Jack B Yeats, The Small Ring (1930)
Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull (1980) is a boxing film, and a uniquely vicious one at that, but it cannot be said to be about boxing. What the odyssey of Jake LaMotta’s sharp rise and slow decline offered to Scorsese was a concrete case study for a powerful character analysis of rage, its causes, and its consequences. We may interpret Scorsese’s masterpiece, Goodfellas (1990), in a similar light: it is a gangster film, probably the best ever made, but it is not about gangsters or the American criminal underworld; it utilises the example of Henry Hill and his associates as material for a study in personal ambition, extending in this case to encompass and critique the ‘American dream’ itself. Scorsese is a director of Shakespearean ambition, as if this wasn’t readily apparent or acknowledged. Regardless of whichever mode of literary criticism you adopt in reading a Shakespeare play, if you look for the universalising themes of liberal humanistic exegesis you will find them there. Whether these insights are of much use to us today, or in any way reflect Shakespeare’s intentions in writing his plays, is another matter. Regardless of whether it was his intention – as New Critics like Harold Bloom wanted us to believe – to hand down to us an oeuvre rich in moral and political guidance (as if there was such a thing as a universal ‘human nature’ or ‘human experience’ in which we all particulate on an equal basis and have done since the dawn of modernity – inaugurated, unsurprisingly, in Bloom’s mind, on the moment Shakespeare decided to pick up his pen), I don’t see us as having much to lose in taking Hamlet (1601) as a valuable repository of human sentiment and perennial wisdom, some of which may be of practical use to us in our social, political, and emotional lives, but only so long as we do so critically and with an eye attuned to the requirements of literary historicism.
This is equally the case with Raging Bull. It is unashamedly a film of its time, evident in the repulsiveness of its gender politics. But here precisely we may locate one component of its contemporary relevance. I want to briefly identify two such components.
This is a film about rage, but rage of a particular kind; Scorsese is wise to orientate us in the second scene as to which. Here, in the aftermath of a violent outburst against his first wife, Jake LaMotta (De Niro) confides in his brother, Joey (Joe Pesci), the cause of his discontent: his hands are too small, restricting him to the middle-weight boxing category, ensuring that he will never proceed to the heavy-weight division and challenge Joe Louis, widely regarded at the time (the 1940s) as the greatest boxer in the United States. No matter how hard LaMotta trains, therefore, and regardless of how many opponents he slaughters in the middle-weight division, he will never proceed beyond this, into the highest realm of boxing glory, even though he recognises himself to be more than capable of doing so. He sets himself an impossible goal, fixing his eye on a fleeting, transient ideal, one he likely knows to be impossible but would find it demeaning to his character to admit this and its implications. His persistent inability to actualise this goal, the frustrations of coming near but never close enough to achieving it, drives him to rage as the only form of emotional venting deemed acceptable to a man finding himself in the social and cultural environment of 1940s New York.
The women in LaMotta’s life ultimately bear the weight of his frustrations, his inability to actualise an impossible ideal as well as his inability to articulate his emotions without making recourse to rage. In this, and probably without necessarily intending to do so, Scorsese offers a powerful case study in the dynamics and manifestations of toxic masculinity. LaMotta’s driving ambition to become a great boxer is perpetuated, in effect, by his tacit desire to actualise a domineering form of masculinity and supersede or out-command his rivals in this sphere. Hence the almost-despotic authority he exerts over his second wife, the true locus of his masculinity, and the unnerving vigour with which he responds to any passes directed against her and her own subsequent ‘digressions’. He does so not for her sake. Who and what she is as a person doesn’t matter, as the film is clear to emphasise. She matters in terms only of what she represents, of what she embodies, in playing a foundational role in LaMotta’s own self-construction. Were she to leave or dishonour him, he would fall apart; so he sublimates his seething resentment into keeping her down with the same ruthless energy he applies to his opponents in the ring, all to solidify and substantiate his own fleeting sense of masculinity.
This, in brief, is one component of the film’s contemporary pertinence. Despite what we would like to believe, inured as we are to the myth of normative progress, standard notions of masculinity still find themselves rooted in a hardened stoicism into which effeminate emotion ought not be permitted. This was fairly evident to myself growing up, both in experiencing my father’s frustrations turn to violence and evasion (through alcohol, in his case, instead of boxing) and navigating a rough secondary school wherein the teachers dared not attempt to introduce a lesson on personal or communal wellbeing, relationships, or sexuality, fearful of the response they would provoke. Outward displays of emotion, to my former classmates, were signs of inner feebleness, weakness, and latent ‘queerness’; and women were to be possessed (conquered, rather) as essentially purveyors of sexual and emotional support instead of being related to as friends and human agents in themselves.
I was lucky in being able to break the mental mould that such a childhood and adolescence bequeathed to me, partly from being able to stand outside of it with thanks to the many inspiring women in my life, in compensating for the veritable absence of certain men and providing a lucid perspective that allowed me to think differently. Others were not so fortunate: some of this rests with the Irish educational system – changing now, fortunately, but most Irish school nevertheless retain their affiliations with religious institutions, primarily the Catholic Church. Persisting cultural attitudes, underpinned by prevailing social arrangements, bear equal responsibility. The effects of social media in construing conceptions and confining users through the algorithm to their own belief systems into which inconvenient truths need not intrude, is apparent; as is the influence of such repulsive figures as Andrew Tate and Conor McGregor, admired by innumerable disillusioned young boys and men in search not only for a role model, but for someone to explain things to them so as to make the mess of life intelligible. In this, however, we need not fall to the fatalism expressed by some commentators. There is hope, as amply demonstrated in my own brother and his friends. As to how exceptional and unrepresentative they are, I don’t know. A new form of expressive masculinity is in the ascent; it’s our task to foster and encourage and prevent it from subsiding. There is still much for us to do, in any case, as any viewing of Raging Bull today will make clear. Here lies the second component of its pertinence. It is a disturbing portrayal of violent misogyny, but do we not inhabit a world in which violence against women is still present if not also institutionalised, both in the private and public spheres? Such works are essential in that they demonstrate how far we have come, in one sense, but also of how far we have yet to come. Raging Bull serves simultaneously as an evocative reminder and an incitement to carry on the long fight.