Saturday, July 6, 2019

Least likely



It's always interesting when Johnny Sack shows up on The Sopranos.

Tony is a lot of fun to spend time with, as a character. (If you actually knew him, maybe not.) But his appearance, behavior, and lifestyle are pretty consistent with what you'd expect a mob boss to be like. The interesting character turns are buried under that.

Johnny's if anything a bigger boss, since he's a power player in New York, still basically the center of the universe. But he's got none of that Italian-style extroversion. From what we can tell, he's monogamous, faithful to his wife. His only apparent vice is cigarettes, which for a man in that position is pretty lame.

Overall the impression he gives off is a harried office manager. Someone this off-model has to be based on a real gangster.

2 comments:

susan said...

It's been a while now since we watched The Sopranos, but as I remember the relationship between Tony and Johnny Sack it seems to me, although they were contemporaries in age and semi-friends, they were also very different people. Tony was a very volatile and unsettled character whereas Johnny was a conservative. The office manager allusion is a good way of describing him. Tony was a 'hands on' thug while Johnny gave orders to others when violence was required.

Ben said...

Pretty well-put. Both of them are dealing with the fact that federal law enforcement is constantly watching and waiting for them to slip up. They adapt in different ways. Tony's background and motivation are developed in more detail, since the whole show is about them. Johnny's more enigmatic, as far as I know.