How Dare a Dumb Thug Appreciate Tony Soprano?
by Miles Klee
Part of me hates to do this amid The Horrors™, but, to quote an unfortunately brilliant email subject line from Trump’s comms team, there is “another disgrace I have to tell you about.” It involves the long-overdissected show The Sopranos, which ended in 2007, and which I have written about far too often due to my upbringing in the vicinity of the shots from the opening credits and a sincere pride in Northern New Jersey for producing this masterpiece of familial angst. Before I get to the scandal, though, a little context is in order.
When the finale of The Sopranos aired, social media was still a novelty, understood mostly as a place where real people blithely represented themselves as, well, themselves. Real names and faces abounded on Facebook and YouTube, while MySpace, a platform very much built for individual users to showcase their unique personalities, was then the largest social networking site in existence. This moment was also something of an inflection point. The launch of Tumblr that year heralded an age of pseudonymous and anonymous web accounts, many of them centered on narrow genres and subcultures. Along with the nascent Twitter, it helped to give rise to what we now call the Stan Wars.
Online grudge matches between obsessive factions of round-the-clock posters eager to argue endlessly over, say, the most alluring male romantic interest in the Twilight franchise, would set the template for the virtual beefs among rival rap and K-pop cliques we still see today. And as people slowly learned hard and painful lessons about internet privacy, they also began to conceal details of their actual lives, choosing instead to stay within the safely anonymous confines of identification with mass-media products and celebrities. This is why you can follow popular X/Twitter users who exclusively share photos of, and praise for, the actress Florence Pugh, or updates on Marvel Studios productions—but there is also a thriving trade in nostalgically repackaged old content, such as clips from nu-metal music videos produced around the turn of the millennium, or scenes from The Sopranos.
The HBO mafia drama has been a gold mine for a handful of content recyclers who figured out that the greatest show ever made has fans who never really left that world, and who rewatch favorite episodes as comfort food (the TV equivalent of a tray of baked ziti). Some cleverly remix Sopranos moments to address current events and invent dialogue for its characters about our present moment; others share trivia and set photos; a few especially enterprising fellows were able to turn this digital ecosystem into a real-life 2019 event, SopranosCon, with actors from the original cast signing autographs and giving panel interviews.
One guy, meanwhile, has an X/Twitter feed that automatically posts every frame of the show in order, one image every fifteen minutes. I followed this account for a period of time, and the guy who ran it followed me. It is, I suppose, a rather lazy way to accrue nearly 30,000 followers for your paid blue-check account, along with whatever Muskbucks that kind of engagement brings, yet I liked being randomly reminded of favorite lines and facial reactions, and quoting these frames to pull off my own little jokes when I felt like it. Alas!—on August 24, this user went mask-off with the kind of bloated and reactionary cri de cœur that appears to be the real motivation for buying verification on that platform these days.
He complained that a friend had been detained and interrogated for hours by law enforcement in the U.K. for making “anti-immigration, anti-lockdown, and anti-vaccine statements,” a legitimate grievance in a country that prides itself on freedom of expression. He used this story, however, to bash immigrants himself, make wild claims about “Pakistani rape gangs,” and moan over the plight of “White English people” aged 18-25, all after having identified himself as the son of immigrant parents from Italy and Australia. The post, unsurprisingly, got a like from Musk himself, and when @FrameInOrder was really feeling himself in responses to the criticism he faced, he posted that he found himself “wishing that a certain Austrian painter was victorious,” and that those who had immediately unfollowed him—including me—“should find Jesus Christ and follow him instead.” (He has since deleted those replies.)
As anyone who has watched the show knows, the mobsters of The Sopranos are depicted as grotesquely racist, exploitative of minority communities, sociopathically violent, and, often, painfully stupid, at least when attempting to grapple with questions beyond the spread on a football game. Many are also aware that other loyal viewers, with a limited moral compass and minimal media literacy, see in the same story a glorification of that lifestyle. Even so, it is dismaying to realize that a fellow fan has so entirely missed the scathing critique of its narcissistic ensemble—that they themselves, in fact, exhibit defining attributes of these sometimes relatable but ultimately toxic, dangerous personae.
Predictably, a number of far more popular Sopranos meme accounts told the every-frame dude to “[s]hut the fuck up,” with one fan going so far as to insinuate that his own family despises him. He fired back with quips such as “Catch AIDS and die” while blathering in direct messages to yet another critic that a “civil war” was coming, and that he himself had forgone a “social life” to devote himself to gym exercise and the bible in preparation for this looming cataclysm. To call this mere “loser shit” is an irresponsible understatement.
Anyway! Why was I so irritated to realize this was just some chud piggybacking on a masterpiece he can never hope to comprehend, and, far worse, a literal Nazi whose idiotic babbling received enthusiastic support from likeminded white nationalists? I already knew he was a nobody with a cheap gimmick—who cares if he’s a bigoted English incel? Surely that was too pathetic a fact to inhabit my brain for long. Nevertheless, I struggled with it for a couple of days. What a piece of shit, I thought, poaching a ready-made audience for marvelously complicated art only to announce himself a proud fascist.
Then it hit me: I had fallen into the intellectual trap of online fandom itself, which makes us believe that we are meaningfully aligned with anyone who likes the “correct” TV, movies, music, art, restaurants, journalism, cities, cultures, genres, bodies, influencers, memes, etc. If there is no accounting for taste, then there is no reason to regard it as a unifying aspect of the human experience. It’s too easy for me to stumble across a goofy frame of Tony Soprano (or Christopher Moltisanti in his neck brace and sunglasses) as an avatar for an anonymous account and assume the best, trust that this person shares an enlightened interpretation of the material. This, of course, is foolish in its own way, considering the very fun arguments I have had over unresolved questions of Sopranos canon with friends who do share my literary and political values.
Maybe I needn’t suffer over adding ambient Sopranos content to my social media diet without questioning the source. These cretins can’t help telling on themselves sooner or later (@FrameInOrder has existed for barely a year), because they can’t wait to capitalize on the attention they never really earned. And I’m ever so slightly comforted to know that the young vanguard of white supremacy includes dolts tending to fantasies of their righteous uprising while hiding behind the admiration for a powerful narrative that rejects everything they stand for.
Tony Soprano was a descendant of hard-working immigrants and felt that entitled him to the fruits of everyone else’s labor, while regarding anyone of a different ethnicity looking for their “piece of the action” as a parasite. He can easily charm you, make you root for the shreds of his humanity that shine through in every episode, and raise your hope in the possibility, however thin, of redemption. But once you’ve fallen for this false premise enough times, through all the extortion, affairs, abuse, and murders, you ought to know better. When you take the full view of this tortured boss, that abrupt cut to black seems almost merciful.