Pride comes before the fall: Nonhle Thema Vs Tony Montana
They say it takes a lot of work to get to the top, and it takes even more work to stay at the top. Every person that has ever been in the pursuit of power, fame, wealth or greatness has always lived up to the notion of bringing the best out of themselves because of the harsh conditions they have to live through. The heroic and stoic tales of the underdog facing all the adversity the world has put before to then watch them to rise and become beacons of their time.
We love the story where the hero rises to the top, when they conquer everything that ever stood in their way and for that moment nothing in this world could stop them. It is very much like the Narrative in Brian DePalma’s classic film “Scarface”, where after the protagonist “Tony Montana” Rises from the detention center and evades being deported back to Cuba, by carrying out a murder, thereby him getting a green card to live in the United States, where he does several crimes including partnering up with a another drug lord “Alejandro Sosa” as well as eliminating his former boss “Frank Lopez” making him the drug kingpin of Miami. Tony Montana’s life turns positive with him becoming rich, living in luxury and opulence, extravagant weddings and extreme excess. Tony Montana finally has everything. But what happens next can even be said to be karma catching up to him where he loses control. He gets investigated by the IRS, he dives deeper into his lifestyle of drugs and partying thereby ruining his mental state, he even kills his best friend, betrays his greatest allies and eventually dies.
Tony Montana’s story is a cautionary tale of how letting your success get the best of you and can ultimately become your demise no matter how hard you worked to get there. In our South African Industry we have many stories that are within the vein of Tony Montana’s. Nonhle Thema is a classic story of falling from grace.
The year was 2006, and Channel O was searching for their next TV personality. A young Nonhle Tema was one of the many hopefuls on this quest. Nonhle reached the top of mount olympus and lived in complete glory. Moving to 2007 she was officially the Queen Bee of TV, from hosting the most popular shows on channel O, meeting international celebrities, being a top brand ambassador, and global tours. She was at the helm of shows like O-Access, as well as V-entertainment. Noble was indeed the first crossover star as she even had a reality show called Nonhle goes to Hollywood. Aside from her fame and the spotlight she had multiple endorsements with Dark and Lovely and several car manufacturing companies.
Circling back to Tony Montana, regardless of his short-sighted impulsive ways he was ambitious, and he had tenacity. He never thought all his actions through but he was stead-fast in making himself a success by any means necessary. However when he attained his success, his downfall was imminent because of his pre-existing flaws. His flaws were his ego, his lack of discipline, and as mentioned before his impulsive tendencies. When the money and the success of killing his adversaries including the people who empowered him his ego made him feel invincible. In the film as mentioned before he starts being careless with his money, begins a terrible cocaine habit, he mistreats his wife, he kills his friend, he is cruelly over-protective of his sister, the worst part comes when he has a task to bomb an anti-drug activists vehicle in order to stop the campaign against him and his organization but spares his life because the activist has his children in the car with him. It is that impulsiveness which leads him to spare the life of the activist but he kills the bomber put in charge of killing the activist, this angers Sosa and Sosa sends an army to essentially destroy Tony.
Nonhle Thema’s downfall was less violent but arguably just as dramatic. Starting with the “Nonhle goes to Hollywood” reality show, she had been exposed for buying twitter followers and faking and exaggerating her life on the show. Twitter was having a field day with her, trolls would go back and forth with her, and she didn’t do herself any favors by insulting them back. She proclaimed how she was richer than everyone online, she even went as far as to call herself “God” and anybody beneath her was deemed poor. She would show up late for shows and interviews and she was extremely rude to the executives, producers and managers who used to coordinate her shows. She ruined 10 million-dollar endorsement deals to the point where one would conclude that she thought nothing of it. Now Tony Montana had a whole legion of gunmen that invaded and infiltrated his estate and murdered him, Nonhle went through a similar war on her timeline going back and forth with fans and they trolled her into shame and irrelevance, even one fan who claimed to have dated Nonhle describing a night where Nonhle was holding a bottle of whiskey while wearing lingerie and high heels proclaiming herself to be a deity, and more fans thought this was true with the way she interacted with the timeline in 2011. Another comparison to the legion of fans that ridiculed and disempowered Nonhle were the generation of “it girls” she gave “birth” to. Nonhle was the original influencer, the way Paris Hilton paved the way for reality television as a startup to any career endeavors after the season has been aired and the way Kim Kardashian followed suit and created a dynasty is the way Nonhle paved the way for many girls just like her. After 2011 Nonhle’s hard work as well as her demise opened the floodgates for the media divas like Bonang Matheba and Pearl Thusi who also became influencers on a global scale to the point of even surpassing Nonhle herself, leaving Nonhle in a the realm of irrelevance and obscurity, where she herself became a joke and a far cry from her former glory.
At the end of the film Scarface we see Tony Montana lying in a pool of his own blood, in an in house fountain, the fountain is under a statue of a planet written the ‘world is yours’. That phrase ‘The World is Yours’ can be said to be a slogan of ambition and the possibilities of your desires that manifest into your actualisation but if treated ill that slogan can be the result of your demise. The same applies to Nonhle Thema, she created the world of the ‘media diva’, but it is how consumed she was in that world and so self absorbed by her accomplishments and being so young and so influential that effectively gave her the god complex that in essence was her downfall. Tony destroyed the only family he knew, destroyed everyone who ever helped him just so that he could feel untouchable and all he had was himself in the end. Nonhle also explains in recent interviews of how she burnt bridges with all those people who were closest, the corporations who endorsed her and the fans who once supported her turned around and made her the laughing stock creating room for the leaders of media today. In the final scene before landing in the pond Tony falls from a balcony, in reality Nonhle fell from grace, the both of them suffered from the selfishness of main-character syndrome. Those two are cautionary tales of how pride comes before the fall.
