Have we reached the point of the ‘Sincere Turn’ in the current era of political discourse? Can earnestness ever be the predominant function of parliamentary debates and panel shows or, with Britain specifically in mind, is the sneering cult of the arched eyebrow destined to have its way?

Superficially, it felt as if the UK were beginning to tire of the smirking theatricality which had previously defined the public face of its parliament, with the Labour Party bearing a genuinely welcome humourless disposition in a country where most leaders of the opposition eventually end up guest hosting Have I Got News for You. 

But we know how that ended up, with the longstanding court jester emphatically gaining control of the entertainment, after embracing pantomime in a campaign which appropriately saw him hiding in a fridge to avoid scrutiny from reporters.

Reading Christopher Isherwood’s Farewell to Berlin last week put me in mind of this purging of the performative from the political, as I occasionally struggled with a readable, entertaining and well-meaning novel which had a tendency towards glibness at the wrong moments.

Isherwood’s playful memoir had me wondering whether a well-meaning approach to political struggle can ever get by without seriousness, and furthermore whether irony might be framed as an innately conservative characteristic.

As a relatively short piece of fiction goes, Goodbye to Berlin is a diligent piece of craftsmanship, vividly rendering a life peopled by picaresque street urchins, charmingly sterile toffs, a coquettish landlady and the inimitable Sally Bowles. While there is a not insubstantial narrative thread holding the novel together, it is comprised as a series of vignettes from Isherwood’s time in Berlin, where he experiences a variety of social milieu during his time working as an English teacher, and, along the way, engages with the changing political environment of Weimar Germany.

The problem is this political environment, and its treatment throughout the novel, is never fully assimilated within this rambunctious environment, emerging as no more than vaguely affective window dressing. Isherwood’s intention is to, through a blithe, carnivalesque figuration of Berlin, implicitly foreshadow the era of Nazi government which is to become its dark antithesis, but the requisite tonal sensitivity is found wanting in this aim.

There are obvious objections to my point, chief among them being the argument that literature can do better than portray those caught up in historical atrocities as tragic automatons. Goodbye to Berlin admittedly avoids this trap in its very human portrayal of the idiosyncratic Landauers, the upper-class Jewish family befriended by Isherwood, while the embers of Berlin’s Communist underworld burn brightly until the very end.

But when we observe the moments where sincerity steals into the novel, its presence is worrying all too often felt as an afterthought, as if Isherwood has suddenly remembered the complicated human entanglement involved in the farce. This is evident in the ‘On Reugen Island’ episode, a chapter recounting the constant vicissitudes of a possibly homosexual relationship between Chris’ (1) housemates Peter and Otto, with Otto comically winding up his older friend / partner by making himself a favourite with the local women of the eponymous island.  Isherwood wraps up a raucous and chaotic chapter with a wistful reflection on ‘Otto’s dancing-partners [who] have stopped lingering sadly in the twilight’, and it feels as if he is in the act of retroactively infusing his own writing with order and meaning.

Other times, it almost seems, though no doubt he has noble intentions as to rendering the pathos involved, as if sincerity is vindicating Isherwood. Particularly apt is the case of Chris’ friend Bernhard Landauer, he of the ‘gentle ironical laugh’, whose ‘gestures’, Isherwood recounts ‘are clothed in arrogance’ – not only does he treat his friends ‘as children’, but most frustratingly the businessman will ‘never tell me anything about himself, or about the things which are most important to him’. The Jewish Bernhard’s fate, likely unconsciously, is somewhat stylised as a reproof to his knowing, ironic manner, with Chris fancying that he spotted ‘something a little exaggerated in his laughter’ the last time he saw him, at it is interesting at least that he saw fit to highlight that Bernhard is less than even master of the humour of his situation at this point.

The purpose of this piecemeal sincerity is to uphold Isherwood’s dominant narrative mode of gentle ironic mocking which relies on the author installing himself as the novel’s all-seeing deity. A further look into the notorious ‘Sally Bowles’ chapter should better illuminate my point here.

Of all of Isherwood’s semi-fictional creations, Sally Bowles, based on Jean Ross, the author’s real-life acquaintance during his time in Berlin, is one of his best-known and best-loved. Chris’ adventures with the happy-go-lucky cabaret singer form the comic crescendo to Goodbye to Berlin, and there is much to be enjoyed about her blasé attitude towards her various romantic relationships and idiosyncratic attempts to assimilate in Berlin.

To be slightly more exact, the Sally chapters are mainly so riotous because of her perpetually quotable brand of ditsy naiveté, as typified by her conviction that she can get herself out of her endless scrapes by becoming a famous actress. Another layer of humour is added by Chris’ implicit role as an urbane, ironic judge who acts as a revealing foil to her character – as Sally puts it, ‘you do understand women most marvellously: better than any man I’ve ever met’.

This is not without its uncomfortable moments, as when Sally puts her foot in it by, during a meet-up with Chris and the Landauers’ daughter, Natalie, excusing her lateness because she’s been ‘making love to a dirty old Jew producer’. It’s hardly surprising that Ross’ family objected to how the singer was immortalised, with her daughter Sarah Caudwell writing in a 1986 ‘Reply to Berlin’ in the New Statesman that she suspected that Isherwood’s portrait of Sally Bowles more accurately resembled how he himself behaved with his male friends. Indeed, this is not without substantiation from Ishwerwood’s own end, who admits that much time of his was spent with friends who ‘fluttered around town exclaiming how sexy the Stormtroopers looked in their uniforms’. (2)

In Goodbye to Berlin this fascination in fascist aesthetics from a socialist standpoint does have a not-so-occasional tendency to pop up, as in the amusing rendition of Chris’ housemate Frl. Mayr, a virulent anti-Semite who sits ‘like a war-horse at the living-room table’, or the ‘model son’ Lothar, a Nazi whose Spartan work-ethic is admired by Chris while staying with Otto.

For Goodbye to Berlin to be elevated to the status of serious literature rather than an extended comic piece, the work of an accomplished writer who can write about ‘anything you like’ (the words with which Sally goads Chris), perhaps some device is thus needed to insulate Isherwood from this notion that he has played the role of a passive, vapid outsider during a time of national crisis. Perfunctory, fleeting gestures of sincerity which lend credibility to the largely wry disposition behind the novel’s structure perform this work, tying Goodbye to Berlin’s ribaldry into the illusion of something more.

Isherwood’s lack of success in adding an undertone of pathos to his novel suggests that sincerity is most convincing as a sacrifice, when the way in which it is employed is painful, but sustainable, rather than self-serving. But what about when the truth itself is hard? We are talking about novels which focus on the difficulty of historical constraint after all. Faced with such conditions, especially those which threaten our sense of self, can we help shying away from the sincere?

One of the novels that I have most enjoyed over the past year, Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty is neurotically focussed on this exact dilemma, and bears much comparison to Goodbye to Berlin in this respect. 

The plot follows Nicholas Guest, a perceptive, intelligent English student from a somewhat prosaic middle-class background who has been staying for some time with the upper-class Feddens, a subtly dysfunctional family whose patriarch Gerald is a high-ranking Tory MP. Despite the Feddens being much more responsible than he, Guest is blamed after a series of scandals, including the discovery of Gerald’s infidelity and involvement in some ‘creative accounting’ but also Nick’s own fling with another man at the family’s holiday home, lay them low.

When I did this at university, I was surprised to see that a lot of my classmates really didn’t like Nick, but it was understandable. Superficially, Nick comes across as a pompous student of Henry James and aesthetic theory, and is rather too uncomfortably involved with the machinations of the upper class for someone of his own overtly socialist principles.

While this is a simplistic prism through which to discuss character, a couple of considerations redeem Nick. The first of these is that he can hardly be accused of cynical intentions in remaining with the Feddens, drawn to them as he is through motivations romantic (his infatuation with their steadfastly heterosexual son Toby and the world of beauty of which he is a represenative), and a naïve but earnest belief that he can help their bipolar daughter Catherine. More importantly, Nick, as a chronicler of the excesses of Tory Britain, makes the best of a frivolous existence amongst his chosen milieu. He is self-aware to the extent that he is self-aware about his own self-awareness, (3) and thus not only understands the quirks and machinations of the upper-class bubble, but is free from any illusion about his own place within it.

Indeed, unlike Isherwood’s imperious irony which seeks to master the likes of Sally Bowles, Nick’s is an ironic mode which admits defeat where necessary – on a date with Leo, a working-class guy who is unused to Nick’s affectations, he finds that his ‘mock-pompous’ tone comes across as ridiculous rather than subtle. (4) The consequence of this magnanimity on Nick’s part is that irony and sincerity can be more meaningfully delineated in Hollinghurst’s novel as ‘effects’ of factors present only in their obscurest form in Goodbye to Berlin – class and sexuality.

What surfaces from diligently tying irony and sincerity to social phenomena in this fashion is a conceptualisation of irony as either ‘defensive’ or ‘dominant’, a distinction which, for those writing in or about a right-wing environment flexing its muscles, either in Berlin or Notting Hill, is especially important to make.

Thus while Nick’s irony can be straightforwardly cruel, just like Chris’ – there are too many deliciously cutting remarks to count, as in Nick’s description of when Gerald’s younger lover and assistant Penny talks about “high society” at a party to Nick, ‘clearly thinking that’s where she was’ – it self-consciously allows Nick to feel safe in a hostile environment dominated by powerful men who take a dim view of gay liberation.

Nick is a stranger in an aggressively heterosexual battleground amongst the likes of Barry Groom, whose brusqueness is such that he is notorious for never saying hello, and Gerald’s university friend Derek ‘Badger’ Brogan, whose ‘seedily hush-hush’ personality is almost exclusively constructed around the more lurid memories of their time at Oxford together. By demystifying the behaviour of these men through his inwardly ironic disposition Nick can adjust his own outward disposition to be non threatening and pliable, thus continuing his peaceful existence alongside the Feddens – wryly noticing Badger’s ‘free and easy way’ amongst Gerald’s tribe, he knows for example that it is simply easier to ‘enrol in the family cult of Badger as a character’.

This isn’t to say that what Nick is doing isn’t to some extent cowardly or an abdication of duty – he realises as much when things get out of hand with the loathsome Groom, who seems on the cusp of making a racist remark to a taxi driver, at a family soirée, with Nick ‘shaken’ by his own surprising bravery in abandoning his calculating, ironic protocol to impulsively and sincerely label the MP an ‘arsehole’ to his face. But Nick’s protective reticence can be rationalised by a rather more sympathetic desire when his circumstances are taken into consideration, a desire better explained with recourse to the other breed of irony skilfully identified within The Line of Beauty.

Something that Isherwood does not quite account for in his wish to be the all-knowing comic puppeteer of Goodbye to Berlin, as we have already somewhat established, is that he is practicing a ‘dominant’ form of irony, whose love of mastery and tendency to complicate solidarity is thoroughly suited to historical moments of conservative ascendancy.

Gratuitously cruel instead of occasionally cruel, this brand of dominant irony is weaponized against those who don’t quite fall in with the ascendant group in question in order to assert this group’s absolute superiority. A telling example occurs when, while Nick is trying his hardest during the aforementioned soirée to keep up some small talk with Penny about Henry James, he interprets Badger knowingly and surreptiously flirting with her on his other side as ‘one of Badger’s little sexual challenges to him – it was almost a way of calling him a fag’. Defensive irony is not just a question of Nick’s pliability, but to whom he is pliable. Accordingly, Badger making the Feddens’ houseguest keenly aware of his difference as a gay man, without that difference itself being spoken of, emerges as the subtlest method of making him accountable to the c(/C)onservatism that his priniciples urge him to resist.

This stealthy formulation of irony is characterised most of all by its anticipation of the moment where it can aggressively re-emerge of sincerity, a wish for exposition that is of course tempered by the degree of boldness required within a certain political moment. 

This, after all, is the political era of Section 28, where Margaret Thatcher’s firmly-entrenched majority has emboldened a reluctant, ‘I-don’t-see-why-they-should-stuff-it-down-our-throats’ outlook on same-sex relations. The opportunistic Barry Grooms of this delicate social formation accordingly search tactfully for the moment to follow through on the implications of this ‘tolerant’ intolerance. Groom bides his time deferring to important (implicitly) gay Thatcherite allies such as National Security expert Morden Lipscomb, but always with a certain sinister futurity, producing ‘something awful, a sly smile’ after Nick’s reprimand. 

When Groom is no longer on the back foot, with Nick’s extracurricular activities blamed for the vultures circling the Feddens, he is free to dispense with the act of knowing but not telling. He shoves past Nick on his way to crisis talks with Gerald, calling him a ‘stupid little pansy’, before harking back to the fateful soirée to give his previously private thoughts on Nick’s character:

‘I remember sitting next to him after dinner here, years ago, and thinking, you don’t fit in here, do you,  you little cocksucker […] I could see he wished he was upstairs with the women.’

The irony that seeks to dominate rather than defend is thus an even more pronounced form of cowardice, a protective chrysalis which ensures that the aggressor can stalk its prey from a distance until the moment is right, belying the vulgar wish to see its victory decisively confirmed.

The mirror image of this insidious longing for all that is solid to melt into air, which poses as irony, is the poignant longing which characterises Nick’s own defensive irony. For all of Nick’s shameless schmoozing, the referent of his own irony is his aspiration of belonging to normal, beautiful life, but as a gay man. Nick enjoys a fanciful status as a ‘lost middle child’ among the Feddens, where this balance is seemingly struck – he is in an environment where his professional interest in aesthetics can be supported while his sexuality is ostensibly accepted. This lifestyle is conditional – it relies on Nick knowingly ‘playing the game’ alongside the other cynics and sycophants – but this seems a small price to pay at first.

What The Line of Beauty asks us is, why would you want to live your life in this way? Masking the sincere fact of your vulnerability may do to get by, but ultimately when the moment arises, others have only been pretending that they cannot see through this mask. Having been wholly betrayed by every member of the Feddens at the end, each of them individually disavowing him in one way or another, Nick, anxiously awaiting the results of an HIV test, ruminates on his ‘love of the world that was shockingly unconditional’, and sees that the vibrant, seductive social world which he painfully attached himself too was merely one of many paths he might have chosen, that, in the midst of leaving a street where he suffered so much for himself and others, ‘the fact of a street corner at all […] seemed, in the light of the moment, so beautiful’.

This moment of candour, unsurprisingly occasioned by Nick’s very pressing feelings of bodily vulnerability, tells us that sincerity is the discovery of unities, an appraisal of the self which turns outwards to sacrifice the delusions of the self on the altar of the greater good, as Hollinghurst puts it a ‘self-pity [which] belonged to a larger pity’.

Irony and la règle du jeu are necessary and even forgivable to a certain extent, but it has to be remembered that they are best employed as an expedient cloak for those looking to reaffirm their own advantages. For the well-intentioned, irony invariably, both in the examples of Nick and Isherwood, has a corrosive tendency to sever our connection not only with ourselves but the wider world. Only in sincerely taking account of one’s own human frailty, a process which enables Nick to see that he isn’t exempted from the persecutions of Thatcher’s Britain, can this connection with the beautiful struggle of an existence on the political margins be regained.

(1) I’ll be referring to Isherwood’s novelistic persona as ‘Chris’.

(2) I have to admit I lifted this quotation from Wikipedia, but the original can be found in Christopher and His Kind

(3) There are lots of humorous moments where Nick almost steps outside of himself to scrutinize his own behaviour – I really enjoyed his date with Leo in the novel, where, distinguishing himself from the Feddens in conversation, he is poignantly ‘rather surprised to hear himself throwing his whole fantasy of belonging there out of the window’

(4) ‘He unlocked the gate and let Leo go in ahead of him. ‘Cycling isn’t permitted in the gardens, but I dare say you can walk your bike.’ Leo hadn’t learnt his mock-pompous tone yet. ‘I dare say bumshoving isn’t permitted either,’ he said.’

This episode’s comic and unsettling meditation on what it means to watch your friends grow old escalates David Chase’s interest in life after New Jersey, finding in the relationship between memory and peace a blueprint for dying gracefully.

‘You probably don’t even hear it when it happens, right?’

Bobby Baccalieri’s eerie prophecy of a mobster’s last moments in ‘Soprano Home Movies’ are explored and contested in ‘Remember When’, an episode which, in giving significant screen time to two elderly men in Paulie Walnuts and Junior Soprano studies how death happens, and what we can do about it. Paulie and Tony are forced to lay low in Miami after the FBI are tipped off as to the whereabouts of the body of Tony’s first murder, bookmaker Willie Overall. As the trip progresses, Paulie’s old-fashioned mannerisms and proclivity for nostalgia begins to rub Tony the wrong way, whilst the chiacchierone himself is ill at ease, wondering just how disposable he is to the younger man. 

Starting from a dilemma centred around the grisly beginnings of one great North Jersey mafioso, the episode then focuses on the twilight of another. Junior, by means of bribing a corrupt orderly with ‘autographed pictures of the man who capped Tony Soprano’, is treating his mental care center like he used to treat Artie Bucco’s restaurant Vesuvio in Season One of The Sopranos. Running illicit card games and manipulating residents with the help of his young protégé Carter Chong, the former head of the Sopranos family begins the episode reluctant to let go of his former criminal prowess.

As is typical within this season, bodily anxiety is a significant motif within the episode, and it is no coincidence that ‘Old Ironsides’ Peter ‘Beansie’ Gaeta, rendered paraplegic by Richie Aprile in Season Two, makes a return to the show. The attendant paranoia which the other characters feel in the presence of Beansie’s disability, memorably surfacing when he excuses himself to go and empty his drainage bag, evokes the more abstract paranoia felt by Tony and Carter within this episode as they respectively watch Paulie and Junior stumble away from the peak of their powers. Indeed, for Carter the pivotal moment involves looking away after watching Junior piss himself as he attempts to tell a lewd joke to the other inmates. 

Junior’s humiliation results in the former boss agreeing to take his prescribed medication, which sedates him into a gentle state of senility, rather than going along with Carter’s schemes to get out of it. This somewhat comic state of affairs, which leaves Carter sullen and despondent at the state of his mentor, is reflected in the main plot as Tony begins to despair at the state of his old friend. Tony Sirico excels as always in the hilariously idiosyncratic role which by all accounts was custom-made for his talents, with every doddery gobbet dispensed (‘Chevy Chase, fuck ever happened to him?’) a precious pearl. These half-formed reminiscences eventually become too much for Tony, who gruffly remarks over dinner with Paulie and Beansie that he regards ‘remember when’ as ‘the lowest form of conversation’.

Tony’s unexpected response to some harmless sentimentality on Paulie’s part is useful in explaining how an episode which superficially pokes fun at two of The Sopranos’ senior citizens is in a deeper sense an indictment of a crossroad in the lives of Tony and, to a lesser extent, Carter. W.B. Yeats fans will enjoy AJ’s earnest relationship with ‘The Second Coming’ later on in Season Six, but it is ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’ which better illustrates my point. Yeats admits that his own poetry is, thematically, an extended game of ‘remember when’ which takes the Irish mythological canon as its source, affecting a case of creative ennui when he asks ‘What can I but enumerate old themes’. But Yeats admits that when it came to writing his poems, ‘[p]layers and painted stage took all my love / And not those things that they were emblems of’. In other words, recalling or reliving the past is a deeply subjective activity, where the character of what is being related, and any vulgar symbolism, is irrelevant.

How does this relate to Paulie Walnuts? In some sense, Tony is right – the almost preverbal character of nostalgia is the lowest form of conversation, but it also comes from ‘the foul rag and bone shop of the heart’, and Tony’s discomfort at dinner shows his own reluctance to plumb his own internal depths. For Tony in this episode, the past is more of a cudgel with which he beats others, and perhaps at times an instrument for self-flagellation. His own reminiscing, in the uncomfortably familiar setting of a yacht trip with Paulie, is a not-so-subtle attempt to force his friend to confess to provoking the DiMeo family feud with the Lupertazzis after telling Johnny Sack about a joke made at his wife Ginny’s expense. Tony and Carter need a healthy Paulie and Junior, in practical terms, to maintain a certain standing – Carter, his own high-powered father implicitly involved in some unscrupulous activities, needs a boss who inspires respect, Tony needs an efficient underboss. But more importantly they resent the fact that Paulie and Junior can tap into the past and access positive structures of feeling, fearing that they will reach the end of their own lives without hope of some nostalgic reward.

This ability to appear cheerfully reconciled with the past finds its fulfilment in a preparedness for the future which lends an odd and sometimes misfiring episode (the series still has an unfortunate hobby of offering up quite crudely-sketched African-American characters) its poignancy. Junior’s fate is the numbing opiate of compliance, dutifully participating in the childish activities as he signs away the penultimate phase of his life. Paulie’s is a little more complicated – rattled by Tony’s attempts to goad him and the presence of a conspicuous knife on the fishing trip, he later has a dream where he asks another of Tony’s victims, Sal ‘Big Pussy’ Bonpensiero ‘When my time comes, tell me, will I stand up?’ In both scenarios, between Junior’s voluntary choice of dignity over control and Paulie’s hope that when his time comes, he’ll stand firm against the dying of the light, the domineering Tony’s own restless blustering against oblivion is shown up. With this blog looking ahead to a commentary on the series finale, I would pose the question, can the distant strains of ‘Don’t Stop Believin’ be heard in the fabric of this episode? In both cases the tragic contingency which governs life is exchanged for an emphasis on feeling and dignity. As Tony draws near the prospect of Phil Leotardo authorizing the shot that you never hear, the promise of this kernel of poise and defiance might be identified as that which keeps us believing as viewers.

An episode which chronicles a number of strange and sometimes poignant reconciliations and sunderings assesses arguably The Sopranos’ most pressing question – whether humanity truly possesses the capacity for positive, long-term change.

A number of epistemologies accumulate around the hospital where Tony Soprano is fighting for his life against the septic shock inflicted by the complications of his gunshot wound, from the unnerving evangelism of Pastor Bob Brewster, to the intriguing Buddhist presence in Tony’s comatose dreams, to the rationalistic mysticism of John Schwinn, the physicist befriended by Tony. One of the more enigmatic sources of inspiration which lingers during Tony’s convalescence is the Ojibwe phrase ‘Sometimes we go around feeling pity for ourselves, but behind our back a great wind is carrying us’, stuck onto the cork board in his room by an unknown benefactor.

A transformative wind blows through ‘Johnny Cakes’, with Patsy Parisi setting the tone by complaining that ‘It’s over for the little guy’ upon discovering that the new coffee chain in Tony’s old family neighborhood cannot be extorted by the Soprano crime family for protection money on account of the corporate giant behind the chain simply not feeling the damage. Yet the tense character of change in ‘Johnny Cakes’ moves constantly with the ‘little guy’ in mind, a train of associations begun in a euphemistic sense by Tony cheerfully recalling that the ‘baguette in my pants’ has finally returned after his surgery. The smallness, and indeed the ugliness, of the repressed psychological rubble which obstructs change is portrayed predominantly through sexual motifs here.

Tony’s brief return to consciousness in the hospital in ‘Join the Club’, a traumatic moment where he rips the breathing tubes out of his body, establishes him as a sealed object thereafter, his chest a choleric cauldron which is barely held in place. ‘Johnny Cakes’ continues this anxiety by creating a tension around the uncomfortable openness involved in sex, with Carmela and Tony’s union at the beginning overshadowed by worries over Tony’s surgical incision. This is mirrored later in the episode when Tony, looking to begin an affair with Julianna Skiff, a real estate agent offering to buy a building that he rents to a local poultry company. Even the engaged Julianna continues this motif of sexual repression, giving into Tony’s advances despite her own attempts at self-discipline. As Julianna unbuttons his shirt, close to his incision, an unusually flustered Tony tells her to stop repeatedly. This refusal to betray his vulnerability at any costs is the kernel Dr Melfi constantly attempts to strike at in her therapy sessions with Tony, but occasions such as this show the psychic material to be buried awfully deep.

Yet the repressed protectiveness which blankets the protagonists of The Sopranos is met by its cynical opposite in ‘Johnny Cakes’ – modern change as an act of disavowal. The globalisation which Julianna’s real estate company comes to represent seems to offer Tony a chance to sign away those elements of his local history which he privately feels are less desirable. One ingenious moment in the episode sees Tony, mentally debating whether to agree a time to sign the papers, looking over to the elderly Mrs Conte, leading the viewer to believe that he could not possibly sell this quaint living relic of his father’s day down the river. However, it is far likelier that he is remembering Conte racially abusing some local Puerto Ricans, and in doing so writing her out of history in exchange for a Jamba Juice chain. In this sense, perhaps Tony’s moment of repression in Julianna’s apartment is a dubious vindication for those antisocial instincts cultivated by the neighborhood of his formative years, a reminder that change by nature cannot easily let go of that which came before it.

Yet ‘Johnny Cakes’ is also an episode of great beauty, precisely for those moments where change is experienced neither as repression nor disavowal, but instead as a dialectical ‘great wind’. Soprano captain Vito Spatafore and Tony’s son AJ are both shown approaching decisive points in the formation of their identity in this episode in narrative arcs whose resonances provide a fleeting mirage of beauty and peace. Vito, on the run from his friends and family in New Jersey after his secret life as a gay man is discovered, takes a fancy to local firefighter and diner owner Jim. After responding to Jim’s reciprocation of his affections with initial disgust, attempting to fight his friend, a penitent Vito returns to the diner to declare to Jim that ‘[s]ometimes you tell a lie so long you don’t know when to stop’. Back in Vito’s home state, AJ, feeling a partially imagined pressure of expectation in the wake of Tony’s shooting, decides to assassinate his uncle Junior. With the plan failing miserably, and only Tony’s law enforcement contacts saving his son from serious trouble, Tony’s response, initially aggressive, melts into pathos. Realising that his tearful son feels obligated to emulate him, Tony, himself close to tears, pleads that ‘[y]ou’re a nice guy and that’s a good thing, for Christ’s sakes’.

In both cases, change has reconciled the antagonism between repression and disavowal by extracting their positive implications – the need for distance from a past, wayward self implied by disavowal, but equally the permanence and even importance of this self which repression helps to preserve. For Vito, the idyllic afternoon that him and Jim spend together in the wilderness is produced by reacting not to the humiliation of his past, closeted life with violent resistance for once, but using it to start a relationship on honest, renewed terms. Likewise, Tony’s emotional display, especially after AJ frustratedly points out that Tony’s always calls Michael Corleone’s avenging of his own father in The Godfather his ‘favorite scene of all time’ replicates this formula. His initial angriness shifts the culpability onto AJ, but his emotion betrays an understanding that for his son to make it as a ‘nice guy’, Tony himself will have to reflect on his own role as father.

Here the mysterious ‘great wind’ which bears suffering humans along has some correspondence with Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, his face ‘turned towards the past’ but propelled ‘irresistibly […] into the future to which his back is turned’. ‘This storm is what we call progress’, states Benjamin, a cryptic summary which might be interpreted as stating the following – whilst we cast a pitiful glance at the detritus of human relations, they are transformed into something constructive through the alchemy of historical continuity. For the time being, at least, Vito, AJ and indeed the reconstructed Tony are borne along by this great wind of history, their fragmented histories redeemed by their continuity with the cohesive future that they are connected to, which is itself structured by this past. But as always in The Sopranos, the harsh headwind of the past exercises an irresistible pull, and I am intrigued to see whether this future is dangled in front of the viewer as a hinterland, or emerges as tangible progress in a maddeningly circular text.

The endgame of David Chase’s show reveals a terrifying fragility behind the edifice of the protagonists’ lives, with the first episode of the final season often shocking in its proximity to the way of all flesh. 

The astonishing montage which fills us in on events in the two years since Tony Soprano killed Tony Blundetto at Uncle Pat’s farmhouse in the midwinter sunlight sees William S. Burroughs reading from The Western Lands as some new lives enter the light, and the light begins to decline in others. Burroughs is delineating the seven souls which Ancient Egyptian theory proposes to exit the body at the moment of death, and his reading sets the scene for a change of emphasis in The Sopranos where the body feels at its most mutable and permeable. 

If Season Four of The Sopranos is obsessed with financial precarity, and Season Five returns to Chase’s pet theme of the familial sphere, in ‘Members Only’ it is the master signifier to which the show defers, as Chase aims to make the viewer painfully aware of the mortality of his creations. What Tony refers to as the ‘circle jerk of life’ in his therapy sessions with Dr Melfi is prominent – The Sopranos continues to be an array of funeral visitations and hospital bedsides in ‘Members Only’ in the respective heart attack of Ray Curto and the gory fate of Hesh Rabkin’s son-in-law, but the added distinction in Season Six is a broader view, a focus on the daily wear and tear which is fatal in its own way. Between Vito Spatafore’s bombastic celebration of his weight loss, Johnny Sack’s determination to wear contact lenses in court as not to appear weak and the normally menacing FBI Agent Harris’ parasitical illness, this season dramatizes the constant duress which our malleable bodies find themselves subjected to and the perennially delusive quest to conceal this accumulation of pressures.

The tragedy of Soprano family soldier Eugene Pontecorvo which structures the episode perfectly mirrors Burroughs’ idea of the human body as ‘sinking ship’ from which life is gradually secreted. The lonely, awkward capo Pontecorvo has inherited a cash windfall from his aunt, and asks Tony’s permission to retire from organised crime to build a new life with his family in Florida. Whilst waiting for an answer from a reluctant Tony, and taking pains to remain loyal and serviceable to the Soprano family, Pontecorvo, who we see early on throwing a glass bowl at the wall in front of his young daughter, strikes a taut, bubbling figure, his physiognomy barely containing the enormous stress under which he finds himself. The additional strand of his son’s heroin addiction gives another definition to this tragic narrative of the body, with Pontecorvo not only failing to physically contain his anxieties, but also seeing his failure to secure Tony’s blessing insidiously poison his son’s bloodstream.

At times, the episode labours too manically in the service of this ongoing corporeal metaphor – Pontecorvo’s hanging, depicting a grim struggle before the onset of spasms was gratuitous and arguably required a subtler touch. But the final image of a bloated, bleeding Tony, barely alive after Junior erroneously shoots him ideally conveys that the aspect of the body which will form the conceptual stage for the final season of The Sopranos is the sense in which it is both capacious and empty, loaded with intent and tension which dissipates in the face of an unforgiving outer world.

Of the three new additions to the Premier League this season, Aston Villa are the most immediately unremarkable, their stroll to 15th, relying on a solid home record, less talked about than the methodical, impregnable approach of Chris Wilder’s surprise package Sheffield United, or Norwich’s immensely watchable but risky attacking play under Daniel Farke. What Villa do possess is a talent more remarkable than any John Lundstram or Lys Mousset, more watchable than an Emi Buendía or Todd Cantwell – 24-year-old midfielder Jack Grealish. Since announcing himself to the wider footballing world in Villa’s 2015 FA Cup semi-final defeat of Liverpool, Grealish’s return to prominence has been arduous and often painful. Grealish gained a reputation as a loose cannon after some youthful antics on holiday in Tenerife and elsewhere made pundits and fans question his commitment to Villa, whilst his involvement with Rémi Garde’s notorious 17-point season tarnished his return to the top flight, with the Englishman infamously taking twenty games to win his first Premier League match. Declaring for England ahead of Ireland when he seemingly had no chance of ever fitting into their midfield, the poster boy for a profligate Championship club who were failing miserably to bounce back, Grealish was in danger of being cast as another forgotten wonderkid, undone by his lack of discipline. 

What followed was nothing short of a renaissance, with Grealish working his way into the 2018/19 Championship PFA Team of the Year, contributing 6 goals and 6 assists from midfield, alongside another 2 assists in the playoffs as part of a mercurial display against West Bromwich Albion. One moment from the playoff final of the previous year, a 1-0 loss to Fulham, gives the most concise encapsulation of Grealish’s precocious talent. With his side desperately chasing a goal, Grealish picked up the ball at the edge of the centre circle in the Fulham half, made a slaloming run between two defenders before gliding left past another, and was unfortunate to see his low shot saved by Marcus Bettinelli. In short, his natural game combines tenacity with a spectacular ability to keep the ball glued to his feet in a fashion which invariably invites comparisons to Paul Gascoigne.

Going into last Monday’s game against Newcastle, Grealish, though not yet chosen for an England side who have recently capped Mason Mount and James Maddison, was beginning to establish himself amongst some of the Premier League’s most esteemed company. On 2 goals and 3 assists so far this season before the Villa Park clash, Grealish led his teammates in assists and final third passes (Sky), whilst he was fourth in the league in key passes, and the most fouled player in the English top flight (WhoScored.com). One of the pertinent question marks left by Grealish’s play, especially with Mount, Maddison and the England set-up in mind, is whether it can be replicated in a team where he isn’t the home-grown golden boy, but one of multiple stars. 

Following on from previous articles on Mount and Rúben Neves, I had a look at how Grealish got on against former manager Steve Bruce’s Newcastle side and saw an electric performance which went some way towards suggesting that he is ready to test himself at a higher level, whilst nonetheless leaving some questions about how he would perform at this level answered. Even in their thirteenth game of the season, Villa were under a not insignificant amount of pressure going into this match, with three consecutive losses leaving them a point above the relegation zone, with fixtures against Manchester United and Chelsea to follow. An organised Newcastle side who had stolen points off Spurs, United, Wolves and Leicester would be a stern examination of Grealish’s ability to penetrate an attritional low block that would have no problem kicking him up in the air if necessary. Starting on the left wing alongside fellow forwards Wesley and Anwar El Ghazi, Grealish lined up against a back five knowing that a captain’s performance would be the minimum required to ensure that Villa’s energy levels remained high throughout an attritional battle.

For all of seven minutes, Grealish was uncharacteristically quiet, perhaps finding his feet in the game as he lost the ball a couple of times on the wing, and when he went down holding his calf after a hefty challenge Villa fans (and bloggers sat at home writing a profile on him) feared the worst. In hindsight, Joelinton may have ended up regretting his clumsy reducer, acting as it did for a catalyst for the hellfire unleashed on Newcastle for the remaining 83 minutes. The newly awoken Grealish, his every touch booed by the away fans, started to mix it up with a series of elegant cross-field passes and dummies, the highlight of his first 15 minutes when he refused to allow his initiative to be lost after an incomplete pass, instead bursting forward to chase it, nearly setting up Wesley excellently. Minutes 16-30 saw a continuation of this brilliance, and it was remarkable to see the precision in everything that Grealish did, with every through ball to an overlapping player perfectly weighted, and very few rash decisions made even for a player with, positionally, as little time on the ball as he possesses. One telling example from this period was Grealish’s sensibly squaring to the sharpshooter Douglas Luiz rather than shooting himself or driving at Newcastle defence in a dangerous position, with Grealish’s every move being made to facilitate Aston Villa’s holistic offensive strategy. 

At the end of minutes 16-30, Grealish was fouled cynically at the edge of the box by DeAndre Yedlin, perhaps reasonably given that the American international could barely live with the winger’s speed of thought on the ball, and what followed, to kick off minutes 31-45, was Grealish’s reward for half an hour of honest work. An ingenious set piece routine saw Grealish cannily tee up Conor Hourihane by nudging the ball to change the angle of the Irishman’s free-kick, with Hourihane’s brilliant effort flummoxing Martin Dúbravka. Three minutes later, Grealish’s directness once again bore fruit, winning Villa another free-kick, and Hourihane turned provider to tee up El Ghazi. Particularly impressive about Grealish’s play about this point was his ubiquity – his style is redolent of a point guard in basketball, dropping deep to collect the ball and using his skill in possession to regulate the speed of the attack. On two separate occasions before the break, Grealish picked up the ball in Villa’s defensive third, and started a fast break with a pinpoint pass, exemplifying how he thrives on the role of acting as Villa’s primary creative force.

It is precisely Grealish’s enthusiasm to take over his team’s attacking responsibilities which raises the question of his suitability for an international role. In an English side which could arguably, but not definitely, be labelled the most accomplished attacking force at Euro 2020, Grealish will not be the focal point of his team’s forays forward, and, in contrast to the freedom of Birmingham that he is given in Villa matches, will be expected to display positional discipline in whatever role he plays. The first third of Villa’s second half against, however, would have been encouraging for those worried about Grealish’s ability to play when his team are on the back foot. Newcastle, themselves needing a positive result to stave off relegation fears, found a second wind after the restart, and Grealish was essential in reestablishing control, his deft close control and ability to construct counter attacks limiting Newcastle’s ability to sustain any meaningful pressure on the Villa goal. Defensively, his tactical intelligence ensures that he is rarely outdone for a man of his comparatively limited athleticism. Indeed, Grealish set himself well to ensure that Yedlin, one of the quickest fullbacks in the Premier League, was unable to breeze past him on the Newcastle counter, and was generally competitive, if not always succesful, in the air.

What possibly augurs less well for Grealish is his goalscoring. In a side where the starting places of Harry Kane and Raheem Sterling are more or less sealed, with Marcus Rashford or Jadon Sancho likely to occupy another spot in the front three, Grealish, having never produced more than six goals in a single season, will be of no real threat to anyone’s place at present. Though he thrives out wide, Grealish may be forced to settle for a midfield place which would curtail his swashbuckling style of play unless there is solid evidence of a turnaround in fortunes in front of goal. It sounds foolish after Grealish’s exquisitely taken opening goal at Old Trafford, but there is evidence to suggest that this is a technical flaw in his otherwise impressive game which requires some tinkering. Grealish evokes his fellow England hopeful Dele in how he often seems to find it difficult to set himself outside of the box, rarely connecting with his shot powerfully, but unlike Dele he has shown little interest in or aptitude a more advanced number ten role which would see him poaching goals through late runs into the box. Minutes 61-75 were a study in how Grealish may need some time at the training ground if he wants a place in England’s front three – in these fifteen minutes Grealish mustered a mixed bag, featuring one curler which came agonisingly close, one shot which saw Grealish take the ball down fantastically and cut inside before producing a tame shot and one plain bad attempt.

Even in a deeper midfield role, it is nonetheless undeniable that Grealish could perform one invaluable service for England, that of getting their dangerous fullbacks on the ball. Gareth Southgate has shown a preference for dynamic, cavalier fullbacks in his side, with Trent Alexander-Arnold preferred over Aaron Wan-Bissaka, and Ben Chilwell now looking to have won his protracted battle with an aging Danny Rose. Throughout the entirety of the match, Matt Targett and Frédéric Guilbert, as well as Villa’s other wide players, were able to whip devastating balls across the face of the Newcastle goal because Grealish was so adept at finding them, his through balls unnervingly accurate in producing the right amount of pace for Targett and Guilbert to get in behind the last lines of Steve Bruce’s defence. In the final 15 minutes of the game, where Grealish was named Man of the Match by the Sky pundits, the midfielder was at it again, playing through Hourihane down the left to see Wesley inexplicably miss from the resulting cross, before the Brazilian once again failed to convert after Grealish’s delicious outside of the boot pass to Guilbert put him through.

Southgate’s reticence when it comes to Grealish can feel inexplicable at times, and perhaps an argument can be made the Villa man is a victim of his own style of play – if he plays as a forward he does so with the scoring rate of a midfielder, and if he plays as a midfielder it is possible that he does so with the defensive instincts of a forward. Watching Grealish barely miss a beat in a crunch clash which he dominated at the age of 24, however, it is clear that he can only be kept away from the England side for so long. His creativity, confidence on the ball and old-fashioned ability to frighten the life out of defenders with his energy will be the national side’s loss, with neither Maddison nor Mount able to summon up Grealish’s magic in any of their England appearances thus far. It seems likely that a point will be reached where Southgate has to go out of his way to fit in Grealish, and should the midfielder continue to electrify games as he did last Monday, it will be sooner rather than later.

Martin Scorsese’s epic of the middleman is a measured and ambitious study of the nature of complicity. Though its prosaic style means it lacks the vivacity of some of Scorsese’s greatest films, The Irishman atones for this with a chilling central message about the selfishness of compromise.

As the global connections which structure modern relations have been increasingly made manifest to us, it has become clear that even the smallest of choices we make are fundamentally lacking in innocence. Between the coffee we purchase on our way to work, the multinational we choose to deliver our consumer goods, and how we dispose of what is left behind, we are more than ever forced to constantly take diligent action to maintain a credible image as a responsible person. Even the putatively ‘good’ routines we go out of our way to adhere to are themselves shown to be suboptimal when scrutinized against some lesser known alternative, as when Extinction Rebellion supporters last month blockaded workers attempting to access public transport, a method of transit which conventional wisdom deems healthier for the environment than driving to work. The difficult nature of staying true to such good intentions when the nature of the good we do is itself ambiguous and loaded is a dilemma that the gangster genre has long alluded to in less subtle terms. Mob flicks typically play on how gangster figure attempts to split himself into two separate archetypes – the brutal, unscrupulous enforcer and the caring,upwardly mobile citizen. Those adjacent to organized crime such as Lorraine Bracco’s Karen Hill, the ‘mob wife’ of Henry Hill in Goodfellas are used to demonstrate how the one compromises the other. Bracco, who in Goodfellas shows Henry’s activities perilously seeping into his home, a decade later reprises this function, turning mob psychiatrist as Dr Jennifer Melfi in The Sopranos, and listening to Tony Soprano rationalize the pain for which he is responsible through the transcendent aim of providing for his family.

The Irishman is a film about how, faced with a world where innocence is little more than an aesthetic front, to affect moderation is the most false and dangerous position of all. This is realised through an at times painstakingly gradual narrative frame, showing the oppositions which accrete over many years in one man’s life and how he fails to address them. The man in question is Frank ‘The Irishman’ Sheeran (Robert De Niro), who, having become an unlikely success in the Italian-American organised crime scene in post-war Philadelphia, finds himself employed as a fixer for International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) President Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino). The story is just as much about Hoffa as it is about Sheeran, steeped in the historical context of Hoffa’s career which takes us through the election of John F. Kennedy, Hoffa’s removal as President and imprisonment, and then his eventual murder, which takes the view of its source, Charles Brandt’s I Heard You Paint Houses, that Sheeran was the perpetrator. In a remarkably dexterous narrative, Sheeran’s youthful exploits in the war intermingle with his penitent stint in a retirement home, whilst another strand of Scorsese’s script follows his family life as it becomes at every turn more precarious, before his daughter Peggy (Lucy Gallina and Anna Paquin) is eventually alienated by her suspicions about Sheeran’s involvement in Hoffa’s death. 

What The Irishman’s ambitious scope achieves commendably is a portrayal of the extent to which Sheeran’s methods of self-delusion never fail to assert themselves. The much-vaunted de-aging technology of Scorsese’s film, as well as its 209 minute running time, allow the viewer to examine Sheeran’s career as a war veteran and delivery driver alongside his work as a mob fixer, where in every case he cynically and unfailingly tethers himself to a higher purpose. Discussing his service in southern Italy with gangster Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci), the brother of IBT attorney Bill Bufalino (Ray Romano), Sheeran airily states that when it came to the execution of enemy prisoners in a ditch, ‘You know, you got orders, you follow them’, a need for some transcendent object to justify his existence which sets the precedent for Sheeran constantly invoking the desire to ‘protect’ his family as a justification for perpetrating violent deeds in their name. Ironically, the agony of Hoffa’s family is used against Sheeran by federal agents eager for a confession, evoking a lame demurral from their target. If family is of paramount importance to Sheeran, it is interesting to note the times at which this fails to apply, with family increasingly emerging as an organic group of values beyond his control. In the wonderfully structured relationship between Sheeran and Peggy, family is not a malleable form which can easily support the self-justifying tendencies of De Niro’s character. Peggy is standoffish and nervous around her father, a disposition which Scorsese implies develops after she witnesses her father brutalising a grocery store worker who scolded her. Through Peggy, we see family taking on a mind of its own, failing to align sympathetically with Sheeran’s interests – out of her father’s two close associates, Peggy fears Sheeran’s efficient business partner Russ whilst idolising the more unpredictable Hoffa as a second father.

The chillingly effective performance of Pesci is particularly useful in terms of illustrating the futility of Sheeran in striving to harmonise dirty work with the image of a personable family man. Pesci here does not replicate the volcanic Tommy DeVito of Goodfellas, instead cutting a calculating, wintry figure whose warmth dissipates without warning. Russ places a certain value on family, but as a useful veneer, with his advice to Sheeran to keep his family close after his divorce because children ‘get resentful and they don’t know who to take it out on’ sounding more than anything like a warning that it might be inconvenient to have one’s offspring as enemies in the world of organised crime. It is through Pesci that we most clearly perceive Sheeran’s mistaken belief in his complicity in this criminal underworld to be one of powerful mediation rather than pure utility. The best sequence in the film features a conversation between Hoffa and Russ to straighten out Hoffa’s recalcitrant attitude against the organised crime network which supported his rise to power at a glitzy dinner in Sheeran’s honour, a conversation where Sheeran acts as a proxy. At this dinner where Sheeran’s friends and family are arrayed in their dizzying multiplicity, a testament to his ability to form wide-ranging connections from Hoffa devotees to skeptical mobsters, we see his position as the personable middleman as a form of ineffectual cowardice. Sheeran tells Russ that Hoffa won’t listen, and admits to Hoffa that he doesn’t know what to do. Negotiations devolve into a series of fractious long-distance phone conversations and enigmatic glares from Russ as nothing is ultimately resolved, with the passive Sheeran later forced to accept the necessity of killing his friend. Sheeran’s peacemaking thus does not achieve results worthy of the name, simply insulating him from the firing line as the plans of more powerful movers are allowed to proceed unimpeded.

There is much to suggest of all Scorsese’s films, The Irishman is one where he is most personally involved within the questions at stake in its script. Indeed, the director might well see himself in a similarly dubious position of mediation as Sheeran’s, attempting to balance his much-discussed recent summation of cinema as ‘the complexity of people and their contradictory and sometimes paradoxical natures’ with the vivid stock characters of popular entertainment that he turns to. With Jordan Belfort allegedly commanding speaking fees of up to $100,000 a day, despite Scorsese’s 2013 film The Wolf of Wall Street showing him to be a vulturous wife-beater, perhaps Scorsese has pondered on the stylised, irreverent, and undeniably Hollywood figures which act as a mirror to our ‘contradictory and paradoxical’ moral compositions in his films. The Irishman does well to ensure that the comings and goings of major and minor characters (Paul Herman, better known as The Sopranos’ ‘Beansie’ Gaeta has a particularly satisfying cameo), as well as the constant injection of some fairly weighty historical context rarely feel intrusive. But Scorsese’s reluctance to get caught up in a lurid, whirring cinematic world on this occasion would provide an intriguing explanation for why the first hour or so of The Irishman is oddly humourless and rather slow, the plodding, sometimes excessively narratival structure of the opening allowing us to focus on the intricate mechanics of Sheeran’s work, with the fast-paced glamour of his ascent to wealth a distant second – the quaalude-addled camaraderie of Wolf is gone here, with Sheeran and Russ’ sedate meetings always maintaining a sharp operational focus.

If the film’s tone is tellingly cautious at the start, the self-pitying tone of its final half hour feels equally thinly-veiled. A penitent Sheeran makes his first steps towards confession after an epiphanic conversation with his daughter Dolores where his self-image as a watchful father who made terrible sacrifices for his childrens’ sake is decisively shattered. It is at this point that the film’s epic length becomes actively tiresome as material that really ought to have been left implicit after Peggy’s disgusted realisation that her father killed Hoffa is torturously unspooled. De Niro’s doddering portrayal of the elderly Sheeran is irritating rather than moving in the service of this ending, and his laboured, flubbing style of speech is an apt embodiment of the overly constructed denouement of The Irishman. The need for exposition and penitence which Scorsese expresses, perhaps with his own work in mind, has the unfortunate effect of fostering a didacticism which patronises his audience’s intelligence. What films such as Taxi Driver and Goodfellas accomplish in the aftermath of the maelstrom of violence that they depict is the art of leaving much unsaid, instead allowing the audience to consider the extent of their own complicity in consuming and enjoying these events. Conversely, the final shot of The Irishman, showing De Niro and a small, illuminated lamp through the crack of a door in his nursing home, seems to actively draw us away from the dark vortex of human suffering which has come before towards the light of possible human absolution.

As in the early scene which sees Sheeran carefully mapping out the journey which will take himself, Russ and their wives to Detroit for Bill’s wedding, it feels like each minute narrative layer of The Irishman is designed to gently corral the viewer towards the path of the righteous. If Scorsese wants the complicit viewer to realise their own lack of innocence in a fallen world, he is heavy-handed in doing so. The film nonetheless remains a remarkably cohesive portrayal of how one man is blanketed under the weight of his own hard-won connections when they clash with the uncontrollable acceleration of a wider history. As the defiant Peggy shows us, a virtuous life can be sought through alienation and disavowal rather than a performative desire to see everyone happy. Though the force of this critique becomes fatigued and simplified by the time of Sheeran’s dotage, The Irishman’s portrayal of its eponymous would-be peacemaker as a man produced by rather than producing events is a powerful argument in favour of seeing polarity rather than unity as the real motor for change.

A curious by-product of the transformation of Gareth Southgate’s England side from a peripheral influence in tournaments to a legitimate international juggernaut has been that the perennial question of a creative attacking midfielder within their set-up has changed somewhat. England now possess arguably the most potent front three in world football in Raheem Sterling, Harry Kane and Jadon Sancho. The first goal in England’s 5-0 victory against the Czech Republic at Wembley in March was a stunning vindication of this terrifying trio – Kane, so excellent for England as a deeper playmaking forward, played a perfectly weighted ball to the electric Sancho who squared it to Sterling for a simple finish. With Manchester United winger Marcus Rashford and exciting Chelsea duo Callum Hudson-Odoi and Tammy Abraham also in the frame should their fellow marksmen falter, it would seem that this system of three forwards is non-negotiable for England at the moment. 

Where the simplicity of the SKS becomes complicated is the status of the midfield in Gareth Southgate’s preferred 4-3-3. In what will feel like a welcome relief for many England fans after many years in the creative wilderness, there are a number of promising attacking midfield talents contending for a starting berth in Southgate’s side. These talents include uncapped Manchester City starlet Phil Foden, Leicester’s in-form attacking midfielder James Maddison, and one of the Premier League’s surprise packages this season, Chelsea’s Mason Mount, who has 4 goals and 1 assist in the English top flight. Southgate’s system at the moment hands such players not only the responsibility for progressing the ball towards England’s explosive forwards, but also significant defensive duties in a deeper midfield role. Fastforwarding to England’s defensively porous fixture against Kosovo at St Mary’s, it becomes evident how this might be an issue at the Euros next summer. The defensive shortcomings of midfielders Declan Rice and Jordan Henderson were evident in Valon Berisha’s second goal – Rice initially gives the ball away cheaply to Florent Hadergjonaj, whilst Henderson’s unfortunate positioning allows Vedat Muriqi’s cross to pass him by. The more direct Ross Barkley, appearing alongside Rice and Henderson that evening, was also famously caught out for his lack of serenity at the back in England’s surprise 3-1 Nations League against Holland last summer. Whilst the respective passing range and dribbling ability of Henderson and Barkley especially provide England with strong attacking options in midfield, the freewheeling approach of Sterling, Kane and Sancho in Southgate’s 4-3-3 creates a gap between attack and midfield which requires even the most aggressive of midfielders to be extremely defensively proactive.

Mount comes into England’s configuration as an indictment of its structural flaws, but possibly offers Southgate a solution at the same time. Rice, a longtime friend of Mount from their time together in the Chelsea academy, explained that Mount’s success has come from Chelsea manager Frank Lampard deploying him ‘like a second striker, making those runs which Lampard used to do’. This freedom to play as a number 10 has been instrumental to Mount’s surprisingly quick adjustment to life in the Premier League. Three of Mount’s four league goals this season have come in remarkably similar circumstances – against Norwich, Wolves and Southampton he starts high up the pitch (against Norwich and Southampton he is the highest Chelsea attacker, against Wolves the second highest), and peels off the shoulder of the last defender, leaving him with a fairly simple finish. This is a vindication of the offensive freedom allowed to him by Lampard as part of Chelsea’s newly belligerent tactical outlook, allowing Mount to make expansive runs without worrying about vacating space.

In the spirit of last week’s article on Rúben Neves, I had a look at Mount’s performance in England’s 7-0 dismantling of Montenegro, evaluating how he was suited to a deeper position in the left of the midfield three, and judging his performance against Maddison’s England debut that same evening, and the ominous presence of Dele behind the arras. This game was, in truth, little more than a formality for England, who needed only a victory against an injury-raved Montenegro outfit to secure qualification for the Euros after winning five out of six games in a simple group. For Mount and his midfield partners Harry Winks and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain there could be no such complacency, with only perhaps Henderson having truly nailed down a starting spot in England’s side. With that in mind, the one-sided nature of this match should be largely ignored in any analysis of Mount’s showing, with the 20-year-old clearly eager to put his name in Southgate’s thoughts throughout.

The first 15 minutes at Wembley were largely quiet from Mount – he played some neat, simple passes, finding Rashford in the area with one, and attempting a number of tackles with varied success. After Oxlade-Chamberlain’s opener, Mount also came close with an effort of his own after Kane scuffed the ball, some early evidence of his instinctive ability to arrive late in the box. Minutes 16-30 saw England score thrice in a thrillingly efficient siege of the Montenegro goal, and Mount will have been concerned that he was at best peripheral during this assault, with fouls and sloppy passes creeping into his game as he attempted to curb Montenegro on the break. As Kane completed his hattrick before the end of his half, Mount had improved but was unlucky not to get in on the act himself, with Sancho and Rashford unable to find him on separate occasions in a fantastic scoring position. Here there was more definitive evidence that Mount knows what to do near the penalty area, one delightful flick creating a good chance down England’s right side, and another probing run on the opposite flank unfortunate not to win a foul. But equally, the rudiments of maintaining a solid tempo in midfield were lost to Lampard’s number 10, with one particularly dreadful attempt to spread play going out for a throw in. It is not totally damning to say that by this stage, Mount was probably England’s worst player given the competition, but it was an evening where nothing but the best would do for the youngster.

As England entered the second half, the commentators had already begun to talk about the possibility of Maddison coming on, one of two factors that will be a cause of concern for Mount. Maddison has been a crucial cog in another unlikely Leicester title challenge, and fits the profile of the lithe, intelligent creative player that has been cited in discussions of England’s deficiencies for years, and in one league match less has matched Mount for goals this season, with one more assist, climbing up to eighth in the league for key passes (WhoScored.com). To some extent Mount began the second half as if he were aware of this possible scrutiny, starting with a renewed positivity which saw him pull off some more useful flicks, progress the ball through a crowded defence, and even see an effort hit the back of the net, only to see the offside flag go up. During this 15 minute period, however, Maddison was also introduced for Oxlade-Chamberlain, and was notably attempting more through balls than his Chelsea counterpart, whose efforts risked being overshadowed by the Leicester man’s capacity to make things happen in compressed areas of the pitch. As England approached the hour mark in a game barely resembling a contest, Mount was at last involved in a comical goal his shanked effort hitting Aleksandar Šofranac and ricocheting in. It was hardly what his efforts deserved after a meek showing, and though he was involved in a few more chances, it was unsurprising to see him hooked for Joe Gomez, who needed a chance to face his home fans after an awkward scuffle with Sterling earlier that week. From thereon I followed the remainder of Maddison’s game, who evaded pressure well, and generally seemed to display a greater deftness of touch and passing range as England made it seven on the night.

A difficult night for Mount, where he seemed both unable to cope with the obligation to track back and maintain England’s midfield tempo, was followed by a joyous release in Pristina, as he scored the final goal in a 4-0 defeat of Kosovo. Mount, entering the competition in its 72nd minute, was perhaps less constrained by the tactical side of affairs, with England looking to experiment with fresh legs in what was a dead rubber for them. In typical fashion, Mount was the highest player on the pitch for his goal, taking advantage of some good work from Kane, who won the ball on the edge of Kosovo’s box, to finish a simple chance. All the evidence suggests that a freer role benefits Mount, and that a compromise for Southgate in terms of injecting creativity into his lineup could be a switch to a 4-2-3-1 formation wherein Mount can play in his favoured number 10 position whilst two sitting midfielders in the mould of Henderson or Rice have greater accountability for defensive duties. However, in a side where England are already blessed with an abundance of nifty goalscorers, Mount’s creativity itself was less evident in these games than his ability to time his runs precisely, and he often struggled to slip through the forwards at opportune moments. Whilst Maddison would undoubtedly fit these responsibilities better, a name which has been egregiously omitted recently has been Dele’s. 

Dele’s recovery from a recurring hamstring injury has caused England fans, and most worryingly Southgate, to forget what a devastating player the Spurs attacking midfielder can be in the number ten role when fit. By the age of 22, Dele had 26 Premier League assists to his name, leaving Mount at present two years to add an unlikely 20 assists to his current total to match Dele, whilst even the in vogue Maddison has just 9 at the age of 23 years old. Clearly, Dele’s record in this position should exclude Maddison and Mount from a starting berth should he prove his fitness, to say nothing of his intuitive understanding with Kane. Dele is also a player whose tournament experience as a creator speaks for itself – Tottenham’s celebrated comeback against Ajax would not have happened without his tenacious through ball to Lucas Moura, whilst as far back as England’s disastrous Euro 2016 campaign there is evidence of his ability to provide a spark in important moments, improbably squeezing the ball through to Daniel Sturridge for England’s last gasp winner against Wales in Lens. Dele’s ability to play a more defensive role at centre midfield, which he has done on multiple occasions for Spurs, offers Southgate a flexibility which at present Dele’s competition have not seemed capable of. Southgate’s need to experiment with form players is understandable, but as Dele looks to add to an impressive performance against West Ham as he revives his career under José Mourinho, staying loyal to one of his tried and tested players presents him with the easiest solution to restoring balance within England’s midfield.

Set in a bracing cinematic universe where scene and character alike are marked by rich and complex detail, the aristocratic mind is the richest and most complex interior of them all in Luchino Visconti’s stunning historical epic.

A gripe not infrequently levelled at contemporary ‘prestige TV’ is its fixation with the bourgeois mind as the central theatre for its critique, with the lives of those occupying a lowlier social rung implicitly judged unworthy of comment. From Walter White the secondary school teacher to Don Draper the Manhattan director, whatever the viewer sees is never far away from the constitutive prism of a repressed patriarch of the professional classes, whilst for all the social nuance of The Sopranos, the peculiarities of Tony Soprano’s immigrant heritage can be judged as window dressing as the show increasingly focuses on the hoarding and preservation of the material. Luchino Visconti’s Il Gattopardo is a film which, steeped in the even more illustrious social world of the aristocrat Don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina in Sicily, anticipates and understands this tension between protagonist and world, and yet cannot help dramatizing the latter extensively through the former. The peculiar identity of Visconti, the Communist Count of Lonate Pozzolo, who believed that ‘[i]f you have content […] mechanics will take care of itself’, is given expression in a film wherein our view of the content is invariably determined by the mechanics of the aristocratic perspective. If Visconti is limiting himself in his choice of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel of the same name as his source material, he cannot be accused of wasting a page of what he has to work with, as the decomposing world of the complicated Prince presents a cracked lookingglass in which the formation of modern Italy is reflected in perfectly imperfect fashion.

Il Gattopardo opens with a comical double movement which sets out the film’s thematic stall,  juxtaposing the self-contained image of Fabrizio’s household monotonously reciting the Rosary with a cacophony outside which slowly tears the tetchy family away from its prayer. A local soldier has been found dead in the garden of the Bourbon family and the forces of revolutionary military leader Giuseppe Garibaldi, marshalling the Expedition of the Thousand to fight for Italian unification, has just landed at Marsala, and is on course to take Palermo. The simplest reading of this scene is that the barbarians are at the gate and the Salina paradise has been lost, but equally the viewer’s derision is directed towards the slightly pathetic response led by Fabrizio’s wife Princess Maria Stella (a criminally underused character in this film), with the Prince’s measured determination to stand firm marking him out as an intransigent beacon amidst this display of upper-class histrionics. Indeed, Fabrizio’s is not the grasping, furious reaction you would expect, but an intrigued, slightly cynical relationship with regime change which, in the slow decline of the aristocracy, sees opportunities for permanence. This attitude arises through a discussion with his ambitious and charming nephew Tancredi Falconeri, who explains to the initially skeptical Fabrizio that he has decided to join Garibaldi under the banner of the Tricolor, anticipating that in order to negate the consequences of the overthrow of the Bourbon monarchy in Sicily for the rich, the rich themselves must be embrace the revolution.

In Tancredi’s words, ‘For everything to remain the same, everything must change’, and the remainder of the film takes us through the series of battles and referendums which adjoin Sicily to Italy, living history which brushes past Fabrizio and Tancredi as the former refuses an offer to become a Senator of the new kingdom, whereas Tancredi hungrily seizes at the chance to become involved in Italian politics. The central narrative perspective never roams far from Fabrizio and his proxy Tancredi’s, the tale told by means of Fabrizio and his family’s summer retreat to Donnafugata. Here Tancredi, having previously flirted with Fabrizio’s daughter Concetta, spurns her for Angelica, daughter of the ambitious mayor Don Calogero Sedara. The early days of Angelica and Tancredi’s blissful life as newlyweds follows, culminating in a ball signifying Angelica’s debut wherein Fabrizio grows increasingly disaffected with Italy’s nouveau riche who have made their fortunes by allying with and then rejecting Garibaldi.

To see Fabrizio’s story as a glorification of the aristocracy is wide of the mark, demonstrated in no small part by the sensitive pacing of Il Gattopardo. The earlier scenes are a whirl of romanticised history, the giddiness of forging the new and unfamiliar Italy, Tancredi’s part in the siege of Palermo told through a sequence of breathless and disorienting cuts. From this point, the whiff of corruption obstructs the carefree gallop of the film’s action, with Don Calogero fixing Donnafugta’s referendum on unification in favour of the formation of Italy in order to ingratiate himself with Fabrizio. The cheerful dinner party scenes in Donnafugata where Tancredi begins the courtship of Angelica accordingly give way to longer, meditative conversations between Fabrizio and Don Cicceo Tumeo as the film reluctantly slouches towards a conclusion. The key set piece in this thickening of Il Gattopardo’s plot is the forty-five minute ball scene, heavily cut within the 165-minute American edition of the film, which with an almost dreamlike stillness takes the form of several tableaux in and around the humid ballroom. In one such tableau, an exhausted Fabrizio is disapprovingly transfixed on a group of noblewomen chatting and laughing on a large bed, the camera resting on the darting colour of this image such that it resembles an enclosure of exotic birds. The energetic motion of the moment, so central to the earlier war scenes, is now secondary to Fabrizio’s own listlessness, with the sexual vitality and romanticism which brightens Garibaldi’s initial foray into Sicily rendered stale by the Prince’s tired response. The virtue of Visconti’s pacing is to identify a fatigued limit to this aristocratic romanticism, and in doing so disputing its quality as a force for leadership or change.

Indeed, the infinitesimal yet intricately patterned texture of Il Gattopardo’s universe points towards an underlying structure of cynicism from which inspiration struggles to escape. Another moment in the ball scene at which time stands still sees Fabrizio stares fixedly at Jean-Baptiste Greuze’s La Mort du Juste, a painting which puts the aging Prince in mind of his own death, and the role that his family will play in it. This is one of multiple instances in which a picture seems to take on its own life within a film where each elaborately conceived interior jostles for contention with what is foregrounded. Elsewhere, a painted map of Donnafugata suddenly occupies the shot after Fabrizio and the conniving Don Calogero have hashed out the finer points of Angelica’s dowry, with the naturalistic frame not the only valid mode of perception within the film as another unfamiliar, semi-fictive Donnafugata becomes the focal point. The routine existence of aristocratic life is shown to not be without its enigmatic otherworlds, and for those like Tancredi, driven to believe that they could live in a different world, the openness of Il Gattopardo’s topography, where every portrait is a portal and the technicolor Sicilian mountains look out onto a new dawn, is a source of validation.

However, on a structural rather than aesthetic level there is something closed and insular about the panoramas and hidden universes which fill Il Gattopardo, and the act of framing experience that they perform, Visconti implies, is deadening. Visconti is successful in showing that all the ornate roads of the nobility, irrespective of their promise, lead to the same stagnant conclusion. A visual metaphor for this is Tancredi and Angelica’s exploration of the endlessly expanding summer palace in Donnafugata which belongs to Fabrizio – Tancredi claims that his uncle has said ‘if you know all the rooms of a palace, it’s not even worth [living in] it’. The continually unfolding house contradicts Fabrizio’s maxim in showing that there is nothing at the end of its eternity, seeing the betrothed couple chase each other through several sparse rooms before their sexual frustration threatens to boil over. As the political capital of the aristocracy declines, the fundamental emptiness of its splendour reveals that as an institution, for all its capacious palaces and fleurs-de-lys, it is without metaphysical bearings. Such is the case when an Aymone Chevalley of the Turin constituent government appears to offer Fabrizio a role as a Senator in the new Italy, giving him an opportunity to alleviate the poverty of his fellow Sicilians. The Prince cordially rejects Chevalley, offering in response the poetic excuse that his fellow islanders possess a ‘longing for voluptuous immobility’ which political power will never tame. This highfalutin rejoinder to a pragmatic suggestion that he might be a force for improvement embodies the contradictory stance of the traditionally wealthy which Il Gattopardo explores. Fabrizio may, in his welcoming and decent nature, represent the best of the aristocracy, but Visconti does not have a nostalgic attitude towards this decency, interested as he is instead in the resistance to renewal which the outwardly refined nobility conceals.

Nonetheless, the outcome of this critique is that the case study for this fascinating period of history in Il Gattopardo is the ennui of one man. Fabrizio’s final, self-pitying appearance, where the Leopard slinks amongst the Sicilian alley cats in a prefiguration of his eventual demise makes the mission statement of the film perfectly clear – if Fabrizio and the nobility emerge from the film as feeble and degraded, they are still worth three hours of our time in an attempt to account for the history of modern Italy. In Il Gattopardo, it feels as if only a small portion of the story of Italian unification is (exquisitely) told. The various loose ends and oddities which rupture the circularity of Fabrizio’s perspective are worthier of time than Visconti feels they are. One of the more intriguing plot elements, redolent of fairytale, which fragments the integrity of the focus on Fabrizio is the question of Don Calogero’s wife. According to Don Ciccio, Don Calegero’s wife is jealously guarded from the public eye by the mayor, appearing only at the ‘5:00am mass, the one nobody attends’. The brief glimpse which Don Ciccio is afforded of this ethereal woman as he sneaks into the early mass represents an interest in disparate or forgotten narratives during the experience of the Italian Risorgimento which Il Gattopardo is sporadic in its attempts to attend to. But the most emphatic collapse of Fabrizio’s perspective occurs under the skeptical stewardship of the household priest Father Pirrone, who is privy to all of Fabrizio’s affairs, his vices included. Pirrone’s ability to speak freely amongst lord and peasant alike felt promising in the early stages of the film in terms of providing a means of mediating between the different parties of the revolution. The priest, rationalising the Prince’s motives in turning revolutionary, explains to a group of poor Sicilians with whom he prays and drinks that their monarchy ‘don’t care about things that are very important to us, but they are afraid of things we ignore’. Here, we are treated to a rare moment in which Italian history is discussed outside of the context of what is ‘important’ to Fabrizio, with the peasants no longer simply couriers and cart drivers amidst the withering of the Bourbon lineage in Italy, but participants in a wider drama. Pirrone’s gradual disappearance from the later events of the film sees Il Gattopardo itself vanish from the material plane of everyday human needs, reducing the film to an artful but incomplete study of historical change which excludes its primary agents and subjects in the peasantry.

As a historical epic, it feels bold but correct to contend that Il Gattopardo gloriously fails in its objective. The finely-tuned mechanics of Visconti’s film clothe the story of the creation of a seat of power in Turin and Garibaldi’s fall in a beautifully-woven romantic fabric, but a fabric through which the totality of the content is only dimly visible. It is a problem which reverberates still through the plots of today’s ‘prestige’ HBO productions, where the moments in which the protagonist emerges from the inner sanctum of their own misery to face the outer world are figured as awkward and, in many cases, either transactional or antagonistic – one need only look at the simultaneously vital and peripheral roles of African-Americans in The Sopranos or Mexicans in Breaking Bad as examples. (1) Just as these shows are hardly ‘about America’ in their selective interpretation of who gets to speak for the national psyche, in the same way Il Gattopardo is best understood as a psychological study of the human condition decline rather than an essential instalment within the Italian historical canon. For all the sensational pomp of Visconti’s film, it remains a text in retreat from its original generic ambitions, and it is ultimately the plaintive growl of the Leopard that the viewer is left with as they attempt to piece together the strange identity of contemporary Italy.

(1) Tony’s HUD scam in ‘Watching Too Much Television’ is a particularly apt case study.