Alex Massie continues the Knocked Up-and-abortion discussion. Russell Arben Fox rounds up the Rorty conversation, and pitches in with his two (okay, more like fifty) cents. And Emily Nussbaum has a great essay on the narrative arc of The Sopranos, and how David Chase related to his audience. Here's an excerpt:
... the moment that really wrenched the show off its axis was a brief, almost throwaway scene in the third season, in an episode titled “Second Opinion.” I remember the first time I watched it, the way it seemed to invert everything that came before. Carmela goes to a psychiatrist we’ve never met before, a Dr. Krakower. She is eager to make the session a referendum on personal growth: She wants to “define my boundaries more clearly”—from her perspective, the issue is that she’s unhappily married. She’s toying with divorce.
But Krakower cuts her off. With riveting bluntness, he addresses Carmela not as a seeker but as a sinner. She is not Tony’s wife, he informs her; she’s his accomplice. She needs to leave now, reject Tony’s “blood money,” and save her children (“or what’s left of them”). And he adds a remark that might serve as a punch line for the series: “One thing you can never say, that you haven’t been told.”
Read the whole thing.
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I have a problem with gangster movies/shows, too, in that, for some reason, I just don't like murderers and don't want to pay experts to try to manipulate me into emotionally identify with murderers.
I prefer cowboy movies -- they may behave in similar fashion, but at least the heroes do it because they are living in a Hobbesian state of anarchy on the frontier beyond the reach of the law, which is not true, last I checked, of New Jersey.
Posted by Steve Sailer | June 16, 2007 8:53 PM