What happens after the world becomes yours? I’ve pondered that question more than most people. “The world is yours” is tattooed across my back in my father’s handwriting, borrowed from the glowing sign that follows Tony Montana through the iconic crime drama “Scarface.”
My father introduced me to the film, the same way he introduced me to most of the movies I love. I was almost immediately captivated by the dizzying excess, the blood-soaked Miami skyline, Al Pacino’s operatic performance and Tony’s absolute refusal to remain insignificant.
Released in 1983, director Brian De Palma reimagines Howard Hawks’ 1932 earlier version of “Scarface” through the lens of the cocaine boom in 1980’s Miami. Tony arrives from Cuba during the Mariel boatlift and enters the United States with nothing except his limitless ambition to become wealthy and respected. He begins in a refugee detention camp, washing dishes at a food stand, but soon murders his way into the city’s drug trade, transforming himself from an unwanted immigrant into the boss of a cocaine empire.
His ascent is brutal, but it is also seductively cinematic. Everything is excessive: the synth-heavy Giorgio Moroder score, the neon Miami nights, the men and their money.
For a while, the world appears to have rewarded his ruthless hunger for success. De Palma makes Tony’s ascent look so spectacular that it becomes easy to forget we are watching a tragedy. He seizes control of Frank Lopez’s drug empire — a Miami druglord and his boss— after killing him and then steals his glamorous girlfriend, Elvira Hancock.
Tony never seriously asks what she wants because, in his world, being wanted by him should be enough. He goes about “acquiring” her like one would an object, assuming that surely she will simply gravitate toward the richest, boldest, and most powerful man. Eventually, Tony marries Elvira and installs her in the mansion meant to certify his victory. A golden globe bearing the words “the world is yours” eventually stands inside his home. By every measure Tony understands, he has won.
I can understand the appeal of Tony’s outlook on the world. Women spend so much of their lives being instructed to become accommodating and to take up less space that there is something thrilling about watching a person who has never once stopped to think about whether he is taking up too much space.
Tony never apologizes for wanting more. The problem is that he cannot distinguish wanting something from having the right to possess it. He measures success purely through acquisition.
Even his attraction to Elvira, played by Michelle Pfeiffer, begins with his recognition of her as another symbol of the life he wants. He pursues her with the same hunger he brings to the drug trade. Once he has her, however, neither of them is happy. Their enormous home becomes cold and cavernous, their marriage hollowed out by addiction, resentment and Tony’s inability to understand why possessing so many objects of happiness has still failed to make him happy.
Pfeiffer’s performance in the film stands in stark contrast to the fantasy Tony constructs around her. While Pacino expands to occupy every available inch of the screen, Pfeiffer retreats. Elvira is languid, detached and nearly translucent, her pale dresses and controlled movements contrasting with Tony’s restless physicality. He is always reaching, shouting and consuming.
Elvira is aware that proximity to a powerful man automatically generates a power of her own. It produces expensive rooms in which she is expected to remain beautiful and impressed. I recognize something painfully familiar in that expectation: Women are frequently taught to perform desire before we are encouraged to understand it. We learn how to appear desirable, how to respond to male attention and how to make a man feel chosen.
Yet, despite Tony’s riches and her newfound power, Elvira remains bored. This may be the greatest insult anyone could present to Tony Montana. Elvira’s refusal to perform happiness exposes the emptiness of everything Tony has acquired. She looks at the life that he’s constructed, one that he believes should make her worship him, and she finds it unbearable.
Tony’s wife is not the only woman who disrupts his fantasy. He returns to his mother expecting his expensive clothes and stacks of cash to prove that he has succeeded, only for her to recognize the violence behind them and order him out of her home.
With his younger sister, Gina, his desire to provide for her quickly becomes a determination to control her. He insists that his jealousy is protection, even as it becomes increasingly invasive and violent. Tony may love Gina, but his love leaves no room for her personhood. He wants to save her from dangerous men without noticing that he has become the most dangerous man in her life.
In each relationship, Tony offers a different version of the same bargain: He will give a woman material security as long as she allows him to define the terms of her life. Elvira’s beauty matters because other men envy Tony for possessing it, but her unhappiness becomes an insult. Gina’s sexuality is harmless while it remains hypothetical, but the moment she chooses Manny, Tony perceives her decision as betrayal. He does not believe these women possess desires independent of him. Tony Montana can face bullets more easily than he can face a woman whose desire he does not control.
“This expectation that women should be desirable –– but not encouraged to desire for themselves –– extends far beyond “Scarface.” Women are permitted to attract male attention, but condemned when they decide what to do with it. Tony’s violence may be extraordinary, but the entitlement beneath it is painfully ordinary.”
This expectation that women should be desirable –– but not encouraged to desire for themselves –– extends far beyond “Scarface.” Women are permitted to attract male attention, but condemned when they decide what to do with it. Tony’s violence may be extraordinary, but the entitlement beneath it is painfully ordinary.
Recognizing misogyny doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with finding “Scarface” fascinating. I certainly do. Pacino makes the character so magnetic, frightening and, at times, genuinely ridiculous. That combination is far more interesting than uncomplicated villainy. Tony is ambitious and desperately insecure, protective and predatory, but utterly dependent on other people’s recognition.
There is something revealing about the men who admire Tony without recognizing that the film condemns him. They remember the mansion, the money and his refusal to apologize; they forget the women whose lives reveal the cost of Montana’s entitlement. Worse, they repeat his logic whenever they treat women and our interests as performances designed for male approval.
But Tony does not get the final word on the phrase he made famous. “The world is yours” is written across my back in my father’s handwriting, the man who introduced me to the film but trusted me to find my own meaning within it. The world belongs to women — not when we are chosen, but when we are free to choose.
Bianca Mirica PO ’29 loves gangster movies and crime dramas and has endless material for opinions about her favorite mobsters, which she is more than happy to put into writing.
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