Television
Two Sagas
By RAYMOND A. SCHROTH
One of Western literature’s
most famous opening lines -- “All happy families are alike; all unhappy
families are unhappy in their own way,” from Leo Tolstoy’s Anna
Karenina -- has never been more true than during the last two months on
Sunday night TV.
There, PBS’s “The Forsyte Saga” and HBO’s
“The Sopranos” have fought to the death for our attention, each with
its parallel dispiriting saga of threatened ambition, bad offspring,
adulteries, betrayals, brutal punishments and sudden deaths -- some of them
well deserved.
Seldom have the last quarter of 19th-century London and the last
eight weeks of the cities clustered around the north end of the New Jersey
Turnpike seemed more alike.
There are differences, of course. The British upper-middle class
speak softly without opening their mouths or even moving their lips; New Jersey
mafiosi yell #@%&*!! at the top of their lungs and poke their fingers in
your chest.
The British drive to their country estates in clippity-clop
carriages, moving so slowly that you wonder whether they will arrive before
next week’s episode; the Jerseyites drive their SUVs lickety-split to the
strip club or at midnight to the Hudson River to dump a corpse.
The Forsytes and friends engage in sexual activity usually fully
covered in billowing nightgowns. Their purpose is to quickly conceive and
deliver sons, and only sons, to protect the family fortune. For them a fully
clothed kiss can be as passionate as a Puccini last act, even more so than the
marital act. The Soprano couplings are naked and wild, often elevated by
heroin, and seldom with a spouse. Their purpose -- pure self-gratification. The
hug and kiss are the greetings of two mobsters, one of whom will be
“whacked” within the hour.
The Forsytes control their family and punish their enemies through
gossip, social ostracism and cutting off their allowances. The Sopranos enforce
discipline by threats, whippings, garroting and the cutting off of heads and
hands.
The Forsytes, though presumably members of the Church of England,
are secular. Their gods are: themselves, their property, and -- though far down
the list -- the British Empire. The Sopranos are materialists. Boss Tony S.
lives in a big house with a swimming pool and a new “entertainment”
center with a screen as big as his bed. All his assets are in bushels of cash
hidden from his wife, locked in a trash can at the pool.
But unlike the British, these middle-class Jersey Italians are
religious. They have two kinds of priests. First their real priests, who are
their psychiatrists, who listen to them, separated only by a symbolic coffee
table, and respond with questions -- “Why do you think you feel like
that?” Then their Catholic priests, who speak to them from behind their
huge rectory walnut desks and deliver canned consolations like, “God has
his own reasons for letting this happen to you.”
But Soprano Catholicism carries over into their work. Recently,
when Christopher stuffed the sliced-off head and hands of Ralphie into a
bowling ball bag and buried them in a ditch, he paused to make the sign of the
cross. Perhaps “The Sopranos” and “The Forsyte Saga” differ
most in the process of their creation.
Though I am sure the whole season is well-mapped out, “The
Sopranos” has the feel of being written from week to week, feeding off
current events and the real-life tabloid lives of the cast, some of whom
actually are or have been criminals. James Gandofini, who plays Tony, has been
in and out of drug rehab and is divorcing his wife. Robert Iler, who plays his
son, was arrested for a mugging last year. Following an early-October episode
where the mob put the heat on some Native Americans (Indians) who were
protesting the Columbus Day Parade, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg invited
two cast members to march with him in the Columbus Day Parade and was told by
the parade sponsors, who feel the show insults Italians, to stay home.
My theory is that the writers get together and read
“Hamlet,” where, when the curtain comes down on Act V, eight of the
10 principal players lie dead by stabbing, suicide or poison. Then they draw
lots to determine which and by what means one of their players will be out of
work within a week.
“The Forsyte Saga,” however, takes its inspiration from
the first two of three John Galsworthy novels -- The Man of Property and
Indian Summer of a Forsyte and In Chancery -- written
right after World War I and published in the 1920s, and then the landmark BBC
TV series (in black and white), which pioneered the “Masterpiece
Theater” miniseries form with 26 episodes in the 1969.
The volumes were in our family library when I was a boy; but only
last week did I take them off the shelves of our college library. One copy
printed in 1922 had never been touched: Its pages were still uncut.
As TV, it’s wonderful, even better than the books -- and, in
the long run, better than “The Sopranos” -- though we really have to
consult the books or a Web site to be sure whose cousin is whose and who is
that whiskered fellow in the crowd who gets such deference. If we have missed
this round, it should pop up again if there’s justice in TV land. Sequels
will appear next year, and the old version will soon be available on DVD.
What’s it about? The Forsytes, as a family, number themselves
in the hundreds, and, insofar as the middle-class financiers control British
social and political life, they represent the British Empire. Collectively they
don’t come across as a malevolent force. Though individually they are as
screwed up -- as today’s headlines on Princess Diana’s butler testify
-- as today’s British royal family.
Yet they all wear top hats and evening clothes to breakfast, and
the appearance of propriety is the only value at stake.
The bounder, drunken husband of Winifred Forsyte takes off to
Argentina to tango with his mistress, and the central character, Soames Forsyte
(Damien Lewis), Winifred’s brother, sends private detectives to spy on his
own wife, Irene (Gina McKee), who has deserted him, to get evidence of
infidelity to support his divorce, so he can marry a French girl, Annette,
whom, he thinks -- perhaps because he has sexually stereotyped the French --
will give him the male heir Irene has denied him. We have been treated to a
scene where Irene, who married Soames only under the condition that he would
free her if the arrangement didn’t work, after forced intercourse, goes
right to the tub to wash herself out. Are you with me so far?
On one level, the level I think Galsworthy intended, this is the
story of Soames Forsyte, the 40ish, tight-lipped and uptight fellow who
controls the legal and business fortunes of the family. He is a “man of
property” in the fullest and worst sense. He imagines he owns all his
relationships -- from the new country proto-Frank Lloyd Wright house a creative
“buccaneer” architect is designing, to his wife Irene, a young widow
who married him only because she needed stability and who hates him.
On the second level, it is Irene’s story. She manages to
seduce or enamor, one way or another, the architect, who was engaged to
Soames’ niece; Soames’ ancient uncle, who leaves her a lot of money;
and Soames’ cousin, an artist who had left his original wife to run off
with the governess 25 years before.
Meanwhile two handsome nephews, 19 and 20, because of their macho
rivalry, enlist to go fight for the British Empire in South Africa in the Boer
War. The whole tone of the story changes. The outside world has intruded with
questions that transcend adultery -- like war and death.
As the red-coated troops march onto their ships and the band plays
“Soldiers of the Queen,” we think of both the old and recent versions
of The Four Feathers, where signing up was a burst of idealism, and
“Breaker Morant,” where the same march was an ironic comment on the
British hypocrisy that motivated the Boer War. We are not surprised when one
nephew dies and the other stumbles home without a leg.
Reality has intruded on the Forsyte world. Not that they would all
notice.
In the final scene, Soames has married Annette, who does not love
him, and made her pregnant. But the doctor tells him that an operation might
save her life but lose the child. To not operate might possibly, but not
likely, save both.
The TV version has conditioned us to see Soames as an absolutely
unfeeling creep, to cheer for Irene, the woman who married him for money, who
had a fling with his architect, and casts spells on the Forsytes young and old
who stumble into her web. He tells the doctor to not operate, to take the
chance of bringing both mother and child through.
The decision was right. Annette lives, though she can have no more
children. And the expected “son” is a girl. Yet, Soames picks up the
child and sees her as beautiful. He is transformed. He has become a human
being.
In the book, Soames exults that the girl is “his.” She
is property. With either interpretation, it is as lyric a moment as TV -- or
literature -- can offer.
We cannot expect a similar redemptive scene in “The
Sopranos.” Tony Soprano blows his top and orders retribution over the
deaths of a horse and a dog. That is the limit of his compassion.
Jesuit Fr. Raymond A. Schroth of St. Peter’s College, in
Jersey City, N.J., is author of Fordham: A History and Memoir (Loyola
Press). His e-mail address is raymondschroth@aol.com
National Catholic Reporter, December 13,
2002
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