Scarface · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Watch where the X falls. In the rafters of a garage, in the strut of a steel sign, in the digits chalked on a wall, finally in the scar carved across Tony Camonte's own cheek — every time Hawks and his cameraman Lee Garmes are about to let a man die, a little cross slides quietly into the frame first. You don't have to notice it for it to work on you. The X is a death-stamp seeded through the whole picture, and once you see the pattern you start to feel that nobody in this Chicago is choosing anything. They're being marked.

That feeling is the door into what this film actually is. On its surface Scarface looks like pure action: a nobody perceives an opening in the underworld and acts, claws upward, gets gunned down. But that's not quite the rhythm Hawks gives us, and it's why Deleuze's odd middle category — the impulse-image — fits Tony better than the gangster-as-businessman ever did. Deleuze slots this image between feeling and action. It isn't a man weighing a situation and deciding; it's a creature in the grip of an appetite, sliding down a slope toward exhaustion and death. Paul Muni plays Tony exactly that way — grinning, simian, a child intoxicated by his own power. He doesn't deliberate. He grabs. Loud suits, then silk dressing gowns; steel shutters; the moll Poppy he covets the way he covets everything, as an acquisition. Hunger is the only motor.

Deleuze would say a film like this runs on two worlds at once. There's the derived milieu — the realistic, sociological Chicago of Prohibition, tommy guns and newspaper headlines, the surface the censors thought they were policing. And underneath it an originary world, a savage zone where only drives exist, where Tony is less a striver than a predator working an unchanging law of appetite and ruin. This is what Deleuze called naturalism: the social crust cracks and something elemental pours through. The famous incest undercurrent — Tony's violent possessiveness of his sister Cesca, the killing of his own friend Guino when the two secretly marry — isn't really subplot. It reads as a symptom: the same drive that conquers the city turning, with no change of gear, on his own blood. Even George Raft's endlessly flipped coin belongs here. It's a fetish, a part-object the hand keeps working while the man stays blank, appetite idling in metal.

And because it's an originary world, time in it has only one direction. Deleuze calls it the line of slope — entropy, a downward grade toward death. The genius of the rise-and-fall arc, which Scarface did so much to set in stone, is that the rise is the fall. Every acquisition is a step further down the slope. The neon travel-agency sign blinking "The World Is Yours" presides over the whole descent as the film's bitter symbol — the single object that condenses its logic, promising a limitless appetite and delivering a corpse in the street beneath it. Where the X is a local mark (see it, expect a body), the sign is the law of the entire organism written in light.

None of this would land without the look, and the look has a pedigree. Garmes pours hard light into deep black, a sculptural chiaroscuro that arrives a full decade before film noir made it a house style. Deleuze ties this register to expressionism — shadow as a kind of non-organic fate, things charged with doom. The debt is direct: the foreboding graphic mark and the doom-lighting come down from Caligari and Nosferatu, German cinema's shadow-as-destiny, retooled by Garmes into an American crime grammar. The screenplay's clipped, ironic newspaper-room speed comes from Ben Hecht's Underworld; the rise-and-fall skeleton from Little Caesar, whose W.R. Burnett worked on this script too; the limitless appetite and the ironic death-tableau from The Public Enemy. Scarface takes all of it and pushes it toward grotesque excess — the Borgias relocated to the South Side.

What it gave back to filmmaking is everything the genre later took for granted. The montage of conquest — headlines spinning, calendar pages, violence telescoped into seconds — is here in working order. So is a mobile camera tracking and craning through space at a moment when most talkies were bolted to the floor by their own sound equipment. And there's the wit of displacement: Gaffney shot dead at a bowling alley while we watch only the thrown ball and a spinning, toppling pin. Half censorship dodge, half pure cinema — the murder is more terrible for being withheld.

That withholding is the whole film in small. Scarface keeps showing you the mark instead of the act, the slope instead of the choice, the sign instead of the satisfaction. So watch it again with that in mind. Don't track Tony's decisions; he doesn't make any. Track the appetite, and track the X — and notice how early the film has already told you, in chalk and rafter and shadow, exactly how this ends. The world was never his. It was only ever the slope he was falling down.