Scarface, masculinity at its worst

Scarface (1983) directed by Brian De Palma, written by Oliver Stone, cinematography by John A. Alonzo, starring Al Pacino, Steven Bauer, Michelle Pfeiffer, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio.

Tony Montana is an immigrant, a poor man, looking for a way to change his life, he wants to go to the top and the only way open for him to do so is through illegal trafficking. He is the average man who wants to make something of himself, a man who has been convinced by society that respect equals money and that money equals freedom. In the movie we explore the limits of that ideal, and with them the limits of capitalism.

Scarface is deeply rooted in todays society: patriarchal and capitalistic.

The American dream. The neoliberalist dream. The enrichment, the accumulation, the unobtainable power, the privilege, the destructive cycle, endlessly repeating itself. Capitalism, the beast that won’t stop eating and is never satisfied.

Slaves of money - as Elvira says in the bath scene -, the oppressed trying to become the oppressor, and the cycle is never broken. It goes on forever, if we don’t stop it.

Consume, produce, sell, consume, produce, sell. Get rich, become poor, get rich again, and so on.

Tony can only trust himself, that is made evident by the camera slowly leaving him, in all his richness, his giant pool-bath tub, with golden details, alone.

He wants to keep all that he has and he is so worried by losing it that he does not manage to enjoy any of it. There’s this Italian tale from the late 1800, written by Giovanni Verga, which tells the story of Mazzarò, a man who got very very rich, to the point he owned every piece of land all around his area, and then he got sick. When faced with death his biggest fear was leaving his things behind, his stuff was all he cared about, so he tried to bring it with him to the grave. He killed all his cattle, thinking that this way he would have owned it in his afterlife too.

But it is obvious to the reader that this ideal of enrichment is very flawed and limited. I guess the moral of the story is that of the famous line “money does not buy happiness”. Or success, or privilege, in a society that wants you slave, having money only widens what you have to lose, and so you become even more a aslaved to it.

Having nothing to lose - some might say - is freedom.

Tony has lived in a world that has taught him that what makes a man’s worth is his “balls”, his courage. Obviously that stereotype of a brave man, getting what he wants with his strength, never crying or feeling emotions, is an ideal that is declining today. More and more gender has become a fluid concept, one can feel “male”, “female”, or both, or neither, and reject the social constructs imposed onto any of these labels. Many times we’ve said sexuality is a spectrum and gender is too. A binary world is not enough, two gender can’t cover all our identities, we need more space, less cages.

Tony lives in the cage of the straight white man - even though he’s Cuban, the hierarchy is reproduced amongst the oppressed as it is with the oppressors. And that is evident in his relationship with Elvira as well.

I recently listened to Male Fantasy by Billie Eilish. I think it’s very naive and very simplistic and there is no political in-depth analysis, but her feelings are totally coherent to the world we live in today. A world where the ideal person is a white straight rich man, a world where rules are made my white straight rich men, as well as beauty standards and laws and cultural expectations and social obligations.

Elvira is trapped in this world, but so is Tony.

She is not in love with him. But most of all, he is not in love with her, he wants a pretty doll on his arm, he wants the idea of Elvira but not once have they had an actual conversation. They’re both stuck in their roles and they are never just humans with each other.

Tony loves her sister but is extremely violent with her in multiple occasione cause that is - paradoxically - his way of loving.

The relationship between Elvira and Tony is the apex of toxicity. Tony doesn’t want to love her, he wants to control her, to own her: like when he tells Elvira that he wants to marry in the pool scene, he says that when he first saw her he thought “she belongs to me”. That is incredibly toxic. Instead, to our society, it almost sounds sexy, alluring. People - couples - dress up as them for Halloween, as if there was something “cool” or even “romantic” to that relationship. Our world aestheticised abuse: when Elvira says to Tony that she is not his baby, that is a move to make the audience think she had a choice. But she doesn’t.

Elvira isn’t just a victim of the system, she’s of course in part responsible and in control of her actions, but she was treated as an object her whole life, a belonging, and now she believes it too. She’s a drug addict, drunk with privilege and luxury, stuck. She doesn’t know she has other options, a condition a lot of women share, the idea “this is all a woman is fit for” (as Joe March would say, from Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of Little Women).

She finally leaves, but Tony will never fully understand why. She did not break her chains at last - like the tiger -, she got overwhelmed by them, but who says she won’t replicate the same scheme of oppression in her next relationship. We want to think she is free now, cause she’s left the “bad guy”, but Tony - as well explained in his restaurant monologue - isn’t the source of her problem, he’s just a tool of the system that oppresses them both.