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Image, Desire and Reality in Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull

The Scorsese hero, who would be better termed his “lone, mad, usually masculine” anti-hero, is a man content with delusion. He is not a dreamer per se, but an illusionist of the highest order, living Scorsese’s own impossible dream of personal identity, thrust into and becoming his own fantasy image.

Scorsese’s films – and specifically the one this essay will be looking at in some depth; Raging Bull (1980) - step unannounced into a heightened fantasy realm in which all the characters’ profound desires are completely invested, and into which his audience must also delve.

These neurotic characters, struggling constantly with their reflection, seek to control their mirror image. As Adrian Martin points out in his essay ‘Martin Scorsese’s Indirect Aim’,

“The Scorsese hero always lives with an image of himself. He cannot bear to be himself, just a man among other men. He hates to be reminded that he even looks like himself, and thus like everyone else. He hates to be a type, and especially hates being typed by others in society.”

Railing against an uncaring and filthy world these protagonists request only our empathy, and their director flawlessly combines violence and desire in their pathos to just that effect.

The Scorsese hero desires, and then imagines, a world fitting his image of it. The tragic effect this delusion has on our hero is realised only when that world is shown to be false and his world no longer exists, driving him into oblivion. The disintegration that ensues is an epitaph to Desire considered without thought to Reality. When the Scorsese hero inevitably falls out of his dream he has been fundamentally changed. He has been elevated, transfigured by his liminal awareness, an act Scorsese deems absolutely necessary for his troubled illusionists.

Of all his films, Raging Bull (1980) is unquestionably Martin Scorsese’s most agonised and soulful masterpiece about a transfigured male hero. Scorsese describes Raging Bull as being “about a man who loses everything, and then regains it spiritually.” While the author’s opinion is not necessarily comprehensive his identification of a redemptive aspect to La Motta’s decline and fall requires further enquiry. For what has Jake La Motta learnt since dancing gladiator-like through the opening credits?

Resisting simplistic narrative closure, Scorsese’s film leaves open the question of Jake’s redemption. The director himself insists however that La Motta has redeemed himself; that downfall involves loss, and that that loss is mourned . For La Motta develops as a ‘victim-hero’, caught between his desire to change the conditions of his existence by becoming a champion boxer and his powerlessness in the face of those who control those conditions. Jake is coerced into taking a fall for mobster Tommy, the man he most jealously guards his wife Vickie from, to ensure a shot at the title. In an utter betrayal of his body La Motta loses, still standing, to Billy Fox, a most unworthy opponent. He now desires contrition for his perceived sin, and immolating himself against Robinson may be La Motta’s way of atoning for disgracing himself against Fox.

As his punishment is meted out the ringside commentator cries that “no man should endure this kind of punishment” but for La Motta this would be only the beginning of his descent. At this point he still manages to display his injured masculine pride, reminding his nemesis Sugar Ray Robinson that “you never got me down”.

Jake’s violence and animal energy are the source of both his drive for success and his resistance to exploitation, and as such they are validated. On this level violence is celebrated as an addendum to the desire for glory.

Yet as Pam Cook points out the “tragic scenario of Raging Bull demands that the hero be shown to be the guilty victim of his transgressive desires: his violence is so excessive, so self-destructive that it has to be condemned.”

The palpable violence that foreshadows La Motta’s every appearance in frame and lingers in his absence is testament to his primitive poise. In-the-ring scenes echo his state of mind, even establishing the mise-en-scene, according to editor Thelma Schooner (who was awarded an OscarTM for the film, along with De Niro’s for best actor. Meanwhile Scorsese has not won an OscarTM.). A wide, open ring is used in La Motta’s first fight against Sugar Ray, yet by their third encounter flames were kept below the camera to blur the action and represent a mirage-like personal hell . Allowing La Motta (and De Niro) to ‘control’ the ring scenario implicates him in the making of the film, and permitting De Niro’s gaze to linger while the camera slows on his discovery of Vickie at the pool furthers this subjective atmosphere. De Niro takes up a role as surrogate director, which forces the audience to experience ‘his film’.

Scorsese would maintain his obsessive fixation on the relationship between reality and artifice in all his major films, displacing the real story behind a world of subjectivity. By utilising objective camera angles, multi-character narration and permeable ‘dream sequences’, as in The Age of Innocence, where Newland Archer imagines an ideal Ellen Olenska submitting to his desires. By the end of that film Archer refuses to see Olenska, literally erasing her physical presence and replacing it with his more pleasing ideal.

In many ways every scene with Jake in it is a ‘boxing’ scene, for Jake lives to fight (unlike standard Hollywood heroes who only fight for their lives), and he can only relate to the outside world through physical violence. His is a physical rather than moral code, and in his world he cannot differentiate between behaviour ritualised as legitimate inside the ring and coded transgressive outside of it.

Yet by the last scene, as the bloated Jake La Motta confronts his own image in a dressing room mirror, his defences are down and the anger is gone. Having lost the title, his body, his wife Vickie and finally his belt, the world that La Motta built lies in tatters. He is the embodiment of the fatally wounded bull, now looking only for forgiveness. Observing the Christian tradition of the tragic hero suffering in our place, we’re asked to take pity on this man who has lost the attributes necessary to masculinity. Punishment and suffering are built into the structure of tragedy: the hero batters against his fate until finally redeeming himself by accepting it. But pity (that is if you grant it) does not equate to deliverance, and La Motta can either hope for further purgation or come to accept his own flawed image. As the film closes Jake resolves his relationship with a reluctant Joey – who eventually accepts his brother’s embrace in an inversion of the classical Hollywood clinch climax - moments before implicitly blaming him for his demise. Following this with the biblical sentiment that “Once I was blind but now I see” ends the film ambiguously asking, and suggesting the potential, for apprehension and acceptance of Jake’s lot.

Although awarded the honour of best film of the 1980s by the American Critics Association, Raging Bull continues to garner a mixed critical response. Indeed some feminists have condemned the camera’s collusion in Jake’s objectifying gaze towards Vickie. Whereas others assert that Scorsese’s work (and Raging Bull in particular) is a radical critique of patriarchal masculinity, praising the film as an exposure of the violence inherent in a masculinity that must viciously repress all signs of femininity and/or homosexuality.

An overwrought tension exists in Scorsese’s work between his level of personal identification with his protagonist – consistently played by Robert De Niro – and his repulsion from these characters. This tension attests to the ambivalence Scorsese feels toward his subject, ambiguously positing the director halfway between acquiescence and repudiation, and giving his oeuvre a uniquely disturbing quality.

Scorsese’s work involves a sweeping re-evaluation of Hollywood genres, either combining them in such a way as to foreground their contradictions (western and horror in Taxi Driver) or disconcertingly reversing the expectations they traditionally arouse (the boxing movie and ‘biopic’ in Raging Bull). Hollywood films are not meant to be innovative, difficult or challenging, hence explaining Scorsese’s limited commercial success. Scorsese is not a Hollywood director but an in-spite-of-Hollywood filmmaker. He persistently makes each of his films follow their subject (the loner male anti-hero) remorselessly through to the point where the film reveals and dramatizes the fundamental ideological and sociocultural tensions of our time. In Taxi Driver it was the isolation and subsequent rage able to fester in a modern metropolis. In Raging Bull it was the tension between acceptable violence between consenting men and unacceptable social violence perpetrated against women by familiar men.

Why is there a need on Scorsese’s part to so violently disfigure the rules and codes of narration and representation? Partly it is because his films have always been concerned to impart a moral lesson; the necessity of escaping from convention and type in order to be truly free.

Scorsese in the 70s began what Fight Club finished: a documentation of masculinity threatened (to the core of its existence) by the effects of feminism. Delving into the pathos and personal politics of Scorsese’s protagonists sheds light on the reaches to which mankind will go to move within the ‘world of his desire’, and how desperate he can become convincing the world that his idea is the world. It speaks volumes also of Scorsese the auteur’s intense relationship to the texts he designs. But perhaps more subliminally his work comes off because Scorsese’s own creative character, and his own ideal masculine self, is bound up with a dream as mad and absurd as any that occupy and consume his heroes.

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References and bibliography

Wood, Robin ‘St James Film Directors Encyclopaedia’. Andrew Sarris (ed.) Visible Ink Press, Detroit, 1998.
Cook, Pam. ‘Masculinity in Crisis?’, Screen, vol23, nos. 3-4, September-October, 1982
Friedman, Lawrence. ‘The Cinema of Martin Scorsese’ Continuum, New York, 1998.
Kolker. ‘A Cinema of Loneliness’
Martin, Adrian. ‘Martin Scorsese’s Indirect Aim’, Phantasms. McPhee Gribble, 1994.
Melbourne Cinematheque website, www.sensesofcinema.com
‘The Bronx Bull: An Introduction to Raging Bull’. (doc)

Did you know? The best man at La Motta’s most recent marriage (of 10 years) was none other than Sugar Ray Robinson!