PARTISAN REVIEW
that basis the necessity of the action is established, and it progresses by
inalterable paths to the point where the gangster lies dead and the
principle has ben modified: there is really only one possibility-failure.
The final meaning of the city is anonymity and death.
In the opening scene of
Scarface,
we are shown a successful man;
we know he is successful because he has just given a party of opulent
proportions and because he is called Big Louie. Through some monstrous
lack of caution, he permits himself to be alone for a few moments. We
understand from this immediately that he is about to be killed. No
convention of the gangster film is more strongly established than this:
it is dangerous to be alone. And yet the very conditions of success make
it impossible not to be alone, for success is always the establishment of
an
individual
pre-eminence that must be imposed on others, in whom
it automatically arouses hatred; the successful man is an outlaw. The
gangster's whole life is an effort to assert himself as an individual, to
draw himself out of the crowd, and he always dies
because
he is an
individual; the final bullet thrusts him back, makes him, after all, a
failure. "Mother of God," says the dying Little Caesar, "is this the end
of Rico?"-speaking of himself thus in the third person because what
has been brought low is not the undifferentiated
man,
but the individual
with a name, the gangster, the success; even to himself he is a creature
of the imagination. (T. S. Eliot has pointed out that a number of
Shakespeare's tragic heroes have this trick of looking at themselves
dramatically; their true identity, the thing that is destroyed when they
die, is something outside themselves-not a man, but a style of life,
a kind of meaning.)
At bottom, the gangster is doomed because he is under the obliga–
tion to succeed, not because the means he employs are unlawful. In the
deeper layers of the modern consciousness,
all
means are unlawful, every
attempt to succeed is an act of aggression, leaving one alone and guilty
and defenseless among enemies: one is
punished
for success. This is our
intolerable dilemma: that failure is a kind of death and success is evil
and dangerous, is-ultimately-impossible. The effect of the gangster
film is to embody this dilemma in the person of the gangster and re–
solve it by his death. The dilemma is resolved because it is
his
death,
not ours. We are safe; for the moment, we can acquiesce in our failure,
we can choose to fail.
Robert Warshow
244
