How Did Tony Montana Get On Your Kid’s T-Shirt?

 
November 6th, 2006 by iMonk

How could Tony Montana be your hero?
You don’t know Tony Montana? Where have you been? Tony Montana is the protagonist of the 1983 Al Pacino film, Scarface.
As films go, Scarface is memorable for an excess of bad accents, bad script-writing and bad ideas of how to remake a gangster movie. I’m very much a Pacino fan, but note to the film community: Pacino isn’t the man to play mumbling, overdone, insane Cuban refugee drug lord gangsters. Not that Pacino can’t act the part of a man snorting coke like I might eat free pizza. He does. No, it’s that accent. Once you’ve had to sit through 2 hours of Pacino’s over-the-top version of Tony Montana, you’ll wonder how his career ever recovered.
You’ll also wonder, when you see his face on a $75 t-shirt, how Tony Montana has emerged as a pop-culture icon and hero in 21st century America.
It was sometime last year that I first spotted Montana’s face on the oversized t-shirts our students like to wear. I’m used to seeing rappers, athletes, even the occasional significant historic figure like Frederick Douglas. I’ve seen a hundred Bob Marley shirts, and at least that many Biggee Smalls. Frankly, none of them gave me particular pause. Youth culture rarely surprises me. I’ve had a few t-shirts that needed explanation along the way myself.
But Tony Montana? In addition to being a cartoonishly poor performance, Montana is a character without redeeming qualities. In the annals of movie-making, Montana may be one of the two or three most morally corrupt characters ever imagined.
Here’s the short version: Tony Montana and friends are booted out of Cuba during the Marielle boatlift. He comes to Miami by way of escaping a Federal detention center for refugees. He quickly falls into the drug trade, and before long is making moves to be a major player in organized crime.
Tony is ambitious and dangerous, but he’s also stupid. His own increasing drug use mars what little intelligence he has and increases his violent determination. Like a vicious animal, Tony is never far from biting the hand that feeds him. He’s useful to the drug lords because of his consciousless violence, but it’s inevitable that he’s going to eventually kill his mentors or anyone else who challenges, irritates or annoys him.
Before long, Tony is the king of Miami drug dealers, awash in a sea of cocaine and opulence. There’s no subtlety or mystery to Tony. He’s crude, stupid, violent, paranoid, insane, addicted, cruel and doomed. One can see the end of the movie coming from a very long way off. The closest Tony Montana comes to being a truly human character is his regret over the grief he causes his mother and sister, but that doesn’t last long, passing in an inevitable hail of gunfire and clouds of cocaine.
Tony Montana is captivating because of the sheer capacity for evil and violence presented in one person. The film-makers made Montana into a demi-god of a villain, one where the complete and total abasement of the human personality is constantly on display. In contrast to an interesting monster like Hannibal Lector, Tony Montana is one-dimensional, predictable and ultimately, clownish.
He’s also on t-shirts, a symbol of something heroic, manly and desirable to thousands of young men.
Why?
Gangster culture is a constant fact with the students I teach and minister to. In the absence of legitimate heroes, I am not surprised to see unreal, imaginary, exaggerated characters becoming more and more commonly embraced as statements within youth culture. What is it about Tony Montana that these young men find appealing?
Tony Montana has declared himself morally without accountability and boundaries. Like many criminals, he has a totally self-consumed notion of right and wrong. He is willing to kill everyone who offends him in the slightest. His versions of “compassion” and “loyalty” are all simply veiled threats of future violence.
Tony lives in decadent wealth. His home is palatial, and his lifestyle worthy of the most corrupt of the Roman emperors. This is the “American Dream,” gangster style, a twisted, sick version of freedom and the pursuit of happiness. It is drugs, money and toys without limit or question. The mountain of cocaine that he feeds off of symbolizes his manipulation and dominance of his world, but also his destruction by the same forces that empower him.
Tony is a version of masculinity that fits into a morally evacuated landscape of dysfunctional families and absentee fathers. He “cares” about his family as millions of young men conceive of “caring”: being a “godfather” figure, immature, but feared and generous. He creates “family” by access to drugs, money and power. He is raw lust and raw ambition. He “succeeds” where others fail by destroying everyone in his path. He is strong and powerful, though he is doomed and ultimately dead.
Why is Tony Montana on a t-shirt in America? Whose idea was it to make Tony Montana a statement of maturity, maleness and success? How is a slave to violence, an addict, a moral monster and destroyer of others a symbol for a young person in America today?
Who is marketing this, and why? What parents buy this, and do they have any idea what Tony Montana represents? (You can ask what schools allow this shirt to be worn, and I’ll happily tell you I quickly made sure the shirt was banned in the dress code. But that’s a convenience for our school. It does nothing to change minds or hearts.)
I think of John Piper’s provocative book title, Don’t Waste Your Life. Tony Montana is like a coke-charged, explosive version of the book of Ecclesiastes. He has it all, but he’s destroying everything at the same time. Tony Montana doesn’t live life to the full. He destroys life, destroys his capacity to enjoy life and wastes his life. He is an icon of waste and destruction, a suicidal thrill-ride of a life destined for the abyss and leaving nothing of worth behind.
A Tony Montana shirt is a statement that it’s cool to imagine wasting your life as a criminal of the worst sort. It’s romantic, masculine, and enough women respond positively to it to keep the symbol in fashion. (Tony’s treatment of women ought to be enough to convince a rational woman that a man wearing such a shirt is a dangerous psychopath.). It’s a self-destructive Kurt Cobain without the nod to creativity and poetic angst. Montana is a symbol of pure, cancerous, vicious, violent evil. And young people identify.
I am forced to conclude that a young person wearing a Tony Montana t-shirt is part of a culture that is turning in upon itself; devouring its own virtues and replacing them with the glorification of vices. Tony Montana isn’t a rogue who stands up for the little guy, or a Robin Hood providing for his people. He’s a pure force of waste and wanton destruction.
In what way is this cool, validating or empowering? What is there to imitate? What does this kind of symbol give back to those who wear it?
I’m imagining the parent who decides to tell their middle-schooler that the Tony Montana they bought with that birthday money isn’t going to be worn any more. I’m imagining the protest that “I’m not going to be a criminal,” and “You’re taking all this far too seriously. It’s just a movie. It’s like wearing Bugs Bunny or Jack Sparrow.” I’m imagining that most parents will say to themselves that it’s just a phase, that it’s harmless and means nothing.
Sometimes I agree with that reasoning. I generally stand for our students’ ability to express themselves in what they wear. But this is different. This isn’t Elvis or Malcolm X or Tupac. This is an inversion of every moral standard. This is inexplicable other than the simplest explanation: we are admiring terrible people who do terrible things.
Why?
Because we are so morally and culturally dead that we can’t innately sense the wrongness of what we’re doing? Because we are so afraid of being judgmental that even the most basic moral judgments intimidate us? Because youth culture itself intimidates us, bullying us into submission in the name of letting kids express themselves?
I don’t entirely trust myself on my reactions to these sorts of things. I’ve gone overboard with some long black trenchcoats that reminded me of Columbine, and I made a fool of myself. Occasionally, I’ve gotten too interested in particular examples of youthful self-expression. It’s not easy moving in youth culture when you are surrounded by the constant claims and chaos of the Kingdom of darkness.
But I don’t distrust myself on Tony Montana. It’s very little difference from a Hitler shirt. It’s the worst possible choice made for reasons that are not imaginary, but all to real. It’s evil on about as many levels as I can count.
Living in such a culture is painful and disorienting. The “Amish option” seems completely reasonable at times. Yet, at other times I relish the opportunity to engage in discussion of such cultural symbols. They open the door for questions of good and evil, morality, God and matters of the soul. Jesus was a victim of violence, but his violent death was redemption for the world. Such redemption makes meaning possible, and is victorious over the one who comes to steal, kill and destroy real lives in the real world.
How can Jesus become the hero, the icon, the symbol for the truth of the Gospel? The battle isn’t fought on t-shirts or over dress codes. The battle is fought in the real world as the Kingdom of Jesus presents an alternative to the illusions and pretensions of godless culture. To present a witness is impossible if we are not in the place where the contrast with what is false is not apparent. If I want to shield myself from the fact that Tony Montana is a hero to millions of young people, I will have little comprehensible or relevant to say about Jesus to this generation.
In many ways, Tony Montana represents something more authentic than what many young people see in the church or among Christians. That is painful, humiliating and twisted. It’s also too often true. Our cartoonish version of Christianity offers a Christ that many young men, particularly African-American young men such as the ones wearing Montana, cannot see as worthy of worship, obedience or following.
The challenge of a missional, post-evangelical Christian is to go into the world and do battle with the idols and “gates” of culture that take minds and hearts captive. Our goal, however, is not moral reformation alone, as compelling as that seems in these confused times. Our goal is the exaltation of Christ, a communication of Christ that topples all competition, and a community of authentic Christian living that shows true heroism, true ambition, and the beauty of holiness.
That means we just might need to watch Scarface with a group of young men, listen, ask questions, and tell them the story of another one, scarred, but with an entirely different heart and something much more dangerous to offer. There is perverse worldly glory in distorted face of Tony Montana, but the glory of God comes to us in the face of Jesus Christ.

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