Archive for June, 2007
“Money, Shame and Reparation: A Moment from The Sopranos”
Jason Jacobs, Griffith University (Australia) — June 28th, 2007|
Season three, ‘Another Toothpick’ and Tony and Carmela are driving home after a joint session with Melfi. It didn’t go well: Carmela is crying, Tony is speeding and a traffic cop, Leon Wilmore (Charles S. Dutton), pulls them over. Tony’s bribes are considered with contempt by Leon who threatens to call backup. Later Tony gets his political partner, the corrupt Assemblyman Zellman, to get the fine quashed.
This moment takes place midway through the episode as Tony discovers that, as [...]
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The Winning Side?: Agent Harris and the FBI on HBO’s The Sopranos
Douglas Howard, Suffolk County Community College — June 27th, 2007|
While the “closure junkies,” as Paul Levinson recently called them on his Infinite Regress blog, continue to analyze the last episode like the Zapruder film in search of a more definite ending, The Sopranos has generally resisted the attempt to offer the comfort of resolution and the suggestion of a moral outcome. Inasmuch as more traditional “law and order” dramas work toward punishing "the bad guys” and allowing people to turn off their sets safe in the belief that crime does not pa [...]
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You have options …
Janet McCabe and Kim Akass, Manchester Metropolitan University / freelance writer — June 26th, 2007|
Way back in season five with the Sopranos’ marriage on the rocks, Carmela shops with Meadow. Tension breaks out in ladies fashions. Meadow berates her mother for having no thought beyond “being dependent on some man” while clutching clothes that Tony will pay for. The irony of her thinking may be lost on her, so firmly embedded is she in an economic world where everything is possible with a gold credit card paid for by daddy, but surely the paradox speaks to a broader debate raging in o [...]
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Paulie Walnuts
David Lavery, Brunel University, London — June 25th, 2007|
In its six season run, THE SOPRANOS never failed to make all of its characters, major and minor, anything but multi-dimensional. Even its minor players seemed fully fleshed out--real.
Of all the 2nd tier SOPRANOS characters none fascinated more than Paulie Walnuts, memorialized in this fan compilation. What would Dr. Melfi say about Paulie (assuming she ever wants to treat a mobster again!)? Recall that in the final episode of Season One, he did confess to having "coping issues." Really?
W [...]
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The Mouth Wants What It Wants
Dana Heller, Old Dominion University — June 22nd, 2007|
No more chick food! This appears to be the unabashed claim of fast food television advertisements that have aired in recent years. The appeal-- ostensibly directed toward thirty-something white men who are quite literally fed up with the feminization of fast food product lines, the cultural demonization of popular food chains evident in documentaries such as SUPER-SIZE ME, and the sissified purging of trans fats from the American diet -- suggests that it might be possible to reclaim a liberate [...]
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The Haunting of Spiders, Cities and DVDs
Tama Leaver, University of Western Australia — June 21st, 2007|
Spider-Man has always been intimately connected with New York. Peter Parker never inhabited a fictional Gotham or Metropolis, but has in one way or another been just one of the eight millions residents of American’s most mythical city. Even the Spider-Man costume can be read not just as a literal spider’s web, but as metaphor for the city itself; the grids of the New York’s streets, stretched across Peter Parker’s body, filled with the reds and blues of the American flag, encapsulate t [...]
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Terror’s Blinding Horizon: 24 and the Normalization of Nuclear Terrorism
Christian Erickson, Roosevelt University — June 20th, 2007|
In the clip you just saw, the city of Valencia, California is annihilated in the year 2013 in the fictionalized near future of the sixth season (2007) of the Fox Network’s 24. What I find remarkable about the season opener, which was aired in four episodes on January 14th and 21st, 2007 in the United States, is not the representation of a near future act of nuclear terrorism within the territorial confines of the US “homeland”, but rather the suburban banality of the context of this attac [...]
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Wrapped in Diapers, Built for Speed
Melissa Hardie, University of Sydney — June 19th, 2007|
An astronaut is built for speed? Witness Law And Order: Criminal Intent’s rapid remediation of the case of Lisa Nowak, the astronaut who drove from Houston to Orlando allegedly to kidnap a colleague she believed responsible for interference in her romantic life. It took less than three months from Nowak’s apprehension for this episode, “Rocket Man,” to air.
Of particular interest to the event’s reporters was Nowak’s “speed kit,” astronaut diapers that obviated the need to pac [...]
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“The Power to Entertain Yourself: Mobile Video Strikes Out (Again)”
Max Dawson, Northwestern University — June 18th, 2007|
On June 2, 2007, the cell phone startup Amp’d Mobile filed for bankruptcy, marking yet another inauspicious milestone in the still-brief history of mobile video. Amp’d had staked its brand identity on the multimedia content it delivers to its subscribers’ handsets. But despite the backing of investors like MTV, and despite having secured the rights to distribute programming from ABC, Comedy Central, and a host of other networks, as of June Amp’d had managed to sign up only 175,000 custom [...]
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Feminist Sopranos
Maurice Yacowar, University of Calgary — June 29th, 2007