The World is Yours: Scarface

In my article on Phantom of the Paradise, I wrote that Scarface “was a decade too late to be good.” The film’s vision of toxic masculinity mingling with winner-take-all capitalism (aka capitalism) makes it a rehash of The Godfather with a pulsing eighties soundtrack. Been there, done that.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that Scarface is a bad film. De Palma’s talent is certainly on display here, as he drenches the film in an enjoyable style with his own typical flourishes. The film is toned back from the neon weirdness of Phantom of the Paradise, but I nonetheless relish the willingness of De Palma to depart from the realistic simplicity of the classic gangster drama. It’s a film in which style is the substance.

But I can’t shake the fact that as a teenager, I liked the film for the wrong reasons, just as I saw many others appreciate the film for the same wrong reasons. In an essay in her book I Like to Watch, Emily Nussbaum describes television’s “bad fan” who takes the satire or cautionary tale literally: from Archie Bunker to Walter White, viewers miss the point that the message often runs against the characters’ grain.

Cinema’s most potent bad fans, then, are likely those of Scarface. The genius of De Palma’s most overrated film is that viewers are inspired, rather than repulsed, by Al Pacino’s Tony Montana, creating a kind of meta commentary in which the reaction to the film is in itself part of its narrative. It’s one of the worst performances of Pacino’s career, yet indelible in moviegoing consciousness; the actor scowls and yells his way into the hearts of angsty teens like my former self and others who don’t realize the film is not a tragedy but a farce.

Seen one way, Tony Montana is the immaculate American capitalist: a refugee who seeks his fortunes on the sunny shores of the United States. With pluckiness, grit, and determination, Montana rises to the top of his game to live in glorious wealth with a beautiful wife and a mountain of cocaine. The true embodiment of the American dream, The World is Yours, as Tony’s sculpture says, so long as you can keep it.

However, seen another way, Tony Montana is… well, he’s still the immaculate capitalist: brutally violent, aggressively ostentatious, and locked in a constant struggle to remain on the top of the world (ma!) at the expense of the people below him. With a few well-placed bullets, Montana rises to the top of his game to die alone surrounded by pointless ornamental filigree. The true embodiment of the American dream, The World is Yours, so long as you can keep everyone else around you down.

The fact that Pacino plays the role to the extreme end of the spectrum is a clue to how De Palma intended his film to be seen. Unlike The Godfather, which relies on an intellectual critique of capitalism laced into an understated drama, Scarface is a visceral, guttural comedy masquerading as an aspirational drama. Not enough people are laughing.

[Update 09-21-2020: read my follow-up article here.]