cold cuts

In "Proshai, Livushka" we see Tony rewatching an old mobster movie again and again, and we know that he saw the whole story every time, but the piece of the story that we get to see and our corresponding understanding of Tony's character changes over the course of the episode.

Meaning that Tony's arc in this episode, or the overall arc of the episode, may be less a true transformation of Tony himself than a transformation of what the audience knows of him. In fact, we are the ones who are changed by this episode, and from Tony's perspective he has no arc at all.

Which is sort of perfect, because here if there ever was one is a story with no "arc."

An "arc" (in the context of screenwriting, which is the context in which it was introduced to this show) is what gives meaning to the whole story. It's the narrative satisfaction, the profound feeling, the purpose, the message, the thing that makes the movie feel like it amounted to something and it was worth your time.

In the wake of his grief, Tony isn't just obsessed with just any mobster movie, he's obsessed with a movie full of broad stereotypes and simple messages that amounts to a cliched, simplistic mother figure losing her son. It's the tragedy of a mother's profound grief that gives tragedy to the death of her son and makes the movie worth your time.

It's a contrast to Livia's obsession with mothers who kill their children, and its an extension of his comment to Melfi that he deserves to die. And you realize when the son character dies that Tony is wishing it was him in the coffin. Not because he's suicidal, but because he's just that desperate for a sense of meaning. For a story that has an arc.

And then you realize in the final scene, when it's not the mother's grief but the mother's love that brings him to tears, that he knows it wouldn't work. His death would have no arc, no profundity, no purpose. Because Livia never loved him the way a mother figure should.

His story isn't written in broad caricatures and it has no divine mother's love at the center of it giving divinity and meaning to everything else. Losing himself in a movie is the closest he'll ever get to putting some kind of arc or meaning or sense to that relationship.