A.J. Soprano and Neoliberal Masculinity
Repost of a 2018 sketch accepted into a media studies conference I couldn’t afford to attend
AJ Soprano embodies a fractured masculinity unique to consumer capitalism. On the one hand, neoliberalism strips masculinity of its historical dominions. The family and the immediate community—both sites of power and dignity in traditional masculinity—are ransacked and left for dead by neoliberal “structural adjustment.” These were the arenas that facilitated and consolidated Tony Soprano’s reign. AJ Soprano, bereft of them, is left to mall-walking. On the other, the eye-clawing competitiveness of neoliberal society incentivizes solipsism and emotional emptiness. But devoid of any means of channeling his emotional absence into power, his preternatural coldness lapses into existential despair.
AJ’s one raised eyebrow signals his perplexity in the face of a hostile social field; his chronic forward slouch is always poised to resolve into a helpless shrug. Tony vents to his psychiatrist, Dr. Melfi, about AJ’s platonic friendship with girls. AJ, here, represents a furrowing of the orthodox Soprano masculinity that Tony knows was already compromised by his own visits to a therapist. Tony is incredulous about AJ’s histrionic spell following his breakup with Blanca Selgado, a beautiful Dominican woman with a young child. If the durability of Tony’s masculine self-respect was threatened by his visits to Melfi, AJ’s is shown to be threadbare as soon as he is again deprived of that facsimile of a nuclear family.
AJ is the nadir of successive generational deviations from a masculinity composed both of sentimental tradition (the Catholic family) and brute force (the authoritarian stewardship of community.) We can see how this plays out in ‘Commendatori,’ the episode in which Tony and his contemporaries visit Italy. Paulie, the myopic old-school ball breaking psychopath with a hair trigger temper, is repelled by the atavistic violence and intimacy on display in the old country. He heaves a sigh of relief in the car ride home from the New Jersey airport, comforted by the impersonability and interchangeability of the scene. AJ is the furthest removed from old Italy. If the Italians were decisive to the point of barbarism, AJ’s solipsism—a condition of consumerism—always resolved into inertia. If the Italians were intensely intimate, AJ loitered at the mall with a fungible group of nameless classmates.
At the same time, AJ’s indifference is itself a mutation of his father’s steely masculinity. The atomized anti-society AJ embodies finds a masculine expression in the 21st century free market and especially its armed wing, the corporate spectacle of the War on Terror. In “Made in America,” AJ’s fractured self-identity collides with the schizoid politics of post-9/11 postmodernity. “Bush let Al-Qaeda escape,” he says. “And then he had us invade some other country.” Nevertheless, AJ soon resolves to join the Army, “focusing on the terrorists.” Competitiveness liquidates community, solidarity, and love. The restless mania of consumerism paralyses action. Paranoia, then, is sovereign.