When we first hear from Robert De Niro’s Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull, it’s not as a boxing champ but as a bloated chump. The former middleweight contending Bronx Bull has long since been past his prime, gaining weight and woe alike as he festers under the Miami sun. He opens the film with a monologue of rough rhymes concluding with the phrase “That’s entertainment!”
At this very moment, LaMotta stretches out his arms as if to resemble a cruciform figure. Scorsese uses the shot to set up a running dialogue throughout the film. It’s Jake’s sacrifice, for our spectatorship.
It took me a few watches to warm up to Raging Bull, admittedly. Scorsese’s domestic drama centered around a bruising boxing tale is pointedly inscrutable. In an era where the “trauma plot” seems to provide an easy answer for our darkest characters, Jake La Motta just broods and brawls. I’ve come to think of him as the dark flipside of the American Dream, equally as compelling as the Corleone family’s inversion of the national mythology in The Godfather. This is a film about what happens when there is always a new frontier of success one match away — and all the jealousy, rage, and covetousness that rushes in to fill the void in one’s soul as they continue scrapping for it.
My guest today is Christina Newland, the lead film critic at the UK-based i paper, but you can frequently find her writing strewn elsewhere across the web and on newsstands. For all you Oppenheimer anticipators, she wrote the recent Rolling Stone profile on Cillian Murphy. She’s quite the Scorsese scholar (who’s also done a wonderful video primer on Scorsese at large for BBC) who brings a certain amount of critical distance to how the maestro approaches Americana as someone raised here who now lives abroad. Her great Substack
about women in crime cinema will be relaunching this week — I can’t wait to see what she has in store.But most pertinent to this conversation, she recently wrote the program notes for Park Circus, the distributor responsible for the film’s re-release. Here’s an excerpt from the essay’s conclusion:
“Ultimately, form and subject make Raging Bull something of a paradox: a film of balletic, strange visual poetry, with elegiac beauty written into its every shot; yet about a man of unmoving, ugly viciousness, pierced with rough Scorsesean street vernacular and a dark heart of broken macho ambition. The ring serves as both penance and justification for LaMotta’s wild behaviour; an arena where he can both primitively perform his gender and satisfy his inarticulate desire for self-punishment. Jake’s rage outside of the ring can only be purged inside of it, and as his impulses grow uglier, his so-called success story does too.”
If you can see the new restoration of Raging Bull — it’s still touring and looks to have quite a few Stateside engagements at Alamo Drafthouse theaters this August — I cannot recommend enough having this magisterial film just wash over you in that way. But if not, it’s streaming on Max in the U.S. and Prime Video in the U.K. And if you still have a physical media player, it’s worth buying the Criterion Collection disc solely for Scorsese’s commentary track with his longtime editing partner Thelma Schoonmaker. Those two hours are as informative as a semester of college film studies.
We’ll get into some of the “spoilers” of Raging Bull here, so you might want to bookmark this conversation to return to it later if you’ve never seen it. But I think the below makes for either a good reintroduction for a rewatch or supplemental reading following such an occasion.
Do you think of Raging Bull as a quintessentially American story?
The whole structure of Raging Bull is and isn't the classic "rags to riches" tale. It's the "rags to riches to rags" tale, in a sense. It is different from Horatio Alger, somebody's coming out of the immigrant slums to great success and fame. That is a quintessentially American story in many ways, and the structure of that does play [well] with the traditional sports narratives that we are familiar with. Boxing movies often have it because so many of the professional fighters come from an immigrant or lower-working-class background. But in so many sports stories, you have a quintessentially American tale of somebody rising to success from very little. The key difference that makes Raging Bull reach an operatic level of melodrama is that we don't end on a happy note, do we?
I liked what you said in your program notes about how it’s sport less as the American dream and more as American delusion: “It’s a film which contains no sense of real victory or success, despite any external trappings of athletic fame or upward mobility; LaMotta’s pursuit, ultimately, feels hollow.”
Ultimately, the close-knit nature of Italian-American families coming up from this background, and the relationship that he has with his brother Joey LaMotta (played by Joe Pesci), is so key to so much of the film. No matter how successful he gets, ultimately, his relationship with his brother becomes forever damaged. They become estranged from each other, so in and of itself, that makes any of his victories hollow. That's before you get into the fact that he himself was just totally incapable of celebrating or really enjoying success in many ways.
In my mind, there’s a single-mindedness to the American Dream — if you can dream it, you can do it. In Raging Bull, this is both Jake’s rise and his downfall because he wills himself into a reality where everyone is out to get him. It’s a cautionary tale of motivated reasoning.
Sure. And he becomes very paranoid as well about who's out to get him. The real story of LaMotta was very much dogged by controversy because he was caught being involved in fight-fixing with the Italian Mob, which we see dramatized in the film. That was a bit of a shame, really, because the real-life LaMotta had been very resistant to having Mafia involvement or backing. And yet he was the one who ended up being hung out to dry, in many ways. He was certainly not the only one, far from it, to be involved. He was unlucky enough to be caught.
Scorsese is notably ambivalent about the film’s relationship to boxing, which is not something anyone would say about you. How did you come to be so steeped in the sport and genre?
A lot of it probably did begin with Raging Bull. I was a huge Scorsese fan, and one of my dissertation chapters was on Raging Bull. As a part of that, I spent a lot of time digging into boxing film history. That was the first time that I started reading and watching films about particularly mid-century American boxers. Boxers today are celebrities; we know who Floyd Mayweather and Tyson Fury are. But it's hard to compare the level of fame and admiration we had back then. That was very much the peak of the sport. The Jack Dempseys had their own restaurants and nightclubs. The Jim Lewises appeared in Hollywood movies. They were enormous. (It goes without saying: Muhammad Ali.)
That was a peak for the sport and its figures, but also kind of a peak for the movies around it. Seeing stuff like Body and Soul with John Garfield, which is an incredible 1947 boxing film directed by Robert Rossen, and the Italian film Rocco and His Brothers directed by Luchino Visconti, which is really more of a family melodrama but heavily features boxing, was a start for me. I have a lot to thank Raging Bull for.
Raging Bull came out after the heyday of Muhammad Ali, right?
I would say that is true. He was displaying signs of Parkinson's by the early '80s and pretty well out of commission at that point. A lot of fighters of that period who had once been these glorious images of traditional manhood and athleticism were aging. But the particularly damaging effects of being punched in the head for a living, you see that come full circle in Raging Bull. It is interestingly timed in that way because it is showing so much of the physical damage that one takes in the sport.
The reason I asked that is that it's kind of occurring to me, a little bit on the fly, that I think the film is timed somewhat with the decline of boxing in culture and lamenting that to some extent. It's not that boxing went away, but it became a shadow of its former self and maybe even a little bit of a perverse novelty. I'm wondering if Scorsese saw cinema losing its central place in society and being dislodged by something that he thought was more profane and just pure "entertainment."
I think it's an interesting take. It's also interesting to remember that Raging Bull is a flop at the time. I think it was mostly critically well-received, but not universally. That's fascinating to me as somebody that's just like, "This film is a masterpiece!" But it does come at a really interesting time in the culture. The golden age of American cinema was very much also the golden age of American boxing. Whether Scorsese was specifically making that leap, I don't know. 1980 is an interesting year, just for the Academy Awards' Best Director race. You know I love Robert Redford, but Ordinary People is no Raging Bull. You had David Lynch up there as well for The Elephant Man. You have these really artful, black-and-white, complex, retro films. You're seeing a schism in the culture.
Do you have theories on why it's becoming more beloved with time? I think Scorsese is becoming in the realm of Hitchcock where we can start to say that a certain movie from his filmography is “popping.” I would have said this was Taxi Driver last decade with the rise of the alt-right and the fever swamp of conspiratorial thinking that overtook politics, but the pendulum seems to be swinging back to Raging Bull. Do you feel that, too?
Sometimes it's time, with new audiences coming to it. In the UK and the US, there was a theatrical re-release from Park Circus. A thing that really interested me was quite a few of the people that I know, including other film critics but generally young people in their early twenties, said to me they were going to see it for the first time. I never want to be that person that's like, "Oh my god, you haven't seen that?!" I don't think that's a helpful way to be, but I certainly was like, "Oh my god, go see it!" For the most part, people came away shellshocked because they couldn't believe what they just watched because it was so amazing. But there were a few people that weren't loudly dissenting, but there were one or two people that I know that were kind of like, "Why would you make a film about a man that is so terrible?"
I think I first watched Raging Bull when I was 15 years old right after it hit #4 on the AFI Top 100 List. I liked it at the time, but I do think it took me like two or three times returning to it (with some more life under my belt) to emotionally understand it. Scorsese doesn't explain why he is the way that he is. That's so tough to grasp whenever you're young and looking for a reason for everything. He won't spoon-feed it to you.
People still argue about this, but some of the more "out there" interpretations of it are that actually that Jake is in the closet. He has to have like this slightly homoerotic relationship with his brother, which is a little Freudian for me. I don't think I'd go that far. But there is an interesting preoccupation in the film with homophobic language. Anyone who's watched it recently can definitely attest to this, but it's really nasty, graphic, and repeated. It's men using it to insult each other's masculinity. Once or twice, it's an offhanded remark and maybe that's how people like certain people spoke in that period. But there is a point where you think there's a repetition that doesn't feel accidental. Not with a filmmaker as careful as Scorsese.
There's also all the religious iconography everywhere which helps contextualize Jake LaMotta. If I have one criticism of Scorsese here and throughout his work, I think he might overly extrapolate just how much the violent and virginal imagery of Roman Catholicism seeps into the souls of people.
I was raised Roman Catholic ... I've lapsed, but all my favorite filmmakers seem to be Catholic or lapsed Catholics. Robert Bresson, Abel Ferrara, Luchino Visconti. There is something about the screen about the imagery and iconography of Catholicism that really does stick, so I might have to quibble on that point.
I mean, I've heard a discussion about whether Catholicism is camp on a podcast.
It really is insane. It's a blood cult, isn't it? I can see what the ongoing fascination is. I find this with [Paul] Schrader, who was raised Dutch Calvinist, they start to lose me a little when they get into the more complex notions within the dogma like transubstantiation. It's like I need to have a Ph.D. in theology. But there's some really interesting cross-cutting in Raging Bull where there's a sponge on Jake's body and it's like blood being rinsed out, which is a very Christ-like, thing.
I wouldn't call it a fatal flaw, but if I had one issue with Raging Bull — which feels a little bit like sticking your nose up against the glass with Mona Lisa and trying to find something wrong with it — the Biblical quote at the end implies to me that LaMotta is capable of being redeemed or finding redemption. I think it's almost a little bit too Catholic, a coward's way out. I don't think he is a redeemable character. It's looking for hope where I'm not sure I see any.
I feel like we must get into two of the film’s more hotly contested legacies — this is, for all intents and purposes, the film that birthed some of contemporary acting’s worst “Method” tactics from De Niro’s dramatic weight fluctuations. How much of the performance do you attribute to that transformation affecting his lived reality?
I really think far too much is made of this. This is why we end up with people like Jared Leto ... which, for God's sake, someone should send him back to wherever he came from. I do feel like the weight loss and gain are notable. In terms of physicality, sure, it changes the way you become lumbering. That's all fine. That's all relevant. But we're talking about somebody like Robert De Niro. I think we could sit him in a pair of overalls in an empty white room, and he would still be remarkable. At the time, he said was struggling to put on some of the weight so he went on an eating tour of Italy.
But far more interesting to me, if we're going to talk about the method stuff, is the time he spent in the ring to effectively look like a professional middleweight fighter. The time he spent talking to Jake and Vickie LaMotta (his wife, played by Cathy Moriarty). That, to me, is the stuff that seems to be more directly useful and makes a case for the method. It's less crass, but I think it makes sense to me.
You’re also a living rejoinder to the idea that women can’t really like or understand Scorsese’s films given his portrayal of the opposite sex. I won’t make you regurgitate the argument you made in the i paper for Raging Bull’s re-release, but I’d love for you to expand a little bit more on Cathy Moriarty’s Vickie and how her passivity and objectification in the film is only a part of the picture.
Talk about a willful misreading! Oh my god. In Goodfellas, a woman has a voiceover!
But Vickie is a tricky part. If you're talking about Scorsese's women in the broader sense, she's certainly not the first person you would go to for as a character. And I get that. My argument about that is you don't go to Scorsese to look for brassy female empowerment. Those aren't the films he makes. That doesn't necessarily put him on the back foot in another camp. It doesn't mean he's the opposite. All it means is that his interest is in masculinity and the wounds that type of machismo then creates in women.
In that respect, the film is sterling because it shows you the dissolve into abuse. This is clearly a very macho guy that has a very particular way of operating in the world and toward women. We see that with his first wife at the beginning of the film when he's arguing with her over the steak. It makes for a violent fight. We know this is the kind of guy we're dealing with here where women are concerned. But we see what she's attracted to in him, what is appealing to her about him, and the slow forms of control which eventually culminate in physical violence and domestic abuse. But that is not to say that we're dealing with a character who is completely passive in this role.
It's also worth bearing in mind that we're talking about a girl who, in real life, was about 14 or 15 years old when she met this guy. It was the 1940s in the Italian-American Bronx, we need to give the context that we're not talking about modernity. But even in that context, this is a woman who talks back. This is a woman who continues to go out and try and live her life despite dealing with a husband who is clearly out of control a lot of the time.
I think she's a character who is more of a survivor than somebody who thrives within this world. But that was the case of Vicky LaMotta, and when she saw the film in real life, she said that actually, her husband had been much worse than LaMotta was portrayed in the film. They actually pulled back on portraying some of that stuff because they'd have lost the audience completely. It's a really chilling depiction of abuse and sexual jealousy.
When I was reading through Ebert's book on Scorsese, he talks about Raging Bull more like a domestic drama that happened to involve scenes of boxing. Do you feel similarly about the narrative's priorities?
I take that point. The boxing scenes in the film formally do feel very distinctively cordoned off with the way they're interspersed in the film. But also, there is a threat of violence which makes it inextricable from that sport. It's saying, "Here's a ritualized form of organized violence which is acceptable, but actually all the worst violence in the film happens outside of the ring." This is somebody who cannot contain his rage, and even when he tries to channel it, he's just got this overwhelming urge for being punished. Going back to the Catholic thing, it's self-flagellation. It's very hard to detach that from boxing. I would say that it makes sense Scorsese's not a huge boxing fan because although a lot of that stuff is very historically accurate and looks exactly as it should, it doesn't particularly speak well of the nature of the profession or the people involved in it.
Pauline Kael, who panned the film, also described it as more like a biography of boxing movies. Having reviewed the "literature" yourself now, do you agree?
100%. Scorsese was an indoor kid. He was asthmatic, he didn't play sports, that was his whole thing. That's why he spent all his time at the movies. It makes perfect sense that he would be associating boxing with this particular kind of machismo, not just for all the obvious reasons that you or I would. That would have been the predominant sport that the men went and watched on Friday while the women did something else. It was a male bonding activity. That would have been the certain kind of man that Scorsese often speaks about having grown up around. It makes perfect sense that he would have landed on looking at boxing in that particular light, which was very much through the eyes of a kid who was probably more interested in watching movies about it than in hearing his dad and his uncles talking about whatever they'd seen happen.
My layman's read on the sport, especially from watching Raging Bull, is that it’s a sport that combines athleticism with a dash of artistry. Do you think that has something to do with the way the sport developed in America alongside motion picture technology, as you wrote in your essay accompanying the Criterion Channel’s boxing film program?
I think that he said himself that the only film that he felt ever actually got boxing right was Battling Butler, the Buster Keaton movie, which is a very funny film about a shy guy who has to fight for the affection of the woman he loves again professional fighter through a series of hijinks. It's just an incredibly funny scene where he's being chased around the ring by the fighter because he does the thing that never happens in a boxing movie, a thing that we all should probably immediately want to do when we get in the ring someone wants to hit us ... which is just run away!
I think it's quite a telling thing about Scorsese and boxing, but it's also telling about his interest in the history of cinema, vis-a-vis boxing. There are versions of prizefights in Chaplin films, and they were literally some of the earliest things ever captured by motion picture cameras. It was one of the first things captured in the 1890s Edison films made in New Jersey, partly because of the rising popularity of the sport and partly just because it lent itself so well to being filmed in the same way that dance did. The choreography, the movement. There's a certain beauty and elegance to it, and there's an immediate narrative to a fight that is easy for anyone to discern. Someone's going to win, and someone's going to lose.
Taking a step outside the ring, I think the film's coda set decades later is where you get the meat of the "message" in the film. Many people intuit that Jake LaMotta seems as motivated by the desire for fame and recognition as he is for victory in its own right. In the final act, you see this devolution of competition into just "entertainment." Do you think that plays a part in driving home why he's so pitiable?
Yeah, he's really pitiful. The whole nightclub thing is him trying to do Jack Dempsey, basically. The Dempsey Restaurant and Club was one of the most famous places to go in New York during the Prohibition era. You're talking about something that's a tried and true thing. Again, the history of boxing crossing over into entertainment and vice versa, perfectly meet here. Fundamentally, much like showbiz, it's a bit of a shark tank and a losing game. If you're not on the top, then you're at the bottom.
When you see when you see The King of Comedy, with De Niro again, you're dealing with the same thing. You're dealing with these aspirational men who are really quite self-deluded about their own positions within that world and are grasping so hard to get to the top. That's what we see with LaMotta, and we see him try every way possible. There's even a bit where he's talking about how he's only a middleweight, and that means he'll never be able to be the heavyweight champion of the world. And his brother actually says that's just how it works. But it is this grasping thing because there's no bigger person in the world than the heavyweight champ of the world. It's about him trying to shore up his sense of self and his masculinity. It's why the Boogie Nights ending, which is of course a copycat of the Raging Bull ending, works perfectly because it is really about that macho dick measuring, so to speak. It brings together so many ideas, and that's why it's so clever and powerful.
I'm glad you brought up The King of Comedy. I think when most people are thinking about De Niro-Scorsese movies, they probably lump Raging Bull in with Taxi Driver. But this time around, I saw just as much Rupert Pupkin from The King of Comedy as I did Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver.
They have a quality at the end where you want to look away. It's hard to look at because it's like that secondhand cringe that you have to watch. In Taxi Driver, there's that famous scene where the camera pans away from Travis Bickle when he's on the phone as he's being rejected. Scorsese famously said that the camera moves away because it's as though you can't look because it's embarrassing. And you get the quality again and again, he keeps forcing you to wriggle on this hook of wondering how this person cannot be more self-aware.
Do you see something Trumpian at all in the character of Jake LaMotta? Not just because both men worry about their small hands and end up charged with crimes as they recede from the spotlight in Florida.
Trump is almost comically on the nose as a symbol of so many of the excesses of American culture, showbiz, and masculinity. It's almost impossible to see a film which is about those things and not maybe see that a little bit, especially with the "that's entertainment" stuff. And, certainly, his horrible treatment of women.
I'll close us out with a quote about Scorsese from your favorite Pauline Kael: “He is a great director when he doesn’t press so hard at it. He’s got moviemaking and the church mixed up; he’s trying to be the saint of cinema.”
Pauline, I love you, but he is the saint of cinema.
My thanks to Christina Newland for joining me today! Be sure to sign up for her Substack
if you liked what you read here.I’ll be back with July’s The Upstream later this week!
Yours in service and cinema,
Marshall