It’s no real surprise when the mafia needs to hide funds, valuables, or simply a body. This is a part of life when it mafia city hack to mafias from coast to coast. No other character in the mafia knew this better than Tony Soprano, a mafia boss who regularly needed to hide behind the guide of a dumpster rental service to protect his friends and family from the authorities. In the series, Tony Soprano took the title of garbage man to throw off suspicious neighbors, cops, and other acquaintances in him and his family’s life.
Despite his constant attempt to cover up the fact that he was in the dumpster rental and garbage removal service, his extravagant lifestyle often got in the way. While Tony Soprano lived in a massive house that he purchased for himself and his family, his character in The Sopranos received backhand talk that occurred around town that speculated about his ties to the mafia. As he came into more and more money, he was forced to launder it or bury hard cash in an attempt to shield himself from those trying to put an end to the mafia economy in New York and throughout New England.
Tony Soprano went to great lengths to protect his image, family, and personal finances in the show. Writers were sure to make his character a tough and masculine as possible. But while Soprano was a hard-lined mafia lord with severely violent tendencies, a wonderfully artistic aspect of the show developed when the writers made the character a romantic when he contemplated alone. This was particularly important for the development of the character in the earlier seasons of the show.
There was one specific scene in which the character had finished hiding cash in a dumpster rental on his property and then found natural wildlife appear in his backyard. As a machismo Italian mafia lord, viewers may have expected the character to rid his property of this wildlife. Instead, the strong, muscular, masculine mafia god fed the animals and attempted to keep them around as long as possible. For the script, this was a form of symbolism that revealed the mafia tough guy had more problems with humans and fewer problems with animals.
Indeed, the character would have much preferred to deal with natural wildlife than the people he dealt with daily. This symbolism in the show was necessary to characterize Tony Soprano not as a romantic lover of animals, but as a misanthropic mafia boss. The final season was one of the most watched series in television history, and the final episode has gone down in HBO history. The final episode was even parodied by the Clintons during Hilary Clinton’s run for president in 2008.This worked to the show’s advantage, and as a result, The Sopranos became one of the most watched showed in the United States.
