Martin Scorsese's 1980 sports biopic Raging Bull is a study of the Bronx prizefighter Jake LaMotta, who comes from a world which demands that men display hypermasculine behavior that rejects anything feminizing and glorifies violence. Jake, along with the other Italian-American males he surrounds himself, lives his life based around a masculine code emphasizing fierce loyalty to those close to him and the need to beat the competition both in and out of the ring.
Although he excels as a fighter, Jake also takes his fair share of punches, and the camera indulgently lingers during shots of his battered face. Just because he gets hit, though, does not necessarily make him less masculine in our eyes. If anything, his resilience in the face of extreme pain proves his manliness. We can compare that to Janiro the "pretty boy", who pathetically falls to the floor after Jake beats him to a pulp.
The continual problem for the hypermasculine man, however, is emasculation. The men of Raging Bull attempt to fight off emasculation through their casual homophobic remarks and controlling attitudes towards women, but this doesn't suffice for Jake since he spends an inordinate amount of time obsessing over Vicky and the man or men he believes she had an affair with. In fact, it's the men he's fixated on. It could have been Salvy, one of the older men, his own brother, or even all of them. The men in this film have the outlook that women are their property and must be controlled, so a man who can't do that is not truly a man.
I really find it intriguing how it glorifies violence in some cases. There is conflict both in and out of the ring, I agree. What really caught me off guard in this film was how up front the domestic violence is. Compared to today when we see violence it really is on both sides of the scale. But even looking back the only depiction of it from the last thing I saw is almost a pat on the cheek by a girl who thinks some guy is being a jerk. The violence outside of the ring in the homes really stood out by itself. I feel Jake LaMotta will always be 'the man' in the house he resides.
ReplyDeleteI honestly disliked this man for how possessive he acted towards his second wife. But after reading your description of how he kept his manliness (in his eyes) throughout the film, I feel sort of impressed by him.
ReplyDeleteI love how you point out that no matter how many mistakes he has made or what goes wrong in his life to him he is still the boss he is still the champion and that close minded narcissistic mentality to me is what causes him to end up alone. I also like how you touch on the topic of toxic masculinity and the way men in this film saw women as property that alone is one of the reasons why I did not like that film because as a women I saw that as demeaning and kinda offensive.
ReplyDeleteI think one thing that it is easy to overlook in this film because of the graphic nature of its depiction of violence is the ways that the characters are using that violence to enact a complex code of honor. With LaMotta's character this idea gets grafted onto, as you say, an idea of women as simple possessions that makes him largely dysfunctional since women are not possessions but have agency even under oppressive conditions. I think its interesting how viewers can end up sympathetic to this character based on his desire to live an honorable life even though he is so dysfunctional.
ReplyDeleteI think you hit the nail on the head, I was thinking the same thing during the fight scenes. LaMotta doesn't fight like he's trying to win, he fights to prove that he's better than his opponent. Sometimes it seemed like he took punches just to prove that they didn't hurt him.
ReplyDeleteI really like your point about women "being property" in this film, and what was intriguing to me was seeing how even after abusing them, they don't want to lose them, especially not LaMotta because he's afraid that she'll be with other men. He begs her to stay with him, and it creates a sort of contrast between why he is crying, because he doesn't really love her, it just scares him that she might leave him
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