Raging Paranoia

BOXING ENJOYS a special prestige in this country, equalled in degree only, perhaps, by money. There is nothing more intimately involved with the American way of being a man than the ability to knock someone down with a fist, and the cachet of a prizefighter exceeds that of, say, a football or hockey player, or a soldier, or certainly a novelist. In a century of institutional mayhem on such a scale that not only motives but actual numbers are impossible to comprehend, the boxer is our Deerslayer, the last surviving synthesis of American violence and American aloneness. And whether the boxer deserves to be a hero, still there is no denying him his status in merely practical terms in a country where violence is "as American as apple pie."

So it was probably inevitable that Martin Scorsese, one of a crowd of fine young American directors and maybe the best of them, would end up making a movie about boxing. All of the American rituals of machismo apply a fortiori to Italian-Americans; the pathetic pulp idiocy of Rocky virtually created Raging Bull. It is the story of Jake LaMotta only as much as Taxi Driver was the story of Travis Bickle, for Scorsese's new film has the same epic thrust of the earlier one. But where Taxi Driver was about America after Vietnam, Raging Bull is really about Martin Scorsese; only this essential decadence keeps it from greatness.

Jake LaMotta was once middleweight champion of the world, at a time when that title meant even more than it usually does. He could take a punch better than anyone--partly because punching his head was like punching a provolone--and he had a left hook that could leave even Sugar Ray Robinson, maybe the best pound-for-pound fighter of all time, quivering on the mat like a dead leaf too long on the tree. He came out of the tough neighborhoods of the Bronx, and when it was over, he had an old middleweight title, a divorce, a bad morals rap in Miami, a gut like an ocean basin, and a comedy routine that got him places like the Jerry Lewis Telethon. He used to hang around bars like P.J. Clarke's in New York, telling people his story, telling them how they would make a book and a movie out of it. And they did. Jake LaMotta was the kind of guy who always seemed to get what he wanted, mostly because he went after it like a gorilla with a hard-on.

SOMEWHERE IN THE FILMING of Raging Bull, though, Jake LaMotta disappeared--literally, he was kicked off the set, but in another sense, the real LaMotta didn't fit Scorsese's purpose. Raging Bull is about a parochial way of life, the mores of Italians moving up in the Bronx after the war. As a period piece, the movie is astonishing in its particularity--every detail is right, from the shirt collars to the old-style Kleenex box in LaMotta's bathroom; from the night at the Copacabana (where all the Italians of that era used to go for their big night out) to the Souvenir Special Club (there are still dozens of them all over the Bronx--they all have Venetian blinds in the front plate-glass window and they're all fronts for bookie joints); from men eating dinner in their underwear to the opera on the radio.

But more than the close attention to visual detail, what distinguishes Raging Bull is the way Scorsese has captured the flatness and banal perversity of these lives. Much of the credit for this belongs to Paul Schrader, who scripted Taxi Driver and was called in to assist Mardik Martin with Raging. Schrader writes highly stylized dialogue, the way short story writers write it. Often there's a total lack of communication:

The only way you're not gonna get a shot is if Tommy dies.

Is Tommy sick?

No, but I mean the only way you're not gonna get a shot is if Tommy dies.

What do you mean, if Tommy dies? Is Tommy gonna die?

No, no, but the only way you're not gonna get a shot is if Tommy dies.

Why do you say that? 'If Tommy dies.'

And the lack of expression, in Raging, becomes violent:

Joey, did you fuck my wife?

What?

I'm askin' you, did you fuck Vicki?

That's a sick question, and you're a sick fuck.

You're not answering me, Joey.

I'm not gonna answer that.

You're not giving me the answer I want.

I'm not gonna answer that. Lookit you, you fat pig...

Every other word is "fuck," everything is spoken in a monotone, the only modulation is in volume.

Scorsese underscores this by keeping the direction flat, or at least flat for Scorsese. Camera angles are straightforward and conventional, and the only "cinematic effects" are subtle ones: the way he almost always has DeNiro in the frame, ever when he's not talking; marvelous chiaroscuro effects with the black-and-white film; remarkably restrained glimpses from subjective angles. This approach not only fits the material--flat, quotidian life--but it allows Scorsese a creative contrast in technique in filming the boxing sequences.

They are spectacular on every level. Scorsese has always aimed at a visual sort of lyricism, and in these fight scenes he achieves it, weaving images and sound (terrific thumping, a bull lowing, a bull breathing, with crowd noises entering and leaving according to the intensity of the action). Scorsese uses every camera effect in the director's handbook--slow motion, freeze-frame, subjective camera, aerial shots, close-up, blurs--and the miracle is, it works. Clearly, this is not boxing as it really is, but boxing as the movies saw it; indeed, the fights are choreographed just like the corny old boxing movies like Golden Boy. This is boxing the way Life magazine saw it, boxing in the white glare of flashbulbs.

SCORSESE IS NOT glamorizing boxing. By showing us such an incredible flurry of artistic technique, and still insisting, as he does, on the ugliness of the violence (the direction is beautiful, not the boxing), Scorsese debunks the whole idea of lyrical violence. Boxers are animals, and we are animals for wanting to enjoy boxing at a distance, mediated by films and television and magazines.

Raging Bull is not merely the Jake LaMotta story, or a provincial vignette of life in the Bronx (although it functions on those levels); neither is it America; rather, it is a look at Scorsese's demons, with America serving as a prop. Violence extends beyond the ring to the crowd (where a woman is trampled in the crowd riot) to the church social hall (where drunks are thrown out by bouncers) to the Copacabana (site of a huge brawl) to the kitchen and dinner table. Cathy Moriarty, stunning in her debut as LaMotta's wife Vicki, is as beautiful, in her way, as Taxi Driver's Cybill Shepard; but for the pristine campaign worker, Scorsese has substituted a passive, pliable coital robot. And it all ends with LaMotta, less than glorious in his heydey, the Raging Whale, even painful to look at, unable to get around his titanic belly to hug his brother. Everything is vile, and the only relief is vapidity.

With such stylized direction and dialogue, and such an overpowering vision, Scorsese has always relied on his actors to make his films immediate and real. They have rarely failed him, and they don't fail him here. Moriarty recreates the sex goddess of that era: blond and yielding. With her coyness of expression and a voice low and flat as a pool table, she tells us all we need to know about a certain kind of woman in a certain kind of neighborhood. Joe Pesci, also in his first movie role, is perfect as the little man and the little brother, scared by and ultimately disgusted with LaMotta.

BUT RAGING BULL is, as the advertisements would indicate, Robert DeNiro's movie. DeNiro combines all the wit and spontaneity and genuineness of a Method actor like Brando with all the craft and attention to detail of an Olivier. You become oblivious to the devices he's using: the way he takes the windmill motion of bodypunching, for example, and turns it into LaMotta's leitmotif. Things that DeNiro did to prepare for the movie--learning boxing well enough to become a good club fighter, for example, or gaining 60 pounds or whatever to play LaMotta in later life--have almost come to be expected of him. In Raging Bull, DeNiro confirms that he is our greatest film actor.

Still, after all is said about the brilliance of the performances and the direction and Michael Chapman's cinematography, one can only be left with the gravest reservations about Scorsese's purpose. Raging Bull is not a movie about people, it is a movie about beasts. This conception of man, too obsessive to allow any alternative notion or any modification, would seem to be as limited at one extreme as Rocky was at the other. Now, it's perfectly all right to believe that we are nothing but animals; but if you really believe it, go live in a barn--don't make movies about it. The implication of Scorsese's movie is that we live like animals, he lives like a director. Taxi Driver was nihilistic, but the view was Travis's; and if we suspected all along that it was Scorsese's as well, that was incidental. Raging Bull, unmediated by any narrator, reveals only the diseased, morbid horror of Scorsese's mind. It is a paranoid vision of America.