What The Sopranos Teaches Us About Writing Rape Into a Story
By: Matthew Black
Tags: Television, Equality, Culture, Justice, The Sopranos

[Spoilers for Game of Thrones and The Sopranos below. Although come on, you’ve had plenty of time to get around to them.]

Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken

On May 17th, 2015, Game of Thrones aired the infamous episode in which Sansa Stark was raped on her wedding night as Theon was forced to watch.

Fans did not respond positively. The scene was considered gratuitous, misery porn, a cheap attempt to shock the audience. Not only that, but the rape scene in question wasn’t even in the books, so it was clear this was something the showrunners could have avoided in any number of ways.

The camera cuts away from the scene as it happens, instead choosing to focus on Theon’s face as he witnesses the act. This is perhaps the worst part of it all: the fact that Sansa isn’t even the main focus of the scene. Her suffering is being used as a device to further along Theon’s character development, pushing him closer to the point where he can finally break free of Ramsey’s control.

But in the backlash to this scene, I think a lot of fans left the books off the hook in a way that isn’t fair. In the books’ version of this storyline, Sansa isn’t raped. Instead, her childhood friend Jeyne is the one who has to go through all this suffering, and the pain inflicted on her is much worse than what Sansa goes through. Cartoonishly worse.

That isn’t to excuse what the show did, but rather to ask the question of why the books get a pass and the show doesn’t. Like in the show, Jeyne’s suffering doesn’t really further the plot or tell us anything new about the characters; it exists mainly to emphasize how bad of a person Ramsey is, and to push Theon further to the breaking point where he finally helps. The main difference is that Jeyne isn’t a major character, and Sansa is.

But doesn’t that make it worse, not better? Rape is a constant threat in this universe, one that haunts the female characters at nearly every turn, but at no point does it happen to any point-of-view character. The only rape survivors of the main cast are Cersei (the assaults happens before the books begin), Tyrion (if you consider what happened with Tysha rape, which I do), and Daenerys, who never really considers what happens between her and Drogo to be anything but normal.

In the books, rape is something that happens to unimportant people. It exists to make us hate particular characters or give other characters motivation, but the main characters themselves don’t have to deal with it directly, on the page. George R. R. Martin has no problem showing women get casually raped in the background of a scene, but seems to write a lot of convenient scenarios to avoid the point-of-view characters from suffering from the same thing.

So with that in mind, Game of Thrones deserves a very, very small amount of credit for at least trying to show a main character deal with something the audience has been happy to tolerate when it happens to the hundreds of minor female characters on the show before her.

Overall, the show still handles it pretty terribly, and if you’re a writer trying to figure out how to incorporate such a delicate subject into a narrative, there’s a lot of lessons to be found in this show regarding what not to do. Perhaps the best way to show this is to compare it with another famous episode in a highly regarded HBO show: The Sopranos.

Lorraine Bracco in HBO’s The Sopranos, “Employee of the Month,” 2001.

‘The Employee of the Month’

This is one of the few episodes of the show to focus almost entirely on Dr. Melfi. I also think its one of the most powerful episodes of the whole show, despite the fact that I was very much not on board when I first realized what the episode would be about.

Melfi is walking to her car in a parking garage when she is suddenly confronted by a man we the audience have never seen. There’s a brief moment where it seems like this is connected to the mafia somehow — maybe one of Tony’s enemies wants her to tell them what she knows or something — but no, turns out he’s a random rapist, completely unconnected to anything else going on in the show.

This man rapes her in what is easily one of the darkest, most stomach-churning scenes in the entire show, made even more shocking by the fact that it’s happening to the person the audience would least expect this kind of thing to happen to. Melfi lives a life removed from any of the normalized violence of Tony’s world; up to this point, the audience has been conditioned to associate Melfi’s scenes with low stakes. When Melfi is on screen, nobody’s in immediate danger.

So, on first watch this scene comes out of nowhere, which from a writing perspective is something you want to avoid. For obvious reasons, rape is extremely upsetting to a lot of people. Nobody wants to have a graphic rape scene suddenly thrust upon them. Nowadays, HBO has content warnings before the show for exactly this reason.

The other issue is that these kinds of assaults only make up a tiny percentage of actual rape cases. These things still happen and it’s not exactly a mark against The Sopranos for having it play out this way, but ultimately you are much more likely to get assaulted by somebody you know, not a random guy in a parking garage. The fact that writers so often choose to have rape play out in the latter way, despite its statistical unlikeliness, is a sign of a general unwillingness to acknowledge rape culture. The fact that only the obvious, easy-to-recognize version of rape is usually portrayed on screen lets the majority of real-life rapists off the hook.

The fact that this scene comes out of nowhere is strike one. The fact that the assaulter is a random guy completely unconnected to the plot is strike two. So far, The Sopranos is on thin ice for this episode. If I hadn’t been watching with other people, I might have very well turned it off around then.

But the reason this episode stays an example of “rape handled well” and Sansa’s storyline doesn’t is partly because after Melfi is assaulted, the show spends another forty minutes or so dealing with it. The episode doesn’t end on that shocking note; the audience gets to see Melfi in the hospital, they get to see her talk to her family and to the police, they get to see all the little details of how this event has so thoroughly destroyed any sense of security she’s had up to this point.

Game of Thrones, meanwhile, leaves Sansa’s disastrous wedding night as the final scene of the episode. It has a cliffhanger vibe, a feeling of ‘how are Sansa and Theon gonna get out of this one?’ The scene has no interest in exploring rape on any kind of thematic level; it’s there to shock the audience, to make them wonder what’s going to happen next. It’s also there to make them feel sympathy for Theon and Sansa (which the viewer already had) and to make the viewer root for the eventual comeuppance of Ramsey (which the viewer was already doing).

The Sopranos takes the time to show Melfi recover from the event, and it shows how her family deals with it as well. It’s clear by this point that what’s happened isn’t merely a plot device or a vehicle for character development; the writers have things they want to say about how rape victims are treated. The police completely fail to help her achieve justice, and even as her ex-husband and son show support, their ability to help is hindered by the fact that they can only seem to express their emotions through threats of violence.

At one point her ex-husband says, “I just want to go find that bastard and kill him with my hands.” When her son sees the state she’s in he says, “I’m gonna kill these fuckers,” and then, “I want five minutes with that asshole!”

These are both typically masculine responses to this kind of event, and in each case, Melfi is unimpressed. These sentiments, which are so often framed as badass in other shows and films, are portrayed here as eye-roll inducing. This anger of theirs doesn’t help Melfi in any way; it’s just them seeing her suffer and making it about themselves. Neither of these characters are portrayed as bad people for responding like this, but the show definitely seems to be making a point about how people — especially men, who aren’t expected to be emotionally vulnerable — can fail to process their emotions in a thoughtful or productive way.

Lorraine Bracco and James Gandolfini in The Sopranos, ‘Employee of the Month,’ 2001.

Melfi’s Choice

The thing that really sets this episode apart, however, is how it connects to the larger plot of the show.

One of the biggest challenges of writing a rape scene into any work of fiction is that if it only exists to service the plot, that’s lazy writing, but if it doesn’t service the plot, it’s gratuitous.

As the episode goes on, the viewer starts to think they understand where this is all going. As the police fail to do anything about the assault despite Melfi having more than enough information to identify the guy, Melfi slowly begins to consider another option: let the mob boss patient of hers deliver some vigilante justice. If Melfi told Tony what happened, there is no doubt in any of our minds that he would’ve hunted the guy down. Tony probably would’ve given him a slow, painful death, much like Ramsey Bolton’s.

For a little while the episode dangles the possibility in front of us, and the viewer starts to imagine an entire new direction for Melfi’s character. For the first three seasons of the show, Melfi’s stayed firm and kept herself outside of Tony’s life. She’s resisted his early advances and rejected his gifts. It seems like this event serves the narrative purpose of changing their character dynamic. We start to imagine what it would be like to see Dr. Melfi and Tony working together. We wonder how that would affect their relationship, and whether this could be the start of Melfi becoming more directly involved in Tony’s life.

After spending so much time showing the pain and injustice of what Melfi’s going through, the show puts you into a position where you badly want Melfi to let Tony kill her rapist. It would’ve been so, so satisfying to see this happen, and she herself is clearly tempted. But at the end, when Tony can tell Melfi’s suffering and asks her if she wants to tell him something, Melfi says, “No,” and the credits roll.

It’s not exactly a feel-good ending, but it’s a powerful one. Melfi is given agency not by enacting vengeance, but by keeping to her moral code even when she desperately wants not to. As the showrunner David Chase puts it:

“If you’re raised on a steady diet of Hollywood movies and network television, you start to think, ‘Obviously there’s going to be some moral accounting here’. That’s not the way the world works. It all comes down to why you’re watching. If all you want is to see big Tony Soprano take that guy’s head and bang it against the wall like a cantaloupe… The point is — Melfi, despite her pain and suffering, made her moral, ethical choice and we should applaud her for it. That’s the story.”

Melfi decides not to pursue revenge through Tony, but the knowledge that she could get it at any point is what helps her feel in control. This doesn’t instantly cure her trauma — it’s clear that this event is something that sticks with her long after the episode ends. But The Sopranos recognizes something that Game of Thrones never quite seemed to understand, or never seemed to seriously explore: that trauma can’t be resolved through revenge. You can’t give Melfi a happy ending by having her feed her rapist to his own dogs and giving a little smile as she walks away from his screams.

So, in terms of using rape as a plot device or a cheap tool for character development, where does this episode stand? From a purely plot standpoint, the function of this episode is to provide a reason for Melfi to continue being Tony’s therapist. When the episode began, Melfi was considering sending Tony to a behavioral therapist. She seemed to be under the impression that she had helped him as much as she could, and it was time for him to move on. But after she’s attacked she changes her mind. It’s never explicitly explained why, but the most likely reason is that she likes the sense of control he provides. She finds comfort in the knowledge that she could unleash Tony on her rapist at any point, so she decides to keep him around.

Was there a way to keep Melfi on the show as Tony’s therapist without using rape? Yes, most likely. But it also serves the purpose of complicating her relationship with Tony, as well as exploring just how far her commitment to her moral code goes.

In a lesser show, there would’ve been some kind of romantic relationship between Melfi and Tony. Even a good show would’ve been tempted to complicate their relationship, to have Melfi grow increasingly involved in Tony’s life. There were points where I thought their dynamic would take a similar turn to how Walt and Skyler’s dynamic in Breaking Bad went, in which Skyler slowly starts to come around to Walt’s side.

Here, it was very easy to imagine a sequence of events in which Melfi breaks down and tells Tony what happened. Tony is then outraged on her behalf, has the guy murdered, Melfi becomes more sympathetic towards him, and so on. That would’ve made for some juicy, exciting TV, but it wouldn’t have stayed true to the characters and it would’ve contradicted the larger message of the show: that the mafia is bad, and involving yourself with someone like Tony will bring you nothing but further pain.

This episode makes it clear that no matter what, Dr. Melfi and Tony’s relationship will never be anything more than professional. It shows that while Dr. Melfi may occasionally make questionable choices (like not sending Tony to a behaviorial therapist), she will never break her moral code, even when everything in the world seems to be pushing her to do so. It also adds an extra layer of complexity to their scenes together, with the audience knowing something crucial about Melfi’s motivations that Tony himself is unaware of.

(The fact that every actor involved gives an amazing performance doesn’t hurt either.)

So, if you’re a writer who, for whatever reason, wants to include rape in a story, there are a couple questions to ask yourself:

Is this gratuitous?

Does this only exist to serve the plot?

Does this not affect the plot at all?

Does this only exist to provide character motivation?

If your answer is yes to any of these questions, take a step back and rethink things. Also consider these other questions:

Is this the kind of story where the reader/viewer can reasonably expect something like this to happen? This isn’t a massive tonal shift, right?

Are you prepared to substantially explore how this affects the victim, to give their trauma significant narrative weight?

Is there no other way to tell this story without including a rape scene?

Are you making sure not to create a narrative that blames the victim or lets the perpetrator off the hook, explicitly or implicitly?

If the answer is no to any of these questions, take another step back. Maybe you shouldn’t be telling this story.

Like any painful, provocative subject, you should always write about it with a lot of thoughtfulness, compassion, and a healthy dose of self-awareness. That’s what The Sopranos did. They never used rape as window dressing, or as a shorthand way to show how evil a certain character is, or to make the victim more sympathetic. It was a narrative choice the writers only made once throughout the show, and they mostly handled it well.

The show didn’t always treat women particularly great, (the characterization of Lorraine Calluzzo in season 5 felt particularly lazy and sexist to me), but when it came to dealing with rape, the show took it seriously in a way that Game of Thrones never did.