Dudes Rock!

The Sopranos and obsession

The first image you get of Tony Soprano is a beautiful one: massive 1920’s boxer torso draped in a taupe bathrobe, twinkling little chain nestled in his chest hair like a pony in straw, wading gleefully into the pool to look at his beloved ducklings. 

For the next 73 hours you spend with Tony Soprano and friends, through all the beatdowns, the holes in drywall, the raucous sexcapades with goomahs while sweet Carmela microwaves ziti at home, the poor saps being taught lead lessons, funds siphoned away from the taxpayers of Newark, you can think back to Tony and his ducks and be comforted. 

The Sopranos is not the first mob story to do this. Vito Corleone dies while goofing around with his grandson near his prized tomatoes. In Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan, Dexter Styles loves looking at the Navy boats through binoculars at dawn. There is a highly effeminate undercurrent of mafia machismo what with all the pinkie rings, the kissing your homies, and the futzing over clothes. Remember in The Irishman when that guy wears shorts to the meeting? Al Capone was famously persnickety about his shirts. Within the banality of evil is the vanity of evil: Saudi sheikhs taking 200 photos next to their new Rolls Royce with a manatee leather interior, a $21,000 appointment with the best foreskin reconstructor on the Upper East Side, Obama wearing a tan suit to the drone strike. 

The human element. The man behind the monster. Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde. (I don’t know which, I never read it.) Mob stories love making us choose between the flashy exterior and fearsome interior of the mafioso. But, the masterstroke of The Sopranos is that the American mobster, like nearly every other occupation besides bespoke vibrator machinist and Instagram Forex trader, lives a much more embarrassing life than they would have 50 years ago. Tony does not go to lavish outdoor weddings with Frank Sinatra or canoe on Lake Tahoe. He cooks wieners on a charcoal grill and owns the tackiest yacht at the marina. Tony exists with a profound lack of taste, panache, or class. Suburbia wrings sex out of a person like dishwater from a wet rag. Today, some consider him a style icon, but those people have a Blood Irony Level far beyond the legal limit. 

Tony’s ducklings are proof of his primal masculine capability for obsession.  Ultimately, this is the best proof of vestigial humanity that lingers inside him.

When I began dating my first girlfriend, her father mailed us both copies of Why Men Don’t Listen and Women Can’t Read Maps. (At the time, I thought this was a good thing, because it showed that her family is crazy just like mine. I now know that every family is crazy; the important part is that they’re crazy in a vaguely similar way. But anyway:) WMDLAWCRM is a lovely little tract of pseudoscience by Barbara and Allen Pease, a married couple who write books about how to be married. This book purports to show you the evolutionary and genetic reasons for why your spouse is such a fucking annoying piece of shit. 

My favorite detail concerns a scenario in which a husband and wife are fighting because the husband can never seem to find items in the refrigerator which the wife can spot instantly. Sure, it doesn’t help that the husband has late-stage dementia and is looking for milk in the microwave. But, the Peases have a better explanation. Based on research done by an anarcho-Protestant think tank funded by the E-Z-Squirt mayonnaise fortune, we know that in hunter-gatherer times, men went out hunting for megafauna while women stayed back at camp, drinking Pinot Grigio and sitting on the washing machine. This caused men to develop highly-focused vision which can spot small things from far away, while women can concentrate on a number of objects simultaneously at close range.

This is all to say that men are good at being obsessed with things. Nowadays, it is rather distastefully labeled “autistic” when a fella gets super into something. I know many dudes who like trains, like Gordon in Big Little Lies. There’s the frat boy who meticulously cleans his $700 Illadelph bong and the hedge fund manager with a Jimi Hendrix memorabilia collection. Tom Brown, who rediscovers lost breeds of apples. Look at any reptile expo, sewing machine collectors’ convention, or digits of pi memorization competition. It’s all guys. 

That gets magnified in quarantine. With time on our hands, people are “getting back in touch,” “making time for things,” “rediscovering passions.” When my beloved hedgehog Cantaloupe z”l passed away last month, I was briefly at sea, hobby-less, with no delicate creature to dote on. So, I cleaned out the bird feeder, filled it with black oil sunflower seed, and now spend hours per day watching it. My camera is finally back in use with a memory card full of red-bellied and downy woodpeckers, Carolina wrens, black-capped chickadees, goldfinches, and tufted titmice. It’s the first time I’ve done photography since I received a cease-and-desist from the state of Connecticut for taking pictures of ladies jogging in the park. And it feels good to be back!

My grandfather passed away last week. I don’t want to talk too much about him (yet). But I know what he loved: detective novels, crossword puzzles, Frank Sinatra, silly jokes, golf, the Red Sox, auditing the check at a restaurant, never, ever missing a meal or skipping dessert, my brother and me. These were his obsessions, and for the 22 out of 90 years that I knew him, they defined him. A man is not much more than what he gives his attention to. 

As a child, I flitted constantly from one fascination to another. Collecting rocks, collecting typewriters, ToonTown, COD Mod 2, baseball, bass guitar, and blogging all had their day. While I submerged like a free diver into those fascinations, I forgot about other things. The nipple rocks, the boners while giving a PowerPoint, being 4’11” in high school, sucking at sports were all replaced by other, supposedly healthier mania. There was, however, a spate of crippling, compulsive, crushes-cum-infatuations that nearly destroyed me with their intensity. It was not only awkward, but unfair, to subject girls to that level of unyielding attention. Nobody deserves a daily “so whats up?” Snapchat with just an acne-riddle forehead in the frame.

The male ability to obsess is a dangerous thing. Stalkers, genociders, gun freaks, etc. etc. -- the endless litany of terrible men all have an obsession at the root of their evil.  Mafia movies, to return to that, are really about the twin obsessions that drive La Cosa Nostra: obsessive loyalty and obsessive greed. Eminem’s terrifying lyrics in “Bagpipes from Baghdad” prompted Mariah Carey to write “Obsessed.” Even at the micro level, it can be disastrous. Many men I know often get sucked inexorably into their phones at the expense of those around them and the rest of life. Being monomaniacal is only positive if it’s about something good, or at least harmless.

Men have a freakish, terrifying ability to obsess. Where we aim our hunter’s gaze, what we turn our attention to, defines us. If only Tony passed on waste management and went into ornithology…