Holy cow! Camilla Paglia agrees with me! She seems to have some pretty radial ideas for someone who's Prince Chuck's upper-crust squeeze, but that's besides the pontoon, let's hear what her ladyship has to say:
archive.salon.com
On to another, lesser matter of media groupthink, HBO's series, "The Sopranos," which has been wildly over-praised by middlebrow commentators whose critical judgment is clearly bankrupt. I have yet to watch a single entire episode of that show, which I find vulgar and boring as well as rife with offensive clichés about Italian-Americans that would never be tolerated were they about Jews or blacks.
What I find especially repugnant about "The Sopranos" is its elitist condescension toward working-class life, which it distorts with formulas that are 30 years out of date. Manners and mores have subtly evolved in the ethnic world that "The Sopranos" purports to depict and that extends from South Philadelphia to central New Jersey and metropolitan New York. The critics who have raved without qualification about "The Sopranos" have simply exposed their own bourgeois removal from real life as well as their reactionary attachment to "plot" -- which is so mechanically and even neurotically obtrusive in that show that it betrays the authoritarian tendencies of its confused creator, David Chase, who has no instinct for psychology, his own or anyone else's.
It's not the Mafia theme that I detest, tired and pointless as that is after its canonical treatment in masterpieces like the first two "Godfather" films, directed by Francis Ford Coppola. It's the sickening combination of effeteness in conception and crudity in execution that no major media article on "The Sopranos" has even noticed much less analyzed. Last week's panel discussion at the New York Hilton about "The Sopranos," sponsored by the National Italian-American Foundation and featuring James Wolcott and Bill Tonelli as well as myself and others, is tentatively scheduled to be broadcast by C-Span on June 2. |
