The World Is Yours: ’s Paradise Pie in Kim Nicolini

(LONG MESSY UNCUT VERSION OF THE ESSAY)

In Harmony Korine’s recent film Spring Breakers (2012), the film’s central anti-hero “Alien” dies face down on a dock during a shootout with a rival gang in St. Petersburg, Florida. Alien is a complete American mash-up -- a white guy who talks, acts and raps like a black man; a self-created gangster who was born poor and made his way to the American Dream by dealing in drugs and firearms. In one scene, he brings the four young white girls who star in the film to his house, and he boasts about all his material acquisitions. “Look at all my shit!” he says, walking through his sprawling house on the Florida coast and showing off everything from his gun collection to his alien- shaped bong to his designer sneakers. "This is my fuckin' dream y'all. I got shit! I got fuckin' shorts y'all! I got Scarface on repeat y'all! I got Calvin Klein Escape!" The girls are in awe that Scarface plays repeat, and they acknowledge it as the greatest movie ever. Never mind Calvin Klein. Never mind Nike tennis shoes. It’s Scarface that counts.

When Alien dies at the end of Spring Breakers, the effect on the audience is not unlike that of the death of his hero Tony Montana at the end of Scarface. We find that against everything we think we believe in, we care about this gangster a lot more than we think we should or could. This is one of the things that makes Korine’s movie so successful and which makes ’s Scarface (1983) a brilliant and ground-breaking film that set the stage for Korine’s Alien and changed the look, feel and message of the American Gangster genre. De Palma made a lavish, violent, and rupturing film that captured the violence of the new economy of excessive greed and acquisition, an economy without limits or morals, where the lines between the drug world and the world of government and law were blurred.

Tony Montana is a classic American fairytale – the immigrant dishwasher who fights his way to the top, but he is also like a caricature of laissez-faire capitalism gone berserk. Fueled by greed and a voracious appetite for power, Montana uses everything at his disposal (namely the drug trade and the people who run it) to attain material success. The American Gangster film, including the Howard Hawks 1932 version of Scarface, purported to be warnings and parables for the dangers of the criminal world. They touted themselves as condemnations of gangsters though they ended up creating some of the greatest heroes in cinematic history. The traditionally started with an opening sequence that states how the incidents in the movies were based on real life events and warned the audience against turning to the life of crime. However, despite the supposed intent of the Hollywood studios, the gangsters in these films always ended up more hero than villain, even as they met their ultimately violent and fatal end.

Regardless of the violence that fuels the protagonists, the gangster story is the story of the underdog and how the American underclass fights for success in a system that doesn’t leave a lot of room for the racially and socially marginalized to succeed. As much as the studio system may have wanted to produce films that steer the public away from violence, ultimately people like to cheer for the underdog, even when he’s wielding a Tommy gun in their face. In Howard Hawks’ Scarface, racism, immigration and discrimination are alluded to in various scenes, but they are never brought full fledge to the surface. Brain De Palma’s Scarface puts us immediately in the context of immigration and the underclass as the film opens with archival footage of Fidel Castro and Cuban refugees fleeing to America as part of the 1980 Mariel Boatlift. An American flag waves on one of the boats, and the screen is filled with hordes of refugees crowded into boats and internment camps. They all are coming to America for one thing – to flee oppression and for a chance at economic opportunity. Tony Montana comes in on one of those boats, and no matter how much director Brian De Palma, writer , and producer Martin Bregman state that Scarface is an anti-drug, anti-crime movie, we all want Tony Montana to win because he embodies everything we love to love and love to hate about America – freedom to succeed in any way possible and the virile drive to grab success by the balls. As Tony Montana himself says, “All I have in this world is my balls and my word and I don't break them for no one.” If those aren’t the words of an American hero, then I don’t know what are.

Basically, everyone who is not Native American came to the United States for the same thing and in the same way. They all came on boats somewhere down the line, and they all wanted a piece of the American dream – freedom and economic prosperity. The problem is that through the course of American history, attaining the American Dream was largely relegated to European whites, while the brown and black skinned immigrants scrubbed white people’s floors, picked their fruit and cotton, and did the dirty work. The whites worked Wall Street and the stock market, while the underdog immigrants built their own economic platform through the black market of the criminal world. In Howard Hawks’ film, Tony (played with ferocity by Paul Muni) achieved economic success and dominated the market by trading in liquor in the age of Prohibition. Frances Ford Coppola’s Godfather I and II (1972 and 1974) showed the paradigm shift in the gangster economy – from “legitimate” mob trade in gambling, booze and firearms to the dangerous and dirty world of drugs. They also very overtly showed the connection between government, big business and the mob, illustrating that one system was no less or more corrupt than the other. By the time Brian De Palma’s Scarface hit the screen in 1983, there were no more secrets about the connection between organized crime, organized government and the free market.

By putting the immigrant front and center and creating a lavish decadent film, De Palma not only shifted the genre to a new place, but he also took on Hollywood whiteness in general. Prior to De Palma’s Scarface, gangster films predominantly focused on European immigrants (Italian and Irish), and they were largely already established in the world of crime. Tony Montana is a Cuban, fresh off the boat, and we are completely immersed in his rise to power, not matter how violent, absurd and excessive it gets. In the opening sequence, the film uses archival footage of the Cuban refugees coming to America. De Palma then shows them penned in an internment camp under the freeway, or literally being held captive beneath the flow of “traffic” (a.k.a. the market). De Palma built the camp on a set in LA, so already the blur between fiction and fact, or American Dream versus reality is established. The camera then shifts to an interrogation room where we meet the film’s star in close-up. Tony Montana’s face fills the screen as he answers questions like how he did not get his scar by “eating pussy.”

The scar on his face is crosses from his cheek to his eye, dividing his face and making it into a messy hodgepodge not unlike his character, America, or capitalism itself. By situating Tony Montana as a refugee from communism, the capitalist dream of success becomes front and center in the story’s narrative. When asked how he learned English, Tony says he learned it from the movies, and he wants everything that has been promised to him through Hollywood movies. He eventually gets it as he takes on drug kingpins and acquires a ludicrously excessive lifestyle. Interestingly, his gaudy house, leather- walled office, fountains, pillars and statues that look like something from an old Hollywood film were actually created as Hollywood sets and include old props from the movies, so Tony Montana’s life literally embodies what he saw and desired in the movies. It isn’t just any pie that Tony wants. He wants the big, glorious, Technicolor neon saturated glitz, glitter and kitsch pie depicted at its most decadent in the Hollywood film industry. He doesn’t just want the American Dream. He wants the Hollywood Dream.

The lesson Tony learned from watching movies is: “In this country, you gotta make the money first. Then when you get the money, you get the power. Then when you get the power, then you get the women.” We watch Tony get all these things through ruthless calculation and manipulating the powers of the market that are accessible to him. Every single move he makes is calculated, and if you listen to what he’s saying between all the references to “fucking” and “pussy,” he deploys the language of capitalism. He talks about exploiting the market, controlling production, protecting his assets, etc. He starts his stay in America by literally assassinating the emblem of communism in the internment camp, and then he takes any means accessible to him, which in his case is the cocaine market, to grab his piece of the pie.

De Palma’s film hit the screen during an age of absolute material gluttony in the United States. People were hitting discos with their designer clothes and their noses stuffed with cocaine. Gone were the days of late 1960s utopian delusions. The 1980s embraced artificial material culture at its most excessive and repulsive levels. De Palma’s vision of this world is brilliantly and beautifully artificial. He shows a mirror- paneled, acrylic lined, cocaine-fueled world where paradise is painted on murals on the side of buildings, on $10 paintings in cheap motel rooms, and printed onto the fabric of shirts. Paradise is everywhere and nowhere in this movie. It’s all fake. What seems like a beautiful sunset is a mural painted on a wall.

Tony first lands a job as a dishwasher in a corner dive restaurant called El Paraiso where a billboard for paradise hangs above the cockroach infested diner. He and his best friend Manny () look out the window of the food stand and watch the disco across the street. It glows in purple, pink and blue neon while fancy cars filled with women and the men who own both enter the disco. The scene alternates between the gritty and grimy social realism of the food stand and the artificial neon lit disco across the street. Tony and Manny watch the scene across the street through the frame of the window as if they are watching a movie. This is the world that Tony wants, and the takes it.

While working at the restaurant, Tony’s offered a small crime job for $500. He scoffs at the offer saying that taking a job like that would decrease his market value. Instead, he takes on a job as mule (delivering money for drugs) and he ends up ruthlessly getting both the money and the drugs, putting him in the driver’s seat and taking over ’s cocaine-fueled economy. Tony grabs the power, and soon he is in the world he dreaming of, wearing a white suit and making big plans for big production, global expansion, and controlling the market.

Tony hooks up with cocaine mob boss Frank Lopez (), who himself is an immigrant, but every material evidence of his success is coated with white. He wears a white suit, drives a white car, lives in a white house, and most importantly owns the white woman. ’s is white as white gets. When Tony sees her descend Frank’s house is a glass elevator, she is like a blonde Barbie doll, the female embodiment of the white dream. Her skin is as white as the cocaine she continuously snorts up her pristine white-powdered nose. She is packaged in gleaning white skin. She is so stiff and so white, it’s as if she is made out of the same material as the acrylic chairs that furnish Frank’s house. Tony takes one look at Elivira, and he knows she is the white dream he wants. She is the whipped cream on top of his success. He talks about fucking Elvira in various scenes, but the truth of the matter is that Tony never fucks. We never see him have sex with Elvira. We never see Tony or Elvira naked. For Tony, the sex act is acquisition and power. Early in the movie, when Tony and Manny are driving through Miami, Tony says, “This town is like a great big pussy waiting to get fucked.” For Tony, the fuck is in getting the power, the act of dominating the market, not dominating a woman in bed. When he finally acquires Elvira, the possession occurs when Tony places his bloody, dark-skinned, tattooed hand on Elvira’s pristine white sleeping body which is wrapped in white satin sheets. He does not possess her sexually. He merely says that she belongs to him now.

The only way Tony knows how to “feel” is through his relationship to his sister Gina (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio). Certainly, part of the American Dream is being able to provide for and protect your family, so Tony throws his cash and his love and protection at his sister. De Palma overtly plays on the incestuous undertones of the Hawks’ 1932 film, but even as Gina begs Tony to fuck her in the film’s climatic scene, there is no sex in Tony. He wants to possess, control, and in Gina’s case, protect, but Tony Montana is a sexless man, even for all his talk of fucking. The sex act for Tony Montana is the act of “winning.”

Certainly these descriptions of Tony Montana don’t make him seem like a very likable guy. He claws his way to the top. He is a calculating man obsessed with power and control. He wants, wants, wants, and he’ll do anything to get what he wants. He ends up in a giant gaudy mansion, a kind of grotesque Disney- turned-darkside vision of opulence – with his dead sister leaning against a ludicrous Greek column while his face and suit are covered with cocaine – the product he exploits to gain economic power. Yet, he oddly remains sympathetic. Even as he falls to his final demise, face down in a pool of his own blood with a neon sign that reads “The World is Yours” glowing above his dead body, Tony Montana remains a hero. Oddly, the world still is his because he goes out on his own terms.

The big question is: Why do we care about Tony Montana, and why does he remain a hero even after everyone he cares about becomes a casualty to his all-consuming desire to own, possess and control? Partially, we are coerced into liking him because of De Palma’s filmmaking and ’s acting. We are immediately put inside Tony Montana’s head and asked to stay there for the duration of the film. During the opening sequence when Tony is interviewed by detectives, the camera circles him as he looks out at us, the cameras alternating between close-ups and pans. We are inside his skin, but we are also in the position of the camera watching him. We are the watcher and the watched at the same time. Al Pacino’s eyes are constantly taking in everything around him and staring out of the screen in close-ups, so we both see through Tony’s eyes and become the object that he is seeing. This reflective position makes us inextricably connected to his character. The cameras alternate between super tight close-ups which fill the screen with Tony’s voracious face and 360 degree pans in which the camera circles Tony in which he becomes a body that resists a fixed position, so we have to keep watching him to try to hold him. Al Pacino’s Tony Montana is always watching the world around him with calculated plans for dominance and control. Whether he’s watching his friend get hacked by a chainsaw or Elvira descend in a glass elevator, he visually consumes everything around him with the ferocity of the tiger he keeps chained at his McMansion. Ironically, it is in the ultra-violent and controversial chainsaw scene that implores us to sympathize with Tony. As much flack as the scene got for being over-the-top in its violence, there is actually no violence shown on the screen. When Tony’s friend is hacked to death with a chainsaw, we experience it through sound, the juxtaposition of the claustrophobic scene in the bathroom in which his friend is chained to the shower rod and the sun-drenched Miami beach landscape, and mostly through Tony’s eyes. Tony’s face is literally physically grabbed and shoved into the camera as he watches his friend brutally murdered. His eyes bulge from his face, and we are put inside his head as blood sprays and his friend dies. We feel what he feels, but we also become the thing that he is watching. Because what he is watching is so horrific, this this brilliant manipulation of perspective lures us into Tony’s world and doesn’t let us go, even when it is at its most ludicrously gaudy, greedy, and materialistic. The fact that we are always inside his head , makes Tony human and makes it almost impossible for us to not identify with him even when he is doing ugly things.

Also, Tony’s sheer will, the ferocity in which he tackles his desires is hard to resist. It is the American Dream even if it looks like a nightmare. Even when his face is buried in and his suit is covered with his White Dream -- cocaine -- and even when he is consumed by his all-consuming desire to attain success, Tony Montana’s will is so fierce, so furiously single-minded and powerful, that we are coerced to care about him. Even in his final demise, when he knows he’s going down and there is no escaping death, Tony Montana does not go down like a beaten dog. He goes down fighting on his own terms. In the final shootout, De Palma had the cameras synced to the gunfire so the lens opened with every blast of Montana’s gun, so Tony looks like a firework (that emblem of American liberty) gone wild. And we celebrate him as he blasts away his would-be assassins with his M19.

Tony Montana goes out fighting, and in the end, his excessive failure is a bizarre kind of excessive success. “Nothing exceeds like excess. You should know that Tony,” says Elvira Hancock in a scene when Tony sits in his giant bubble bath ranting and raging. In his infamous “Bad Guy Speech,” Tony Montana yells at a bunch of rich white people in a restaurant. He says that they need bad guys like him so they can feel better about themselves, but he also says they’re not better and no different than him even if their skin is white and they got their money from the market instead of drugs. The truth is that Tony Montana represents a kind of bombastic freedom that the rich stiff white people can never attain. By being outside of the law and outside of the system, he has more freedom than the free. Regardless of what filmmakers say about Scarface being an anti-crime movie, this is a movie that celebrates anarchy, bucking against the system and laissez-faire capitalism at their most ferocious and intertwined state. Tony Montana, with his slashed face, is the messy merge of capitalism, criminality and anarchy. He is a free agent who calculates every move, including his own death when it becomes inevitable. He doesn’t have access to that white world of money and privilege, so he creates his own American Dream with the terms he has at his disposal – drugs and crime.

One of the great ironies of the movie is that Tony Montana becomes the very kind of character he aspired to in the movies. The movie hit the screens at the rise of teen gang culture in America (Nortenos and Sudenos in the Mexican-American community and Crips and Bloods in the black community), and Scarface became their hero, an icon of success as depicted in a multitude of rap songs, video games and other pop culture references. Tony Montana became a hero for the cultural underdogs, especially those whose skin is not white and who through economic and social barriers only had access to “success” via the criminal market of drugs rather than the white-washed criminal world of Wall Street. Tony Montana became the very model of what the character in Scarface saw in the movies and aspired to become, and he has maintained his heroic status to this day which is reflected in movies as recent as Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers in which the complex identity of Tony Montana continues to fuck with our heads and our hearts.