"There was certainly less profanity in the Godfather than in the Sopranos. There was a kind of respect. It's not that I totally agreed with it, but it was a great piece of art"
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Aiello is doing something slyly old-school here: he’s not clutching pearls about swearing so much as staking a claim about craft. By contrasting The Godfather with The Sopranos, he’s drawing a line between two eras of screen masculinity. The earlier world has violence, betrayal, corruption - but it’s packaged with a ceremonial politeness, a code that pretends to be honorable even while it isn’t. That “less profanity” isn’t a moral metric; it’s a tonal one. The language in The Godfather is curated, almost courtly, which makes the brutality feel fated and mythic rather than messy.
When Aiello says “There was a kind of respect,” he’s pointing to an aesthetic of restraint: characters who perform dignity, and films that treat their rituals seriously. The Sopranos, by design, strips that performance down. Its profanity is democratizing and destabilizing; it pulls mobsters into the fluorescent light of therapy-speak, suburban irritation, and petty humiliation. That shift isn’t just about what audiences can “handle” on TV. It’s about what the culture wants from its antiheroes: not distance and grandeur, but intimacy and abrasion.
His aside - “It’s not that I totally agreed with it” - is the actor’s careful split between ethics and admiration. He can dislike the worldview and still defend the artwork, arguing that greatness can live inside morally compromised material, especially when it’s shaped with discipline rather than noise.
When Aiello says “There was a kind of respect,” he’s pointing to an aesthetic of restraint: characters who perform dignity, and films that treat their rituals seriously. The Sopranos, by design, strips that performance down. Its profanity is democratizing and destabilizing; it pulls mobsters into the fluorescent light of therapy-speak, suburban irritation, and petty humiliation. That shift isn’t just about what audiences can “handle” on TV. It’s about what the culture wants from its antiheroes: not distance and grandeur, but intimacy and abrasion.
His aside - “It’s not that I totally agreed with it” - is the actor’s careful split between ethics and admiration. He can dislike the worldview and still defend the artwork, arguing that greatness can live inside morally compromised material, especially when it’s shaped with discipline rather than noise.
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| Topic | Movie |
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