The Sopranos’Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) andEuphoria’s Nate Jacobs (Jacob Elordi) have a lot of things in common despite the fact they are generations apart. Tony Soprano represented a form of masculinity going out of style in the ’90s and early 2000s. However, in 2022 Nate Jacobs is taking up a very similar space of being unapologetically violent and morally corrupt.
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If Tony Soprano is the father oftoxic masculinity on TV, then Nate Jacobs is his son. Tony embodied something that audiences feared and hoped would come to an end. Nate proves that it hasn’t and has only gotten more insidious and harder to spot. Nate follows the Tony Soprano formula of a layered TV villain who operates under his own rules.
Obsessed With Maintaining Their Rigid Views
The mafia boss gave audiences a dark figure obsessed with maintaining his rigid worldview. Tony aimed touphold the criminal enterpriseand the old-fashioned ideas that go along with that by any means necessary. Viewers see his discomfort primarily intherapy sessions when Dr. Melfi(Lorraine Bracco) challenges him. Nate functions in a very similar way. He is often repulsed by those who don’t align with his narrow worldview, as the audience saw inseason one ofEuphoriawhen he was confronted with Jules (Hunter Schaffer) and his feelings for her. Nate’s obsession with Maddy (Alexa Demie) is partly because she falls into line with what he believes a woman should be.
Tony and Nate feel entirely justified in making black and white judgments to protect their worlds. They are willing to cause immense harm at the expense of others to succeed in this. Both men are made very uncomfortable when confronted with something they don’t quite understand. They are scared of growing beyond their current form and act out aggressively.
Violence Against Women
Perhaps the starkest example of Tony and Nate’s toxicity is their violence towards women in their lives. Tony took out plenty of anger and aggression on his wife, Carmella (Edie Falco), and his many mistresses. Nate got physical with his girlfriend, Maddy, and intimidated and threatened Jules.
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The problem with Tony and Nate is that they see the women around them as disposable and something to be manipulated. When challenged by women, both men will act out violently. Neither holds a tremendous amount of respect for women, but both are aware that they need their support and affection to fulfill their desires.
Products Of Harmful “Families”
Tony is the product ofgrowing up within a crime familyand saw violence as a necessary part of becoming a man and participating in criminal work. Nate, not unlike Tony, grew up absorbing therhetoric and standards of his father, Cal (Eric Dane). Tony and Nate were both forced into conformity based on their families' expectations and internalized these teachings to the extreme.
Tony and Nate have an unquestioning devotion to what they were taught growing up. They treat their upbringing as a roadmap to accomplishing masculinity and becoming the right kind of man. Both believe they are lucky enough to have this kind of knowledge, while others do not understand as they do. Although, the extremist psyches of Tony and Nate take what they were taught too far, and they revise it to suit their violent tendencies.
Blaming Others And Not Being Accountable
Even though Tony and Nate covet their upbringings, they understand that they are harmful people and refuse to take accountability for their actions. Tony and Nate remove themselves from their problematic actions by primarily blaming their parents. In therapy, Tony blamed his mother repeatedly for how he responded to conflict in his life. He points to her as the source of all his bad behavior. Nate does the same thing with his father; he views him as weak and evil because of the double life he was leading. Nate blames Cal forbeing a violent individualbecause of Cal’s secret violent activities.
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Though they both come from troublesome backgrounds, Tony and Nate reflect very little on how they are in control of how they react. They do not want to change even though they get that what they are doing is wrong. Therefore, they cannot be responsible for how they act; the blame must be shifted onto others. They are problematic because of how they were raised, and they react the way they do because of how others behave. Tony and Nate refuse to see themselves as perpetrators of violence because they do not want to contend with their morality.
Breaking Their Own Moral Standards
Tony and Nate both have stringent standards that they hold other people to, while they readily will ignore that for themselves. Tony constantly skirted his loyalties to the men who worked for him while he expected their undying loyalty to him. Nate attacked a man he thought assaulted Maddy while he harmed her himself multiple times. They both see themselves above their moral cords because they need to keep other people in line.
Even though they have a strong sense of justice, they felt they had to go beyond it to maintain it. Tony and Nate are undeniably only focused on their self-interests and skew their own choices as necessary evils. They adamantly believe what they are doing is for a greater sense of how things should be. But they are only protecting themselves from the harm that they cause.
