“Nothing exceeds like excess. You should know that, Tony.”
Those are Elvira Hancock’s words to Tony Montana in Brian De Palma’s immortal masterpiece Scarface. Essentially an almost three-hour-long rise-and-fall chronicle of its titular antihero. The film, released in 1983, is an incendiary meditation on the source. It’s the blood-pumping heart behind the psychology and phenomenon of fame: ambition. Its lessons (and prophecies) were writ large throughout the ‘90s, the last cultural era when fame it appears, was directly measured by tangible output and product and continues to illuminate its current strains the way a blacklight picks up stains.
Fame is a universal proposition—like love, rage and Nike. Everyone, everywhere, wants some iteration of it, whether it’s just a little piece or the whole pie. A big part of what makes Montana such a compelling and indelible character isn’t just that Al Pacino played him with reputation-defining gravity, but because of the humanity—the good, bad and downright ridiculous extents of it—that was hardwired into his pursuit of empire. At one point, his associate Manny Ray asks him: “Oh well, what’s coming to you, Tony?” To which he famously replies: “The world, chico, and everything in it.” As we know, that response didn’t age well.
Of course, Montana is a tragic and therefore, drastic deeply instructive and emblematic of what happens when fame runs amok. When its public-facing veneer becomes overwhelming and when it eats its host from the inside. Every time we lose Kurt Cobain or Pop Smoke, the feeling is the same.
