Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull is not about boxing. It is a film about a man whose paranoia and insecurities fuel his boxing career, but eventually cripple him and his relationships. The film starts and ends with two halves of the same scene, an image of what would eventually become of Jake LaMotta after his retirement. He is a walking example of what happens when you overcook a steak: “It defeats its own purpose.” During his career LaMotta was known as the Raging Bull because, as Schrader mentions numerous times in the script, he was an animal. He had such little purpose in life (fighting, and being paranoid about his wife and brother) that by retiring and allowing both his wife and brother to walk out of his life he essentially turned himself into nothing more than a piece of burnt meat.
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The most interesting character, in my opinion, is LaMotta’s sexual obsession and one of the strongest figures in the film: Vickie (Cathy Moriarty). At the age of 15 she is more confident than the famous boxer himself. Throughout the movie Scorsese uses multiple tactics to paint her on higher ground, figuratively and literally, relative to her husband and brother-in-law despite the differences in physical stature. For example, during the first scene in which the three of them interact, Jake and Joey LaMotta are standing on the sidewalk and Vickie is on the pool deck which is significantly raised, immediately implying that she is on the highest moral ground:
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| Joey (left) introduces his brother (center) to Vickie. |
Later, she maintains her position over them. After Vickie and Jake have been married, some of Jake’s paranoia rubs off on his brother who sees Vickie with a group of men at a bar. He immediately pulls her away from the crowd and chastises her, but the strategically placed mirror behind Vickie causes her many reflections to overwhelm the frame, suggesting that she is actually in control of the conversation:
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| Joey attempts to scold Vickie for being out without Jake. |
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| Vickie walks away after a a tense exchange with Jake. |
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| Jake LaMotta, now alone in the hallway, retreats into his hotel room. |
In these shots we can see how Scorsese makes Vickie such a commanding presence over the two men in the eyes of the viewer, even though she is often physically beaten by her husband. This allows her character to set the moral bar for the audience, and the two men clearly fall short of it in these scenes.
Vickie is the underdog in all of her fights with Joey and Jake, but the confidence highlighted by these shots gives us something to root for. We sense that she is the “good guy.” In the many boxing scenes, we are not asked to root for Jake, which is what most distinguishes them from the ones in Rocky. LaMotta is seldom the underdog and we often find ourselves rooting for his opponent, if only because his merciless punches remind us of the abuse he lays on his wife. However, when Jake is backed against the ropes, we admire him for refusing to be knocked down, and we pity him for his own sense of honor. These are the moments that make Raging Bull a tragedy because we realize why he never goes down: he needs the pain and he knows it. In the final shot before cutting to his post-retirement years, Scorsese has the camera pan almost 180 degrees until it slows to a close-up on the dripping blood LaMotta left on the rope. This acknowledgment of his suffering is the closest thing to redemption Scorsese will end up offering.
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