Twenty years after its release, “Scarface” feels like a Rosetta Stone for translating our pop language of righteous thuggery. If there isn’t a Ph.D. thesis already written about the fascinating mixture of criminality and violence masquerading as social crusade, a graduate student could do a lot worse than starting with Brian De Palma’s masterpiece, which updates the gangster blueprint first sketched in “Little Caesar”, “Public Enemy”, and of course 1932’s “Scarface” (the film is dedicated to Howard Hawks and Ben Hecht).

What had been a “shame of the nation” seventy years ago has slowly permeated almost every corner of pop consciousness. De Palma’s gangster epic is unique because in Tony Montana, fully alive thanks to a blistering performance by Al Pacino, it merges the familiar qualities of the gangster, society’s scapegoat, with those of the oppressed minority figure fighting back against a racist social order. A generation of school backpacks with Che Guevara stitched on them begins with Tony Montana. In a recent Sixty Minutes interview, Russell Simmons of Def Jam was asked to defend rap lyrics that seemed to promote thuggishness. Simmons countered by inquiring as to why no one asks about the thuggishness of the U.S. government.

A similarly self-exculpating appeal to proportionality is made here first by Oliver Stone, who wrote “Scarface”, then almost unknown in 1983 but no less politically cynical than he would be as a director. His script is always alert to the corruptions of the power structure against which Tony fights. Nearly every crime Tony commits is mitigated by a larger act of villainy by white men in suits, acts even more nefarious than Tony’s by virtue of the fact that they are concealed by lies and hypocrisy.

The government and its legions of crones are the true demonic agents in Stone’s Faustian tale, and there’s no limit to their reach (behind his desk Lopez keeps autographed photos of Robert Kennedy and Richard Nixon). The one cop who can lay the hurt on Tony instead cuts a deal over drinks (ordering an ironic glass of milk, of course). When Tony meets with his Bolivian connection, the one U.S. representative (“from Washington”, as if nothing else need be said) is a balding blond who stands out in his sky blue suit. Montana is a bad guy, no doubt of that, but more importantly for Stone, he isn’t the worst guy.