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July 21, 2005
Thanks to Homescreen I'm watching the first season of the Sopranos Season 1 on DVD, instead of the repeats on free-to-air television, or the one dimensional Law & Order, NYPD and CSI.
I'm impressed. This is classy, wellcrafted, work. I'd given up on the gangster genre after Martin Scorsese's 1990 excellent Goodfella's. I struggled to watch the third part of Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather(1990). I've missed the British versions of the genre.
I love the sharp, witty dialogue; a suburban mob boss seeing a pychiatrist due to anxiety attacks; the mob boss is on Prozac whilst the daughter is on ecstasy; the darkness of the dysfunctional suburban family; the chaotic, violent incompetence of the New Jersey mob running their "waste management" business and nightclub; the continual visual and verbal references to the Godfather; the sense of dislocation within 1990s Italian culture and everyday life; the way time is slipping away; their own impending obscurity as their form of life fades away; and the music. The overall sense is one their suburban world coming to a tragic end. Things just don't look good.
The postmodern show is so accessible that it undercuts the need for the literary/film institution, with its high cultural (Leavisite?) assumptions, to filter, order, shape and interpret the work for us by those with highly valued cultural capital to act as academic critics.
What I find interesting is the form. It transgresses the linearity of most TV dramas to give us a complexity of action moving forward in odd lurches without explanation. Things just happen. This refusal to signpost why x happens is what gives rise to a sense of dread.
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thanks for using HomeScreen!
- alan
(from homescreen)