Posted on 08/26/2011 11:11:00 AM PDT by Borges
Edited on 08/26/2011 11:32:12 AM PDT by Sidebar Moderator. [history]
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.
“Depressing? Both are highly comic.”
I don’t at all see how comedy and depression are unrelated, especially in these cases, when we’re talking about “black comedy.” See the real life of any random comic.
“RD is a story extremely well told.”
I wouldn’t say extremely. That whole nonlinear trick is just that, a trick. I still believe in Aristotlean unity of time and plot. Not that flashbacks are useless, but they were here overused. Also, as a rule I hate the cliche of the Tarantino Mexican Standoff. It works in “Pulp Fiction,” wherein Samuel L. Jackson gets away without having to soil his newfound spiritual mission with blood. But not here, where the climax consists of all the characters, except one whom we don’t care about anyway, kill eachother within a couple seconds. It is only saved by the emotional climax that comes moments later between Keitel and Roth, though that was really pointless and tension-free since they were dead anyway.
It’s my favorite Tarantino movie, by the way. So that can be said for it. I especially like the relationship between Keitel and Roth. It’s just that most of the characters and nearly all of the things they do are depraved, and it all leaves me feeling like dirt.
I think the point is - what is the point of any book, play or movie?
The eternal teenagers will never understand that first line, they live to be amused.
But the world needs adults to guide the young or else you have a land of children and that becomes a target for barbarians to conquer.
MacBeth, Moby Dick, most of the great books including A Clockwork Orange AS ORIGINALLY WRITTEN (21 chapters not the 20 that America printed and the movie depicted) all had a point, a moral if you want to say so.
What I think reprehensible is when a story is left hanging, when you don’t show what happens in conclusion. To take A Clockwork Orange for example, the 21st chapter (which Burgess wrote very intentionally) is that ultimately, the nasty Alex and his ilk will age and will be preyed on by the next generation, by the next in line.
That is why it is so very tragic that America is going that way because in the long run it’s going to allow “barbarians” to take over - leads to a new Dark Ages.
Of course those Dark Ages will eventually pass but that is too far down the road to even imagine.
RD and PF didn’t have any flashbacks. The story was simply told in non-linear order. No one calls them flashbacks when Faulkner and other writers did it. It’s just a modernist storytelling device. Flashback has a very specific meaning that doesn’t fit here.
Never saw it. Don’t plan to.
“Never saw it. Don’t plan to.”
I also never saw “Scarface” (though I unfortunately have seen too much else not worth my precious life time) and I SALUTE YOU!!!!
“Interchapter-like digressions had been common in fiction up until the 20th century.”
I’m not saying digressions are bad as such, and in fact they do persist into the 20th and 21st century. Take “1984,” for example, with the fake political treatise it plops into the middle of the story. I love that part, and hang on its every word. Contrast that to the history of the whaling industry in “Moby Dick,” which sickens me.
Perhaps I wasn’t explicit enough when I brought up “Don Quixote” and “War and Peace,” but the purpose was to clarify that it’s not the aesthetic anachronisms of “Moby Dick” that get to me. I understand novels were different in the past, and that even if certain classics aren’t in every aspeact as readable as something written last month, that doesn’t make them illegitimate. Because unlike many other disappointments, and even though I can’t satisfactorily read them all the way through, “Don Quixote” and “War and Peace” are masterpieces. Despite what I call flaws—and I’m perfectly willing to concede that to an extent I only consider them flaws because I live in an age with different literary taste, although I might ask what a classic is but that which —I have no qualms about placing them in the pantheon.
“Moby Dick,” however, is in my opinion an egregious offender. But even if that’s prejudice, fine. I already said the digressions and such are not the main problem. The whole thrust of my post was that all its flaws (dragged-out action, long digressions, poor non-main character characterization, pretentiousness) are secondary to the problem that it is boring and impossible for me to get through.
“The Whaling interchapters in MD are actually metaphors”
Not very good ones.
“the Historical Philosophy chapters in ‘War and Peace’ can easily be skipped.”
Yes, I know, and I do. The whole point of my bringing it up, again, was to show that I can look an old books flaws and love it for what it is. And flaws they are, by the way, even if they’re relics of a bygone stylistic era. That is, if you believe, as I do, in the higher goal of unity of purpose, and in art that lasts.
By the way, I don’t think in Tolstoy’s case we are merely dealing with a different evolutionary period, as we are with Cervantes’ episodic romanticism or Melville’s contextualization. It wasn’t ever to my knowledge common to include serious essays on the philosophy of history in novels. That was some weird stuff in his era, too, I think.
“’This movie is trash’ is just a crappy retort.”
Not really. it may be prefunctory, but it’s right on.
“None of the characters are redeemable, but they’re interesting”
Pornography is interesting (for a certain amount of time), too. That’s an extreme comparison, so let’s think of something with less moral content. Okay, pro-wrestling is trashy, too. It’s visceral, immediate, and meaningless, just like Scarface. Oh, sure, they threw in stuff about the plight of immigrants, the dead end of menial labor, the danger of ambitious youth (assuming Pacino was supposed to be a youth), the hypocrisy of the War on Drugs, the need of comfortable people to have a villain to point the finger at, and blah, blah, blah.
All it was really about was blood, guns, chainsaws, Bang!s, Boom!s, and mountains of coke. Pure voyeurism. Watch a guy live freely in the extremes of sex, money, and violence for a while, see how boring it gets, and then feel good about him dying. It’s about as fulfilling an experience as eating a happy meal, which is why we call it trash.
What’s with the dissing of Mr Mom?
Your Mom calls the vacuum cleaner “jaws”?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTwqmj1551E
Scarface was a simplistic movie, .. to make the point almost every guy I knew in college who had a Scarface poster on his wall ended up wasting time and money being in college cause they took on the underclass lifestyle seriously, apparently didn’t realize the morality play shown in the final scenes of the movie.
“All the idiot hip-hoppers who love this film and actually admire and envy the characters miss the point intentionally or otherwise despite the very unambiguous ending.”
Was it ambiguous? It ended the same way every rags to riches (or riches to more riches) gangster story ends: with the ambitious, Icarian upstart dying by the sword. I’m pretty sure we’re supposed to feel good about his death, no matter who’s benefitting from it, nor what is its soci-econo-political import. Ultimately Tony’s just one more Macbeth, and no one ever really roots for Macbeth. Not even the ones who do, if you know what I mean.
“let us not forget Robert Loggia’s Falstaffian role which he managed to make a multi-faceted one”
What? I won’t touch the Falstaff reference, so out of nowhere does it come. But multi-faceted? You mean in that you briefly feel sorry for him after long expecting his downfall at Tony’s hands? They do the same thing for every heavy that originally stands in the hero-villain’s way. Loggia was just the guy the main character has to get through to move up the ranks, and not much more. Dime a dozen in moveidom, I think.
It may not have been intended as camp originally but yes, it has become so, and with camp bad sufficiently overblown becomes ironic good, and it is there that Tony actually becomes an antihero instead of what he really was, just another upwardly mobile thug. Maybe too much theorizing there. I'm done.
“RD and PF didn’t have any flashbacks. The story was simply told in non-linear order.”
Wrong. “Pulp Fiction” was told in simple non-linear fashion, in a manner of speaking. That is to say, it consisted of a series of somewhat overlapping episodes told out of chronological order. Contrariwise, “Reservoir Dogs,” after the introductory scene in the diner, consisted of one long linear sequence frequently interrupted by flashbacks. Whereas in “Pulp” you’d have to draw a diagram, mentally or otherwise, to put everything in its relative chronological place, most of the action of “Dogs” happens at one time, and everything else at random times but always prior to the main action.
“No one calls them flashbacks when Faulkner and other writers did it”
For the record, I find Faulkner insufferable and vastly overrated.
“It’s just a modernist storytelling device”
Actually, flashbacks are a very old device. What’s modernist is the nonlinear thing, or perhaps I should say the extended and persistently nonlinear thing. Along with tricks like the epiphany I consider it to be sufferable at best and illegitimate at worst. But it would take a long aesthetic digression to explain why, so just leave it at I don’t like them.
In “Pulp”’s case, I wonder, what do you consider the benefit of telling things out of order? What did it accomplish, other than confusing us? You might say that Sam Jackson provided the emotional climax, and his scene happened to take place before Bruce Willis’ journey and John Travolta’s misadventures. But it didn’t have to be that way; that’s just how Tarantino wrote it.
Maybe I’m blinded by a preference for cause and effect and have been erroneously led to believe in a meaning to history by the capitalist, patriarchal, heteronormative superstructure, but I still believe stories should consist of a sequence of events building up to something we call a climax. Tarantino lets you have it both ways, in that things fit together, the most interesting part comes at the end, and everything leaves you relatively satisfied, beside lingering confusion over what happened in what actual order, that is. Which I consider cheating, since it’s invoking the ghost of lineality to do your storytelling work for you, without having to acknowledge it, and appearing experimental to boot.
“Flashback has a very specific meaning that doesn’t fit here.”
It fits perfectly. We see Tim Roth being an undercover cop, travel back in time to see how he got to be an undercover cop, then jump back to the original time, bolstered by our knewly found knowledge.
Note that I wrote the ending was UNambiguous.
I didn’t feel good about his death nor did I get the impression that I was supposed to - it was just another body on the pile after an orgy of violence.
However, I admit that this conclusion is influenced by Oliver Stone’s other works which also go to great lengths to create characters specifically lacking heroic or admirable qualities.
“That’s like comparing ‘The Manchurian Candidate’ with the JFK assassination”
I’m sure people did, although certainly in a much broader sense than with the “Basketball Diaries.” There’s no motorcade, nor limo, nor warehouse window, nor grassy knoll, or whatever. All there is, really, is that Oswald was also in the military, the communists are involved, and the target is a political figure.
Have you seen the scene in question from the latter movie (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sfAZYmMig4)? It’s too evocative, eerie, and anticipatory to scoff at in your manner. I’m not saying it has any meaning, just that it’s weird and impossible to completely deny.
By the way, not that it means anything either, but Oswald was known to have seen assassination movies before committing his act. I’ve heard “The Manchurian Candidate” in this respect, and also “We Were Strangers” and “Suddenly.” The thing to remember about interest in moviedom’s place in inspiring killers is that it’s not a case of causation or “triggers.” It’s that they probably would’ve killed anyway, but that what they saw might have influenced them to kill in a particular way, i.e. while wearing a black trenchcoat.
“Note that I wrote the ending was UNambiguous.”
My mistake.
In reading MD, you have to keep in mind that Melville was dealing with an industry that was reviled even at the time. He was trying to raise something as mundane as whaling to Epic scope. The whaling chapters try to take this or that aspect of whaling and try to make it Significant with a capital S - to imbue it with more meaning than anyone ever thought it could posses. And in the narrative proper, he conjures up a sense of wonder with some of the best prose every written in English. It’s also very funny. The battle at the end with three consecutive nights is genuinely Homeric. You could see his influence on everyone from Faulkner to Pynchon.
Tolstoy didn’t even consider W&P a novel.
Tarantino insisted they weren’t flashbacks and got catty when anyone called them so. A flashback is generally more explicitly tied to what was being flashed back from than what was seen in those two films but I suppose RD comes close. And the reason for making PF that way was to bolster the connection to the Godard films that influenced it.
“He was trying to raise something as mundane as whaling to Epic scope.”
He was trying, and gave job security to generations of literary critics in the process, but I say he tried too hard, hence my calling it pretentious. He doesn’t earn his grandeur and epicness in the classic manner of Shakespeare and Milton due to his boringness, nor in the modern manner of Kafka due to his bloatedness.
“he conjures up a sense of wonder with some of the best prose every written in English”
One man’s best prose in the history of english literature is another’s ambien, I guess.
“The battle at the end with three consecutive nights is genuinely Homeric”
I hear people say this sort of thing, and I trust they believe it, but it sounds like Dyson vacuum ads telling me about their incredible technological feats. You’re not curing cancer; it’s just a vacuum, guy. “The Iliad” is still riveting after thousands of years, and I offer as proof my being unable to stop reading it, even though I was assigned only a few chapters that night. It actually hurt my class performance, as I finished weeks ahead of schedule, then had to go back and write a paper as if I just finished it.
Needless to repeat, Melville did not nail me to the seat. I couldn’t read a page without thinking about what I can do once I’m finally free.
“You could see his influence on everyone from Faulkner to Pynchon.”
I don’t know about those authors in particular, aside from the fact that Faulkner is, if not equally, somewhat as pretentious. I also don’t know when he was added to the cannon, but he couldn’t help but be massively influential when critics never stop talking about him and he’s required reading for generations. This is a bad thing, in my opinion. Just as the outsized influence of other frauds in the house of the classics, for instance Joyce, is a bad thing.
I was going to rent a room from a man in a really nice town...until I saw that he had a big framed picture of Tony Montana from Scareface in his home...yikes!
“Tolstoy didn’t even consider W&P a novel.”
I did, and it’s almost perfect as a novel, whereas it’s middling as history and shallow as philosophy. Think of how mighty is his Napoleon as a character compared to how pathetic he is as historical figure and how nearly nonexistent he within the philosophical system. My thinking has been heavily influenced by Berlin’s “Hedgehog and the Fox” on this point, but I felt that way beforehand as well.
“Tarantino insisted they weren’t flashbacks and got catty when anyone called them so.”
C.S. Lewis claimed not to write allegories. Writers don’t always understand what they’re doing, and can be liars.
“I suppose RD comes close”
That’s fine by me, and for the record I never claim that what we’re seeing in “Pulp Fiction” are flashbacks.
“And the reason for making PF that way was to bolster the connection to the Godard films that influenced it.”
The only Godard movie I ever saw was “Breathless,” and I don’t recall it being out of order. But if that was one of his tricks, that only pushes the question back a generation, becoming what did New Wave films gain by arranging events out of sequence?
By the way, I think it’s more accurate to say that Tarantino was influenced by the American movies of the 70s which were influenced by Godard, than to say Tarantino was influenced by Godard. Or maybe I’m being too cute about the whole thing. I just get more the 70s depresso-Young Turk-Film School-Scorsese/DePalma-Blaxploitation feel from him than the 60s French New Wave feel.
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