History of Film: Martin Scorsese’s ‘Raging Bull’

I’m one of those who believes Raging Bull is the best film of the 1980’s.

It’s a lyrical, operatic, and brutal masterpiece from director Martin Scorsese who would helm multiple masterpieces throughout his career. However, while such qualities can come together to create something great, it’s difficult to articulate why the result feels like “the greatest of them all”. The great films of the 80’s would delight audiences, terrify them, inspire them, and challenge them. The world of cinema was getting smaller, and films were getting greater exposure than ever.

What makes Raging Bull so special?

For help with the answer, I turned to my brother Shane, a Scorsese scholar. When I asked him about Raging Bull, he brought up a great point:

“Sometimes the best film of a decade has zero relation to the decade it represents. Raging Bull is very much the end of New Hollywood, and only an 80s film in the sense of its release date.”

I have to thank Shane for bringing up Raging Bull’s status as a New Hollywood film, since I hadn’t thought about it in that regard. The film would be one of the final offerings in the movement, in some ways its grand finale. It exemplified the very best of what this new class of filmmaker could do, right around the same time Michael Cimino was demonstrating why a director should never be given carte blanche.

As The New Hollywood movement ended, film in the 80’s decided to go in very different directions spurred by something of a new studio system. Films of the decade would echo the era’s materialism, the moral majority in America, and the thrills that came with the new brand of blockbuster. In these times of excess, Raging Bull feels like a throwback, which is precisely why it would become so special.

The film marked a turning point for Martin Scorsese, the man who grew up on fairy tales written by Bergman, Rossalinni, and Fellini. He had already caught filmgoers’ attention with the rock & roll sensibility present in Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, and Who’s That Knocking at My Door. Those films allowed him to put extensions of himself up on screen – a coked-out Catholic punk from Little Italy. Had he kept making that sort of film, we might not be talking about him with the same reverence that we do today. Thankfully, that wasn’t what happened.

At the very moment Scorsese was looking to get his life together, his friend and artistic vessel Robert DeNiro told him that the time to make Raging Bull had come. Everything he’d made to date – both successful and unsuccessful – had led him to this. He could either clean up his act and create something grand, or he could continue down the path and become just another cautionary tale.

Happily, Scorsese chose the former.

Raging Bull would feature an anti-hero that felt familiar to Scorsese’s canon, but paint him in a far more tragic light. This wasn’t the story of a man who was trying to get his piece of the pie, nor was it the story of a lonely outsider. This was the story of a true champion – a person who had the tools and the talent to be the very best. The only thing he lacked was the confidence. Jake LaMotta’s tragedy is that he has the body and bravado of a lion, but none of the willpower. Many believed in him, but he could never believe in himself.

Such a broken anti-hero felt deeply out-of-place in the 1980’s, considering it was the era that depicted Rocky Balboa continually overcoming all odds. In a time of lavish colour, Raging Bull was black and white. In an era of Michael Jackson, Raging Bull played Mascagni. It was an age where America would celebrate its champions, but in its midst was Jake LaMotta – a man who would lose, lose repeatedly, and lose big.

Seeing such tragedy and such ugliness portrayed with such beauty is rare. So rare in fact, that it would not happen again before the decade was out. Perhaps because audiences didn’t want it anymore. Perhaps because no other director could do it. Perhaps both.

It’s rare that a film can be both alpha and omega within a given time frame. However, by applying everything he’d learned in the era of New Hollywood, Martin Scorsese was able to make Raging Bull just that in the cinema of the 1980’s.