Is Tony Soprano Evil?

Or is that really the question you're asking?

“I’m like King Midas in reverse. Everything I touch turns to shit.”

-Tony Soprano

The genius of the Dr. Melfi scenes in Sopranos was not that they “revealed the inner life” of a gangster. The genius was that we were able to see how the inner life of a gangster works in pretty much the same way as our own. While other shows and movies tend to showcase our inner life as one of imagination and raw potential, The Sopranos confronted us with an uncomfortable truth: most of our inner life is a just a PR firm that we contract to justify ourselves to…well, mostly to ourselves (and secondarily to others).

Go ahead and type “Was Tony Soprano Evil?” into YouTube search and see how many videos pop up. I understand this curiosity, but it always amuses me. Of course Tony Soprano was evil. If the show never existed and I merely provided you with a rap sheet of Tony’s actions and asked if this person is evil, there’s not a single one of you who would deny it. This is a man who regularly engaged in murder, deception, thievery, cruelty, intimidation, sadism, and ultra-violence. Why is it that there is even the slightest notion that he’s not evil?

It’s not just that he was “likable.” Plenty of cinema villains get the pass for being likable or charismatic. Many in the “gangster” genre also get a pass for being driven or committed, a product of an unjust system that requires lawlessness and viciousness to get what is owed (think Scarface posters littering dorm room walls). But there is something distinct about Tony Soprano that leads many viewers to not only attempt justification of his actions, but to openly wonder if the man is actually evil? Perhaps he was just wounded, confused, or deranged from an emotionally abusive and traumatic childhood.

Do you care? Do you actually care if someone had a traumatic childhood? Maybe you do, in theory. I doubt you would if you were the victim of this person. If someone breaks into your home and beats you and your spouse to an inch of death, do you think you’ll be very interested in their childhood? Or what about if they have a “mental disorder.” Do you care? Do you like to say that you care? Do you want to be a person who cares?

It doesn’t matter what sort of complexes your attacker has when you are victimized. They have violated you, robbed from you a sense of peace and safety. They have made your home feel unwelcome to you. They have made your sleep restless. To “care” about the childhood of that person is a theoretical indulgence. In truth, most humans want less to know about the victim’s past and more to know about their future. Mainly: will this person’s future include commensurate suffering, preferably to the degree they levied suffering upon you?

This is a very human thing to want, especially when you are victimized senselessly. When you are doing nothing more than idling at a red light and gun barrel is pointed at your temple and you are told to get out of your own car to surrender it to someone in a ski-mask, there is no sense in that. You didn’t do anything to deserve that (no matter how much society wants to thread together the narrative that you or someone who looks like you did something in the past that made you deserve it). The more senseless the violation, the more we desire justice. This is a human desire that thousands of years of civilization has scarcely mitigated. This is not to say we have made no progress - after all, we don’t cut hands off for stealing or honor trial-by-combat requests anymore - but the scales of justice are still based on finding a balance. Perhaps not an “eye for an eye” but at least “5 years of hard time per eye.”

“The Last Judgment” by John Martin (1853)

No one would actually think that real-life Tony Soprano was “a good guy.” No matter how much he loves geese and his daughter, no matter how much he grieves the death of Pie-O-My or Pomeranians crushed by his drug-addict nephew, it doesn’t excuse his behavior. I’m certain that at least a few serial killers were very good pet parents, and many others hid their atrocities behind the squeaky clean image of being a “family man.” And make no mistake, Tony might not be a “serial killer” in the sense of doing ritualistic murders in sequence, but he was at the very least a mass murderer.

A short-list of the people he killed:

• “Febby” Petrulio (the rat he finds in hiding while doing college visits with Meadow)

• Chucky Signore (associate of Junior who tried to plot his killing)

• Willie Overall (killed by Tony & Paulie in 1982, body discovered in 2007)

• Matthew Bevilaqua

• Salvator “Pussy” Bompensiero (his best friend)

• Tony Blundetto (his cousin)

• Ralph Cifaretto (his capo, a made-man)

• Christopher Moltisanti (his nephew/cousin/second cousin once removed?)

And the deaths he either ordered or was directly responsible for:

• Jimmy Altieri

• Mikey Palmice

• Philly Parisi (Patsy’s twin brother)

• Jackie Aprile, Jr.

• Barry Haydu

• Rene LeCours

• Phil Leotardo

Neither of these lists are complete, and there are many others deaths on the show you could make an argument of tracing back to Tony. But just with the names above, that’s 15 people dead, 8 of which killed by Tony’s own hand. So…is he evil? Gee, I don’t know. Guy killed more people than sharks do on an average year (though, oddly - looking at that chart - there were 4 shark attack deaths in 1916, all in New Jersey…hmm).

If killing were the only thing, perhaps we could create some framework that absolves him of this. Maybe we create a metaphor that compares “life in the mob” as being a sort of soldier, and as such killing other mob members represents a kind of “just warfare.” Tony himself made this excuse during a visit with Melfi, asserting that “soldiers don’t go to hell.” This rationalization, however, is flimsy. First of all, in this analogy, Tony wouldn’t be a soldier; he’d be something like a captain or even a general. He’s the boss of a crime family, so the idea that he is “just doing his job” is bullshit. Furthermore, we can plainly see throughout the series that Tony only follows a “code” when it suits him, and when it doesn’t - he writes his own code (Ralph Cifaretto’s murder comes to mind here).

As you look through each one of his killings, you could spin a justification based on the physics of the universe these people live in. But this approach pretends that these mobsters live in a vacuum. The idea that you “have to kill Pussy” for being an FBI informant seems unavoidable to Tony, and by extension it might seem that way to the viewer. But if we press pause on that thought for even a second, we can come up with a wild alternative…instead of killing his best friend for being a rat, what if instead he admitted to his crimes, stood trial, and went to jail? How bout that?

Does that seem ridiculous to you? Perhaps that makes you scoff, the idea that Tony would just walk into a police station with his wrists outstretched for cuffing. But I’ll tell you what - if I was presented a choice between killing my best friend or going to prison, you’d bet your ass I’d go to jail. It’s not even a question. And most of you would, too. In fact I think all of you would (excepting of course the 2-3 sociopaths who are fans of this substack, shoutout to you antisocial psychos and thank you for the support).

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But again, none of this new. We have been drawn into a criminal world before in movies and tv shows. We all liked Jamie Lannister even though he pushed a six-year old out of a window in the first season of Game of Thrones and paralyzed him. We all rooted for the Ocean’s Eleven crew to rob a casino because George Clooney loves Julia Roberts. We even confront the limits of our morality in the face of our mortality through Walter White’s journey in Breaking Bad. But none of these shows scratch the level of pathos that we see in Sopranos. The reason for that is because of the Dr. Melfi scenes.

On the surface, the Dr. Melfi scenes are something you’d want to avoid in script writing. After all, each appointment is a massive violation of the golden rule of “show don’t tell.” Nearly every meeting between Melfi and Tony is exposition, a re-telling of things that already happened or the experience of them. Worse than that, we often already saw the thing that Tony is describing, meaning that we have to live through the story again. This kind of writing is usually painstaking for a viewer, such as in the ending scene of Will Smith’s Netflix movie Bright. If you haven’t seen this movie, please do - it will help you to understand how Chris Rock felt after slapped in the face. This is especially so during the final scene which, after a grueling hour and a half of the stupidest movie imaginable, the main characters then recount - step by step - everything that happened. It’s the closest you can get to suffocation without dying.

The reason why it works in Sopranos, on the other hand, is that we begin to notice the schism between the reality as we objectively saw it (as viewers), and then the morphing of that reality by Tony. Because he has a complex transference with Melfi (she is part Carmella, part his mother, and part his goomah), he is more vulnerable with her than with others. Yet at just because he is vulnerable doesn’t mean he is honest. Throughout the series, we become more and more aware of just how much Tony is lying. At first we chalk this up to him being vague on account of needing to thinly-veil his mafia connection. Then we think he is lying for Melfi - either to sleep with her or to frustrate her. Eventually we realize the truth: Tony is just lying to himself. Moreover, he is perfecting the lies he tells himself with an audience who is paid to give him unconditional positive regard (Melfi).

I argue that this is the reason we want to know if Tony is evil. Not because we know about his childhood, not because we can see how trapped he feels, not because we can see he is depressed and stricken with panic disorder. No - there are many examples of evil characters who have relatable flaws. What makes Tony different is that he is the only character who gives us access to his internal bullshit. And guess what? His bullshit sounds a lot like your bullshit, doesn’t it?

You see, whether the viewer admits it or not, the reason we relate to Tony is not on account of his redeeming qualities. Nor is it from a place of altruism in which we pity his perverse morality that has grown out of his unique circumstances. We might claim this is true, but you and I both know it’s not. We relate to Tony because he is running the same scam as the rest of us. No matter how far-fetched, laughable, embarrassing, or pathetic we find his attempts to “cover his tracks” and justify his evil actions, there is at least some part of us that locates the same internal treachery within ourselves.

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The nature of my work is such that I have had many opportunities to see the unbridled shadow within others. At times it was horrifying, bordering on traumatizing. Other times it was strangely humbling. Especially in those cases in which I could see the source of pain from which this dysfunction springs from, or when witnessing the innocence of someone’s buried shame. Sometimes I have given council to those whose greatest secret is something that doesn’t even scratch the surface of the shit that I’ve been in. And yet, it feels as debilitating as having blood on your hands.

In my work I have also come to know this: being a good person isn’t about how bloody you are. Life is a messy brawl, and you’re gonna get blood splattered on you one way or another. Being a good person isn’t about how well you can clean the blood off you, either. Some of the worst people alive are the best at this. Being a good person is being able to admit that - in our own way - each of us bleed and each of us draw blood.

The meetings with Melfi create a somatic nearness with Tony. Though he is far from a classic “everyman,” he is perhaps more relatable than any other fictional TV character simply because we know so much about him. We not only spend hours and hours watching him, we also have access to his own thoughts about his life. This is a type of access that we only dream about - even for ourselves. We want to know if Tony is evil because we want to know if we are evil. Let me save you the time - you are.

You are also not. I have come to understand that most of my misery I have conjured for myself throughout my life is because I see the world as “good people” and “bad people.” And because I am my own Tony Soprano - and my own Melfi - I am the only person who knows all the wickedness I have done. With only bits and glimpses of everyone else, I usually lose the trials of comparisons with others. I almost always declare myself guilty, or at least guiltier.

But the truth is that we identify with Tony because he has the same playbook as us. His moral failings are almost completely rooted in his inability to be honest with himself about himself and others. And we relate to this because being honest with yourself, despite being such a clear and golden path, is probably the hardest thing of all. So many answers to my pain have revealed themselves to be “right in front of me” the whole time. And yet I could not see these answers, I could not unlock them because the key was honesty.

Opening that door is frightening. We are worried about what our shadow looks like. At this point in our lives, our shadow has become a myth; a monster we hide in the basement. So gruesome and horrible, that even casting our eyes upon - or thinking about casting our eyes upon it - is pain. Yet it is this action through which we are liberated from the pain. We all know this. And yet we all create every excuse imaginable to avoid it.

The first step to opening the door is understanding that you are not uniquely awful. Perhaps you think it helpful to look at Tony Soprano, or Walter White, or Saul Goodman, or Gaius Baltar and think “I am at least not that…I am not evil like them.” But doing so only saves you for the moment. Superiority is a short-lived high, wait five minutes and you’ll fall to the bottom of the self-esteem-totem once more. Like many are finding out in this world of finger-pointing we now live in, finding evil in everyone else won’t rid the evil from yourself.

Is Tony Soprano evil? Yes. Do you still care about him? Yes.

Are you evil?

Do people still care about you?

Do you care about you?