Raging Bull

For Easter Sunday, an exploration of sin, suffering, and penance through the lens of our most Catholic filmmaker

Raging Bull comes at an interesting period in Martin Scorsese's career. Far from the ubiquitous presence and household name that he is today, he was on the fringes of mainstream acceptance. He wasn’t a cuddly old man playing TikTok games with his daughter but the twitchy outcast who made violent, street-level movies like Mean Streets and Taxi Driver. His films up to this point had enjoyed critical praise and passionate response from cinephiles (Taxi Driver won the Palm D'or at Cannes and was nominated for Best Picture at the 1977 Academy Awards), but a true mainstream breakout or wider industry acceptance had thus far eluded him. In 1977 he released New York New York, a musical starring Robert DeNiro and Liza Minelli that was an utter commercial disaster. This was also a period in which, by his own account, Scorsese was battling a cocaine addiction that got so bad he nearly died. It was while he was in the hospital recovering from this near-death experience that DeNiro brought him the autobiography of boxer Jake LaMotta and suggested it as their next film together. As stated by the editors of the book Scorsese on Scorsese, "Raging Bull...offered a way out of his creative and personal impasse. It became, as Scorsese later acknowledged, a means of redemption (Thompson and Christie, 76).” Scorsese later confirms: "‘I understood then what Jake was, but only after having gone through a similar experience. I was just lucky that there happened to be a project there ready for me to express this (76-77).’"

This notion of redemption is significant, because it places Raging Bull firmly within the context of a cinema of not merely self-expression, but of self-redemption. Raging Bull is not literally about Martin Scorsese the filmmaker. In fact, there are enough dramatic liberties taken with the real-life events that it's barely about Jake La Motta the boxer in a truly literal way. But by using La Motta as a dramatic analogue, Scorsese is able to craft a story that serves as an act of cinematic exegesis - a confession - for the filmmaker himself if not the central character.

This last notion is important because it gets at something else that's necessary to understand contextually about Raging Bull, which is that it, like all of Scorsese's films to some degree, is told through a distinctly Catholic perspective. Scorsese, who considered going into the priesthood before he went to film school, is one of our more deeply religious filmmakers, and more than any American director his films grapple with notions of religion and spirituality in a complex way and from a perspective that takes into account the fundamental weakness of humankind.

A key feature of Catholic belief is the idea of the Passion, which is the period leading up to Christ's crucifixion - referred to as Holy Week - that includes his arrival in Jerusalem and, ultimately, his torture and execution at the hands of the Romans. In this way, Catholicism states - and this has of course been filtered through other Christian denominations - that through his physical suffering and death, Christ made himself a sacrifice to God and, in so doing, provided salvation for mankind and a path to forgiveness of our sins.  There is thus a very direct link in Catholicism between physical torment and absolution. It's crucial to understand this in order to properly read Raging Bull due not only to Scorsese's beliefs but also the Catholic iconography seen throughout the film - both in the sense of literal icons (as seen below) and also in some of the audiovisual storytelling choices. 

This doesn't mean that Scorsese is positioning LaMotta as a Christ figure, or Christ-like analogue - any more so than La Motta is being positioned as a 1:1 stand-in for the filmmaker - but merely to say that he's using this imagery to express the idea that La Motta is seeking purgation of his sins through violence and suffering. Because ultimately, Raging Bull is a story about a violent, aggressive, jealous, and self-destructive figure who attempts to seek absolution through the destruction of his own body, primarily in the boxing ring and later, once his career has ended, through over-indulgence. Jake La Motta is not a particularly sympathetic figure - he is a deeply flawed man, and the film makes no bones about that. Though just as depiction does not equal endorsement, we also don't have to like or sympathize with someone in order to see through their perspective, or even perhaps to understand or empathize with them. There is a difference between idealizing someone and identifying ourselves somewhere within them - even if it's only parts of ourselves or parts of them.

From the beginning of the film, Scorsese and his editor Thelma Schoonmaker establish a clear pattern in terms of how the film's language will play out in the ring vs. outside of it, and of how the out-of-ring scenes will engage in a dialogue with the fight scenes. The scenes set outside the ring are - with key exceptions - more naturalistic, and the scenes set within take on a more exaggerated and expressionistic quality. This is because the scenes within the ring are subjective expressions of La Motta’s guilt over what occurs in his domestic life. Because the film centers on a character who does not, perhaps cannot, own and express this guilt or remorse in any genuine way, it thus becomes necessary for the language of the film itself to do so.  

We open on an older, paunchier La Motta rehearsing a nightclub routine alone in his dressing room. The man we see is certainly not one who looks like a boxer - this is a La Motta far removed from any glory he may have achieved at his peak. The scene plays out primarily in one long shot, in real time. We witness all of the awkward flubs and restarts as La Motta works through his monologue, emphasizing how far he has fallen at this point in his life and how pathetic he is. But we're also being introduced to how the scenes outside the ring will play out in terms of the editing - more naturalistic and performance-driven. This is further emphasized by the soundtrack - we get street sounds at the beginning of the sequence to build the reality of this space, and once we're in the room with La Motta we get just his dialogue, no music. There will in fact be no non-diegetic music at any point outside of the ring, with a couple notable exceptions later on - the home movie montage and the extended oner that follows La Motta from the locker room to the ring for his title fight (we also get music over the opening credits - the Intermezzo from Cavalleria rusticana, a tragic opera about the destructive nature of sexual jealousy - sound familiar?).

We don't see an edit throughout this monologue - the first cut is not until La Motta finishes and we go to a closer shot of his face, which then cuts in a time-jumping match cut to a shot of the younger La Motta in the ring, with the repetition of the final line carried under the image via an L-cut. In this one edit we are being told an entire story - the fall of a man, told in reverse through the Eisensteinian juxtaposition of these two images one after the other. This cut also introduces a shift in our experience of cinematic time that will become crucial to the film’s language - a huge component of editing is not only how it controls rhythm and pace, but how it can control our perception of time itself by drawing out some dramatic moments, or speeding up others, or otherwise manipulating it for dramatic impact. 

All of these tactics are used in the film's fight scenes in a way that they aren't in the rest of the picture. Part of this is because the boxing scenes are action scenes, in a sense. But they are also scenes of release. Because of this, they’re allowed to be more expressionistic rather than focused on realism. They are also, because they are serving dramatically as attempted acts of atonement for the sins of La Motta's personal life, completely subjective - ie, told from La Motta's interior perspective rather than the more objective perspective of the other scenes. (There are times when the violence of the ring spills into the outside world and effects the cutting style. Look at the violent discontinuity of the moment in which he flips the table on his wife at 9 minutes 39 seconds, or when he attacks Joey in front of his family at 1 hour 31 minutes).

The sound of the boxing scenes also differs greatly from the other scenes. As we've seen in the opening, the sound effects have been in service of realism. The sounds in the boxing matches are anything but. Let's take a look at a later pair of scenes, in which we'll see the relationship between sin and penance, as well as the contrast between styles between sequences:

Here we start with a scene between Jake and Vicki, who he has recently begun to pursue romantically even though he is married and she is underage.  The scene between them in the bedroom is slower paced on a shot-to-shot basis, playing out in more or less real time and accompanied only by ambient background noise. As the scene progresses, Jake and Vicki move closer and closer to sexual contact until he cuts it off and pours ice water down his shorts, denying himself gratification.

We then cut to the next fight with Sugar Ray Robinson, a sequence that is not only more quickly and expressionistically cut but also given surreal touches like heatwaves in front of the lens and low animal sounds roaring on the soundtrack. Violence here becomes sexual release. This connection between sex and violence is important because La Motta is fueled by jealously to an extent that he destroys his own life as a result of it. But it's also connecting the physical punishment he endures in the ring - here given the heat-soaked illusion of a punishing hell-scape - to the sins of lust and adultery established in the previous scene. 

The fights in general serve as catharsis and as an attempt at penance. Eventually, of course, they serve as a blood sacrifice. The rhythm of the cutting changes not just to emphasize a shift in the way we need to approach them - aided by camera and sound effects - but to also break the reality of the other scenes, which in a way is releasing us from the tension of those domestic moments.

The climax of this pattern, and the emotional climax of the film, is the final Sugar Ray fight.  This of course occurs after La Motta has wrongfully accused his brother Joey of sleeping with Vickie, now his wife, and in a jealous rage violently assaulted them both, severing his relationship with his brother in the process - the person who has been closest to him throughout the film. This is the final fight we see in the film, and is the ultimate act of self-punishment and sacrifice - it is, in a real sense, the moment in which La Motta allows himself to be completely destroyed. It is after this fight that we jump ahead in time to the older, heavier La Motta that we briefly met at the start of the film.

The key moment to discuss here begins at 1:45 in the above clip, as Jake stands against the ropes and invites Robinson to attack him.  At this moment,  the rhythm of the shots slows to the point that this moment in time seems to freeze. This is anticipating a major dramatic moment, but it is also giving La Motta (and the audience) a chance to anticipate his undoing.  Once Robinson begins his volley of punches, at 2:15, the cuts come incredibly fast - almost as violent in their implementation as the attack depicted onscreen. This sequence is in fact designed to mimic perhaps the  most famous piece of editing in film history - the shower scene from Hitchcock's Psycho.

The stylistic parallels are clear - quick cutting in a style reminiscent of Soviet montage, favoring in this case dramatic and emotional impact and suggestion rather than literal continuity. In terms of narrative content, it is no accident that this moment is patterned after the most famous of all cinematic murders - it is, again, the moment that La Motta offers his most violent penance for his sins. It is doubly significant, of course, that this scene is intercut with Joey and Vickie watching, as they are two against whom he has most grievously sinned. While there are of course, somehow, even further depths to which La Motta will fall, this sequence - especially when further contrasted with the more naturalistic scenes - fully represents the film's approach to cinematic language and its own audiovisual strategies.

The degree to which La Motta achieves absolution within the narrative of the film may be arguable (I would posit that he does not, and that this is the ultimate tragedy), though it's clear from the film's closing titles that if nothing else, the creation of the film and its overall context have perhaps achieved this for Scorsese as the film closes with a title card containing this quote John 9:24:

So, for the second time, the Pharisees summoned the man who had been blind and said: 'Speak the truth before God, We know this fellow is a sinner.' Whether or not he is a sinner, I do not know,' the man replied. 'All I know is this: once I was blind and now I can see'.

The question that the audience must answer is whether the blind man in this quote is meant to be understood as La Motta, or Scorsese? Has La Motta achieved some sort of absolution by the end of this film, or has his sacrifice and destruction stood in for the filmmaker and served to in some way purge him of his own unique demons?

-cs