Chili Palmer: From the underworld to Hollywood without ruffling his hair

Chili Palmer is a debt collector from the Miami underworld who, chasing a delinquent debtor all the way to Los Angeles, discovers the movie business and decides to switch to producing. And he does it with astonishing ease: the skills he used to intimidate debtors—poise, reading people, never losing his cool—turn out to be exactly the ones that succeed in Hollywood. For Chili, the underworld and cinema are not opposite worlds: they are two ways of living without bending to an office schedule. For the theory of subterranean values, he embodies with humor the continuity between the values of crime and those of respectable success.

// The theoryThe same values, a different stage

The theory of subterranean values by Matza and Sykes holds that the delinquent shares the values of respectable society, only applied in a different context. Chili is the comic demonstration of that thesis: his “criminal skills”—the cool, the disdain for routine, the audacity, the art of imposing himself without shouting—are identical to the ones Hollywood rewards. When he changes the stage, he changes neither his values nor his character: the same traits that made him a good enforcer make him a good producer. The film laughs at something the theory states in earnest: that the distance between the underworld and certain “legitimate” businesses is much smaller than both worlds pretend, because they share the same subterranean values.

// The subjectThe man who never loses his cool

Chili's defining trait is his cool: he never raises his voice, never loses his poise, never lets his fear show. In the underworld, that calm was survival; in Hollywood, it is charisma. The theory of subterranean values reads that cool as what it is—a much-admired cultural value, one that cinema and advertising are full of—and shows that its criminal version and its glamorous version are the same thing. Chili comes across as likeable precisely because he embodies an ideal we all share: that of the person who masters any situation without ruffling his hair. That this ideal comes from the underworld does not make it any less desirable in our eyes—and there, once again, is the mirror the theory holds up to us.

// The crackNeither "a gangster with charm" nor "no longer a criminal"

The crack with Chili is the comedy itself: his charm makes us forget that his “cool” was forged threatening people to collect debts, sometimes with violence. The theory of subterranean values does not idealize that continuity: the fact that underworld skills work in Hollywood does not wash away the harm they caused in the underworld. The opposite crack is thinking that, by switching to cinema, Chili is “no longer a criminal”: the film suggests the contrary (that he has not changed his values, only his market), and that much of “legitimate” business runs on the same ethics he brought from the underworld. Recognizing that continuity is neither criminalizing Hollywood nor absolving Chili; it is seeing clearly that subterranean values circulate on both sides of the law, and that the respectable suit is sometimes just a suit.

That Chili succeeds in cinema without changing a single bit of his character is the theory's final joke: there was no need to reform him, only to find him a stage where his values were legal. And that speaks about the stage more than about him.