Panic Like It’s 1999: Analyze This, The Sopranos, and Mob Men in Therapy

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The whole doctor-patient confidentiality except in the case of crimes committed and threatened makes mobsters going to therapy a difficult needle to thread. If the point of therapy is to open up without reservations, having to sidestep the emotional fallout of murdering someone makes the whole approach less than ideal. Yet, that very concept of mobsters seeking psychological treatment turns out to be the foundation of not one but two major releases from 1999: the pilot and first season of the television show The Sopranos and the movie Analyze This.

The Sopranos aired its pilot on HBO on January 10, while Analyze This debuted in theaters later that year on March 5. Both projects feature male protagonists, Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) and Paul Vitti (Robert De Niro) respectively, who are members of the greater New York City crime families. Soprano and Vitti both begin suffering from anxiety and depression that manifests in panic attacks of varying degrees. Due to their livelihoods and the toxically masculine expectations put upon them, they each begrudgingly seek out psychiatric treatment in secret for fear of backlash and ridicule.

Although The Sopranos is a television drama and Analyze This is a film comedy, their thematic and narrative similarities tie them together in more ways than separate them. Examining them as a pair also unlocks a path to consider what it means that 1999 became the year when mob men went to therapy—how putting an archetypal American male character in treatment says as much about American masculinity in 1999 as it does about Tony and Paul.

But why in 1999?

The mobster film has remained a strand of the American cinematic DNA since the likes of James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson helped the genre explode in the 1930s. Like any long-running genre, the mobster story is consistently therefore both a reflection of and commentary on the cultural landscape that surrounds it, which includes the always-changing face of American masculinity.

If Robinson and Cagney embodied the fast-talking, hard-living tough guy vision of early and mid-1930s mobsters, the late 1930s and 1940s hard-boiled them into a new strain. Film noir inflections amid World War II and the rise of Humphrey Bogart took the mobster archetype in a darker direction. With hundreds of thousands of American men dying overseas, Bogart led the pack of tortured men on screen who dealt with an America in bloodied freefall. War pictures only had room for heroic and virtuous masculinity, but mobsters and criminals could examine the rising anxieties of what happened after the last bombs dropped.

It turns out the aftermath was the 1950s that championed a post-war economic boom and vision of conservative traditionalism. American men were framed as breadwinners and the anchor of a proper (read: white and suburban) society. Technicolor happiness ruled screens pushing mobsters to the side, that is until the roiling counterculture spilled out in the 1960s and filmmakers looked to undercut the homogeny of the preceding decade. It took another ten years until the 1970s for mob men to factor back into American cinema in a major way, but they came roaring back as a central avenue for cultural refraction.

New Hollywood was ready to blow up every norm. Francis Ford Coppola used The Godfather (1972) to turn the American mobster into an operatic vision of broken dreams and greed. Martin Scorsese took us onto the Mean Streets (1973) with a gritty and unsentimental snapshot of puffed-out machismo. The gangster genre and the mobster man transmuted into avatars for Vietnam and Cold War-era discontents about the state of the country and how those in power wielded it. This is the era with the most strands to The Sopranos and Analyze This, but they were almost snipped by Ronald Reagan and company.

The 1980s, defined by Reaganomics and Arnold Schwarzenegger blowing everything up, promoted the pinnacle of American manhood as a pumped-up action hero—John Wayne’s steroid-crazed descendant. Mobsters went blockbuster, helped by Brian de Palma’s one-two punch of Scarface (1983) and The Untouchables (1987). It was, as theorists across disciplines have dubbed it, the post-Vietnam remasculinization of American culture. That war may not have been a raging success, but Rambo could make up for it with bigger guns and muscles. Mobsters were not at the center. Tommy guns and cigars cannot compete with souped-up rail guns.

And so, the 1990s were the era of post-Reagan cynicism and grunge. Just as the 1960s rebelled against the conservative 1950s, the 1990s threw off 1980s traditionalism. Scorsese started the mobster side of the decade with Goodfellas (1990), a masterpiece that stripped the genre of its mystique, laying bear the mob’s aching heart. Genre deconstructions like Scream (1996) over in horror embraced the post-modernist mindset of tearing down and cross-examining what was always accepted as the norm. Add in the Y2K anxieties about what a new millennium held for American life and the road to The Sopranos and Analyze This is complete.

Tough Guys in Treatment

In the pilot episode, Tony Soprano tells his therapist Dr. Melfi (Lorraine Bracco) “It’s good to be in something from the ground floor. I came too late for that, I know. But lately, I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end.” Soprano is speaking about organized crime, but he could just as well be waxing poetic about the peak of mobster storytelling. That nugget introduces one of the baseline differences between The Sopranos and Analyze This: Robert De Niro was a recognizable movie star in 1999 while James Gandolfini was unknown beyond a few notable supporting roles. Both casting choices influence the analysis that comes after.

By 1999, De Niro’s face was undeniably etched on the Mount Rushmore of mobster actors. His work with Scorsese in the aforementioned Mean Streets and Goodfellas, not to mention a little movie called The Godfather Part II (1974), put him on par with Al Pacino as the definitive genre king. De Niro brings that meta-textuality to Paul Vitti ensuring that the audience thinks about every other tough guy he portrayed in the preceding decades. Therefore, much like Clint Eastwood bringing his cowboy past to bear in Unforgiven (1992), De Niro invites viewers to imagine Vito Corleone or Jimmy Conway in treatment as well.

Comparatively, Gandolfini’s blank slate of a public persona means that he becomes synonymous with Tony Soprano. When the audience first sees Soprano waiting in Melfi’s office and staring at a statue of a naked woman, there is no movie-star-sized shadow falling over the character. As a result, Soprano’s station is one of building a character from scratch that echoes the mobsters that viewers are used to seeing but without an A-lister’s personalized baggage. Speaking with Deadline in 2019, the show’s creator said of Gandolfini that “his eyes grabbed my attention right away, those eyes that could be so sad, and then so ferocious.” And so, a new star was born.

Even for the divergent casting approaches, Vitti and Soprano quickly fall in step as characters. Both suffer inopportune panic attacks that catch them off guard—Vitti during a meeting after his dear friend is murdered, and Soprano during a BBQ following a stretch of tense family encounters. Vitti’s manifest as rapid breathing and chest tightness while Soprano’s breathing irregularity causes him to pass out. Both then seek out medical attention and have doctors inform them of the diagnosis. While The Sopranos skips showing us Soprano’s reaction to the doctor, it’s easy to imagine him responding just as Vittit does, angrily asking the E.R. doctor “Do I look like a guy who panics?”

It’s that question that situates the crux of the men’s shared dilemma: crime-hardened mobsters are not supposed to suffer from anything close to panic attacks and anxiety. As Dr. Benito Chatmon noted in an article for The American Journal of Men’s Health, cultural constructs around American masculinity reinforce “masculine norms” of emotional repression and aggressive behavior. That repression leads in turn to higher rates of depression and anxiety in men because bottling emotions up only succeeds in curdling them into something dangerous. For Vitti and Soprano, decades of this approach culminate in their conditions right when they are most concerned about being at their best.

Layered on top of this is the toxically masculine idea that any behavior likening men to femininity is reprehensible. Both Vitti and Soprano speak this into existence. Vitti tells his therapist Dr. Ben Sobel (Billy Crystal) “If I go fag, you die,” while Soprano tells Melfi that “my dad was tough…my mother wore him down to a little nub.” These comments, both early on in their respective treatments, reflect men so afraid of seeming feminine that they vilify and Other women as well as different forms of masculinity in an attempt to reassert their normative masculinities. Beating someone to death with a pipe is ok, but feminine coding is strictly out.

This feeling extends to the systems around them as both Vitti and Soprano express concern about what would happen if their mobster associates discovered the treatment. Soprano tells Melfi that “I have a semester and a half of college. So, I understand Freud. I understand therapy as a concept. But in my world, it does not go down.” In turn, Vitti makes sure Sobel knows that the other crime families are “animals,” and would use the therapy development as a way to assert that he was “weak.” Because of the societal norms enforced by toxic masculinity, The Sopranos and Analyze This lay bare how mobster characters, with their repressed emotions and constant violence, are often the personification of a problematic vision of American masculinity.

What comes after that assertion in each piece is a systematic deconstruction of the complexes around Vitti and Soprano that reinforce the problems. Yes, Analyze This approaches it with punchlines and gags like Vitti shooting up a pillow instead of punching it while The Sopranos opts for dark drama, but the undercurrent is the same—both men are in distress because of norms around them that are slowly killing them. As each continues in treatment, Vitti and Soprano confront and reckon with who they are and what they have to change in order to survive.

In order to zero in on 1999, we will put aside Analyze That (2002) and the subsequent five seasons of The Sopranos. By the end of Analyze This, Vitti has left the mob, citing that his criminal compatriots “have problems” but that he’s in “a better space.” Come the season finale “I Dream of Jeannie Cusamano,” Soprano has survived an assassination attempt and weathered a full-scale push to arrest him. While Soprano has not made the complete turnaround afforded to Vittit because of the comedic genre and condensed filmic storytelling principles, he does choose to return to and continue with therapy.

As a pairing, Analyze This and The Sopranos offer a coupling of complimentary statements about American masculinity in 1999. Vitti’s arc underscores the idea that archetypal and accepted masculinities, such as the mobsters’ De Niro enlivened for decades, represent an unsustainable lifestyle. He walks away because he is a man choosing to confront his failings and embrace a future self divorced from toxicity. For his part, Soprano’s end of the season is much darker, solidifying the character as a tragic anti-hero caught in the whirlpool of crime that will never fully allow him to be the version of himself that could make it outside. To paraphrase a different famous mobster, he is always pulled back in.

In the intervening 20-plus years since 1999, we have had a great deal of further cinematic and televisual reckoning with mobsters and American masculinities, but Analyze This and The Sopranos debuting in 1999 remains a fascinating moment in pop culture history. The turn of a century is as good a time as any to take stock of what should change in a quickly approaching future, and both Analyze This and The Sopranos adeptly turned their eyes on American mob men to do just that.

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