The show puts it on screen. In one of the episodes, Walt watches the end of Scarface with his infant daughter on his lap and says "everyone dies in this movie", which is the series telling the audience what it is and where it is going. Vince Gilligan has named it as a reference point throughout: the arc of a man who acquires everything he said he wanted and is destroyed by the acquiring, the point at which the money stops being a means, and the refusal to let the audience keep liking him. The difference is the pacing. De Palma's rise takes two hours; Gilligan's takes five seasons, which is what lets the audience be complicit in it.