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Comment by moate | Hacker News Reader

>You got the wrong idea. I don't think anyone idolizes Tony.

If you'd like I can provide a short list of rap songs about selling drugs which contain lyrics positively representing scarface/Tony. People idolize him. He's a self made man who took what he wanted. He's betrayed in the end, but plenty of people look at that as the actions of outside actors and not the consequences of his behavior. I'm not going to go into possible alternative analysis for Tony's character/the events of the movie in which he's a heroic figure betrayed by Sosa and the government (which can also be viewed as a bad guy in drug culture), but it's there.

TL;dr- There are people who aspire to be Tony, understanding full well that Heavy Weighs the Crown.

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I do wonder, though - do people want to be Tony end-to-end, or do they just like the middle and think it wouldn't end that way for them? Even a visceral, horrid ending is easy to downplay when it's just on a screen.

I mean, what does Jay-Z have to say about Montana? Fuck Sosa, this Hova this is real life // This is what the ending of Scarface should feel like. Because he's better than Tony, and he's going to make it all work.

There are definitely people who idolize the Achilles bit, living gloriously and briefly, but I feel like the most common reason people celebrate that is that they get to downplay the messy ending.

Haha, if you'd like I can provide a short list of rappers named after Scarface/Tony

Sorry, I think I expressed what I meant the wrong way. Not that no one idolizes Tony. What I meant was not all the people who liked him and liked the movie idolize him. I liked the movie not because he was rich or someone to be idolized.

>but plenty of people look at that as the actions of outside actors and not the consequences of his behavior.

That's the recipe for a great story/a great movie: The great moment in storytelling is when the viewer/reader starts to see the world as the protagonist sees it. The viewer stopped caring about whether the protagonist was objectively right or wrong/moral or immoral, the viewer starts caring more about whether what they did given the situation make sense or not.

That is - given the situation, could/would you have done the same? The answer for me in the cases of Tony Montana, Scarlett O'Hara, Michael Corleone were a really convincing yes.

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