On the Right - The Sopranos' Underside.(show thrives on sensationalism despite critical success)(Brief Article)

NEW YORK, APRIL 3

I swore I'd shoot myself if I didn't write about it, "it" being The Sopranos, Episode VI, seen on Sunday, an exercise in voluptuous self- abasement. The experience (not new; I had seen most of Year One) was instructive for technical and artistic reasons (the program is justly acclaimed for polish, ingenuity, and superlative acting), but is most interesting in its confirmation of the psychological depravity of the viewing audience. They see it (we see it) because of its shock value as exhibitionistic entertainment, but the question arises: Does it tell us more about the awful human behavior, or about the disposition to transform depictions of it into rip-roaring entertainment?

To explain what goes on, one has the difficulty of trying to explain what it's like to come across a murder being committed. It is without question exciting, as murders are. A visit to a Stockholm late-night club featuring consummated on-stage copulation is memorable, even if the evening ended with bachelor-party resolution not to do it again.

In The Sopranos we get a quick introduction into a strip club, which serves the hour as wallpaper, the camera constantly returning to a half-dozen listless women, bare but for bikinis. Individually, they make appearances with staff members of the club, an appendage of Soprano capo, Tony. In most of these sequences, the girls are either giving sex or promising it or being intimidated or trying to intimidate. The language is uniformly obscene. A review of the series advises us that a cleaned-up-language take is simultaneously shot, the obscenities eliminated; this version no doubt for release to army camps, whose personnel would be astonished to hear on the screen inter- gender vulgarities, language 18-year-old recruits would never hear used, or use themselves.

We move to the courtship of Tony's daughter at Columbia University by a fellow student who very quickly beds her, except that they don't bother to use a bed. The only piety in the entire hour is the young man's dutiful, indeed semi-explicit emplacement of a condom (before the hour is over, he will leave her, pleading the burden ...