Annette Bening is in Tony’s dream as a result of Annette Bening might be in a variety of desires of cinephiles of their mid-40s. But additionally: even amidst all of the intensely private imagery and ideas in Tony’s desires, The Sopranos is indicating that the bigger cultural panorama is inescapable. Earlier than Tony meets Bening, he sees his favourite actor Gary Cooper on a TV in Nuovo Vesuvio. And when he and Vin Makazian depart the desk to go pee (one thing that Tony mournfully observes the useless Vin can’t do anymore), the dream Bening blurts out a line from The Godfather: “I don’t need my husband popping out of there with simply his cock in his hand.”
Bening’s dream cameo even extends into the subsequent part of the dream the place Tony lastly confronts his anxiousness over how his cousin will reply to Angelo’s homicide. As Tony witnesses Tony B kill Phil within the streets, a crowd of onlookers collect to chastise him for not stopping it. Among the many onlookers is Annette Bening, whose raised hand de facto dream M.C. Gloria Trillo acknowledges with a hilarious “Annette Bening?” Annette merely needs to say “There’s one thing bugsy about him,” which is referring to Tony and likewise the 1991 movie Bugsy she starred in alongside her actual life husband Warren Beatty about gangster Bugsy Siegel.
If that is all beginning to sound bizarre and exhausting that’s form of the purpose. Desires solely make the slightest little bit of sense while you look on the highlights. For Tony, that clearly factors to the stress he’s experiencing over Tony B. However the path that his dream takes to get there’s a circuitous one. And never solely that, nevertheless it doesn’t even cease with the homicide of Phil Leotardo and Annette Bening’s probing questions of it.
After the Leotardo homicide in dream world, Tony’s thoughts throws him proper again to highschool the place he encounters his true nemesis: his highschool soccer coach. As Coach Molinaro chastises Tony over his lack of ambition, Tony makes an attempt to execute him however he drops his clip and all of the bullets therein flip to ash in his hand. That is the “check” portion of “The Take a look at Dream” title – the one the place you’re assigned an vital job (a check in highschool) and your mind gleefully orchestrates your failure of it.
Hilariously, the Coach Molinaro portion of the dream is likely to be the one a part of it Tony truly remembers. Often, individuals solely recall the snippet of a dream they have been experiencing proper earlier than waking and afterward Tony calls Carmela to inform her he had the “Coach Molinaro” dream once more.
That doesn’t imply, nevertheless, that the Annette Bening of all of it was all for naught. She was an vital a part of Tony’s dream journey. What half precisely? Nicely, she was there. And in the case of dream logic, generally that’s the perfect you are able to do.
