A Film Canon

As a genre, the biopic poses a formal problem - how to imbue a sprawling, heterogeneous life with a conventional narrative arc. Raging Bull solves this problem - or, rather eludes it - by refusing to provide the life of legendary boxer Jake La Motta (Robert de Niro) with any real arc at all, let alone the kind of agonistic arc that might be expected from a sports film. As a result, it's very much a biopic - if a biopic at all - rather than a sports biopic, dealing with La Motta's life and sporting career in a highly episodic fashion, with no real analogy between the two. Over the course of the film, La Motta doesn't undergo any especial physical or psychological development - he's an aggressive, paranoid character, and remains so, perhaps tempering a little in his old age - and Scorsese relegates his fighting career to a series of recreations of iconic matches. As a result, it's a sharply anticlimactic, bathetic film, in which La Motta's greatest achievement is almost his first couple of matches, after which he starts a steady decline down the entertainment ladder, moving from the owner of a nightclub to the emcee role upon which the film concludes. This anticlimactic quality isn't mere nihilism, however, but simply the emptiness that results from a boxing narrative in which the boxer refused to make any compromises, refused to allow himself to be bought in any way. As such, it's a radical riposte to all but the most uncompromising films in the genre - even boxers who consider, or agonise, over whether to sell out feel like sell outs by La Motta's standards - and goes so far as to make the entire inspirational, uplifting dimension of the genre, specifically its reincarnation in Rocky, feel complicit in the very power structures its characters fight against. As a result, it's nothing less than a materialist account of boxing, an attempt to paint the most honest boxing film possible - or, at least, to return to the grittier, noir-inflected boxing films of the 1940s and 1950s, as evinced in Scorsese's first use of black and white cinematography. However, even the most pessimistic of these films had a residual fascination with the balletic elegance and grace of the boxer - something Scorsese refuses to indulge time and time again, generalising footwork into every kind of mobility that La Motta fails to achieve, and focusing exclusively on his hands. Even these are small for his build, meaning he has to over-compensate by transforming each match into a sheer pummeling fury, completely continuous with his desire to progressively beat his wife, brother, prison guard and, finally, the walls of the his prison cell. What's striking is that Scorsese's aesthetic is anything but gritty - from the opening slow-motion shot, it's lush, baroque and loving, but this lushness tends to be focused on the experience of the boxing venue, most spectacularly in an extended tracking shot from change room to ring, rather than of the boxing, which tends to be shot in a short, staccato, functional way. Admittedly, there are occasional slow motion shots, but Scorsese only tends to use these to elaborate all the ways the fist can damage and disfigure a face, whether the face of La Motta's opponent or of La Motta himself, in one of the self-defeating displays that represent his refusal to bow down to Mafia pressure, and become continuous with his gradual accretion of baroquely made-up face fat. Given that the period recreations are measured against the development of new media - black and white cinema, home movies, television - it feels as if Scorsese's aim is nothing less than to create an entirely new cinema, or even medium, for a sport which is both intensified and denuded by visual representation, or to present boxing as the epitome of a repulsion-attraction between viewer and spectacle that's also figured in his perennial fascination with 'ball-breaking', and the magnetic extremities of Italian-American male friendship. It's a film that understands that the only way to aestheticise sport, or to transform the vernacular into poetry, is to be ambivalent about doing so - and not only does Scorsese invoke an entire cinematic lineage to contextualise that ambivalence, but he still finds its most radical, ambivalent moments, and presumably his own, disappointing and dismaying. Hence La Motta's concluding quotation of Marlon Brando's concluding monologue in On The Waterfront, which offsets its studied defeat with something closer to real defeat - or, alternatively, denudes anything redemptive about the method acting project, which de Niro exhausts as he boxes - imbuing bathos with a pathetic edge, a pathos of utter bathos, or some other unbearable combination, imploring some kind of religious satiation or salvation.