A Renaissance in Popular Culture

The discontents of our time lie squarely in the domain of life-meaning—or rather, in a feared lack of it. Unbelief shadows the post-church, secular West. Once faith waned in the existence of a higher divinity guiding human affairs, as it has for most who inhabit the modern world, the central metaphysical questions rise to the fore. These are the questions of where have we come from, what should we do with our lives in order to make sense of them, and what happens when we die. Doubt becomes pervasive, if mainly lurking beneath the surface of everyday life; grey replaces black and white; absurdity and futility threaten; and anxiety mounts.

The central and difficult truths require answers, for which the primary resource is personal experience. Personal experience is itself framed and articulated through shared images and stories supplied by the wider culture. There, it is art in the broad, taking account of changing times, that helps us understand the world we inhabit, and our place within it. The issue then becomes, which works of contemporary art stand out in terms of finding a language that may speak to the times? Indeed, are there any?

In High Culture there have been precious few. The mainstream of literature, philosophy, art, and the newer media has, since the late nineteenth century, waged war against the traditional view of the role of culture, as responsible for providing people with ways of understanding their lives, celebrating the triumphs, making sense of the tragedies. Modern High Culture has been militant in its hostility to absolute truth; to the pursuit of the beautiful; and to the assertion of any universal good. Painting and sculpture exemplify, in their turn against the authority of the Old Masters, deconstructing the human condition into a blur of abstract squiggles and blotches. Once art abandoned the human narrative—recounting stories about real people subject to life’s trials—it largely lost its mission. Today, it is barely alive, kept moving by its dismal and motive—a desire to shock.

By contrast, Popular Culture has taken seriously the timeless challenge of culture, and furthered it, giving surprising birth to a Renaissance. On occasion it has reached Shakespearean heights, through virtuoso scripting, acting and dramaturgy. It has taken on the big meaning questions, successfully pressing at the frontiers of our understanding.

There is no necessary separation of the two cultures. Indeed, Western culture began in ancient Greece with texts that were both widely popular and of great aesthetic sophistication—led by Homer’s Iliad and Athenian tragic drama. They became “classics” in a panoptic sense. Shakespeare continued this tradition.

Where has this popular modern art of singular quality appeared? Not in the cinema, which had its golden era in the 1940s and 1950s; not in the popular novel nor in pop music; not in contemporary art galleries; and not in free-to-air television. It is American cable television that has been the generative source, predominantly through Home Box Office (HBO). To my mind, two productions stand out, peerless in a broad milieu of high quality that also includes Mad Men, Treme, Breaking Bad, True Detective, House of Cards, Game of Thrones, Suits and, many would add, The Wire. Let me consider these pre-eminent two.

As much as the temper of an age may be read through the most insightful works of the imagination that it produces, and it can to a significant degree be so read, then the last two decades may come to be typified by The Sopranos. Over six cable television series (a total of eighty-six episodes running from 1999 to 2007), the lead character, Tony Soprano, wrestles with his ordeal of unbelief, and loses.

At the outset, in the first episode, Tony is suffering from panic attacks. He collapses unconscious—in a symbolic rehearsal of death. The first attack occurs after a family of wild ducks, which has settled in his home swimming pool, flies away. He has welcomed the arrival of the ducks with wonder and elation. He even wades down into the pool in his dressing gown towards the ducks, the scene replaying baptism images from Renaissance painting. Tony is in search of rebirth, of some kind of metamorphosis that will bring enchantment into his life. The ducks represent a family that has grace—a freedom, innocence and beauty that his own family lacks in his own eyes.

In rational, objective terms Tony should be mightily satisfied with his life, leaving aside that he is the local Mafia boss. He has a family, which he handsomely provides for, living in an opulent suburban mansion; he is the most powerful male around, one feared by everybody he encounters; he is a brilliant and very successful leader of his gang; he has made himself rich; and he is attractive to women, whom he seduces with careless abandon. But he is haunted by a pervasive sense that all these things are somehow tainted, and not as they should be, not right. They lack the special quality that he projects onto the ducks. What should be sacred in his world is mired under a profane fog.

He fantasises that in previous generations the Mafia was glorious, guided by a chivalric code of honour, whereas today it has slumped into sordid and cowardly mediocrity. We see enough of Tony’s father to know that the son’s nostalgia is delusional; a conclusion that is reinforced when Tony visits Naples seeking his roots, only to find the Italian Mafia in an even more decadent state than its New Jersey offspring. On another occasion, sitting in the local Catholic church with his daughter, Tony rhapsodises about the craftsmanship displayed in the stone carving, a care and capacity for quality that has been completely lost in contemporary America—the beauty has flown from the world.

In his quest for meaning, Tony also flirts with the small-g gods of sociologist Max Weber, the least bad solution to the meaning problem in modernity. At the finale of the first series, as Tony sits at dinner with his family, he tells them warmly that these intimate moments are the ones that matter, this is what life is all about. But the tenderness is forced, the cosy glow a Romanticised indulgence that is quickly forgotten. In the last episode of the last series, sitting in a diner, again with his family, a scene accompanied by strong signals to the viewer that he is about to be assassinated, his son has to remind him of what he said on the earlier occasion.

Tony does not yearn for a saviour. He has no interest in finding someone to show him the way. The one pale substitute is his psychoanalyst, and part mother confessor, Dr Melfi, but the program makes clear that she effects no reforming change in him, except for unwittingly providing him with some smart psychological tricks for better controlling others. The Sopranos is dismissive of the modern Socratic hope for redemption through knowledge, or more precisely the hope of becoming a better and happier person through gaining self-knowledge. Here is one marker of its contemporary relevance.

Tony is only fully alive in violence. When carried away in surges of rampaging aggression the blood flows, and he feels great. It is only then that he transcends the depressing demands of the day—for which Dr Melfi has him on Prozac. After flexing his Mafia muscles, which ultimately means committing murder, he finds he doesn’t need his medication. His is a case of what Georges Sorel, in 1906, lauded as therapeutic violence.

Unlike Don Quixote, Tony does not need an extravagant fantasy to activate him. He is not seeking something to believe in. Nor does he feel he lacks drive from within—absence of passion is not his problem. His quest is rather for a world that is enchanted, and right. The way the ducks live represents a quiet and calm order, exemplary of what is natural, and of how things ought to be. If only a magic wand could be waved over New Jersey.

Tony is driven spontaneously and impulsively from within—the most powerful impulse being anger, which erupts sporadically. Lust and a yearning for enchantment also drive him. The cost is that once the blood cools he is back with his existential despair. In the opening episode, Tony’s second panic attack occurs in a nursing home, collapsing at his psychopathic mother’s words: “people come here to die”.

In The Sopranos, the ordinary members of society are fascinated by life in the New Jersey Mafia gang, and especially that of its leader. Whenever Tony’s own psychoanalyst meets other analysts, whether socially or professionally, they eagerly probe the nature and doings of her patient. The culture of counselling is one of therapy and care, mediated by the relentless, unflappable calm of the analysts as they politely massage human nightmare, for hour after carefully-minuted hour. In this television series, it gives way to a near-pornographic leering at a man who respects no rules, who has brute power, and who will, without a blink, exercise it. After Dr Melfi has been raped, she fantasises that Tony is the only man capable of avenging her. Her husband is too civilised—code for emasculated.

The show hits a modern nerve here, for Melfi stands proxy for the viewer, who sees and judges Tony Soprano, in the main, through her eyes. The program taunts: perhaps you the viewer are drawn to Tony because of the very proclivities in him that have become too much denied in your own obsessively orderly, civilised and comfortable life. Tony is the fantasy alter ego, compelling and horrifying, presenting an ultimate ambivalence—If only I could be him; but nothing would be worse.

Tony Soprano is categorised by some of the psychoanalysts as a “sociopath”, a person who can inflict grievous harm with no bad conscience, but who is morally conscious of what he is doing. And indeed he is difficult to place. For long phases within the television series, the audience tends to quite like him. He is a strong family man. Much of the time he is an engaged father, loving his daughter, and doing a pretty good job as father to a very difficult teenage son. He is attached to his wife, in spite of regular clandestine affairs; and he is warm to her whenever he sinks into a melancholy questioning of the meaning of life, which happens regularly. He has masculine virtue, as a fearless leader of the gang—quick-witted, insightful into the motives and intentions of others, a peerless capacity for strategic thinking, and for fast and decisive action. He has strong affection for the key gang members, although he can be ruthless if they are weak, or if they betray him.

A benign reading of Tony’s appeal might posit that the full life requires living and acting in the world; such a life inevitably includes the winning and utilising of power; and it includes a need for adventure and risk. Modern middle-class life is out of balance: it is too secure; too well insured and protected from danger; too bureaucratised; in short, it is too genteel. Hence it sets up a craving for the opposite—in the imagination. Tony Soprano satisfies that craving.

The tougher reading is that viewers are titillated by the fear that many people—perhaps even they themselves—harbour a fragment of something similar to Soprano viciousness inside. The audience unwittingly identifies with Tony, who arouses deeply buried strains of sadism in it, universal ones. Viewers take pleasure, at an imaginative remove, in the powerful act of inflicting pain. Violence is violence, and it can be seductive.

The program engages with this discussion, by including a few psychopathic mobsters. They are contrasted with Tony. There is, for instance, Ralphie, who in a fit of rage bashes his own girlfriend to death, after she has questioned his manliness in front of others. Ralphie, who lacks any normal feelings of human warmth and attachment, is excited shamelessly by sadistic cruelty.

In my view, a second cable program ranks equally with The Sopranos. Deadwood, also made by HBO, ran for thirty-six episodes between 2004 and 2007. The setting is a frontier gold-rush camp bereft of civilised order: life is a struggle for survival in which power is the only law, and the powerful are driven by greed, lust and sadism. Deadwood provides a laboratory for studying the human condition in secular times. It casts its characters into a world of Hobbesian anarchy, stripped of all security and predictability, and it observes how they behave. Produced at the same time as the later series of The Sopranos, it puts a contrasting interpretation of the quest for ultimate meaning in the modern world.

Al Swearengen is the central character. He runs a bar-room brothel. He has no illusions about life, having deliberately left places of comfort and stability farther east, for an elemental Darwinian frontier where there is no moral law, where everything is permitted, life is cheap, and men survive on their wits and their capacity to mobilise effective violence—Swearengen beats women and kills men, and does so mainly unblinkingly, without conscience. His central ambition is to survive. He explores his own thoughts in long Hamlet-like monologues devoted to reflecting on life, human character and the strategies he needs to employ whenever new threats appear, which they do regularly throughout the series.

Swearengen gains satisfaction from acting as the de facto head of the town, directing events, keeping balances, and outsmarting those who challenge his power. An ironic detachment from life, a freedom from illusion, and a formidable practical intelligence combine to make him a kind of political genius, able to see through the motives of others, and plot, chess-like, the sequence of moves he needs to make in order to get his way.

In spite of his own cold-blooded brutishness, he displays some care for his staff, who all love and admire him. He grudgingly likes some other inhabitants of the town, whom he treats with a bemused but harsh indulgence. Through his own complex personality, and the precarious civic order that he manages to preserve, he makes possible acts of selflessness that shine as beacons of hope through a ghastly medieval nightmare. Deadwood has space for human goodness. Charity is embodied in half a dozen wilful, strong-minded and eccentric characters. These include the gentlemanly Wild Bill Hickok, his devotee Charlie Utter, a manic doctor, the drunken man-fearing Calamity Jane, Swearengen’s favourite whore Trixie, the gold-miner Ellsworth, and the proprietor of another brothel Joanie Stubbs.

The Deadwood camp is a society without beauty. The streets are awash with mud and excrement, which soils the garments of everybody who crosses them. Corpses are fed in full public view to the local Chinese boss’s pigs. The communal meeting-places are bars, brothels and gambling houses—or combinations of all three. These places are stocked with semi-naked, unwashed and malodorous prostitutes who are treated like cattle—as, for instance, when they are examined for venereal disease.

When the richest mining magnate in the world arrives he buys the hotel for his accommodation, smashes walls down to give himself more space, but does not bother to repair the damage—this is not a town in which one wastes energy on pleasant decor. The language spoken spews out of the sewer—a constant staccato of foul swearing (the main reason the series was never shown on free-to-air television). Odd characters try to maintain a contrasting decorum by speaking with wooden Puritan formality, or florid Victorian pomposity. Deadwood is a wasteland.

Yet, the series Deadwood is uplifting. It paints a world without god or moral law, viciously misogynist, centred on a town that floats on mud and shit, murder, drunkenness, gambling and prostitution, with a pig-sty serving as the combined funeral parlour/cemetery. Four of its endearing characters—Utter, Jane, Doc and Ellsworth—are explicitly cast without style, elegance or refinement. Swearengen has charisma, but he generally appears with greasy hair, unshaven, dressed in a dirty and crumpled suit, or in his underwear, drinking heavily, urinating, or abusing one of his prostitutes as she performs fellatio on him.

So, wherein lies the redemption, the signal of transcendence? There is a rugged, irrepressible vitality in this town. Life is stripped of its canopy of comfort—customs, rituals, pastimes, pleasantries and sociability—and above all stripped of the normal illusions and hopes that buoy individuals along their mortal journey. There is no hiding the viciousness and the vice that infests the human condition when it is reduced to its lowest common denominator. Everyone in Deadwood lives close to the existential bone, often driven to question the why and the wherefore. Swearengen leads, with mordant eloquent monologues querying the sense, some delivered to the head of a dead Indian chief that he keeps close-by in a box.

The good characters are engagingly likeable—partly because of their raw honesty of perception and acidly-expressed opinion, and a warm, companionable, derogatory banter they trade amongst themselves. There develops an unspoken code of respect and trust loosely binding them, a code of honour that is the more intense and admirable because it flourishes in an entirely unsympathetic environment. A strange type of epic heroism rises out of the slime.

The abiding sense left by the series is of the power of human potential—of the capacity in some individuals for a resilience, craft, benevolence and empathy that blesses them with a kind of nobility of soul. What might be called “redemptive” here resides in the character of the chosen individuals, and how they act within the harsh circumstances into which they find themselves cast. It is to do with being, with the quality of the “I”, and with the way its presence resonates in the world.

The casting and the acting work to brilliant effect, conjuring up a Dickens-like vividness of character. The script, led by the Swearengen monologues, often achieves Shakespearean virtuosity. Finally, what engages the viewer is a composed story—an aesthetic form woven out of the rough and greasy wool of actual everyday life, in just the same manner as Sophocles wove Oedipus the King.

Deadwood is an ideal measuring stick for calibrating the religious in post-church modernity. In its world, individuals struggle to negotiate their lives without the help of any externally provided supports—not church, not community, not moral law or legal system, and not even shared customs and civilities. By implication, where these supports do exist in the actual contemporary West their contribution to existential meaning is illusory, as Tony Soprano also discovered.

The question that arises is, once all the consoling and securing illusions have been stripped away, what is left, what survives? Deadwood works with the ugly—the brutish, the squalid, and the profane—as the base human reality, and examines whether any green shoots emerge from the mud. What it discovers is that half a dozen individuals of strong character throw themselves into the fray with relish, a wry smile, and a defiant sticking to principle, and with loyalty to those with whom they feel affinity—those whom they judge good. They are like a chosen band, although they themselves would baulk at such language.

The chosen endow the category of “goodness” or “virtue” with an absolute quality—they will die for it. They are all, however, secondary players in the drama, performing as a kind of Greek chorus. This does not make them lesser.

Al Swearengen is the central, most intriguing and compelling figure. His character is different. Swearengen achieves moments of goodness, for which the chosen band love him. But he is not a good man, far from it, nor does he strive to become one. He does take some covert pleasure in being liked for his generous acts.

Swearengen’s story is rather that of the solitary journey. His monologues, both in their content, and in what they represent, indicate that he is on a quest. The quest has something to do with taking on very difficult circumstances, and wrestling his way through, not shirking any difficulty or conflict, using his wits, his will, his nerve and his charm. He is contemptuous of the weak, the pretentious and those who live on false hopes and misty illusions (except for his protégés). While pitching himself into the fray, he yet retains a sceptical detachment. He provides a running commentary as he goes, reflecting on the sense of it all, and where he might find some small gratification.

If we blinker out the extremity of the setting, one that requires an extremity of character in order to survive and to prosper, Al Swearengen stands as an ideal of how to live in secular modernity, if a tarnished one whose acts are at times inexcusable. He lives without the need of redeeming illusions, yet maintains confidence in who he is and what he does. At the same time, he is an altogether different character from the absurdist anti-heroes of the mid-twentieth century, such as Albert Camus’s Meursault, from the 1942 novel The Stranger. Swearengen feels no need to postulate some metaphysics of human dignity in the face of an absurd and indifferent universe. He is much more vitally engaged with life than that, and thereby represents a strong negation of modern pessimism.

So what may we conclude? Both The Sopranos and Deadwood cast their central characters in a milieu stripped of all civilised costuming and props, one in which there are no binding rules—everything is permitted. These characters are driven by an elemental human striving for power—power over necessity, in order to survive, power over others, and power as an energising buoyancy in itself. Both men are shrewd, clear-eyed realists.

But Tony is discontented, yearning for a magic light to shine down, illuminating a circle around him. Instead of finding enchantment, however, he experiences the world that engages him spiralling out of control. His son withers into suicidal failure; his appointed successor becomes a heroin addict whom Tony himself is driven to murder; his gang disintegrates; and even his own pleasures sour.

What Tony is missing is the blessing that comes upon the chosen band in Deadwood. In his craving for what lacks, he is given, on occasion, to sentimentality—a sugary overblowing of an imagined reality, in desperate hope that something might be there. Swearengen is not misty-eyed; he accepts things as they are. Life is endowed with a mysterious value, and not cast over by the shadow of the “big nothing”, as Tony Soprano’s mother refers to death. The magic wand has been waved over his world, bringing with it what used to be called grace. This is simply good fortune for those on whom the light shines. It is not a reward for some virtue of character. And where there is virtue of character, it tends rather to follow from the grace. Swearengen gains a zest for life, if a mellow and wryly ironical one, and an affirmation—a riposte to Soprano bleakness.

Grace is a religious term that is perhaps even more pertinent in secular times than in earlier, more explicitly religious ones—ones that were more confident about the existence of powers beyond, ones with the capacity to confer blessings. That God, and multiple gods, have, for most, departed the human world, does not mean that all mystery and wonder have vanished with them.

The two works considered in this essay, springing out of what might loosely be termed popular culture, speak today, to times that are focused on everyday life, as lived relentlessly in the here and now. They take up the big meaning questions of what to do in order to make sense of a life, if that is possible; how to find some fulfilment, if that is possible; and how to move and act free of the shadow of death, which threatens as the big nothing. They do this with more insight, originality and evocativeness than anything else. By any criteria, they are works of the first rank.

The Sopranos and Deadwood present an either-or, between two paths in a world without clear external reference points. Soprano and Swearengen share much in common, yet the difference between them makes all the difference. And it is given; not chosen. One might say that it is fated; not won. Such is the nature of a blessing.