The fundamental question that the TV series The Sopranos poses us with is: Can you love someone who’s a bad person? Someone who does a lot of bad things like murdering people, stealing money, and cheating on their wife?
The question is thrown at us right from the beginning. You know the show is good when you’re cheering for the bad guy. When we get a sneak peek into Tony’s personal life, we get to see his softer side, how he acts like a baby sometimes, how he cares so much about his kids, and so on. He does come into touch with his conscience over time as the series progresses. Don Carveth, a psychoanalyst from Canada, makes the distinction between superego and conscience and calls it a big mistake when Freud collapsed both of these terms into one.
Tony’s superego (norms about what is good shaped by parents, society, and the culture one is born into) makes him think that killing people as a mobster is the right thing to do. He equates himself to being a soldier, and tells his therapist that soldiers don’t go to hell for killing people.
His conscience (something that Don calls innate to us, the ability to know what is good and what is evil, which is not governed by social norms), on the other hand, makes him think about his actions. He gets concerned about the black officer who gets kicked out of the police department for issuing a speeding ticket to him. At the same time, he’s making racist comments about Meadow’s new boyfriend, Noah. He constantly tussles between following the superego and conscience.
The same happens with his wife, Carmela, in this episode. She goes to see a therapist who advises her to leave Tony because he’s a bad guy. But at the end of the episode, we see her asking Tony for 50K dollars as a donation for Meadow’s college. She starts crying in the therapy session when she admits that she’s been with a man who works in the mafia, knowing that she had a choice not to be with him. Her conscience knows that Tony is a bad guy. But the super-ego, here, the luxury, the big house, the money, the prestige, the power that comes along with being Tony’s wife, is hard to give up.
While one reading is to see it in terms of this conscience, the superego lens, I ask myself how someone can love a person who kills people. How did Eva Braun love Hitler? Can this even be called love? Can someone love who kills? Who is bad to society at large and has a soft side to just one person?
We are great compartmentalizers in that sense. Of course, if we were to start evaluating a person for all the actions they do through an ethical lens, it would be very hard for us to love them. Does love then need some kind of simplification, idealization, and a not knowing?
Unfinished thoughts but I leave you with Zizek’s take –
“The first lesson thus seems to be that the proper way to fight the demonization of the Other is to subjectivize him, to listen to his story, to understand how he perceives the situation—or, as a partisan of Middle East dialogue put it: “An enemy is someone whose story you have not heard.”2 Practicing this noble motto of multicultural tolerance, Icelandic authorities recently imposed a unique form of enacting this subjectivization of the Other. In order to combat growing xenophobia (the result of a rising number of immigrant workers), as well as sexual intolerance, they organized what is called “living libraries”: members of ethnic and sexual minorities (gays, immigrant East Europeans, or Blacks) are paid to visit an Icelandic family and simply talk to them, acquainting them with their way of life, their everyday practices, their dreams, etc. In this way, the exotic stranger who is perceived as a threat to our way of life appears as somebody we can empathize with, with a complex world of his or her own…
There is, however, a clear limit to this procedure: can one imagine inviting a brutal Nazi thug to tell us his story? Is one also ready to affirm that Hitler was an enemy because his story was not heard? One can well imagine Hitler washing Eva Braun’s hair—and one does not have to imagine, since one knows, that Reinhard Heydrich, the architect of the Holocaust, liked to play Beethoven’s late string quartets with friends in the evenings. Recall the couple of “personal” lines that usually conclude the presentation of a writer on the back cover of a book: “In his free time, X likes to play with his cat and grow tulips…” Such a supplement, which “humanizes” the author, is ideology at its purest, the sign that he is “also human like us.” (I was tempted to suggest on the cover of my book: “In his free time, Zizek likes to surf the internet for child pornography and to teach his small son how to pull the legs off spiders…”)”
lackingsubject 