That Scarface enjoys a position in the pop culture lexicon that only strengthens with each passing year serves as a validation of its deliberate excesses and its transparently critical view of upper-class decadence in the '80s and the yuppie love for this outrageous lifestyle. Scarface updates Howard Hawks' 1932 original in a way few remakes do: it truly guts the original and places the update firmly within its own time period not only in its references but its aesthetics. In the process, it continues the mounting sociopolitical dissatisfaction creeping its way back into Brian De Palma's work, peeling back the veneer glossed over the whole decade and marking the start of the director's open hostility to the changing social landscape of the 1980s.What De Palma does best with Scarface is demonstrate that those old gangster films (which his protagonist openly acknowledges as an influence on his young mind) were as much glamorizations of violence and decadence as anything being shunned by contemporaneous critics. Those pre-Code pictures came out during the Great Depression, times of hardship and desolation; yet the films showed well-dressed criminals living the high, fast life. When the film came out in 1983, America was just starting to recover from its worst economy since the depression, and De Palma films inside ritzy clubs and absurdly lavish mansions. And like the mainstream culture looking to flashy pop culture touchstones like Miami Vice for comfort, so too did the masses in the '30s enjoy those gangsters up on the screen (hell, they liked real-life gangsters like Dillinger). Scarface was De Palma's way of showing the public face of the '80s, and it's no wonder so many viewers hated being shown their cultural "values" in such harsh terms.
