'Scarface': Over-The-Top, But Ahead Of Its Time

Back in school, I was always amused to read about classics that were dismissed when they first came out — you know, how Moby Dick wrecked Herman Melville’s literary career or how The Wizard of Oz was considered a disappointment when it was first released. I naturally assumed that, had I been around back then, I wouldn’t have missed the boat like that.

But that was before I became a critic and discovered that, over the years, you wind up with a pocketful of unused tickets from all the boats you've missed.

Take, for instance, Scarface, the 1983 gangster picture directed by Brian De Palma, written by Oliver Stone, and starring Al Pacino who gives a performance the size of a Caribbean cruise ship. When it first came out, I panned it for taking Howard Hawks's great 1932 movie and remaking it as something trashy, shallow, and excessive to the point of Camp. I wasn't alone. The movie received lots of bad reviews, and even the public wasn't wild about it. It was only the sixteenth biggest box-office draw of 1983, behind such cinematic triumphs as Mr. Mom and Jaws 3-D.

But Scarface didn't vanish like they did. Instead, over the next quarter century, it became a phenomenon. The movie's now so iconic that it doesn't even seem silly that Universal should bring out a fancy, metal-encased Blu-ray version, the Scarface Limited Edition Steelbook, which captures the story in all its lurid glory.

By now, most everyone knows the plot. Pacino stars as Tony Montana, a small-time Cuban exile. Tony arrives in Miami along with his friend Manny Ribera — that's Steven Bauer — and sets about trying to grab the American Dream the only way he knows how: Crime. Over the course of nearly three hours, Tony rises from being a dishwasher to a drug lord complete with a gold-bedecked mansion, a gorgeous moll — played with sly asperity by Michelle Pfeiffer — and personal stashes of cocaine the size of the Matterhorn.

I tell the truth, too, and here's an abiding one: If there's any quality that makes a piece of pop culture last, it's energy. And like the chainsaw that dismembers Tony's friend early on, Scarface just roars. It's as indelible as a cartoon, from Pacino's dementedly hammy performance to the bevy of quotable lines, almost none of which are clean enough to be quoted here.

Yet the historical reason Scarface became a touchstone is that De Palma and Stone — especially Stone, the most plugged-in Hollywood filmmaker of the '80s — were actually ahead of their time. In Tony Montana's gaudy rise and fall, they predicted much of what we've seen in the last quarter century — the delirious consumerism, the Reality TV egomania, the sense of getting ahead as a life-or-death struggle. Most strikingly, Scarface anticipates the rise of hip-hop culture, with its celebration of the gangsta life in all its aspiration and tragic sense of doom.

Where a comfortable middle-class white guy like me found Tony's story a preposterous fantasy, rappers like Snoop Dog and Flavor Flav saw it as a mythic version of something real. It captured their sense of what it was like to be an outsider trying to fight your way to the top, grabbing all the women and bling you could because you know it could all quickly come to a violent end. They identified with Tony's braggadocio, his desire to live large, his willingness to fight to the end. And as with so much of hip-hop, this taste for Scarface entered the mainstream. These days, teens of all races quote Tony's lines at you and play the Scarface video game. For them it's a classic.

As for me, watching Scarface again the other night, I still found it comically over-the-top. But with the benefit of hindsight, I also saw that such an aesthetic judgment is only part of the story. You see, when it comes to pop culture, what finally matters is not whether something is "good," but whether it has the power to burn its way into the national psyche. And Scarface undeniably has that power. I never would've believed it, but in 2011, millions of Americans find Tony Montana a figure who's truer — and more resonant — than Captain Ahab or even The Wizard of Oz.

“You sound like you just don’t like Modernism”

I certainly like other eras—ancient, baroque, classical, romantic—better. But, no, I do like some modernism. I love Conrad (if he is a modernist, and I think so) and Kafka, am fond of Fitzgerald (as required by law, being a Minnesotan) Hemingway, Anderson, etc. As for poets, I gobble Yeats and enjoy certain Eliot, though not much the footnotey “Wasteland.”

“You probably don’t like Virginia Woolf or Proust either?”

Woolf, no. Talk about pretentious. As for Proust, I see him as antithetical to Joyce, at least in some aspects. His sentences are beautiful, his characterizations ring true without dwelling on bowels and such, and his details are actually interesting instead of the stuff that just happens to be around as in Joyce.

Proust’s style, too, has an aesthetically unearned density of meaning. I mean by that to say the discursiveness of his sentences is not fully justified by what they yield to the understanding. And talk about digressions! Though, in this case, he’s not really digressing from anything, as the books could be seen as nothing but a series of digressions. On the whole, though, Proust yes, Joyce no.

“They were inheriting a Victorian storytelling tradition that they felt had become exhausted and they wanted to make language more important.”

Yeah, you hear this a lot. Painters felt representation and perspective had been done to death, so they replaced them with abstraction. Composers felt the sonata, symphony, opera,and ballet worn out, so they turned to atonality, serial and accidental music. Writers saw nothing more to be gained from meter and rhyming in poetry, and lineality and first-person narration in prose.

So they tried new things. And know what? They made it worse. Tonality is better. Perspective is better. Meter is better. Mimesis is better. Rising and falling action and climaxes are better. You failed, grand experimenters.

By the way, people bash Victorians a lot, and they surely were gas bags. I have to get a running start to read Arnold, Stephens, Spencer, Bagehot, etc. Don’t even get me started on the Germans. But you know what? They were on to something. No matter how little we’d like to go back to talking like that, they were onto something. Something more than Joyce, Beckett, Woolf, etc. I’d rather read a Dickens, a Hawthorne, or even a Melville any day than read “Ulyses” again.

“Joyce was a comic writer who could write in just about any style you choose”

Too many. So many that he lost all grasp on the benefit of sticking to a style, or what artistic point abruptly changing styles might serve.

“Ulysses is an epic on the head of a pin”

This sort of statement might sound profound to some, but is meaningless to me. Except insofar as he deals with ordinary things in limited time and space, I guess. There’s nothing epic about the events, setting, or characters, nor in the way the story is told. It’s just a bunch of slumming and dead-end deep psychologizing.

The only way to perceive epicness is to delve into the footnotey depths. But such depths, in my opinion, have nothing to do with the art of novel writing. Everyone can see this in “Finnegans Wake,” since it’s impossible for anyone really to enjoy, unless they’re enjoying it the same way scholars get a kick out of translating Linear B or mapping genomes.

We can’t see that “Ulyses” is no different only because it, as I have said, is fun to read once you get the hang of it. But not all fun is good, at least when we’re dealing with the subject of high art. The general choppiness and fragmented prose, as well as the famous stream-of-consciousness, and the whiplash style changes are all destructive of good writing, in my opinion. The fact that they are used to cover up the fact that we’re dealing with ordinary, boring, vulgar, and sometimes obscene matter (on the surface, anyway, though not in the footnotes) makes it all the worse.

“he popularized the epiphany as a literary climax so I don’t know who did it better”

To clarify, it’s not that Joyce misused the epiphany. When I call his epiphanies anti-climactic, I should clarify that I was being redundant, and all epiphanies are anti-climactic. It’s a bad trick, and destructive of good storytelling.

“The Dead is probably the best short story ever written in English.”

I couldn’t disagree more. Well, maybe if you had cited “Death in Venice,” but who knows? “The Dead” is compelling. I’d call it a page-turner. It is saturated with details, without it being overwhelming or them being uninteresting (as in “Ulyses”). The setting is well realized. The characters are thinner than I’d prefer; the only one who ends up sharply drawn gets that way via the epiphany, which I shall address presently.

It’s nothing more than a trick, a dirty trick. It runs afoul of all we used to know, up to the modern period (though scholars no doubt could gainsay me with previous examples) of good storytelling. What do you call the reverse of a Shaggy Dog Story? An epiphany. It’s all blow and no build-up. You may counter that the whole story up to the epiphany is the build-up, but it isn’t. Nothing that came before, or at best only subtle little hints, have anything to do with the epiphany scene in “The Dead.” The title does, obviously, but not the rest of the story.

Narrative form is governed by causal chains of rising and falling action capped off by a climax, which is (or isn’t) resolved in a denouement. Long story short, what happens before the climax is supposed to lead to it. To inform it, to help us understand what’s going on in it, to build tension for it, and so on.

What happens in “The Dead” is a bunch of stuff. Interesting stuff, well-drawn stuff, not very dramatic yet pleasing stuff. Then, suddenly, something happens. It’s as if the earth cracks open and Deep Meaning oozes out. Only we weren’t prepared for it. Nothing built up to it. It just happened. Not that nothing like that ever happens in real life. Events like epiphanies have happened to me, I suppose. But only in the sense that nothing immediately preceding them caused them. But I, unlike “The Dead,” have more than one night to reference. Certainly something happened earlier to prepare the ground for what could be considered personal epiphanies.

Literary epiphanies are like a 1.5 seconds of intercourse after an hour of half-hearted foreplay. I can’t say the intercourse would be worthless or that I wouldn’t have a good time. But that’s not the best way to have sex, nor is it the best way to tell a story.

Maybe you see a line between direct murder and indirect. Most people don’t, killing is killing, having it done and doing it yourself doesn’t really change the amount of blood on your hands.

It’s not even a matter of shortly before. Tony was very upfront with Frank about what he wanted to accomplish with Frank’s drug empire, and what he was willing to do to accomplish it. Frank could have played along, instead he got in the way. If he’d paid attention he had MONTHS to see it coming, and most importantly PREVENT it.

Who says they’re nice people at the restaurant? They all know what the place is, they all know who goes there. There’s a certain crowd of people that go to expensive restaurants frequented by drug lords.

I never said subsidize, I said need. There’s a major difference. There’s a lot of stuff in the world we need but never deliberately pay for. Often times we don’t even stop to realize we need it.

Nobody cares about drug kingpins anymore. Quick name 3 drug kingpins active today. Now name 3 business leaders that are often “credited” with crashing our economy. Bet you can’t do the first but can do the second. Which tells you which group are the villains of the day. And I never said anything about benefactors. Stop adding to what I wrote.

I don’t know about deep. But Tony’s rant is accurate. sorry you can’t see the plainly obvious truth in it. Maybe you’re adding extra text to it like you did to what I wrote. Edit out the extra text and it might make a lot more sense.

“Maybe you see a line between direct murder and indirect. Most people don’t, killing is killing, having it done and doing it yourself doesn’t really change the amount of blood on your hands.”

It doesn’t if, say, you employed someone to kill someone else. But we’re not talking about that here. We’re talking about people who may or may not take drugs, and the fact that the drug industry is systematically violent. You may see the moral equivalent of murder in knowingly contributing money to a violent enterprise, but I don’t. Nor does the law, and with good reason.

“If he’d paid attention he had MONTHS to see it coming, and most importantly PREVENT it.”

So what? You’re talking about practicality now. Morally, Tony still isn’t allowed to murder him, as no one’s ever allowed to murder.

“Who says they’re nice people at the restaurant?”

I suppose I could have put nice in quatation marks. All I meant was to distinguish them in the same manner as you distinguish them, i.e. as publicly respectable, compared to Tony, the “bad guy.”

“They all know what the place is, they all know who goes there. There’s a certain crowd of people that go to expensive restaurants frequented by drug lords.”

Again, so what? Now we’re talking about celebrity culture, Tony as a sort of Jack the Ripper, whom people need to see on the evening news and point a finger at to make their otherwise dull and ambiguous lives entertaining and meaningful. I realize this is a large part of Tony’s rant, and the only part of it that makes any sense, but it’s not the part we’ve been back and forthing about. It doesn’t impinge on the “nice” people being hypocrites, nor there being a moral equivalence between them and Tony, which is what you’re mostly on about.

“I never said subsidize, I said need. There’s a major difference. There’s a lot of stuff in the world we need but never deliberately pay for. Often times we don’t even stop to realize we need it.”

Are we still talking about drugs now, or what? Because what you’re saying makes sense if we switch back to the “bad guy” celebrity thing. I hadn’t thought that was the subject, but if it is, there’s even less of an equivalence and much, much more of a gulf between Tony and the audience who “needs” his villainy.

“And I never said anything about benefactors. Stop adding to what I wrote.”

Oh, please. It’s called sarcasm. What you said, or implied, is that there was less attention on business corruption in the 80s. Hello! Do I really have to respond to this claim? It’s utter ludicrousness basically forces me to parody your claim by talking about benefaction.

“Nobody cares about drug kingpins anymore. Quick name 3 drug kingpins active today. Now name 3 business leaders that are often ‘credited’ with crashing our economy. Bet you can’t do the first but can do the second”

Okay, so Tony’s sort of “kingpin” isn’t popular anymore. I don’t really remember when they were, unless you go all the way back to Prohibition and Capone, except that guy they made “Superfly” about, but whatever. I assume there were real-life inspirations for Tony, and there aren’t anymore. Fine. Drug cartels grab major headlines all the time, but we don’t any longer have names.

That’s not to say criminals (or alleged criminals) no longer make names for themselves. It’s just not drugs anymore. It’s possibly killing your cute little kid, or kidnapping attractive college students in the Caribbean. Point is, criminals are as popular as ever. You have to know where to look.

On the flip side, no, the average man in the street cannot name three individuals off the top of their heads responsible for the ‘08 meltdown. They can name Madoff, perhaps, but of course his story is seperate from the larger issue of the crash. They can name institutions and politicians, but that’s it. The current anti-business climate is just that, climactic. It is generalized and institutionalized, and not comparable to the celebrity culture of Tony.

The killing of that business class go a lot deeper than just buying drugs.

Keep in mind Frank tried to kill Tony first. Frank CHOSE to make their relationship violent, and Tony won. Frank could have been a partner with Tony and probably would have been much richer, he wanted to be an enemy, he got dead.

No we’re not talking celebrity culture. We’re talking about people that are just as bad as Tony just in trades OTHER than the drug trade. The only difference between him and them is the veneer. That’s the entire point of the scene, you can willfully ignore it, but that’s on you.

No, we’re talking about the fact that there’s always multiple types of bad people running around, but the attention span of the masses is only wide enough to focus on one and make them society’s villain du jour. All the bad guys that are getting to run under cover because the attention is focused on the “villain” get the benefit of anonymity. Drug dealers were the target bad guy in the early 80s, that let the other bad guys run free. Today it’s the business bad guys everybody hates, so the drug dealers get the cover. All the anonymous bad guys need the target bad guys.

In the early 80s drug kingpins were the big target, popular is a poor word for it, popular implies liked, they weren’t liked, they were the ones drawing fire. Drug cartels AREN’T grabbing headlines currently. The headlines read more like the one here now http://www.yesmagazine.org/blogs/david-korten/blog-who-really-crashed-the-economy . It’s now the business sector’s turn to be the target.

You just proved yourself wrong. You gave a list of people the common man in the street would blame for the economy.

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