RELATED ARTICLE
Raging Bull: Never Got Me Down
By Glenn Kenny
The Criterion Collection
We never see him again, the solitary hooded specter of the opening credits, at least not like this—lithe and limber, shadowboxing, dancing from foot to foot in slow motion, bobbing and ducking through the smoky half-light, the loose cord of his leopard robe swinging behind him like a tail. His movement is so mesmeric, the music so graceful, that we don’t notice the flashbulbs at first, or the ropes—or that this is a ring, that he is pacing the bounds of a cage.
In seven shots, less than four minutes in, Martin Scorsese has already created a modello—a study—giving us the essence, the shape, of this most painterly picture. Raging Bull (1980) is about the damage of time, the damage of the moment; about a man who’s fighting the world while fighting himself.
The real-life boxer Jake La Motta came from nothing, but he had one gift: an ability to fight with power and stamina, to soak up terrible punishment and still be strong enough to deliver a knockout punch. This gift would raise him out of the gutter and make him different from and better than everyone else; he would guard it jealously throughout his life as something almost sacred. Anything or anyone who threatened it was the enemy, and, as a result, he turned selfishness and self-preservation into a personality. Unfortunately for him, his great gift was physical and therefore finite—as was his period as a champion, as a celebrity, and even as a husband, brother, and person to care for. His sacred gift had a built-in timer for self-destruction.
While Scorsese was making Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974), Robert De Niro gave him his copy of Raging Bull, La Motta’s as-told-to autobiography, cowritten with Peter Savage and Joseph Carter. Scorsese knew something of the public story—the New York kid born in his part of town, the Italian American Lower East Side, and raised in the Bronx, who had boxed professionally from the early forties to the midfifties and become world middleweight champion—but was distracted by the preparation for two films with De Niro, Taxi Driver (1976) and New York, New York (1977). Following the underwhelming reviews for the latter, perhaps the director came to the realization that, after making two authentic, emotionally committed classics with Mean Streets (1973) and Taxi Driver—movies that spoke urgently about low-rent, high-crime New York City and a country in recession—the film he should have made, and that would complete the cycle, was buried somewhere in that battered memoir.
Adrift in London in the late seventies and early eighties, I discovered the solitary pleasure of cinema—the small, independent repertory film houses that flourished then in those prevideo, precomputer days. My favorites were the Electric, the Scala, the Ritzy, and the Everyman, but there were film theaters everywhere in those days, and they offered an escape from the austerities of Thatcher’s Britain: smoking, drinking, coming alive.
I have long been particularly interested in the Hollywood films made during the period covered by Raging Bull—the early forties to the late fifties—when the American dream was sliding into nightmare: when a young, optimistic country, already challenged by the Depression, was brutally exposed by being drawn into war and the attendant loss of insular security, then forced to deal with the social upheavals occurring during that war—migration, class and racial friction, urban development, rampant corruption—anxieties that continued afterward, along with a growing sense that all established orders (including white patriarchy) were becoming imperiled, and a deepening paranoia triggered by totalitarianism, communism, and the bomb. Hidden among the popular crime films of the time—the Chandler and Hammett detective stories, the Bogart and Bacall vehicles—were the dark jewels: The Killers, Out of the Past, T-Men, Force of Evil, Criss Cross, Gun Crazy, Night and the City, The Big Combo, Kiss Me Deadly.
These movies looked unflinchingly at this new America: aggressive, turbulent, morally incoherent, and alienating. Many of their directors—Robert Siodmak, Billy Wilder, Joseph H. Lewis, Jules Dassin—were Jews who had fled, or whose parents had fled, a Europe in a similar state of social breakdown. They worked their way up at the studios to be introduced to a technological sweetshop of high-speed lenses; handheld cameras; portable power supplies; sensitive, fine-grained negatives—all perfected during the war. But they didn’t come empty-handed. They brought a new European sensibility to American city culture, informed by both societal dread and an array of confident cinematic styles and techniques—low-key lighting, compositional tension, deep focus, chiaroscuro, vertiginous camera angles—resulting in a unique fusing of existentialism and romanticism, German expressionism and urban realism. It was a new American art form, and it became known, of course, as film noir.
While not strictly a noir film, Raging Bull shares many of the genre’s stylistic tropes. It’s shot in black and white, due partly to Scorsese’s growing concerns at the time about the deterioration of color film stock, but mostly, I’d guess, as an aesthetic choice—a nod to the hard-nosed movies he had watched in his first twenty years, growing up in New York, the years of La Motta’s prime. From the first scenes, there are the familiar noir motifs of enclosure: the roped ring, staircases, cramped rooms; the tunnels under the boxing arenas; the chain-link fence of the community pool through which Jake meets Vickie, soon to become his wife. Young Jake shuttered in a phone booth; older Jake, and his belly, in another phone booth. Even an empty birdcage. All nudges toward carceral paranoia. Mirrors (particularly the one in Jake’s backstage dressing room) are used to suggest doubleness and self-division. The fight camera work is fast and close, with jarring collision cuts, apart from one remarkable Steadicam long take that brings us from safety to peril, from the dressing room to the ring, through the dark and silent tunnel into the lights and noise of the arena—a fluid tour de force, rivaling any of Scorsese’s other bravura tracking shots in terms of impact and technique. Different-sized boxing rings were built, both to facilitate shooting and to manipulate perception, and ways were found to heighten the look of the ring: flames placed under the lens to cause a rippling, mirage effect in the image; contained smoke used to give the clamminess of fog.
The genesis of Raging Bull, we are told, was crisis. A last throw of the dice for Scorsese after disappointing reviews of New York, New York, drug problems, and hospitalization: “I put everything I knew and felt into that film, and I thought it would be the end of my career,” the director has said. “It was what I call a kamikaze way of making movies: pour everything in, then forget all about it and go find another way of life.” The film he made was pivotal in his career, and remains one of his greatest and most widely acclaimed, and though it’s set in familiar territory for him, recognizable from the time and place of his childhood and adolescence, it still feels like a departure.
Everyone seems to have something to say about Raging Bull. They talk about Robert De Niro’s extraordinary, Oscar-winning performance as La Motta—his intense fight training and sixty-pound weight gain—and the recruitment of two unknown actors to play, mesmerically, the other leads: Cathy Moriarty as Vickie and Joe Pesci (a man who, like the director, was by the late seventies thinking of giving up) as Jake’s brother, Joey. They mention the brilliant editing of Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker, which won her an Academy Award, and the cinematography and sound (also nominated for Oscars, though not awarded), and perhaps refer to De Niro’s mumbled delivery of Brando’s famous “I coulda been a contender” speech from On the Waterfront. But what they mostly want to talk about is the violence. How excessive, brilliant, unnecessary, or pornographic it is. But what do you expect? It’s a film about boxing, after all.
Except it’s not, really. It’s about the battles of working-class men with their world and its polarities: the life they lead—poverty, impotence, loneliness, failure—against what could be achieved if they got a decent break. Money, power, women, and success. Jake catches a break because he has a gift. This is not a film about boxing but a portrait of a man who lives only through violence—whose only language is violence. It’s a movie about that: male violence, men’s rage, stemming from an inability to articulate their emotions and experiences—from jealousy, paranoia, and fear—all of which leads to social maladjustment, failure, and self-destruction. All artists are interested in examining what moves or disturbs them—the cause and effect—and I would guess that Scorsese grew up both appalled and intrigued by the urban aggression around him, and that many of his films circle around that dual response, and the investigation into it. So, while the violence in Raging Bull is certainly uncomfortable to watch, it’s not gratuitous, nor is it there to titillate. It is there because it’s there, of course, in the world; but, more interestingly, it’s there because of the director’s curiosity, and because he sees violence as a symptom of limitation, frustration, low self-esteem, of social and sexual vulnerability.
The film invokes many polarities: the kiss or the punch; the passively suffering Christ against the god of regeneration; tenderness or brutality; human or animal; winner or loser. For the volatile La Motta, violence is not just his language and only gift, it’s his way to win. Losing and winning in life are reduced and simplified, in the black and white of this movie—like boxing bouts—to staged conflicts, microcosms. Women are a distraction and confusion, young women being regarded as purely sexual commodities—either Madonna or whore (i.e., before or after)—and the over-thirties not regarded at all. After Vickie—the trophy wife, platinum-blonde and underage—becomes Jake’s property (as he sees it), the idea that she might be possessed by another man becomes a torture to him. Though he clearly adores her, and she loves him, his paranoia, sexual anxiety, and hair-trigger temper are weaponized into violent jealousy. The camera’s prowling, slowed-down surveillance of Vickie emphasizes the strength of his scrutiny. Even if he didn’t hit her, which he does, the ever-present sense of threat would be palpable.
We are trained to look for redemption, and Scorsese sets up some of the rituals: the ringside Catholic symbolism of the bloody sponge, the mouth guard fed into Jake’s mouth like the Sacrament, his face crossed with the anointment of Vaseline. There is an argument that La Motta may be subconsciously driven to take punishment in the ring in recompense for his violence in the home—that he sees heroism as remaining upright: “I never went down, Ray. You never got me down, Ray,” as the character says in the film, and as La Motta apparently actually said to Sugar Ray Robinson in 1951, at the end of their fight and the end of his career—but I’m not convinced.
Bodies are sharpened and blunted in this film: toned, trained, abused, abandoned. The worst thing to be called in this milieu is “an animal,” a term used throughout the film, from Jake’s fight with his first wife over a steak to his late breakdown in a Miami jail. The fights come in hard, as compressed bursts of physical violence, with heavy sound, amplified and distorted, augmented by animal screams: noise that drops out, suddenly—leaving a numb, bewildered vacuum—before the next hammering punch. We watch a young man become a primitive killing machine, then a rabid, tortured animal, then a fatted bull. A man eaten alive by his own uncontrollable emotions, lashing out at anyone trying to help him.
Alone, finally, in his grubby dressing room, Jake seems somehow satisfied in his fantasy world, still claiming, “I’m the boss” (echoing one of his first lines in the movie, two hours earlier: “They know who’s the boss”), though it’s like watching memories of a beautiful young man now stuck inside a fat suit.
The prison scene, in a Dade County stockade seven years before, but coming near the end of the film, is when we really see behind La Motta’s mask. Here is the man stripped of everything, fighting with his demons in the darkness, fighting with himself. The primal despair of this bull of a man enclosed by the walls of his Florida cell, like an American Minotaur trapped in his maze of violence, moaning, “I am not an animal!” is unbearably moving, and this is an astonishing scene—not least because it’s the one time we get a true sense of the man: the bare, forked animal. What we can make out of what he is saying—howling—alone, in time with his punching and butting the walls, bears some attention: “Dummy, dummy. Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why you do it? Why? You’re so stupid, so fuckin’ stupid. They call me an animal. I’m not an animal. I’m not an animal. You want to treat me like this? I’m not that bad. I’m not that bad. Not that bad. I’m not that guy. Not that guy. I’m not that guy.”
For La Motta, as for many lonely, self-obsessed people, when bad things happen, it’s always someone else’s fault. He rages. He hits out. He has learned an image of manliness and sticks with that mask, even though it bears no real resemblance to the boy who first put it on or the middle-aged man he has become. He has learned another language, violence—which is another mask, for those who cannot access, express, or understand their emotions. Even in the last scene, backstage before his stand-up slot, he is still blaming the world. His flat, affectless delivery of the famous speech from On the Waterfront carries a terrifying ambiguity. Is he simply channeling Brando’s character, the fighter Terry Malloy, blaming his brother, Charley, for his downfall, or is he playing himself and blaming his brother, Joey? We recognize one thing, though, by the end of this film: we know that Jake La Motta will never win, and that Joey’s tactical formulation before the Tony Janiro fight (“If you win, you win. If you lose, you still win. There’s no way you can lose”) has proved to be precisely wrong.
In the opening credits, Jake was dancing but was fighting alone. Although he was caged in by the ropes of the ring, we saw a wild thing, pacing: potent and phantom; a very different figure from the bloated ghost of a man that haunts us at the end, gasping, “I’m the boss. I’m the boss. I’m the boss.” We understand that, even though he once won, he still lost. There was no way he could win.
In this semiautobiographical meditation on the fickle nature of creative genius, Federico Fellini opens his arms wide to the enigmas of childhood, religion, art, sex, and love—mysteries with no solution.
In this brilliant adaptation, Joel and Ethan Coen find a kindred spirit in novelist Cormac McCarthy, whose abiding themes—including destiny, the American West, and the contest between our better natures and our survival instinct—mirror their own.
In this tragicomic road movie about a Bible-selling con man and his precocious young charge, Peter Bogdanovich brings Depression-era America to vivid life without sentimentality or nostalgia.
Combining sci-fi magic and a distinctly human sense of intimacy, Guillermo del Toro’s Oscar-winning film reimagines an oppressive era in American history through a tale of romantic fate.