Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull, Italian American Masculinity, And The American Dream 1m1n5h

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“I discuss the differences between emotional reactions to literature and film, and argue against the notion that the intensification of emotions is commonly connected to the verisimilitude of representation.” a b ov e  

An image from Raging Bull (1980)

“His sexual relationship with Vickie also seems to be defined in parallel to his boxing career; the two pursuits mirror each other, signifying the domestic violence of their home life, but also Jake’s desire to punish himself.”

Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull, Italian American Masculinity, and the American Dream By Christina Marie Newland /

k e y wo r d s :

American cinema, boxing genre, Freudianism, homoeroticism, masculinity, Martin Scorsese, Raging Bull

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Mart in S co r sese’s Rag ing Bull (1980), written by Mardik Martin and Paul Schrader, is the semi-biographical story of the rise and fall of the “Bronx Bull” – middleweight boxing champion Jake La Motta. La Motta (Robert De Niro) grew up in the slums of New York’s Italian American neighborhoods to become champion, only to lose his belt to Sugar Ray Robinson. His violent behavior in domestic life caused him to divorce two wives, the latter Vickie La Motta (Cathy Moriarty), and eventually fracture his relationship with his brother, Joey (Joe Pesci). It is within this simple narrative, framed at the beginning and the end by a bloated, older La Motta’s reflections in a dressing-room mirror, that Scorsese addresses issues of masculine identities and violence as they relate to La Motta’s version of the “American dream” success story. I will seek to highlight Scorsese’s interest in the masculine identity crisis at the heart of American society through his depiction of La Motta – the furthest extension of dominant Catholic Italian American masculinity – as a tortured, animalistic brute who may be repressing his homosexuality.

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Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull, Italian American Masculinity, and the American Dream

An image from Raging Bull (1980)

Though ambiguous, there seems to be a socio-economic catalyst to La Motta’s failure; Scorsese offers an “evaluation of his own ethnic group, which he views both sympathetically and critically” (Casillo xvii), specifically in their particular failures in achieving the “American dream.” The boxing ring itself can be seen as allegorical, or “an allegory for whatever you do in life” (Friedman

115); a microcosm for the brutality of modern society. The ring serves as both penance and justification for La Motta’s wild behavior; an arena where he can both primitively perform his gender and satisfy his inarticulate desire for self-punishment. Jake’s violent, jealous rage outside of the ring can only be purged inside of it, and as his impulses grow uglier, his socalled success story does too.

“In consideration of the treatment of women in Raging Bull, its apparent homosexual undertones, and its frequent parallelism of violence and sex, it can be said that Scorsese works to undermine traditional masculinity, highlighting an identity crisis at the heart of his subculture, and more broadly, at the heart of American society.” below 

An image from Raging Bull (1980)

Scorsese himself has been quoted as saying, “One sure thing was that it wouldn’t be a film about boxing. We didn’t know a thing about it and it didn’t interest us at all!” (Grindon 22). To begin with, Jake’s maddening ambition runs a current through the film, pushing the narrative (as well as his erratic behavior) forward. La Motta shares this trait with Henry Hill, Travis Bickle and Rupert Pupkin, as well as many others of Scorsese’s male characters: obsessive individual’s ambitious pursuits often seem to end destructively and Raging Bull itself can be seen as a “story of how the American dream of success can turn sour” (Stefanic 147). To understand Scorsese’s interrogation of the American success story, we must understand his curious attitude toward boxing, and the legacy of the boxing subgenre from the days of classical Hollywood. He certainly borrows from the tradition of films such as Somebody Up There Likes Me (Wise, 1956) and Body and Soul (Rossen, 1947), but frequently Raging Bull’s only resemblance to them is the crisp black-and-white the images are filmed in. Not only does it eschew the rags-to-riches narrative pattern of genre, Scorsese’s style of shooting the fighting bouts differs each time, the ring growing larger or smaller depending on how well La Motta is faring. In a strangely poetic but brutal stylization, the fighters move in balletic warfare, sweat and blood flying from the men’s brows. There are extreme close-ups, unusual point of view shots, flashing camera bulbs and an Eisenstein-esque cutting style. The soundtrack, when not mixing the sound of animals fighting, often found silence profoundly useful, and frequently broke into this silence with startling force. This formal experimentation is reminiscent of European art film, residing in a genre and characterization which is very specifically of the American tradition. One of Scorsese’s quieter influences, thematically speaking, belongs to this tradition: Buster Keaton’s 1926 boxing comedy, Battling Butler. Scorsese is quoted as having said, “The only person who had the right attitude about boxing in the movies for me is Buster Keaton” (qtd. in Christie and Thompson 80). Kevin Hayes offers some insight on the topic: [T]he manager cannot watch the fight without mimicking the punches of the boxers he sees ... depicting such violence among the spectators, Keaton anticipated the violence among the spectators in the first fight sequence of Raging Bull. Both Keaton and Scorsese recognise the boxing

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The ring is large and in clear view to show that Jake (De Niro) has the upper hand in this fight)

ring as a microcosm revealing the violence endemic to modern society. (Hayes 10) In Raging Bull, the worst violence is frequently outside the ring, in Jake’s domestic life. The boxing crowds and matches are violent, but the Mafia-infiltrated Bronx neighborhood Jake comes from suggests that violence is also a way of life: Jake asking Joey to punch him in the face; Joey’s vicious beating of Salvy (Frank Vincent) for being seen with Vickie; and Jake’s continuous violence towards Vickie herself, culminating in a punch that knocks her out. There are many other instances of violence: Joey’s threats at the dinner table that he will poke his son’s eyes out if he doesn’t behave, swiftly followed by Jake storming in and beating Joey up over an imagined affair. Even when no one is being pummeled in the ring or knocked out in their own kitchen, brutality is always close to the surface. In the first domestic scene of the film, Joey upturns a table after a disagreement with his first wife over the cooking of a steak. A neighbor downstairs shouts, “What’s going on up there, you animals?!” and Jake threatens to eat his dog, another relation to the animality of his character and the blood sport he engages in.

Violence against women is another part of the world Scorsese (and Keaton, too) depict. La Motta’s psychopathic sexual jealousy over Vickie – portrayed through his overwhelming desire to control her sexuality – leads him to bully, threaten and slap her throughout the film. Vickie is presented by Scorsese as an old-Hollywood style blonde siren, but one who is completely under Jake’s thumb. Dysfunctional male/female relationships are dealt with in many (if not most) of Scorsese’s films, but never so explicitly as in Raging Bull. The director’s female protagonists tend to be secondary followers to the men, but as Cashmore argues, “Scorsese is depicting periods and places and his effort is to reflect faithfully how people thought, felt, and behaved in a way consistent with cultural demands” (Cashmore 249). Working-class Italian American perspectives on feminine roles were very strictly defined at the time; Scorsese’s portrayal of Vickie, combined with his tendency to only depict her through Jake’s subjective viewpoint, diminishes her role enough to create a portrait of a regressive society. We sympathize with Vickie over Jake in spite of her distance from the audience. The social, cultural and religious milieu of Raging Bull has much to answer for in its

“Far from the nostalgia of suburban high school films, with their happy housewives and consummate family men, Raging Bull is concerned with the first-generation children of ethnic immigrants still living in urban slums and firmly working-class. The characters have all the initiative and ambition to succeed, but none of the resources.” 22

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sexual politics, though many of Jake and Joey’s shared attitudes can rightly be summed up with a psychoanalytical term known as the “Madonna-whore complex.” Robert Casillo, whose book focuses on the twin aspects of Catholicism and Italian ethnicity in Scorsese’s work, recognizes this. Simply described, the “Madonna-whore complex” refers to a tendency in certain men to distinguish women completely based on the dichotomy of either pure, marriageable women or whores, those only good for casual encounters. As a result, they become unable to love or marry women they have sexual encounters with, believing the woman to have crossed over into the “whore” category. Jake’s sexual jealousy can be ed for by this; now that he has had sex with Vickie, he believes that her sexuality is uncontrollable and this makes her potentially available to other men. This paranoia drives him far enough to accuse his own brother of having an affair with her. Scorsese also deals with these issues in one of his early film, Who’s That Knocking at My Door? (1967). Joey and Jake’s attitudes do not merely exist in a vacuum, but are symptomatic of their culture’s attitudes: “Joey shares a perverse Italian-American machismo with Jake. Similar in personality but less extreme than his brother, Joey La Motta emphasizes that their behaviour is a product of a widespread ethos, not simply the malaise of a crazy boxer” (Grindon 30). Catholic symbolism is also rife in Raging Bull. Crucifixes and religious paintings fill the apartments and houses of the film, and Jake appears to adhere to a “masochistic conception of Catholicism” (Casillo 234) throughout. He both lashes out and suffers from intense guilt because of his behavior: he asks Joey to hit him for no apparent reason; he takes such severe punishment in the ring with Sugar Ray Robinson (when he loses his belt) that he appears to be welcoming it; and he beats his fists raw when he is imprisoned later in the film. His sexual relationship with Vickie also seems to be defined in parallel to his boxing career; the two pursuits mirror each other, signifying the domestic violence of their home life, but also Jake’s desire to punish himself. Celibacy, too, is considered a part of the Catholic tradition of self-denial, or “mortification of the flesh” – to cleanse oneself of sins: [Jake] douses his genitals with ice water to interrupt foreplay with Vickie because he does not want sex to weaken his fighting power [and] soaks his bruised hand in ice water … suggesting a parallel between his physical embrace of Vickie and his assault on his ring opponent. (Grindon 24)

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Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull, Italian American Masculinity, and the American Dream

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One of many Catholic symbols in Jake’s (De Niro) home

As is implied by the link between sex and violent blood sport, all is not well in Raging Bull’s world of gender relations. More so than an uncomfortable relationship with women, Scorsese’s men struggle with themselves, with their cultural backgrounds, their religious guilt and the need to live lives predicated on macho violence. The masculinity crisis which leads to misdirected violence and sexual confusion is not only a burden to women, but extends toward other men as well. The best way to insult a man in La Motta’s traditionally masculine world is to call him a homosexual. Raging Bull is full of insults regarding homosexuality, almost to the point of excess. Jake’s first wife screams that Jake and Joey are a pair of “fags,” and when Jake asks Joey to hit him, “he apparently doesn’t know the answer to his brother’s question, ‘What’re you trying to prove?’ and can only answer by provoking through an attack on his hetero-masculinity: ‘You throw a punch like you take it up the ass’” (Peterson 75). This sort of talk can be dismissed as

documentation of the casual slanging matches that occur between brothers and friends from the neighborhoods Scorsese grew up in, which is certainly possible. However, the ongoing preoccupation with denigrating homosexuality does seem to subconsciously as a way to articulate masculine anxieties, and perhaps even to repress feelings of homoerotic or homosexual lust. When La Motta fights Tony Janiro, it is repeatedly mentioned that the young boxer is good-looking. When Vickie says it, Jake is practically incandescent with jealous rage and paranoia, continually asking her what she means by it. He makes a joke that he doesn’t know “whether to fuck him or fight him.” When Jake does fight Janiro, he intentionally batters him to the point of disfigurement; there is a cut to Vickie’s horrified face as she twigs that her casual comment was the cause of this violence. On the surface level, this could be read as Jake’s violent paranoia over his wife, but Robin Wood asserts a more psychoanalytical

a b ov e   Jake (De Niro) goes into a jealous rage when he finds out Vickie (Moriarty) went out with other men

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approach: Jake’s homosexual feelings cause him to displace his anger onto Janiro. Wood, basing his argument in part on Joyce Carol Oates’ book, On Boxing (2006), and also on a Freudian understanding of repressed constitutional bisexuality, says that Jake’s sexual jealousy over Joey and mob boss Tommy Como (Nicholas Colasanto) (both of whom send him into violent attacks on Vickie) is a reflection of his own desire for these men. Tommy Como is an elderly “father figure” and Joey is his actual brother – sexual desire, of course, begins in the family, based on the Freudian model (Wood 231). The film is, therefore, dedicated to the “disastrous consequences” (Wood 231) of homosexual repression. Wood states that in his analysis of Scorsese’s films, he will not limit himself to a specific social milieu, something which many critics, particularly Robert Casillo, seek to do. Casillo locates Scorsese not in relation to a Freudian conception of society and sexuality, but in relation to a specifically New York-based, Catholic, Italian American background. To disregard this background seems, both to Casillo and to me, disingenuous. Wood points out that Scorsese himself “told me in a conversation that, though he was not aware of it while making the film, he now saw that Raging Bull has a ‘homosexual subtext’” (Wood 220). I would certainly argue that a homosexual subtext is present in Raging Bull, a subtext possibly somewhat independent of its creators, but that Wood seems to push a political agenda through his reading of the film, installing a critique of homophobia where there does not appear to be one. His argument that the central theme of the film is constitutional bisexuality and that Jake is in love with his brother seems to me to be utterly missing the mark. However, Jake’s unexplained, inarticulate rage and sexual jealousy, paired with the film’s consistent references to anal sex and homosexuality amount to – at the very least – a conflicted, guilty sexuality. As Joyce Carol Oates observes, boxing can be a fundamentally erotic sport, sometimes linked to homophobia. (Simplistically explained, it uses ritualized violence between two men, primarily watched by men, to invert feelings of lust and shame.) Along with the psychological inclination towards violence in men who are anxious about their masculinity, it seems likely that Jake La Motta is, indeed, a repressed homosexual, masochistically punishing himself in the ring in a subconscious expression of Catholic guilt. Critic Pam Cook is of the opinion that the ambiguity of the film’s characterization and ending opens the way to a regressive reading; ➜

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Christina Marie Newland

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Jake (De Niro) just seconds before getting brutally beaten by Sugar Ray Robinson (Johnny Barnes)

Scorsese is not critiquing masculinity, but “validating” it. Because Scorsese and his screenwriters (Schrader and Martin) fail to moralize for Jake, or dwell on Vickie’s treatment in order to create overwhelming sympathy, the refusal to moralistically guide the viewer translates badly for some critics: [Jake] has the misfortune to be caught up in the “American Dream” which offered success … and insisted on the innate inferiority of the Italian immigrants …. 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. (Cook 45) Whilst I would agree with Cook’s assertions about Scorsese’s placement of Jake as an underprivileged member of his ethnic group attempting to achieve the “American dream,” I think her argument that Jake’s behavior is validated because of this struggle is faulty. Jake is quite simply a “beast whose underdeveloped humanity scars everyone he touches” (Grindon 34). Cook references his “violence” and “animal energy,” and although La Motta is a shell of his former self by the end of the film, evoking a pitiable sort of redemption, the film certainly does not “validate” its protagonist – he is far too brutish and irredeemable for that. Scorsese does not allow us, in the film’s concluding moments, to feel anything other than a sort of dutiful pity at Jake’s self-parody. As he recites Brando’s “I coulda been a contender” speech from On the Waterfront (Kazan, 1954) in the mirror, we realize the quandary: when he says, “It was you, Charlie “, is he thinking about his brother, i.e. still putting the blame on Joey? Or, because he is looking into the mirror, is he finally taking responsibility for his life? 24

(Grindon 28). In either way of approaching the answer, La Motta is presented as a beast throughout much of the film, and in its latter parts, as a shadow of his former self. In consideration of the treatment of women in Raging Bull, its apparent homosexual undertones, and its frequent parallelism of violence and sex, it can be said that Scorsese works to undermine traditional masculinity, highlighting an identity crisis at the heart of his subculture, and more broadly, at the heart of American society. This crisis leads to an inability to achieve the so-called “American dream” – La Motta loses his wife and access to his children, his boxing career and his reputation. Although Scorsese does not allude to any specific reason for this crisis, it seems implied that patriarchal or archaic value systems impede individuals from fulfillment. La Motta’s pain and isolation result from his sexual uncertainty, ultimately causing him to self-destruct. La Motta’s violence is acceptable in the form of his pugilism, and it is also an acceptable manner in which he can act out his aggression and need for punishment. As one critic suggests, the boxing ring offers a simplistic alternative to the sexual confusion of the real world: As in the bullfight or the boxing ring, victory can be of a simplicity, purity, and splendor never achieved outside the limited perimeter of the arena. .... [The arena] offered a stage on which might be reenacted a lost set of sorely lamented values. (Barton 14) Thus, La Motta uses the ring as an antidote to his anxieties around masculinity, and to prove himself a winner and a warrior in of the ring, since he cannot seem to do so outside of it. The contrast is Film Matters Spring 2013

nicely summed up as such: “La Motta was champion of the world, but he’s one of the world’s champion losers” (Scott 137). The impression that grows from this is that the dream is unattainable for some Americans not merely because of their socio-economic status, but because of the religious, cultural and sexual handicaps which this status incurs upon them. La Motta is not portrayed as a victim of his circumstances; there is clearly something psychologically amiss, something enigmatic and unexplained in his character. Regardless, the commonplace violence in his community, paired with pressures to conform to gender expectations (and indeed the influence of the Mafia), must influence the outcome of his pursuit of success. Joey’s similarities to Jake certainly point toward the wider influence of their society on their personalities and habits. Jake is an unstable, violent individual, bordering on psychotic at times, and so is clearly not a typical product of his environment. Scorsese goes a long way in avoiding the traditional explanations for bad behavior; there is no suggestion of poverty or an abusive childhood. The ambiguity which he creates in avoiding these explanations is nonetheless undermined by Italian American influences seeping into Jake’s portrayal: Jake and Joey are both very clearly “from the neighborhood,” and their way of speaking, attitudes toward women, involvement with the Mafia and Catholic references continually suggest this is integral to their identities. As a result, though Jake is never excused for his repellent behavior because of it, he is certainly anchored to his background, and it does not seem to equip him for American success. The film’s release date is 1980, poised on the brink of a decade obsessed with cinematic (and otherwise) nostalgia for the 1950s. If Goodfellas (Scorsese, 1990) can be called a nostalgic film, then Raging Bull can be seen as an anti-nostalgic film in that it seems determined to truthfully show the darkest corners of the 1950s version of the “American dream.” Far from the nostalgia of suburban high school films, with their happy housewives and consummate family men, Raging Bull is concerned with the firstgeneration children of ethnic immigrants still living in urban slums and firmly workingclass. The characters have all the initiative and ambition to succeed, but none of the resources. What we are left with is a preAmerican dream 1940s and 1950s – an alternate, grittier version; the striving but not the succeeding. Where Goodfellas provides us a vision of the American dream at its most lurid, ugly excesses, Raging Bull provides us a vision of the “dream” as unattainable; scuppered from the start, the false promises

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and pitfalls which are just as dangerous as the success it may provide. /end/

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Author Biography

Christina Marie Newland recently graduated from Nottingham Trent University with a first-class honors BA in film and television. She plans to pursue a Master’s degree in film studies to further her research skills and interests in 1970s New Hollywood, classical genre studies and Italian national cinema, particularly the work of Luchino Visconti.

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Barton, Carlin. “The Scandal of the Arena.” Representations 27 (1989): 1–36. Print. / Battling Butler. Dir. Buster Keaton. Perf. Buster Keaton, Sally O’Neil, Walter James. MetroGoldywn-Mayer, 1926. Film. / Cashmore, Ellis. Martin Scorsese’s America. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009. Print. / Casillo, Robert. Gangster Priest: The Italian American Cinema of Martin Scorsese. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 2006. Print. / Christie, Ian, and David Thompson, eds. Scorsese on Scorsese. New York, NY: Faber & Faber, 2003. Print. / Cook, Pam. “Masculinity in Crisis?” Screen 23.3–4 (1982): 39–46. Print. / Friedman, Lawrence. The Cinema of Martin Scorsese. London: Roundhouse, 1997. Print. / Grindon, Leger. “Art & Genre in Raging Bull.” Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull. Ed. Kevin J. Hayes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 19–40. Print. / Hayes, Kevin J., ed. Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Print. / Oates, Joyce C. On Boxing. London: HarperCollins, 2006. Print. / Peterson, Michael. “Raging Bull and The Idea of Performance.” Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull. Ed. Kevin J. Hayes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 69–91. Print. / Raging Bull. Dir. Martin Scorsese. Perf. Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, Cathy Moriarty. United Artists, 1980. Film / Scott, Jay. “Raging Bull: No Punches Pulled.” Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull. Ed. Kevin J. Hayes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 35–137. Print. / Stefanic, Vern. “Raging Bull is a Gritty, Brutal Masterpiece.” Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull. Ed. Kevin J. Hayes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 145–47. Print. / Wood, Robin. Hollywood: From Vietnam to Reagan... And Beyond. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2003. Print /

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Works Cited

Mentor Biography

Gary Needham is senior lecturer in film and television studies at Nottingham Trent University, UK. His research covers American film and television, popular European cinema and occasionally East-Asian cinemas. He is the author of a book on Brokeback Mountain (Edinburgh University Press, 2010), from the American Indies series he also coedits, and has co-edited Asian Cinemas: A Reader and Guide (Edinburgh University Press, 2006) and Queer TV: Histories, Theories, Politics (Routledge, 2009). He has just completed (with Glyn Davis) a book on the films of Andy Warhol called Warhol in Ten Takes (British Film Institute, 2013) and is continuing his research on Warhol’s filmmaking through a focus on Edie Sedgwick’s role in the films and at the Factory.

Department Overview

The Film and Television Department at Nottingham Trent University provides a wide range of modules for varying areas of interests, with a particular emphasis on European cinema in depth, along with building an understanding of innovative new concepts and theories in the age of digital media and global corporations.

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