Excess spaces: Movement and ethnoscapes in Brian De Palma’s Scarface and Edward James Olmos’ American Me

Abstract

This article explores notions of movement and spatiality in two US films about ‘Latino’ gangsters, Brian De Palma’s Scarface (1983) and Edward James Olmos’ American Me (1992). In examining the distinction between gangster films and specifically Latino gangster films, I consider how the detention centre, the penitentiary and the neighbourhood are constructed as ethnic spaces in the sense that they stand in an antagonistic and peripheral relation to mainstream perceptions of the ideal American home. I address the presence of ethnic traces that these films portray variously as archaic, exotic and remote, adding a dimension of excess to filmic constructions of cultural difference. This excess, flamboyantly or grimly displayed in both films under the guise of irrational violence, grotesque gender performativity and cultural deficiency represents – or, rather, figures – the contours of another space, an excess space that vaguely and hesitantly translates fantasies of Latino gangsters while imaging Latinos as gangsters.