The sopranos and genre transformation: Ideological negotiation in the gangster film

Abstract

The Sopranos is a major reworking of the gangster genre, which both conceals and exposes capitalist contradictions in re‐examining the cultural myths on which the genre is based. While The Sopranos incorporates many elements of the traditional gangster genre, it also transforms that genre in response to major social changes occurring in American society in the late 1980s and 1990s: pervasive corporate corruption and political scandal, loss of faith in national business and political leaders, widening income gap between the wealthiest and poorest Americans, decline in the patriarchal authority of the father, growing concern about childhood abuse and dysfunction in the family, reliance on drugs and psychotherapy to treat deviant social behavior, and increase and normalization of violence in society. This essay argues that an ideological negotiation occurs in The Sopranos between the new social and political realities of American work and family life that are represented in the series and the traditional conventions of the gangster genre and the family melodrama. This interaction gives rise to alternative and contradictory readings of the narrative.

Notes

Patricia Keeton (Ph. D., New York University) is a Professor of Communication Arts at the Ramapo College of New Jersey, 505 Ramapo Valley Road, Mahwah, NJ 07430 ([email protected]). Her areas of research are cinema genres, social class representation, Latin American media, and global media. She is also the Director of the Latin American Video Archives (LAVA) Project, a unique collection of videotapes by Latin American producers and artists, housed at Ramapo College. Portions of this paper were presented at the annual conference of the New York State Communication Association, Monticello, NY, October 1999 and the Summer Institute of the Institute for Culture and Society/Marxist Literary Group, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, June, 2000.