The Disappointment of Meadow Soprano
By: Matthew Black
Tags: Politics, Television, Society, Family, The Sopranos

The kids on The Sopranos can be hard to like. They’re often described as spoiled, whiny, self-centered, and hypocritical, and a lot of the time they are. On a show filled with murderers and thieves, somehow these two characters managed to provoke the most contempt from viewers.

While I admittedly lost patience with AJ quite a bit over the seasons, I still maintained a lot of sympathy for Meadow. They were both bratty from time to time, but Meadow was smart and often empathetic towards other people. AJ always felt hopeless, but Meadow had a legitimate shot at breaking free of the mafia world she grew up in.

This is what makes her character arc throughout the show so powerful, and so fundamentally disappointing. She grows a lot throughout the show’s eighty-six episodes, but not in the one way that counts the most.

“The spoiled liberal”

The Sopranos was a uniquely uncomfortable show at times for a lot of reasons, but somehow the arguments Meadow would get in with her parents over race and politics are still some of the most painful scenes to watch.

There’s a scene in season 3, for instance, where Meadow gets in an argument with her father. For the past few episodes, Tony had been getting on Meadow’s case for having a boyfriend who is half black, and now here he finds out that her bike had been stolen by a black guy. Rather than show any sympathy towards Meadow, Tony smirks and acts as if his warnings against Meadow dating a black guy have been vindicated.

This was a scene in which Tony was clearly in the wrong, so I really hoped Meadow would win the argument. I hoped she would coolly explain to him just how racist and hypocritical he was being here, in a way that made him realize how he was acting and maybe make him apologize. After all, if someone’s being a bigot, the most satisfying thing in the world is watching someone else set them straight.

Instead, Meadow reacts in a manner frustratingly similar to those crazy SJW memes that flooded the internet in the years leading up to 2016. Everything she said was technically correct, but she was flailing and emotional while Tony was confident and collected. The scene ends with her crying and storming out of the room, Tony getting the last word.

The scene was frustrating to watch, because I think a lot of young liberals — particularly young white liberals — can see themselves in Meadow in this moment. Most of us know what it’s like to lose an argument with a bigot not because the bigot was in the right, but because they were older and self-assured whereas we were young and inexperienced.

There are several scenes like this in the show, with the liberal Soprano kids going up against the conservative Soprano parents, where I can so easily see them the way that Trump supporters probably view people like me: as a spoiled, naive idiot who thinks they know better than their grounded, realistic parents.

I would often watch the show with my conservative parents in the room (who, to their credit, seemed perfectly aware that Tony is in the wrong in these scenes), and I would be tempted to try to distance myself from these characters, to say “oh, please” every time Meadow stormed out of a room or whenever AJ went off on a hollow rant about the environment. It was my way of signalling, without saying it directly, “I hope you don’t think I’m like this.”

After all, there are a lot of differences between me and the Soprano kids. I’m not rich, for one thing, and my left-wing politics aren’t constantly undermined by the fact that my dad’s in the mafia. And yet, there’s something deeply, painfully relatable about the way these political arguments play out on the show. A lot of it centers around the power dynamics surrounding money.

Meadow (Jamie-Lynn Sigler) in The Sopranos, “University,” 4/01/01.

“Ungrateful”

If you want to make money writing about politics, the best thing you can be right now is a white liberal with Trump-supporting family members. Over the last five years, I’ve lost count of the amount of times an article went viral that was essentially “I used to think my parents/spouse/relatives were fine, but their support for Trump has driven a wedge in our relationship.”

I myself have benefited from this trend; my most successful article so far has been a piece where I wrote about my increasingly pro-Trump family. If you read through the comments of these articles, not just my article but any of them, you’ll notice one response, in particular, gets repeated a lot: “These Trump supporters you hate sacrificed a lot to raise you and give you a good life. Be grateful.”

I don’t find this to be a convincing argument. If you’re a parent, you don’t deserve any special treatment for raising your kids and doing your best to make sure they turn out right. Your kids didn’t sign up to be your kids, and they don’t owe you anything except the same level of respect you give towards them. My parents, for all their faults, have never pulled the “I raised you” card in any political argument that I can remember.

The “I raised you” card is there though, lingering in the background of every heated political conversation between parent and child. It’s an annoying, inconvenient truth a lot of liberals have to deal with: the fact that the Trump-supporting assholes that frustrate them so much are the same assholes who gave them a place to live and food to eat for eighteen years, probably more.

This issue is aggravated by the fact that, in part because of the way people like their parents have voted their entire lives, it is harder now than ever to live on your own. The cost of living keeps going up while wages keep stagnating, which means that a lot of young liberals are reliant on their Trump-supporting parents for much longer than they’d like to be.

There is no shame in living with your parents as an adult. At least, there shouldn’t be any shame in it, but I think we’re all familiar with the stereotype of the socialist who lives in their parents’ basement. You can criticize your conservative parents all you want, but if you’re reliant on your parents for money and/or housing, then for a lot of people this undermines any beliefs you have against them. You’ll hear the question, “How are we supposed to take your opinion on the economy seriously if you can’t even support yourself financially?”

In a lot of ways these are strawman arguments, but there is a valid, if uncomfortable question somewhere inside them: if you believe that your parents are bigoted in their beliefs, that their support for Trump makes them bad people, are you a bad person for taking their money?

This is a question that follows the Sopranos kids around throughout the show. Some of Meadow and AJ’s best moments are when they point out the holes in Tony’s worldview, but these moments feel hollow because, despite Meadow’s disgust with her father’s behavior in the early seasons, she still takes his money.

She goes to a fancy university and never has to worry about how she’s going to pay for it. In the final season she’s deciding whether to become a lawyer or a doctor, two career choices that probably wouldn’t be available to her if she hadn’t been given all the resources in the world to pursue a higher education. Meadow thinks of herself as a good person, but her whole lifestyle has been funded by the violent exploitation of countless people.

The mafia is a metaphor

Meadow’s struggle of reconciling the immorality of her father’s profession with the benefits she reaps from it is not exclusive to people growing up in the mafia, although they are of course one of the more extreme examples.

If you grow up in the Western world, you are complicit to violence in some way. I’ll criticize smartphone companies for the way they treat their factory workers, but I still own a smartphone. I can criticize the genocide of Native Americans as one of the most atrocious acts in human history, but I will still be living on the land that used to be theirs. Does that make my criticisms invalid?

If you’re anything like me, that question reminds you of this meme:

It’s impossible to exist within a society without passively endorsing it in some way, so pointing stuff like this out as some sort of gotcha is often a lazy, easy way to dismiss legitimate criticisms of the institutions that control our lives.

While nowadays, people who try to dismiss leftists by pointing out they own iPhones are usually mocked, there is a reason why that argument exists in the first place: some people can’t deal with the fact that they are complicit, often in ways that can’t be avoided if you want to live a normal life. In their minds, their choices are to admit that they’re a bad person, or to dismiss those criticisms altogether. To admit that they benefit from exploitative labor practices every time they buy a new shirt would reflect poorly on them, so it’s easier to ignore the issue.

This is why a lot of liberals are so unwilling to confront certain aspects of Barack Obama’s legacy, like the fact that his drone-strikes hit civilians, which you’d think most reasonable people would agree constitutes a war crime. Because if Obama is a war criminal, that means they’ve enthusiastically voted for a war criminal. No matter how much better Obama would’ve been compared to opponents, this is still a deeply uncomfortable truth for many of us to deal with.

The best way to handle stuff like this is to simply accept that you’re complicit, and fight against the problem anyway without any of the moral posturing. It’s impossible to be a perfectly moral person in a society like ours, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be critical when you see something worth criticizing. As Meadow herself puts it to Tony in a season 2 episode: “Sometimes, we’re all hypocrites.” That doesn’t mean the problems you’re a hypocrite about are any less real.

Self-awareness vs cognitive dissonance

This is why Meadow’s character arc throughout The Sopranos is so depressing. When confronted with the contradiction of her progressive beliefs with her father’s immoral actions, she doesn’t accept the same advice she gave a few seasons back. She chooses instead to ignore the problem altogether. In season five, when her boyfriend confronts her about the violence her family gets up to, she’s got this to say:

You know, you talk about these guys like it’s an anthropology class. But the truth is, they bring certain modes of conflict resolution from all the way back

in the old country. From the poverty of the Mezzogiorno, where all higher authority was corrupt.

Meadow is smart enough to know how dishonest this framing is, but if she were to confront her family’s actions honestly, she’d be forced to acknowledge that nearly every good thing in her life is the result of her father being a violent, murdering mob boss.

Instead, she finds a way to dismiss this in a way that fits into the rest of her liberal ideology. Her father isn’t an evil criminal; he’s just an oppressed minority driven to crime by government corruption and inequality.

What’s particularly frustrating about this is that by the final season, Meadow is a fairly mature woman who’s long since gotten most of her shit together. If that argument over the black guy stealing her bike happened again, there’s no doubt in my mind that she would’ve effectively held her ground.

Not only that, but by the final season Meadow’s finally approaching a place in her life where she is no longer reliant on her father’s blood money. She no longer needs her parents’ support to survive in the world, nor does she need her parents’ permission for anything she wants to do. But it’s too late: the cognitive dissonance she relied on to justify her complicity has become firmly ingrained. The disgust with her family’s actions she often struggled to contain in early seasons, she’s long since buried deep down.

For instance, back in season 3, she seemed to have figured out that her ex-boyfriend Jackie Jr. was not killed by drug dealers, as the police concluded, but at the hands of someone in her father’s crew. (This isn’t openly confirmed within the show, but it’s a popular interpretation for her outburst at Jackie Jr.’s funeral.) By season 5, however, she seems to have completely suppressed any suspicion of what actually happened. When her current boyfriend brings it up, she repeats the official story without hesitation.

This kind of development of someone’s worldview is depressingly common. There’s the annoying phrase a lot of older conservatives use against young liberals — “when you’re older you’ll change your mind” — which is frustrating because for a certain type of person this is true.

There’s a certain type of person, mostly people with sheltered childhoods, who go through a period in their late teenage years/early twenties where they start to see all the little injustices in the world and try to speak out against them. In doing so, sometimes they make the mistake of seeing societal problems as the results of individual failures of common people.

For example, maybe they blame those around them for not recycling enough rather than direct their anger at the politicians or CEOs who have the ability to enact large-scale change. Maybe they get a little too self-righteous, a little too quick to shame others for not doing enough to fight back against the problems of the world. They put too much weight on their own shoulders.

A lot of these people end up getting burnt out at the fact that these injustices we have to deal with not only seem insurmountable but that it’s nearly impossible to be alive in the western world without being complicit in some way. So they stop caring, stop paying attention, and years later when they see young people being passionate about these things, they roll their eyes and say the same thing that was said to them. “Just wait ’til you get older.”

They see their apathy as wisdom, and their past convictions as an embarrassing period of their life they’ve managed to outgrow. In reality, their disengagement from caring about injustice is borne out of laziness and complacency, an unwillingness to acknowledge their own shortcomings.

Acknowledging your complicity doesn’t need to be the worst thing in the world, but a lot of people cannot or will not do it.