156. "Not in the face okay? Huh? Keep my eyes?"

JAYSON BUFORD and I discuss the Sopranos season 2 finale, "Funhouse."

I grew up five minutes from the Bada Bing, also known as Satin Dolls, a Lodi, New Jersey strip club with the divorce attorney billboard on its roof.

LEAPT out of my car to take this photo in 2013. They left this marquee up for a really long time.

The Sopranos loomed large in my preteendom. I wasn’t allowed to watch it. My mom and dad would watch in bed with the door closed on Sunday nights. It was a big deal when the cast filmed a scene at the Party Box we kids went to to buy Scream masks filled with red dye 4 blood, communion favors, white chocolate melts, and blow-up saxophones.

It was a big deal when Jim Gandolfini, filming a scene at a Jersey City cemetery, sauntered over to the firehouse across the way and took a photo with my dad. (May Jim, a thank you for your service kind of guy. rest.) (Yes, I keep asking my dad where he put this photo, yes I will update this post with it when I get a good scan.) Everybody knew somebody whose uncle was an extra in a boardwalk scene, everybody had met Joey Pants (without that fuckass Leo DiCaprio wig) once or twice.

I finally watched the show through in 2021. I, like any other American, hell probably any other Indonesian, Estonian, Moldovan, Argentinian, or…Francian was riveted by these explosive, abditive, funny, bruised characters, their pinky rings, their goumads, their horse paintings.

Via Instagram, 2021. My daughter LOVES mob shit. Do you see that smile? She will sit with me for all three hours of Goodfellas.

When I met the scribe of the essential sports and music column

Jayson Buford's LOTS OF COMMAS

he rolled up his sleeve to show me his Christophah Moltisanti tattoo after we went to see Gladiator II and I knew I had to discuss the New Jersey saga with him. You can read our first writeup, one of my favorite posts EVER on this blog, here:

After attending an April screening of Not Fade Away with a Q+A featuring its writer-director and Sopranos creator David Chase, Steven Van Zandt (Mr. Paul Walnuts and Bruce Springsteen’s bestie) and moderated by Alessandro Nivola (Dickie Moltisanti in The Many Saints of Newark and - unrelated but fun - the father of Sam Nivola, also known as Lochy of the smoothie suicide on this season of White Lotus) we sat down to watch the episode during our Easter weekends and pulled up a seat in front of Satriale’s (aka opened up a Google Doc) to discuss an episode I thought would be of special interest to us both, season two, episode 13 “Funhouse,” co-written by David Chase and co-producer Todd A. Kessler, and directed by John Patterson, airing April 9, 2000.

TG: You know, I was always a Big Pussy apologist. He had to do it! He had to protect his family! They had him on slinging H! I thought I was a bad Italian for this. But I was adamant. He is, still, my little avatar on the Max Roku app. Watching this episode again…I hate to say it but he might have earned his nickname. What was your original take on the character (and his fate), and what did you glean during this rewatch?

May have to change this.

JB: Hello Tara. Look, this is my favorite Sopranos episode; there’s something so raw about how it re-packages the dreams that you have when you’re sleeping, turning into a mystery about someone that your brain has been telling you not to trust. If The Sopranos is Twin Peaks meets The Godfather, then this episode is the perfect example of that dichotomy.

TG: Yes, yes, hi SORRY lmao I was excited to get into it!! Also I had no idea that this was your favorite. That makes me feel like we are truly meant to be friends. I picked this one because both Italian (my, though honorary for you as far as I’m concerned because you’re my people) and Black (your) cultures are cultures of omerta - not being a fucking rat. Other cultures are stoic. Your Germans, your Vicodined southern WASPs. But the idea of not ratting goes far beyond not airing out dirty underthings. Being a tattler isn’t simply annoying - it’s a mortal sin. Can you say a little about Blackness and omerta, and how Big Pussy Bonpensiero (spelled that without Googling thank you ever so much!) (played by Vincent Pastore) would be perhaps looked at for his crime…or crime-evasion through that lens?

JB: Italians have always been known as the Negroes of Europe; they first moved to America and plenty of wasp’s would call them “white niggers.” They are just ethnic white people, obviously, as anti-Blackness is consistently shown on The Sopranos, but I have always thought that the Italians and Italian-American culture is a shining example of the American experiment in the way that hip-hop is for the Black community. So, there is a reason why Jadakiss (“Gangsters don’t die, they get chubby, and move to Miami”), Jay-Z (“The theme song to the Sopranos, plays in the key of life on my mental piano”), Freddie Gibbs (“Head of the family like John Sacramoni”), and gangster/street rappers like that have shouted out the Sopranos or mob culture in their rhymes. So, Pussy being a snitch is something that is huge with Black people as well. We love the Sopranos for its humor, for its rich layers, and its call to mob culture and hip-hop.(Season 1’s “A Hit is a Hit” episode is underrated). Just like Italians, black gangs have no snitching policy. You see it in The Wire. Now, the RICO act has only just now begun to infiltrate the Black community. I wonder, sometimes, if the omerta that Charlie Luciano created is of the same importance on the streets; Black drug dealers often like to flaunt their success, where Luciano claimed that he wanted the mob to be something that you never admit the existence of. Gotti moved through the world like he was the boss and everyone knew it. Pussy, is a snitch, like the rest of them; but I wonder if his snitching would be more forgiven on a Black show.

TG: I for the first time just realized that your like goomba Italian and 2000’s Black rap culture share a wardrobe, holy shit - gold chain, tank top, track suit, and at least for the uncles a sockless loafer. My god. A poignant parallel, whether a single man of these closet staples would agree or not. Now! Did you ever think they would let Big Pussy dive off that boat? Some part of me hoped on first watch that they would let him swim down to his “acupuncturist in Puerto Rico.” Disappear him through threat, not the Glock.

JB: No. He needed to go. For one, it is a great scene. For two, snitching is not palpable in the mafia. Tony and the gang admit to themselves that Pussy is a rat, but they also tell him how much they appreciated him all these years, and how he is a brother to them. It’s a pretty unbelievable scene; it continues in the season three Christmas episode, where they are still clearly not over having to kill their best friend. The world doesn’t run on love, but they loved Pussy and when they forced to kill, it makes it all the more heartbreaking.

TG: Looking at the episode a second time (yes, I have only watched the show through once) I think he had to just do his time in the slammer. He doesn’t have 17 kids. His wife could get a little job at the local Board of Education. Downgrade to a Civic. Stop buying Coach bags. I have to believe Tony would look after Puss’s family, too, and then Pussy would be a hero, given a watch and a “Whaddya hear, whaddya say?” as he steps back into the (again, I know my people, sockless) loafers of a free man. And he would be alive. I think Tony killed him less for being a rat, which earns the bullet to these men, but more for his hubris that he could get up the skirts of the federal government raw. His hubristic belief that he could treat the government like his mistress, throwing false “I love yous” her way, and the mob the wife he will never leave her for. Do you think that’s the case, or do you think it’s simply a dose of rat poison?

JB: A little bit of both. Tony knows that when someone is flipped, they have them back on the street right away. Plus, the detective in the first season said Pussy was wired for sound. They just so happened to flip Jimmy as well, so they end up killing Jimmy and forgetting about Puss. But, Puss was dead as soon as Sil, Tony, and Paulie showed up at his home.

TG: How does a Black Sopranos fan reconcile the anti-Blackness that you mentioned? It is rife on the show and ignored so, so often - I have a Black friend who immediately stopped watching once he clocked the trend and sideeyed the folks around him for loving the show but more importantly lionizing these characters. I didn’t blame him. Of all of the crimes these characters commit, of all the moral rust they accrue, that one to me makes it the hardest to be cutesy in the average leftist, “antiracist” fan’s memeified love for just about any of the main cast, and makes Meadow the MOST likable character which…nah lmao

JB: The Jamal Ginsberg joke, and Tony’s other verbal barrages against that kid work because the kid is such an insufferable biracial who thinks he is better than everyone. How many Black people do you think that kid knows? David Chase is a perfect artist because he both knows that Tony is a racist freak and that kid is a loser; it allows for the viewers to laugh at the extremities and use it as a comment on the racist ways of Italian-American life. I don’t reconcile at all; they are a ton of Sopranos fans who are Black. Black people have great taste — most of us — and The Sopranos is a show with a rich text, and inner turmoil that Black people can understand. And, it is partly a show about the American empire, and the fixation that Americans have with themselves, about their unhappiness. Although this is angst that Black people have never quite had, we can still understand Tony’s angst in relation to our issues with this country. I also like Tony’s relationship with the reverend from season two and three.

TG: There’s an unfortunate reality of Italians migrating over here, being discriminated against, treated as nonwhites (to the point that the Italian word medigan aka Americano means a white non-Italian, because not that long ago Italians were not of the socioeconomic rung of the Smiths and the Clarks) and then once they assimilated just enough (less than other cultures given our bathtub Marys on the lawn and enduring production of zeppoles) yanked the ladder up with them. This show about the mob and its ruthlessness easily reconciles these entirely selfish, supremacist views: the mafia is above the law, the whites “are above” the not. I wonder how many Italian-American fans fail to connect the commentary on these characters to their own culture. Sadly a lot of my people watching this in 2002 a town or two over from where I grew up likely thought “gangsters, they’re just like us”! This is why I unfortunately didn’t have to Google a single one of the slurs levied during my full watch of the show. I grew up hearing them. Remind me to tell you about the time Jimmy Gandolfini’s nephew asked me on a date next time I see you out. 👀

TG: I want to peek into the dreams. The Sopranos will occasionally inject a bit of the hoke - Livia Soprano’s final scene (which speaking of David Lynch’s oeuvre before…my god that CGI looks like the thumb paralysis demon from Inland Empire…), Uncle Jun’s running around that asylum with the dude from Lost, even fucking Robert Patrick showing up and totally removing me from the show because that’s the villain in the Charlie’s Angels sequel, that’s T-2000¹ or whatever, but for you the dreams are not that. They’re successfully unsettling, and a freshly-Windexed window into Tony’s brain. Why did this episode structure work for you? Are there any dream vignettes that didn’t work? I personally think it’s obvious that Tony wants to fuck Melfi and feels that he could have her, and that sequence was only added for the (merited) laugh of Tony’s face gritted into a smile as he dreams.

JB: I always think Melfi gets a bit of a raw deal from Tony in this show, when it comes to sexualizing her², although I respect how great the chess match between them is in the actual therapy session that you see towards the end of the episode. The structure that truly works is it being Meadow’s graduation day that weekend that he gets arrested and kills Pussy. Tony as a mob boss intersecting in his life as a father is compelling; one thing informs the other. As the Soprano family is having their big celebration — with all the mobsters in tow, cheering each other with their gold watches and bracelets — an entire community in New Jersey is crime infested, people are shooting heroin in the lobbies of hotels, and garbage is being dumped on the street. Every day, bad things happen because Tony and his crew will bring a certain meanness into the world.

TG: And Christopher is graduated in the episode as well, with Tony telling him that he’s putting in word for Chrissy to get his button. This might be the beginning of the end for our boy, and so by the end of this season finale Tony has set Pussy’s murder and the murder of his nephew into motion. Jayson, you have taught me so much about rap and hip-hop: our first conversation was through Instagram when you sent me a ton of underappreciated Jay Z tracks and I’ve learned a lot about Drake and Future from you as well. Assign rappers to some of the Sopranos characters. Who is the Tony Soprano of rap. Who is the Artie Bucco. Who is the Dr. Melfi.

JB: Tony is very rock and roll coded, and he is giving a little bit of a Springsteen vibe sometimes, in his distrust of American power structure. Artie Bucco is Eminem, maybe? Everyone always makes fun of him, but he’s still one of us? Melfi is Jay-Z: someone who thinks they can make hip-hop into this neoliberal and corporate entity, but is mistaken.

TG: And AJ is a rapper himself. “So what, no fuckin’ ziti?” is a bar. Jayson, Thank you as always for being a mensch and a half. When I drive you to see the Bada Bing, I’m buying you a lap dance.

(a photo of Jayson and I basically)

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1. It’s T-1000. I haven’t seen those fucking movies yet, relax.

2. Tara’s note: the episode in which she is violentally assaulted is like FIVE before this too!!!