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.
One of the worst movies ever made, imho.
“the outsized influence of other frauds in the house of the classics, for instance Joyce”
LOL This ignorance isn’t worth pursuing anymore.
Whhat they gained is a foregrounding of their own artifice. A calling attention to themselves as composed narratives.
He wouldn’t be just anyone without the title of ‘Captain’!
LMAO!
I love it. Looking forward to seeing it in the theater again Wednesday. It’s big, it’s loud, it’s brash, it’s crazy, it gave Michael Mann the structure for every single frame of Miami Vice. And amazingly for a movie where every 3rd word is an f-bomb it’s actually got a lot of really quotable lines without profanity.
“I kill a Communist for fun...but for a Green Card I gonna carve him up realllllllll nice.”
It feels like the lines were conceived as “quotable” in the most banal way. The only way it work is as an OTT campy comedy.
The punchline of the restaurant scene is that the others are really the bad guys. Tony is honest (the only time in the whole thing he ever breaks his word it gets him killed) while they make all their profit from lies; he sells a drug, which eventually winds up in their noses; and yet according to the rules of the world they’re the fine upstanding bastions of industry and he’s the crook. They do need him to be the bad guy, otherwise the national attention will look to them. And if you don’t believe him look at who the “villains” of our society are now, it ain’t drug kingpins anymore.
And of course the big thing is that while RD and PF are told non-linearly by the EVENTS they’re actually linear by PLOT. The plot of each scene informs the next and forms a linear narrative, that just happens to skip around in time. You can really see it in PF, if you re-arrange those scenes for chronology the story doesn’t make sense.
Not at all. The story actually works as a moral parable. Early on in the movie Tony throws out the line that he came here with only his balls and his word and he won’t break either for anybody. And that’s how he operates until the end of the movie, he’s always 100% honest, and if he’s putting in hard work it’s for him. Even when he takes over Franks operation it’s totally honest, he never lies to Frank and had Frank been smart they could have become partners. Then he won’t blow up the car, he breaks his word, and that puts his destruction in motion.
There’s actually a very complex story hidden behind Al’s scenery chewing.
“LOL This ignorance isn’t worth pursuing anymore”
I enjoy how I’ve never received a decent answer as to how Joyce is so great, let alone Faulkner or Melville, aside from bald assertions of their greatness and references to their dubious innovations. If I really was too ignorant to argue with, I think you’d merely stop posting.
I didn’t want to go into it, but so long as you laugh at my distaste for Joyce, let me ask, what is it about him? The anti-climax of his epiphanies (climaxes being something I value)?
The unecessary and distracting idioms of punctuation and grammar?
The fact that in most of his sentences the words could be randomly reordered without anyone noticing?
The run-ons of his “stream of consciousness,” which, by the way, sound nothing to me like consciousness?
The psuedo-epicness of previously ingored (for good reason) quotidian subjects like going to the bathroom and what happens to your genitals during intercourse?
The fact that you can’t understand what the heck is going on without knowing that he’s referencing previous literature. Or, as I call it (after what someone termed the infinitely more comprehensible poetry of T.S. Eliot), his footnote art? For more recent examples, see the bloated, vulgar, extremely externally referential, superficially fun but deep-down impenetrable awful novel “Infinite Jest.”
I think I know the appeal. Once you get used to the chopiness of the story, the sentence fragments, and the disjointed ideas, it’s easy to read. Easier at the expense of good writting, in my opinion, me being one of the few left who thinks that good prose consists of saying what you want to say clearly and directly, which is hard when you don’t write in full sentences and jump from idea to idea. Then, because it’s so complex, so dense with allusions and footnote meaning, so saturated with all the little modern literary tricks that it makes you feel smart.
Melville, though not Faulkner, by the way avoids much of this criticism, as he hangs onto the old full sentences and up-front (i.e. non-footnote) meaning. He falls into purple prose as Joyce never would, unless he was making fun of purple prose. But that’s less of a sin, in my opinion. Dickens was purple as anyone and he’s great. There are also choppy writers allergic to full sentences I like, for instance Tom Wolfe and Saul Bellow, though I wish they wouldn’t.
Plus, “I kill a communist for fun” :)
“He was trying to raise something as mundane as whaling to Epic scope.”
You have now given a reasonably succinct description of why Moby Dick sucked donkey dicks.
If you try to write an epic, you have already failed.
I dropped in on my college in the '70's when Anthony Burgess addressed a 400-seat Mensa group citing the medicos who'd given him six months to live during which time he'd written six novels and a screenplay.Hahaha, they said.
Now come the youth of the UK turning and burning to show the rich somethingmumblemumble.
Melanie Phillips' Londonistan meets Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange.
Something is happening here. More youth caterwauling; throw money.
Scarface is being played out in vastly less glamorous vignettes.
On the heels of the two thousand weapons Barky and Holder gave Sinaloan gangsters comes the report the DEA and FBI facilitate that group's business for information on the others.
From Ramos & Compean through Jesus Diaz to Tom Clancy's Clear and Present Danger.
From Superfly to Lord of the Flies.
Coming to a state fair near you.
Bob Dole asked, where is the outrage.
When the senators are turning on the spit, it'll be Crocodile Dundee: needs garlic.
O tempore.
“The punchline of the restaurant scene is that the others are really the bad guys”
That’s what Tony’s trying to say, but they aren’t. I don’t care if they indirectly finance murder, Tony’s an actual murderer, and that’s worse.
“the only time in the whole thing he ever breaks his word it gets him killed”
I don’t know if that’s true, but okay, let’s say he’s honest. That’s one virtue at least. I’m not sure, though, it’d make a difference if the guy who shot me in the face said, shortly before shooting me in the face “I’m gonna shoot you in the face.”
“while they make all their profit from lies”
Who? The nice people at the restaurant? How do you know? And even if they do, he profits from killing people, which is worse.
“yet according to the rules of the world they’re the fine upstanding bastions of industry and he’s the crook”
Insofar as they are drug users and benefit from Tony’s trade, I don’t think we’ve ever been at a level where drugs are part of the diet of fine, upstanding bastions of industry. Certainly, though, drug use is looked on better than being a murdering thug. And insofar as that’s the case, its not because people are hypocrites; it’s because drug laws are less respected than other laws.
“They do need him to be the bad guy, otherwise the national attention will look to them.”
That sounds like a loopy Stoneian notion. The wealthy subsidize criminals to keep the public off their backs. Right.
The plain and obvious reason they need him to be the bad guy is so they, or those of them who do drugs, can get drugs. And the reason they need bad guys to get drugs is because the government has outlawed them.
“And if you don’t believe him look at who the ‘villains’ of our society are now, it ain’t drug kingpins anymore.”
Yes it is, among others. And what do you think, people looked up to the rich as their patrons and benefactors back in the 80s? Ha!
You can sayn all you want about the larger context of the drug war, but nothing can make Tony’s rant anything but the sort of pathetic, half-baked, psuedo-intellectual mumbo-jumbo Stone injects in all his movies. He’s always getting Gordon Gecko to say out of nowhere “You think we’re living in a democracy?” Part of the audience nods, murmuring “that’s deep” and “so true,” while I’m left thinking, “What the hell was that?”
By the way, I think “Scarface” does an okay job of skimming the larger context of the drug war, that is for a trashy gangster picture, especially when he’s hobnobbing with the higher-ups down south. This is also the part of the movie I zoned out on, so perhaps it wasn’t as I remember. All I know is the splashy, attention grabbing restaurant rant was nothing but a low rent Big Dramatic Oscar Clip Speech lacking underlying sense. Perhaps I can excuse it on the grounds that he was drunk, high, or both.
Also, I must add that it was nevertheless one of the most memorable part of the movie, fourth, to me, to “Say hello to my little friend,” the chainsaw, and “first you get the money, then you get the power, then you get the women.” It’s fun to watch a fake drunk/high Cuban yell nonense at a room full of fat, rich, lilly-white people.
You sound like you just don’t like Modernism. You probably don’t like Virginia Woolf or Proust either? They were inheriting a Victorian storytelling tradition that they felt had become exhausted and they wanted to make language more important. Faulkner’s influence extends to places like China, Russia and Latin America so it has nothing to do with Americans asserting his greatness. Joyce was a comic writer who could write in just about any style you choose. Ulysses is an epic on the head of a pin. And he popularized the epiphany as a literary climax so I don’t know who did it better. The Dead is probably the best short story ever written in English.
I just found it painful to sit through and impossible to take seriously on any level. The Gangster as Tragic Hero stuff had been done to death.
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