Raging Bull

by Jerry Roberts

It is a little strange that the most unforgettable image of Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull is one of the quietest. Jake LaMotta stands defiantly in the boxing ring with his hands out to his side, bloody and peering from beneath his sweaty, swollen brow. I can think of nothing else but a nature documentary of a close-up of a Tiger ready to attack. There is a fearsomeness to his gaze, a warning not that LaMotta might attack his opponent but that in a matter of moments he will be destroyed. The moment contains no words but it speaks volumes.

Raging Bull is a biography only in the clinical sense, it is absent of all the trappings of biopics, there are no cliches, no unnecessary flashbacks to help us understand where his temprament comes from. Yes this is a movie with boxing but it's not a boxing movie, it simply an examination of a man caged by his own demons who uses his profession as a manner of venting violent tendencies and sexual repression. Of course, they leak at home too, especially in the direction of his suffering wife Vickie.

In some ways Jake LaMotta reminds me of Travis Bickle, the subject of Scorsese's earlier film Taxi Driver. Both are men who manage to succeed in doing something that makes them a celebrity. Jake demolishes his opponents in the ring while Bickle murders pimps and child molesters in a tenament building. Both are volitile men and both are doing something reprehensable but somehow they managed to become pseudo-heroes in their pursuits.

But director Martin Scorese never tried to give Lamotta a heroic foothold. He is a hero in the ring because of his fearsome strength but personally it affords him an outlet for pent up violent tendencies that won't land him in jail. Just as Travis Bickle destroyed pimps and child molesters, so to does Jake destroy men in the ring as penence. In both cases, outsiders credit them as heroes.

Also like Bickle, there is never an effort to make LaMotta sympathetic or heroic, he's a bastard, he knows it, everyone around him knows it and so there you are. It's tempting to label him as one-dimentional but that's not inaccurate. He is a one-dimentional man filled with loathing, rage, sexual insecurity and frustration. He reminds me of the kinds of people who release agression by cutting themselves, only in his case he found absolution in the ring, beating his opponents to a bloody pulp.

Raging Bull continues a theme present in most of Scorsese's films, the hero's inability to relate to women. Just as Travis couldn't relate to the 12 year old prostitute Iris in TDaxi river, Jake can't relate on a realistic level with this wife Vickie. They're relationship (at least from Jake's point of view) takes on a kind of "from my cold dead hands" attachment. What fuels him sexually is his rage at the very thought of another man attracting her. There is a moment when Jake destroys a man in the ring that she has complimented. When the fight ends he look, not at his opponent but at his wife. It is both acknowledgement and a warning.

For Jake, violence is sex. Sex itself is a frightening concept to him because he seems to suffer from the Madonna/Whore complex in which his wife stands in place of his absent mother. Violence in the ring is the sexual stimulation that he is missing. Twice in the film Jake breaks into childish crying fits: The first after he throws a fight (thus robbing him of his sexual dominence and the second after he had been jailed for selling an underage girl for sexual favors. In both cases he seems to have been robbed of somethign that he dominates. Also too, Jake's reputation in the ring is that he has never been knocked down. In the losing decision against Suger Ray Robinson, Jake leaves the ring but reminds his opponent "You didn't get me down, Ray - You didn't get me down".

His opening lines are almost like a man describing his best sexual encounter:

Read those lines carefully and note that it is here that he lights a cigar.

It's appropriate that he chooses a woman with whom most men would want to seek company. He dares them to so much as look at her and she does little to fuel their fantasies. Jakes insecurity and sexual inadequecies keep him distant sexually but he replaces it with the jealous rages. Impure thoughts about Vickie are, to Jake, a sin and the wages of sin is death or at least severe punishment. His brother Joey recieves the worst of the violence but so does Vickie
That volitile relationship becomes the theme of the film. He can't enjoy sex with Vickie because his sexual release comes in the form of violent jealously. For his inadequecies he married a woman that is, to him, perfect. She's angelic but not a waif, she's friendly but (from what we see) not easy. In a way, Jake would like to see her that way because it allows him a certain amount of contact, even if he is knocking her to the floor.

The casting of Cathy Moriarity was, I think, a masterstroke. She is tall and solidly built, she seems to dwarf Lamotta who is strong but a small man. This disadvantage fuels his insecurity. She's not a weakling and she fights back, if she were a waif cowering the corner the relationship wouldn't have the psychological complexity. Consider how Jake sees Vicki. There are point of view shots in which he observes the way she seems to float toward other men. He has won her for his prize now he obsessivly convinces himself that she is cheating on him.

Raging Bull is one of the saddest and difficult portraits of sex and violence that I have ever seen. It is the best film ever made about the pure nature of human violence. Most movies are extremely violent but I can't think of another film that sees violence from the inside out. Watching Robert de Niro's performance as Jake LaMotta is to play witness to the basest human animal, he is caged inside the form of a man, a lion in the jungle full of rage and hunger and sexual fury and a fearsome sense of territoriality. Freud could have written volumes about this man and, indirectly, he probably did.