Tony Soprano and The Psychedelic Experience
An analysis
Earlier this year, amid a long social-distanced winter, I binged The Sopranos for a second time.
After wrapping the series, I went to the show’s subreddit to share a choppier version of the analysis you’re about to read. The post seemed to strike a chord in the community and spurred some insightful discussions in the comment section.
Like so many impactful scenes in The Sopranos, Tony’s peyote trip, and what he ultimately gained from it, is open to interpretation.
I thought I’d polish up my take, and repost it here…
**SPOILERS AHEAD**
Friday April 30th, 2021
I just finished The Sopranos for the second time. First watched it, and loved it, when I was a senior in college ten years ago. I’m thirty-one now.
It’s amazing how many subtle yet profound moments I was able to catch on a second viewing. I’m not sure if I missed the significance of certain scenes the first time because I wasn’t ready to process them, or if my life experience at the time capped my capacity to relate to the heaviness of what the characters were going through. I don’t know. Maybe the retrospection that comes with age has a way of magnifying the mundane.
The scene I chose to write about is from “The Second Coming” (S6E19), during a Tony-Melfi session following Tony’s experience tripping on peyote in Las Vegas.
It’s worth noting that the scene is framed with chiaroscuro lighting — a style that uses dramatic light, emphasized with shadow, to deepen thematic contrast. It’s the same technique Caravaggio used to heighten the primal and divine forces of nature in his paintings.
Here are some examples:
I like to think this was an intentional creative choice, made to underscore the meaning-of-it-all dialogue between patient and psychiatrist, or, more poetically, man and reason.
The session comes after AJ’s suicide attempt earlier in the episode. Broken and forlorn, Tony starts the session in pity, asking his psychiatrist: “Why me? Doesn’t every parent make mistakes?”
To which Melfi responds: “Why not you?”
“Because I’m a good guy, basically,” Tony tells himself, trying to rationalize the chaos, “…who loves his family.”
“There’s a balance,” he elaborates, “there’s a yin and a yang. You think you know…you think you learn something”
“Know what?” asks Melfi.
No longer able to contain his psychedelic revelations, Tony confesses that he did peyote on a recent trip to Vegas.
Melfi reacts with a playfully disappointed expression, not exactly interested in analyzing what Tony has to say about the experience. When he tells her that he took it for no other reason than being “curious”, Melfi projects that he must’ve been “searching for something”.
“Well,” Tony recalls, “I saw some things. Not things, per se hallucinations…it was kind of disappointing. There wasn’t any of that.”
“What was there?” asks Melfi.
“It’s kind of hard to describe,” Tony says. He then asks if she’s had any experience with “ya know acid, shit like that?”
“No”, she replies, not hiding the hint of judgment.
“All I can say is, I saw for pretty certain that this…” Tony swirls his finger in a circle, “everything we see and experience…is not all there is.”
“What else is there?” Melfi asks through a slightly sarcastic smile.
Tony considers the question, looking off with an expression as contemplative as it is relieved: “Something else.”
“That’s as far as I’m gonna go with it, I don’t fucking know.”
“Alternate universes?” Melfi suggests.
“Oh, you’re gonna be a comedian now” Tony snaps before continuing his introspection.
“I’m not,” Melfi replies sincerely.
“Maybe,” Tony calmly concedes.
“This is gonna sound stupid but I saw at one point that our mothers, they’re bus drivers. They’re the vehicle that gets us here. They drop us off and go on their way. They continue on their journey. But the problem is we keep trying to get back on the bus instead of just letting it go.”
Melfi, impressed, gazes at her patient: “That’s very insightful.”
“Well Jesus,” Tony cracks, “don’t act so surprised.”
“You know you have these thoughts,” he says, turning toward the light through the window,” and you almost grab it…and then…PFFT,” he says, flicking his fingers from under his chin.
Melfi glances down, away from Tony to end the scene. His revelations have clearly affected her.
More than just being a powerful scene from one of the best episodes of the series, Tony’s insights offer a remarkable description of the psychedelic experience in general.
Tony can’t shake his encounter with the ineffable. You can tell by the way he recalls the experience that it offered him catharsis, even peace, however fleeting, The acting here from James Gandolfini is as good as it gets. So is the writing. How Melfi, who’s dismissive at first, blind by her lack of experience, is, by the end of the session, genuinely impressed with Tony’s insights.
While the Sopranos was ahead of its time in commenting on the subject, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that a psychedelic trip can be as powerful as years of therapy. Dr. Stanislav Grof, acclaimed psychiatrist and pioneer of entheogenic research, claimed in the early 70s that psychedelics would be to the study of the mind what the microscope was to biology and the telescope to astronomy.
Fortunately, the taboo surrounding the use of these substances is waning. What Rick Doblin is doing at MAPs is working. Businesses are forming. What was once impossible now seems, well, inevitable.
With psychedelics on the rise, alcohol is falling out of favor. Why is this? It might be that hyper-presence is a better high than crude dissociation, and that it has been all along.
I’ll be honest, I’m not sure if The Sopranos writing team had any of this in mind when they penned The Second Coming. I’m guessing they didn’t. But I’d wager good money someone on that team drew from a personal experience in order to craft something so honest.
Like the entirety of the series, this scene stays with me, enduring. Because like Tony, I find comfort in believing that everything we see and experience, everything we think we know, is not all there is.
In closing, I can’t help but call to mind something Andrew Sullivan, a writing hero of mine, and someone who’s never been afraid to broadcast the awe-inspiring benefits of psychedelics once articulated on the matter so eloquently.
A profound psychedelic experience can give a human being a new perspective, a sense of overpowering divine love, of the unimportance of death, and of the power unleashed by the love of others. It changes you because you cannot unsee the view from the mountaintop. It disappears from view in normal practical life, but your knowledge that it is there, that transcendence is possible, mitigates the jagged and ugly impulses of the primate mind.
Thanks for reading.
2 Corinthians 4.18
while we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal.
Awesome post!