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 Friday
BLING BLING! I SHOT YOU DOWN!
I think the only thing that needs to be added to this latest K-PUNK epistle is the passing thought that the possible MISSING LINK between De Palma and the newly hip-hop-ersized Aguilera would have to be ... SCARFACE.
I would really like to read a decent piece on the huge influence SCARFACE has had on hip hop culture - I'm sure someone somewhere must have written one. The fact is, it's also the one and only De Palma film I ever genuinely enjoyed. De Palma is one of those directors where people not only 'love or hate' his work, they usually hate/love him for those precise same things that other people love/hate him for. Even something like BLOW OUT - which I'm willing to concede has its interest and its merits - is ruined for me by a plethora of De Palma tics and flaws and trademarks*.
But SCARFACE is the one exception. I remember paying money to go see it as a post-lunchtime-pub afternoon matinee in the West End in the mid 80s - precisely because so many people I knew HATED and EXECRATED it.** (People were appalled at the time – it was seen as a new dumbed-down low in ‘Fuck you – No: fuck YOU’ inanity.) It's actually one of the last times I can remember losing my head with utter pleasure at the movies. (Ferrara's BAD LIEUTENANT and THE FUNERAL being two of the others.) It wasn't quite the enjoyment of ‘something so bad that it's good', but any enjoyment of Scarface isn't straightforward. Even its fans would have to admit there's a lot about it that IS just plain old-fashioned bad - but then, I suspect that's one of the reasons it's become so iconic. Because it is mired in shamelessness. This is not a minor point. A huge generational shift has taken place since the mid 80s in all sorts of related ways - the [purportedly] ‘shame free’ enjoyment of Porn, of Bling, of Video Game mega violence etc deserves a whole mini essay in itself***, but SCARFACE would have to be seen as a marker in the genesis of this mindset. Especially as it coincided with the home VHS revolution.
Maybe one of the reasons SCARFACE was so critically unpopular at the time, was that it went against the Reaganite grain: here is your materialist American Dream it said, and feel how tawdry, how unfulfilling, how borderline criminal and psychopathic it is at base. Strangely, if it reminds me of anything, in hindsight, its DOUGLAS SIRK’s Written On The Wind. It has that same lurid, febrile, fever-dream feel, and a subtext of ‘careful what you wish for… if all you wish for is success.’ There is also the little matter of an implied Oedipal/incest sub-plot in common …
Another thing to plot in the film’s relation to certain strands in hip hop history would be precisely its near-Operatic histrionics, its paranoia, its megalomania, and its near robotic obscenity. And all this in relation to a certain conception of masculinity, masculinity in relation to immigrant status and race, or, a kind of Hysteria not of sex but of class/economics maybe. (I'm riffing here: none of this is worked out.)
Everything that's wrong with De Palma, with Oliver Stone, and with the very limited Method man tic-y tacky acting of Al Pacino is on display here, to the Nth degree. But now that Scarface is 'iconic' (and it is: it actually deserves that over used phrase) it really doesn’t matter who wrote or made it or why. It has assumed an afterlife of its own – or, precisely, NOT its own, its phantasmal & looping survival now written in the response and re-iteration of its various audiences.
It abounds in SCENES.
"Is this IT? Suckin, fuckin, snortin....?"
"Say HELLO to my liddle fren..."
"You wanna point your finger at DA BAD GUY..."
These are both vulgar, base, near cartoonish - but also possessed of emotional veracity and depthbomb repercussion. It's easy to miss the point (inherited from the original 1932 Hollywood film's "politics") that this is a deeply pessimistic film. THE WORLD IS YOURS: but what an empty world when you finally get there. It's the first "bling" film - outsize, grotesque in is lavishness, hyping glitzy 80s materialism up to something nausea inducing, a gold-tap shoulder-pad white-Ferrari migraine - but bling as purgatory: you can buy the stuff, snort the blow, get the woman, live in the mansion (someone should do a MTV parody "I'm Tony Montana and DIS IS MA CRIB...") but nothing will fill that lack under the white suit. ("Is this it? Fuckin, suckin, snortin..." is not just American Dream cynical, it approaches Beckett in its existential fault-line ennui! Is this it? Breathin', eatin, shittin...?")
I don’t really know enough about the hip hop thing to attempt any kind of intensive totting up; but I know that Scarface is a huge presence there. You only need to Image Google - the digital equivalent of Benjamin's city strolls or the Situationist derive these days: setting out for one 'destination' but getting sidetracked and lost in a profitably diverting way - the word 'Scarface' to realise how many little subcults accrue around this film. Its influence has been huge in obvious ways (think of the pre-Miami Vice art design - that wonderful Florida sunset wallpaper! Think of the pre-Tarantino chainsaw torture scene in the shower stall) but it would be the trails and trace left in its unconscious hinterland that would be more interesting to consider.
I spent some time last week looking again at J. Hoberman's 2003 book THE DREAM LIFE: Movies, Media and the Myth of The Sixties. (Look past the dreary and off-putting title - this is essential reading, and I can't praise it highly enough.) One of the things that Hoberman reveals is how many of the 'biggest' or most controversial or defining films of the 60s in America are not at all the films we now think of as of that moment; not necessarily the 'hip' received wisdom list at all. I want to come back to Hoberman's book at some later point. But the distinguishing thing here though is that whereas most if not all of the 60s films – as with so many OSCAR winners – are now forgotten, or at best relived only for kitsch or afternoon TV value – the AFTERLIFE of Scarface is something else again. It’s the type of film that in a lot of ways HOLLYWOOD likes to disown, or pretend doesn’t exist. It would certainly never have been rewarded at Oscar time. (As opposed, say, to Pacino in the SCENT OF A WOMAN; and even though I am not a De Palma fan, I wouldn’t be averse to any argument that said something like SCENT OF A WOMAN is actually a hundred times more ‘cynical’ in it marrow than SCARFACE. And, of course, crucially, a hundred times LESS cinematic.
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SCARFACE may, in hindsight, mark the point at which the old narrative/paradigm of Crime (as per GODFATHER) was superseded. SCARFACE intuits a future landscape not just of crime-as terror (for which, see recent developments in South America for just one example) and terror-as crime (heroin as terror funding, post-glasnost Russia and its hinterlands, etc,)but of video game hyper reality and HIP HOP CD-as-narrative. Even the use of PSEUDONYMS might be traced back here in some measure. And certainly violence as EXCESS, as always excessive, and as INCESSANTLY revengeful ( Jacobean tragedy + Art Deco + Method - high mindedness = SCARFACE!). Tony Montana posits crime as incessant and gruelling paranoia, perpetual revenge (revenge against destiny, against beginnings, against identity), and pleasure as self-torture. One of the many reasons SCARFACE chimes with certain gangsta extremes of the hip-hop ethos is because it plays games with how far any one ‘buys’ into materialism. Part of the shamelessness is that you may dress up in designer labels, but some immutable indefinable – and impossible to lose – ‘it’ defines you, forever and always, as LACKING CLASS. (In however many ways you want to read or re-read that phrase.) You buy the ‘right’ shirt, but you wear it the ‘wrong’ way. Shibboleth chic. Your tongue is injured, marked.
Current hip-hop bling-in-overdrive actually celebrates this ‘You can take the thug out of the socio-economic context, but you can’t …’ logic. Far from smoothing off your edges and going uptown bourgie bourgie, you BROADCAST (podcast?) your rough edge posse-defined presence. (And this aesthetic has now seeped thru into white culture, aswitness the success of ENTOURAGE. And I’m not sure how historically accurate this is, but it’s easy to suspect that the second biggest fan group for SCARFACE after the hip hop enclave, might be well Hollywood AGENTS.)
It is this, amongst many things, which informs a lot of the Black community’s OWN reaction against gangsta chic. It is seen as a betrayal – a too public betrayal, because too loud, too garish, to cartoonish. But then – Black entertainers often seem to be lost before they begin in this regard. If you go the Bill Cosby way and offer up a Good Example, the ‘community’ condemns you for Uncle Tom-ism. If you beat White Hollywood at its own game[s] of Cops n Robbers, you’re condemned for being too violent.
It is easily noted that Hip Hop/gangsta rap found a way to transcend this by ignoring it, with a SCARFACE like shamelessness. (The way out of the moral and ethical maze? FUCK the maze! Bulldoze through! Level it with CGI bullets!) What’s more interesting here might be to disentangle just how many of the conduits into this shameless ‘black’ aesthetic were originally – or ambivalently – ‘white’. (Any text on the return of Stagger Lee, for example, cannot but acknowledge the pioneering work of Greil Marcus, Bob Dylan and Tarantino.) What interesting is how symbolic or imaginary ‘codes’ bleed into real life application. And are then LOOPED back into a sophisticated re-staging of the Real as “authentically” Street-derived art.
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In the current series of THE SOPRANOS, the crew – but also the ethic – is falling apart, due to age, due to illness, due to dementia, due to betrayal, due to cultural uncertainty, due to the unlivable pressure of double and triple lives… and how much they abide by, or are hobbled by, or haunted by, various CODES. The code used to be INHERENT, internalised. In past series, THE SPOPRANOS has cleverly played with the quite vertiginous idea that everything started to go ‘wrong’ in a sense, with the success of THE GODFATHER – when ‘real’ life gangsters started to imitate, or measure themselves against, their cinematic representations. The Mafia, in a sense, couldn’t withstand the paradigm shift of post modernism. It couldn’t live an ‘ironic’, spatialised, double consciousness life. The ‘codes’ fragmented.
In real life, the Mafia seems to have been doomed by, on the one hand, its inability to live up to its own much vaunted codes of honour (in the 80s its members started to sell out each other to the authorities, to rat friends and colleagues out in exchange for Witness Protection or shorter sentences etc); and on the other, its anachronistic preservation of certain gentlemanly codes, at a time when other ethnic crime gangs initiated a new ULTRA VIOLENT paradigm which seemed to takes its cues equal parts from INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM, SCARFACE and JAMAICAN politics. The scene in The Sopranos last night where all the old wheezing, corseted, injured, hobbling, handcuffed wise guys are all in one place at one time at the wedding - you can imagine some Russian or South American or Jamaican gang bursting in and just strafing everyone with automatic fire. The old code of 'you just don’t do that' or 'some things are off limits' or 'no women or civilians should get hurt' – now so much bullshit, whether you’re a suicide bomber, or a Brazilian barrio thug (or, indeed, a video game whiz kid). ****
And one of the over looked and under reported factors in a lot of local geo-pol conflicts in the last 20 years - from Sarajevo to Afghanistan to various hell-on-earth conflagrations in Africa - has been the DRUG OF CHOICE many of the young militias were stoked up on. Here, any look at SCARFACE would have to look at the overlap between symbolic and real. Something seemingly trivial and stylistic (did it originate with John Woo?) like that 'Gangsta' thing of holding your gun flat against the palm, in both hands, when shooting, has actually invaded the Real all over the globe.
The TV screen, the cocaine paranoia/megalomania OD, the ultra violence: the United Nations should maybe do a worldwide survey and find out how many teen crims or militia members grew up watching bootleg copies of SCARFACE.
Also, it’s too easily forgotten – but Scarface opens not in garish overdrive, but with NEWSREEL FOOTAGE of the real life events which sparked off Oliver Stone's feverish rewrite. (Boatloads of Cuban criminals and ‘low life’ set adrift and washed up in Miami.) The early part of the film makes it clear that Tony Montana’s shining path to psycho-pathology was the result of ideological abjection, birthed in the grimy jails and backrooms of Castro’s Cuba; that he has been hatched and trained, set in his mould, by his experiences of torture. (There are warnings here, o there are.)
Miami/Florida seem to keep cropping up in this regard. (Just type in ‘Jeb Bush’ or ‘Miami/Cuba politics’ and tour the conspiracy sites.) From JFK and the Bay of Pigs and the strange cabal of figures therein (see De Lillo’s LIBRA) to some of the 9/11 crew, hanging around in Miami, partying, doing coke, trading arms, learning to fly, etc… its lo-rent Baroque and liminal status makes Miami more like an island than a certifiable part of the American mainland. It already looks like some kind of King Ludwig purgatory or waiting room between OD and death. (Why not throw in the Gianni Versace murder here too? Tony Montana is Versace through and through.)
I remember reading an interview with Stone and him saying that one of the reasons he wrote SCARFACE (altho this might just be justification in retrospect, post coke binge) was that he was amazed at what his research had thrown up and how mainstream America just didn’t get it: nobody realised JUST HOW MUCH money was involved in the coke/drugs trade, and how huge and paradigmatic and corrupting an influence it was turning out to be, at ALL levels of society. (Well, he wasn’t wrong was he?) One of SCARFACE’s defining and mot unforgettable montages is the central one of Montana and his men carting (literal) truckloads of CASH MONEY into various banks to be laundered.
It’s doubtful, in this regard, whether the full story will ever be written of the equilateral relationship between drugs, money, the Republican Party and ‘right wing’ Cubano elements in Florida. (Although there is a lot on the investigative record, if you start to track it down.) There is a sense in which the reason the Republicans have triumphed in America is that they have become a SCARFACE party – shameless, un hung up on niceties or political correctness. (You can imagine a backroom meeting in the late 90s with Cheney saying, “I need men with STEEL IN THEIR BALLS!” And it’s too lazy to allow GW’s balls-in-his mouth gee-gosh persona to obscure the fact that he IS a shameless, case hardened, deeply cynical operator. Who knows but that GW may have had his own pre Presidential Tony Montana bath tub moment in some Texarkana whorehouse or coke den. “Is this it? Snortin’, vote riggin, executin’ …?’)
Maybe we could also read the infamous blood-geyser SCARFACE finale as a deeply pessimistic gloss on Cheney/Rumsfeld’s America, convinced that it can take on the amorphous Other at its own mega violent game. (Neo Conservatism as ideological cocaine! ‘Say hello to my little friend’ = the use of torture?)
But the Other was always going to win, IS always going to win: its only ‘code’, its only Law is DEATH.
(The WORLD is whose, now? And the Afterlife?)
Its difficult now not to look at Tony Montana in the closing scenes - bombed, paranoid, a husk, with BANKS and BANKS of security cameras, and an arsenal that would formerly only have been in the possession of the MILITARY - and see some kind of awful future dreaming itself awake.
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*{It was ever thus - from Dressed To Kill onwards I found De Palma beneath consideration. And no - I don’t mean morally, or in terms of sexual pol. I just always found it shockingly OBVIOUS. In terms of cinematic tension and pleasure, I always sensed something off-puttingly cynical at the 'heart' of De Palma. I always thought De Palma = Hitchcock without the psychopathology; which seems like nothing very much at all, except 'technique' as an end in itself. But down the years - from Pauline Kael to my movie mentor Monty Smith at the NME to MarK-P, and others - I have known loads of otherwise extremely intelligent people who will defend De Palma to the death.)
**{The same reason I'm so drawn to Paris Hilton at the moment. And ...hmmm... I've only just thought of this... but the stick-thin shiny silver blonde praying-mantis beyond-unreal-moneyed Paris would be a shoe-in to reprise the Mrs Montana role, in any 21st century remake, non? She could run a Miami hotel; she could ... sorry, anyway ...
Talking of the irresistible Paris: yesterday doing some research I found to my absolute glee that in the last 3/4 years Paris has starred or cameo’d in EIGHT – count ‘em! – different movies. (Not including her own straight to video, er, release.) I can’t wait to research this further!
*** {Relating it out to Abu Garib torture optional. Ditto the new paradigm of ‘loner/post-Columbine shooting sprees. The old paradigm was nutter on roof, picking off the insects below, like a blank abyssal Midwest rewriting of Greene/Welles’ THIRD MAN script. And its hard not to intuit both video game and NEW post-Kubrick STEADICAM in the way in which the new breed of gunmen negotiate and move through the school or office space as if it was some kind of virtual or movie space.)
****{Which I’ll concede is how a lot of us feel about De Palma: we want, you know, jut a bit more finesse…)
posted by Ian 9/29/2006 10:02:00 AM
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THE PILL BOX 
