I've always loved watching Scarface. I'm quite partial to Al Pacino, and I also enjoy seeing endless grotesque violence on film, along with seeing such absurdness as mountains of cocaine on top of a table, and seeing a man get chainsawed to death. But there is so much more to this movie than what meets the eye!
There are a lot of reasons that this movie has turned into a cult classic, a once critically ballyhooed film that few people saw when it was released compared to today. The violence aside, the movie glorified a lifestyle that most people dared not to live because of the certainty of meeting a demise much like Tony Montana did. We all lived vicariously through this film the dark recesses of the back of our minds.
While there are a lot of impressionable people that seemed to have taken this movie as gospel and parade around like gangsters, talking like Tony and aiming to do as much coke as a drug lord, the backbone of the story has much more to do with the equally interchangeable American Dream and the will to power, and these details seem to go over a lot of people's heads. It's the substory line about an addiction to power that is something that Nietzsche, and, I dare say, Shakespeare, would have enjoyed.
Tony Montana was a Cuban immigrant looking to achieve the American dream, but like many immigrants, he had to start off on the bottom rung of the ladder. Imagine you are him, and have a reasonable education like he does, and you come to Miami and see people living the life in fast sports cars with women on each arm. I would imagine that the first thing most people think to themselves is that they would want to live that life and that they are not satisfied with their own. Tony realizes this and embarks on a quest to achieve a life where he thinks he can live with more dignity, but quickly gets in over his head when he realizes he can have it all if he really wants to. His desires to climb the ladder to affluence and to help his family get out of the gutter makes his dreams spiral to the point where he will mow down anyone and break any law in his path to achieve his goals. For him, the ends always justifies the means.
Tony's demise is much alike to that of Icarus, in that his desire to climb and push the limit eventually caused his Hindenburgesque end. Through it all, Tony was unable to protect his sister in his own mind from the life he was living, and kills his best friend and, unbeknownst to him, his own brother-in-law, in a sheer rage. His bloodlust for power destroyed everyone around him including himself.
Somewhere in the sordid tale of Tony Montana is an allegory for our President and much of the culture that benefits from having such a man in power. People that have such a will to total power have no regard or understanding of the scope of all of the people that their actions touch. Tony thinks, in his own mind, that he is doing his sister a service by beating the shit out of a guy in the bathroom for hooking up with her, but doesn't realize that it isn't his business because she is his own person. Only when he kills her new husband then he obviously realizes what he has done, and the hell he has wrought.
What makes Bush so much worse than Scarface is that, aside from whatever booze/coke/anti-depressants he may or may not be on, is that even though he may think he is protecting this country by fighting Iraq, Afghanistan or any other country or entity he may feel like is threatening him, he is really doing a disservice to Americans in ways that he cannot comprehend. His consolidation of power to a unitary executive cannot be mistaken as anything else, despite his or any of his followers' claims that it is to protect the country. Be it the drugs or his blind commitment to his will to power and to protect the ideal of the American Dream, he has actually accomplished the opposite of what he has sought out to do. We are less secure, politically, financially and democratically because of his inability to understand that he has to share this world with others. Simple Newtonian physics is what it boils down to, the weight of such a concept I am unsure if he truly grasps.
Bush may have been to Baghdad, he may have chatted with the families of slain soldiers, he may have said there were mistakes in the invasion. When it's all said and done, his life goes on without any major losses or endured suffering, while it's the members of the public that has either suffered permanent losses or are now dealing with increased hardships. Until his poor decision making, which seems to have been par for the course for his entire life, starts to personally affect that which he cares about most, only then will he ever have clarity. Perhaps this may have happened already in private, but who knows. Maybe it was the undeniable reality that most sane people realized when Katrina and the Waves came to New Orleans. Maybe it stuck in his head when he went to sleep after the correspondence dinner, or sometime during Stephen Colbert's magnificent performance of The Murder of Gonzago.
Tony eventually met a creeping demise that he could not escape from, which was entirely the result of his lifetime of actions coming back to get whatever was left of the shell of the body that a man once occupied. I can only hope that the climax of Bush's creeping demise will be impeachment, which would be a truly fitting ending to this act of American history. The creeping back has begun, and I truly wonder what sort of whiplash Newton has in store for Bush, given the severe magnitude of his lifetime of actions.