Remembering ‘Johnny Cakes’ of The Sopranos
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The Vito–Johnny Cakes affair was, however, just the culmination of creator David Chase’s exploration of the darkly comic collision between old-world, Italian family values and new-world, New Jersey ones. For example, a failed attempt by Tony’s accountant, Patsy Parisi, to shake down a local Starbucks produces his memorable complaint that “It’s over for the little guy,” as in “There goes the neighborhood.” In season 4, Tony and Carmela Soprano are shocked to learn that Anthony Jr.’s high school English teacher is teaching Melville’s Billy Budd as a “gay book”; Tony jokes that Billy Budd must have been the “ship’s florist” while an irate Carmela cries that this “gay stuff” is pervading not just TV but “our educational system.” Tony echoes his wife’s sentiment when, two seasons later, he tells his psychiatrist that today’s TV shows “rub our noses in it.” If it’s self-referential, postmodern pop-culture you’re after, The Sopranos had it all.

Tony isn’t laughing, however, when one of his “top earners” jumps ship after being spotted inside a gay bar in Manhattan. Vito flees to New Hampshire, checks into a B&B as “Vincent” (a sportswriter from Scottsdale), but winds up staying longer than originally planned after tasting those Johnny Cakes. “I gotta have some of those Johnny Cakes!” he exclaims, bellying up to the counter for another short stack. Later, after preparing a home-cooked meal of pork chops and vinegar peppers for Jim, the gangster gushes: “I love you, Johnny Cakes.” Like our anti-hero Tony Soprano, Vito faces two forms of family that are equally ferocious: the thugs that comprise the Di Meo crime family, angry with Vito for disgracing the family name, and the scheming sisters and wives, who are just as ruthless as their “made” men. Indeed this is the central conceit of the series: family can be fatal, and within this crime–family intersection, it isn’t solely Phil Leotardo who demands that Vito be punished, even whacked, but his wife Patty, who declares connivingly that “Vito has to be made to face his problems squarely,” which really means: kill Vito. Phil does so to satisfy the demands of both of his families.  Only on The Sopranos does such deceptively simple small talk result in homicide.

The outrage evoked by the ambiguity of Chase’s choice of an ending to the series—in a now-famous maneuver, the creator pulled the plug on his creation by cutting abruptly to black just as the Sopranos were gathering in a Bloomfield diner for what may or may not have been Tony’s last supper—all but eclipsed the other great conclusion from earlier in the season. The episode “Live Free or Die” takes its title from the New Hampshire state motto, which Vito spots on a license plate before making his way into an antique shop. The preppy storeowner approaches, compliments Vito on his “good eye” in finding the “most expensive piece in the store,” before adding: “You’re a natural.” The platitude is that everybody wants to love and be loved in return, but where same-sex love is concerned, the matter is more complicated: being told, even taught, that one’s love is “natural” is the necessary precondition to loving freely.

The anthemic Independence Day song, therefore, that rounds out this episode—“Hey Baby, it’s the Fourth of July!”—brings the philosophical dimensions of Vito’s and Jim’s predicament to the fore. “Live Free or Die” bears out Jean-Paul Sartre’s argument that the closet is an existential grave. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre posits that a closeted homosexual is living in “bad faith” precisely because he will not acknowledge his authentic self and therefore never “escape into the region of freedom and of good will.” The bad faith, and attendant anguish, of the closeted subject is characterized by what Sartre calls the “wish not to see a certain aspect of my being.” Vito, however, is more likely to gather strength not from the words of Sartre, but of Sinatra, and, in another impeccable musical choice, “My Way” plays inside Vito Spatafore’s big black Cadillac while he swills vodka and drives recklessly down a wintry road. In the wake of Costelloe’s death, the words of that song resound as a queer and triumphant tribute to Gannascoli’s longtime friend and costar: “To say the things he truly feels/ And not the words of one who kneels/ The record shows/ I took the blows/ And I did it my way.”

 

Colin Carman, PhD, is a visiting assistant professor at Colby College.