Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Scarface
1983 · Brian De Palma · Scarface on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the rooms get bigger and emptier as Tony gets richer. (setting)
De Palma moves Tony from a refugee tent under the highway to cramped kitchens and motel bathrooms, then to white-on-white marble with surveillance monitors. The décor gains square footage and loses life.
Payoff: The spaces tell you what the dialogue won't: the more he owns, the less there is around him. In the reading: derived-milieu. The reading calls these settings a derived milieu, a social surface that keeps thinning until raw appetite shows through the marble.
Watch the camera pull away from the worst of the violence. (camera)
De Palma keeps the worst of it at the edge of the frame, then lifts the camera out to the street below. He does this repeatedly: the wide Panavision frame withholds as often as it displays.
Payoff: You supply the horror yourself, which is why the scenes stick longer than anything the film shows you.
Listen for Moroder's synthesizers riding under the violence. (sound)
The pulsing electronic score and songs like "Push It to the Limit" give shootings and beatings a danceable beat. The music never turns mournful when the drama turns brutal.
Payoff: The score refuses to judge while the story insists on judgment, and that gap is where the film's argument sits.
Watch Pacino's hands, jaw and volume in every confrontation scene. (performance)
Pacino plays Tony big from the first interrogation: the accent pushed forward, the body leaning in, the profanity hammered rhythmically. Bauer, Pfeiffer and Loggia all pitch smaller, which makes his size a fact of the world.
Payoff: You are watching appetite played as a creature rather than a person, and it cannot be played quietly. In the reading: naturalism. The reading calls this naturalism in Deleuze's sense: a character driven by compulsion, not reasoning, so the acting goes operatic.
Look for the blimp and the words "The World Is Yours." (staging)
The slogan arrives early on a blimp drifting past a window and keeps returning on signs and objects. De Palma stages Tony in frames where it hangs above or behind him.
Payoff: One object carries the film's whole promise, and the film keeps putting it just out of reach above his head.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the rooms. They grow, they empty, they turn white, and the slogan keeps drifting past the window.