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Tony Soprano and Us: Are We Really So Different?
The mobster as mirror — darkened and intensified — of our own conflicted souls
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For fans of the epochal HBO series The Sopranos, the surface-level contrasts and ethical tensions demonstrated by mob boss Tony Soprano are part of what makes his character both magnetic and reprehensible.
You’d think that the revulsion would hold a greater sway over most people, preventing undue sympathy for this towering anti-hero of American fiction television. And yet… there’s something in Tony — something raw and extreme, yes, but also undeniably relatable and, in a strange way, honest — that keeps bringing us back to an enduring fascination with his moral paradoxes.
Why is that? Is it that, through Tony, we enjoy experiencing, vicariously, the strains, pressures, and balancing act of a man both powerful and “successful,” yet cornered by the rules, the infinite dangers, and the brutality of the life he has chosen to lead, and can never be allowed to leave?
Or is our fascination with this character down to the fact that Tony Soprano is a larger-than-life projection, seen through a dark and dank filter, of our own ethical inconsistencies and situational flexibility?
