Whether or not he is a sinner, I do not know
This is, for now, the end of our Martin Scorsese director project. I hope it has been fun while it lasted. #scorgayse forever
Like 15 minutes into Raging Bull, Jake LaMotta (Robert De Niro) calls his brother Joey (Joe Pesci) “a little faggot.” Joey, with a terrible quiet seriousness, replies, “I ain’t a fag.” The accusation cuts deep for some reason, to a place of real psychological torment; Joey can barely make his rebuttal in anything above a whisper, his voice almost cracking.
Now I’m not saying that Joey is gay, but the script was written by Paul Schrader, so he is. If you think maybe a Paul Schrader character is a fag, then ladies, then he is a fag. Whether or not Joey is gay (he is) isn’t really important to the text of the film, but the way in which he responds, with utter gravity, is. In this world, the Bronx’s Little Italy, masculinity is of the utmost importance. You need to be seen as tough, as sexually virile, as a success in the world. This is so pervasive that Joey cannot let even one comment in private slip by without a firm condemnation.
Jake is always on the offense about his masculinity. He is always talking about other guys getting fucked up the ass, performing alpha male dominance like the world is his locker room. Jake has to accuse everyone else of being gay lest they think he is (and he is). He also has to do this to put them in a box in his mind where they are not a threat to his dominance over his child bride Vickie (Cathy Moriarty). Because a man who is cucked by his wife is most certainly a fag.
Do we all know what Raging Bull is about? It is the biopic of Jake LaMotta, a middleweight champion in the 1940s, following him over about 20 years as he battles his demons, mostly failingly. His demons are, in no particular order, his anger, the desire to be seen as a man (as opposed to a woman), the desire to be seen as a man (as opposed to an animal), and bisexuality, maybe. Again, Paul Schrader protagonists are always battling the demon of bisexuality.
The main sports plot, if you can accuse this film of having a plot, is that Jake really wants to win a world championship title. In order to get the title fight, he is going to have to take a dive first, which causes him to be suspended, because he isn’t able to throw the fight in a convincing manner. So he worries he’s fucked everything up forever. He does eventually get reinstated though and he wins his championship belt. If this were a studio movie, this would be the ending. But not in A Martin Scorsese Picture. The good times can never last; time will always keep marching forward, and what was once The Best will be forgotten.
Boxing is an interesting sport for Scorsese to take on because it is so baldly the commoditization of violence. Scorsese has always been drawn to the audience’s bloodlust but here the audience is actually onscreen, and the people who partake in the violence not only make a living at it (so do most Scorsese characters) but they do so legally. But even though it is technically legal, there is an air of illegitimacy to it (when I drafted this in my COVID haze, I wrote “deligitimacy” and couldn’t figure out why that was wrong). Jake is always treated as a monster. He’s a physical being, a fighter first, a human second—an animal.
Raging Bull has the greatest sound design of any movie ever made, alternating periods of absolute silence with explosions of sound. I am haunted by the sound of tinkling ice in the bucket as Jake nurses his hand, the sound of water squishing from a sponge onto his face during a match. Most famously, the sound designers included animal noises to the cacophony of a fight, heightening the man vs. human theme of the film. They are hardly legible as distinct noises, but they pack a subconscious punch, no doubt.
Raging Bull is also the best edited film of all time. Trying to explain it is honestly difficult because it’s so seamless as to be nearly invisible. It comes down to rhythm; the editing makes each scene feel like precisely the emotion that Jake is feeling. There are long takes when Jake sees Vickie in the car with another man, when he’s in prison and beating himself up—moments from which he is unable to escape. The fights are all edited differently, whether Jake is doing well or poorly, whether he is scared or confident, with the edit becoming more furious or more languid accordingly.
The long takes are occasionally combined with absolute silence, as when Jake goes into the ring to fight Marcel Cerdan, creating an ethereal, almost religious quality. There is a further religious quality to the initial scenes where Jake and Vickie have sex—the silence and the rhythm of the cuts creating a powerful breathless effect. Basically, it’s the best edited movie of all time because every cut is psychologically or emotionally rooted. Never is there a single cut out of place.
I’ve read before that Raging Bull was the first boxing movie to bring the camera into the boxing ring and I feel like that has to be wrong. Like… I’m not a Rocky aficionado but you’re telling me the camera stays outside the rope? Maybe I’m misremembering the quote; I’m still a bit sick so I’m not researching. But what I think that quote illustrates is just how fresh the film feels. Whether or not it is literally revolutionary, it feels as if it is. No movie has ever looked or felt quite like it. Even at almost 44 years old, watching this movie still feels like watching the future.
Raging Bull is arguably my favorite movie of all time. I’ve seen it countless times, and it’s one I go to frequently for inspiration. No matter how many times I’ve seen it, years after having memorized it frame for frame, just the very first couple opening titles over black make me hype. I get short of breath through the entirety of the picture!
I’ve given Raging Bull many superlatives already, but I’ll give one more: the film has the greatest ending of any film in history. Jake is now fat and old and he has a club where he does a little act of monologues—the indignity of the passage of time. Jake is in his dressing room getting ready before going out on stage. There are some quick shots of his sad little dressing room: the bald lightbulb, various open bottles of booze, a payphone. Then, a long take of Jake doing Marlon Brando’s “I coulda been a contender” speech from On the Waterfront to himself in the mirror while puffing on a cigar.
He stands up and starts revving himself up, like he’s hitting a speedbag, the way he used to do before a fight. In fact, the first shot of the film is Jake doing this, in the ring, young, fit, in slow motion, in a glorious wide shot, accompanied by opera. Now he’s doing it in a drab little dressing room, with a shot so tight you can’t even see him doing his full movements. He walks in and out of frame, half visible, face out of frame or obscured entirely as he grunts and repeats to himself, “I’m the boss.” He walks out of frame and we hear him do it one last time before we cut to black. And that’s the end!