The World Is Yours: Tony Montana’s Paradise Pie in Scarface 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 Brian De Palma’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 Oliver Stone, 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.