Seven ways TheManySaintsOfNewark echoes TheSopranos and treats its story as mythology that can be retold, reinterpreted, and revised. mattzollerseitz writes
Photo: Warner Bros. The creators of The Many Saints of Newark: A Sopranos Story wanted to create a two-hour crime drama that could stand apart from The Sopranos, but let’s be real: It’s a prequel to an existing series, and it will be treated as such by most people who watch it.
Thing is, though, the series never addressed whether Silvio wore a hairpiece. This, to me, was as much a troll of the audience as the writers not telling us what happened to the Russian from “Pine Barrens” — grander in scope, honestly, because we had to look at Silvio’s head every week. I kinda like that version better. A mobster who’s so sensitive about his lack of hair that he won’t take his rug off even after he’s been shot seems like the kind of mobster we’d meet on The Sopranos.
Check this out: Dickie Moltisanti dies before his son, Christopher, can know him, after corrupting Tony, the young man who will become his son Christopher’s surrogate father and mentor. Decades later, Tony exploits and corrupts Christopher, then kills him before Christopher’s daughter has a chance to know her dad.
Dickie’s surrogate son, Tony, has Oedipal impulses too. Where Dickie enacts his urges, Tony denies them. Dr. Melfi tells Tony that his most powerful sexual attractions are to women who remind him of his mother. Tony is disgusted by the insinuation, but his parade of girlfriends and crushes proves Melfi was right. The most vivid example is Gloria Trillo , who arrives in Melfi’s lobby weeks after Livia’s death as if summoned by dark magic.
Absurd? Not if you watched the show. The Sopranos was quite comfortable intimating a world beyond the one we inhabit. Christopher’s first and only success as a filmmaker was Cleaver, a horror flick about a murdered mobster exacting revenge on a Tony Soprano–like gang boss. Strangler could have been a sequel to Cleaver: a film in which the demonic spirit of Dickie possesses another mobster’s hands and uses them to kill.
But in the series, Tony never entertains this possibility, no matter how skillfully Melfi maneuvers him towards it. Even after he takes her suggestion and gets on a newer antidepressant, Prozac, he still resists the idea that there could be something chemically wrong with a person’s brain just as there could be something wrong with their hips or heart.
Yeah, sure, he’s wondering when his daughter Meadow will get there. And yeah, sure, he’s a gangster, so he’s wired to watch the door, because you never know who might come through it. And yes, the bell is itself a loaded symbol: “Bring out your dead,” “Ask not for whom the bell tolls,” etc.Chase has repeatedly said that the point of the last scene is not about whether Tony lives or dies, but to spur reflection “about death,” and how life is precious and can be ripped from us at any moment.
Now whenever anyone asks, “What was that final scene about?”, there’s one more plausible answer that’s actually supported by the text. A belated appendix, but still the text. That’s a marvelous joke, and not just on viewers who insist that the final scene of the show could only mean one thing. In Citizen Kane, we find out in the final scene that “Rosebud” was Kane’s boyhood sled, and it burns up in a furnace before we can get a good look at it. Welles never intended that shot to actually “explain” the character of Charles Foster Kane; it was more of a way to poke fun at stories where one fact unlocks the mysteries of a character’s personality.
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