Scarface
By my
estimation Brian DePalma’s Scarface is the
masterpiece of parodies of capitalism.
It speaks to the ridiculousness of material ambition and the culture of
excess in such insane hyberbole that it boggles my
mind that it ever got made, let alone taken seriously by generations of
rappers.
The movie
starts off with Fidel Castro unleashing the worst of his prisoners onto the
shores of Miami and all this John Carpenter electric keyboard music playing
like the Cuban prisoners are zombies or something. We then get treated to a nice inside look at
U.S. immigration where they quiz you about your sexuality and probably play a
game of rock scissors paper before giving your citizenship. They ask Tony ‘Scarface’ Montana about
whether he got the scar on his face from eating pussy while the woman was
trying to cross her legs. I’ll have to
remember not to go down on any chicks from Miami because I guess they must have
boxcutters on their inner-thighs or something. Will ‘The Fresh Prince’ Smith never mentioned
any of this in his song about Miami, but he was from Bel
Air so what the fuck does he know? Well,
my guess would be that he knows just as much as Brian DePalma
and Oliver Stone, who wrote and directed this film, because I’m thinking
neither of them are Cuban refugees or drug lords. I mean, it would be pretty crazy if Stone
actually was a guy like Scarface, but I doubt it because if he were he could’ve
financed the film’s production entirely himself without studio interference. He probably would’ve actually killed all
those people instead of using effects too.
Aside from not
being drug lords, DePalma and Stone are also not
Cubans and they were both surprised that this film was met with a negative
reaction from the Cuban community. Which
makes wonder what kind of fucking maniacs we’re dealing with here. The idea that this film would be considered
even somewhat offensive by Cubans never crossed either of minds makes me wonder
how good a grasp of what they were making they actually had. They were playing with some very real facts
at the time. The waves
of Cuban refugees. The cocaine craze, the anti-Castro sentiment, F. Murray Abraham,
drug lords, political assassinations.
These things were all still fresh in the headlines when this film came
out. Stone must’ve took some stuff that
everybody knew, filled in the blanks from his own insane imagination and hoped
nobody would call his bluff.
Scarface uses this whole setup of the Miami Cuban drug scene
as the backdrop for a parable about the downsides of capitalism. Tony Scarface’s motivation for almost all his
actions is either greed or doing things simply because he can afford to. Scarface’s purchases are especially funny in
that he only aspires to buy the most obnoxiously expensive everything. Earlier he talks about wanting a tiger, and
nobody asks him “Dude, what the fuck would do with a tiger?” Later he becomes rich and actually buys a
tiger and all his stupid friends applaud when they see it chained up in his
backyard. I would’ve liked it if that
was a setup for the tiger to eat one of the hitsquad
assassins that attack Scarface’s palace at the end, but sadly no. But I think the tiger purchase is key to understanding the parody of capitalism this film is
striving for, buying stupid shit because you can. We all do it, but the more money you have the
stupider shit you buy and the more you spend on it, thus making the purchase
stupider. Folk music humorists, The Barenaked Ladies, sing in their song “If I had a million
dollars I’d buy you a monkey, haven’t you always wanted a monkey?”. And I think
that proves the universality of blowing your disposable income on a novelty
animal. If given millions of dollars
both those chubby folk humorist pussies and grand master badass Scarface would
both snort blow and buy exotic pets. If
that ain’t the whole fuckin’
spectrum I don’t what is.
The production
designers must’ve had a blast picking out absurd novelty purchases for
Scarface. One of the funniest is when he
buys a giant gold bath tub that could hold ten people and sits in it alone
watching a tiny television set while other people sit on chairs watching
him. One of my favourite visual moments
is when he kills his mentor and sees a passing blimp and reads the marquee on it
saying ‘The World Is Yours’ and seems to think it is a personal message
to him from destiny and later gets a fountain with that same message in
neon. I wonder how he would react to
other slogans. It’s a good thing they
didn’t have internet back then because all that spam about debts ‘n shit would
probably hit Scarface’s paranoid edge the wrong way and he’d figure somebody
was stealing from him and shot up his computer.
Actually, I would’ve liked that.
The theme of
frivolity extends to all corners of the film.
Like how Sosa handles an assassination by having them fly the victim far
away in a helicopter and he hands Scarface binoculars so that he can see them
throw Omar out the side in a noose that is attached to the helicopter. You know you’ve got too much money when you
get to this James Bond villain level of elaborate killings. Plus, just between you and I me, if Sosa had
handed me the binoculars I probably would’ve looked in the wrong direction and
missed the grisly death and figured he just wanted me to look at some exotic
bird or his pet tiger or something.
Aside from
being oblivious to how this film might be offensive to Cubans, Brian DePalma also doesn’t think he made as violent a movie as
he’s made out to have by the media. His
defence is that some of the violent acts, like a dude getting mutilated with a
chainsaw, happen off the edge of the scene.
I think you’ve got to pick your battles, Mr. DePalma,
and selling Scarface as non-violent and inoffensive shouldn’t be one of
them. Try convincing me that Snake
Eyes was somewhat compelling despite being predictable or that the studio
hacked up your vision of Black Dahlia, you might be able to convince
somebody on those counts. But even
watching Scarface some twenty years after its release I’m hard pressed
to think up a movie with more cussing, violence, sexism, drug use, and
racism. Boogie Nights was a movie
about dicks and pussies, but I think they actually say ‘pussy’ and talk about
fucking more in this movie, which happens to be about capitalism.
If I had to
breakdown the appeal of Scarface it would go something like this:
Scarface is basically an epic exploitation movie. An exploitation feature made on a scale and
budget and with talent infinitely beyond what the genre usually receives. What Doctor Zhivago
was to the Russian Revolution, Scarface is to dudes saying “Fuck you!”. It’s like getting Sydney Poitier to star in a
billion dollar David Lean production of SuperFly. The fact that Mr. Steven Spielberg even
worked as assistant director/consultant on the ultra-violent climatic shootout
is like Stanley Kubrick showing up as a breast-jiggle consultant on Faster
Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
The fact that
they somehow got this movie finished and with an A-list star still baffles me
today. In fact, I’m surprised this film
didn’t sink Pacino’s career even briefly. I don’t know if I can call Pacino’s performance in this film a great performance, but
I can definitely call it the right performance for the film. Pacino plays a
completely despicable one dimensional character who’s
success and failure both bring the world almost equal misery.
Oliver
Stone’s screenplay starts off treating the character with lots of humour during
funny scenes where he tries and fails to impress women and then seems to push
the character through all sorts of absurd and highly entertaining scenes of
action, tension, comedy, and even the odd quasi-Shakespearian moment like when
Scarface begins berating everybody at a fancy restaurant giving a warped
soliloquy about who the real bad guy is.
The “make
way for the bad guy” scene is pretty much the character laid bare and the
very core of Scarface. We know he
likes cars and pussy, but his psychology is totally explained here: he
justifies all his awful acts by hating people for their weaknesses. Like Daniel Plainview in There Will Be
Blood, he resents people for letting him exploit them, which is hella fucked up but probably pretty accurate of these
overly-ambitious types. Oliver Stone
continually puts this character in increasingly ridiculous situations and gives
him increasingly hysterical dialogue like he’s trying to build a trap to
embarrass Pacino, but Pacino’s
acting seems to always rise to the occasion and become even more over the top
than the scenes he’s in. Orson Welles
says he made Citizen Kane to create a myth for a culture (America) that
he believed was without mythology. Brian
DePalma has created Scarface as a myth for a
culture (rap) that likes its myths explained in cock-pussy analogies.
Thank you, Mr. DePalma.
If you liked this, say hello to these
other little friends:
A little bit of white
man’s burden cinema for you.
The one. The only. Unless you count the
sequel.
Getting’ old ain’t so bad when you’ve
got a bag full o’ money.