When New Jersey mob boss Tony Soprano finds himself in the office of psychologist Jennifer Melfi in the pilot episode of The Sopranos (1999), she asks him a number of questions. About his family, his work, and the panic attack that landed him, against his inclination, in psychotherapy.
He asks her only one: “What ever happened to Gary Cooper?”
Contrasting what he perceives as the self-indulgent emotionalism of therapy with the stoicism epitomized by Cooper’s roles in Westerns and war films, Tony persists, “Now that was an American.”
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