have been struggling and questioning why an episode that aired 16 years ago, with no plot that links to my own circumstances, has had such a monumental impact on me.

I saw a tweet that said “have we ever sat down and thought about why relationships only work if the guy is more invested than the girl or is that just something we accept” (@anugov1). Adriana invested more in Christopher, even in the end, than she ever did herself.

As I navigate this transitional period in my life, I am Adriana driving in the vision we see when we think she is going to start her new chapter. We can’t leave the flat, I have no job. The Sopranos has provided the most cathartic escapism for me. As I enter into whatever new world follows this nightmare, I wanted my mate Adriana to find her new world too, turning the classic rock up to 11.

#the sopranos #adriana la cerva #christopher moltisanti #carmela soprano #feminism #cosette #breakup #woe is me #hbo #david chase #drea de matteo

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