The first movie première that I ever attended was the one for Martin Scorsese’s “Raging Bull,” at the Ziegfeld, in the fall of 1980, thanks to a friend with connections. I was a recent college graduate on my first job (in commercials) and a Scorsese-phile on the basis of the three films of his that I’d seen: “Mean Streets,” “Taxi Driver,” and, above all, “New York, New York,” none of which prepared me for the blend of austerity and fury, abstraction and physicality in “Raging Bull,” which I’ve considered, ever since, a high point of Scorsese’s work. Strangely, I didn’t rewatch the film for many years—even after the start of what I consider the Scorses-aissance, the astounding outburst of creative inspiration that followed “The Departed” (more specifically, his Oscar for “The Departed”) and has marked his past decade of films, from “Shutter Island” to “The Irishman.” Finally, this week, I did.
“Raging Bull,” of course, is a bio-pic of Jake La Motta (Robert De Niro), who was raised in the Bronx in an immigrant Italian family and became the middleweight champion of the world in 1949, losing his title two years later and then losing his zest for the sport. He opened a night club, did jail time for procuring an underage girl for his male customers, and became a raconteur and monologuist in New York night spots. The story is told as a flashback from 1964, when La Motta, fat and scarred and thick-voiced, prepares in a tawdry little dressing room to take the stage in a club and recite doggerel; it cuts back to 1941, when he was making his hard climb from obscurity and enduring his first defeat, and continues through his rise as a boxer—and it doesn’t so much document his fall as reveal him to have been as base at the time of his great successes and colossal failures as he was at the very start.
It’s impossible to see “Raging Bull” without the hindsight of Scorsese’s career since. The connections with “The Irishman” are significant, for instance, both in subject and in style, starting with the flashback framework. Both films involve a Mafia boss successfully crushing the protagonist’s conscience, and include a small but significant element that I’d call “the vanishing first wives.” And, of course, both films star Robert De Niro (whose appearance is significantly altered in both films) and co-star Joe Pesci (his first major role is in “Raging Bull”). But, above all, both films are distinguished by an absence of psychology, a trait that renders them subject to negative judgments from critics with narrow expectations of a character study. Jake La Motta is a psychopathic character whose controlled violence in the boxing ring is continuous with his uncontrolled violence outside of it—and, outside of it, much of it is directed toward the women in his life. It’s suggested that he beats his first wife, Irma—and his repeated assaults on his second, Vickie (Cathy Moriarty), are appallingly, horrifically seen; he fights his brother Joe (Pesci) outside the ring while also sparring with him in it.
La Motta’s violence is essentially sexual; what arouses his fury toward Vickie is, above all, jealousy, the overwhelming anger at the idea of her having relations with, or even an attraction to, another man. Though he’s furiously motivated by lust, he’s also bound by the long-standing tradition that a boxer’s strength is sparked by abstinence—in effect, by sexual frustration. Yet his own self-denial also denies his wife a vigorous sex life, which she complains about—and which fuels his jealousy all the more, with catastrophic results. Even in his career, violence and sex are fused: his main metaphor for defeating his opponents is homosexual rape; his casual banter, and Joe’s with his tough-guy acquaintances, is homosexual, homophobic, and sexually violent.
Yet “Raging Bull” (whose script is credited to Paul Schrader and Mardik Martin, with significant uncredited work by Scorsese and De Niro) doesn’t at all psychologize La Motta’s twisted and tormented behavior. The drama certainly isn’t devoid of psychology—the logic of behavior is clear and consistent, and the action doesn’t come off as willful symbolism. Rather, La Motta’s character isn’t diagnosed or traced to specific personal experiences or explained by aspects of backstory. The peculiarity of the film “Raging Bull”—and its enduring inspiration—is its transformation of La Motta into an opaque and external unit, a negative mirror that makes him a perfect and closed embodiment of the milieu to which he belongs.
That’s because “Raging Bull,” like “The Irishman,” is a drama of Mafia power, of the interpenetration of ostensibly legitimate society—professional sports and the media complex surrounding it—and the violent reign of organized crime. The central plotline of the earlier film is La Motta’s vaunted independence; he grew up and rose to fame in a tough ethnic-Italian neighborhood in the Bronx, where mobsters were prominent and familiar. Though they try to lure La Motta into their orbit, he refuses even to associate with them—knowing all the while that, despite his heralded successes in the ring, it would be nearly impossible for him to fight for the middleweight championship unless the bout is approved and arranged by the Mob. Nonetheless, he keeps his distance; meanwhile, Joe schemes to end-run organized crime by using the levers of sport itself, and the related clamor of media, in the hope of forcing professional managers’ hand in setting up a title fight.
But sex gets in the way: seeing Vickie at a night club in the company of the very gangsters who’ve been making overtures to La Motta, Joe approaches them aggressively and then starts a fight that lands him in trouble with the Mob boss, Tommy Como (Nicholas Colasanto), who extorts a commitment from Joe to get La Motta (whom Joe calls “Jack” throughout) to coöperate—which means to throw a fight for the benefit of gamblers. And despite his resulting suspension by the New York State Boxing Commission for his misdeed, La Motta indeed gets his title shot—and wins.
The little world to which La Motta belongs—and, indeed, the larger one to which he connects—is a man’s world, and a white man’s world. There isn’t a woman seen in it who’s anything but a housewife or a playgirl, not a single female professional in sight—and not a person of color anywhere, not at a public pool, not even in a crowd of boxing fans at bouts in which La Motta’s opponent is black. (His first defeat comes at the hands of a black fighter named Billy Fox, played by Eddie Mustafa Muhammad; his greatest rivalry is with Sugar Ray Robinson, played by Johnny Barnes.) La Motta and his circle consistently refer to black boxers with an Italian racist slur; they use sexual slurs for women and gay men; their crude language expresses crude emotions, and reflects the narrow scope of their experience—and of the unchallenged, unreflective assumptions of the segregated, misogynisitc world in which they work and the media that they consume. And there’s plenty of non-ethnic, nonsexual violence in their everyday lives as well: La Motta tosses around threats and epithets with a flagrant aggression and an unchecked hostility that also reflects the impunity that he demands—where he can get it, or get away with it.
