| Culturebox A Loss in the Family James Gandolfini changed television, and us. By Jessica Winter
Posted Thursday, Jun 20, 2013, at 12:42 PM ET  Charisma is measured in contradictions, and Tony Soprano possessed two sides of all of his qualities. He was terrifying and vulnerable, relatable and unfathomable, cuddly and cold. He was a sociopath and a sympathetic victim of his environment. He was a bullying mob patriarch whose mama was the monster in all of his nightmares. He was a master strategist in a fuzzy bathrobe yelling at his lazy kids. He killed men with his bare hands and ate his feelings straight out of the fridge. He was, like many a parent or sibling or old friend, someone we kept hoping might change and kept never changing, someone we loved against our better judgment. Or maybe we simply loved James Gandolfini, the actor who embodied the greatest television character of all time, who died at age 51 of an apparent heart attack on Wednesday while vacationing with his family in Italy. It is a cliché to say that we "love" our pop-cultural icons, and it seems like a bad joke to compare the death of a man who played a Family member to losing an actual family member. But a television protagonist can leave traces of himself around the house; he's in front of you so long that you might start sensing him behind you. Gandolfini spent some 172 hours in my living room: two full cycles of The Sopranos, which ran for 86 episodes on HBO from 1999–2007. Most of us have fallen in love on far less. To ... To continue reading, click here.
Also In Slate
A Loss in the Family
Wiretaps and Drones Aren't Everything
You Don't Have the Right to Remain Silent
|
 |
No comments:
Post a Comment