You have to be strong at all costs, and anything else is a failure of self.
There are certain expectations of masculinity when you’ve grown up in a world that is dominated by violent men. Those are the exact words he uses to describe how his hands look. He complains about this in deep confidence to his brother Joey (Joe Pesci). He feels it’s a failure on his part as a man that he can’t get in there with the best of the very best and see if he can knock them down. Jake LaMotta (Robert De Niro) isn’t content with being a middleweight. When I recently rewatched Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull (1980) one line of dialogue stuck with me and echoed into every single scene that came after, revealing the psyche of the boxer. With these two masters, Raging Bull (1980) becomes what it is: a deeply American story of a man who fights to live, and fights to die. De Niro was even described by those who worked on the film as patient, and gentle to Marty’s vision, but he was method in his approach to becoming like Jake LaMotta in body. De Niro wasn’t method in the sense that he behaved like La Motta. Playing LaMotta would give De Niro the chance to radically alter his body and see how far into a character he could go as an actor. For De Niro, his interest in LaMotta rose up out of thinking of the man as a victim of his own negligence, an underdog who just kept fighting everyone, including himself. The image was religious for Scorsese, Christ-like, and he knew that if he could turn Jake LaMotta into a martyr then he could tell a story that had a philosophy for him as a filmmaker. The cutman took the wet, bloody rag and cleaned the fighter. The image was that of a wet sponge being squeezed onto the bloodied face of a boxer. He went to some fights in New York City with fellow director Brian De Palma, and he still didn’t understand boxing, but an image stuck out to him that gave him a way into the story. After a near fatal drug overdose and the critical and commercial failure of New York, New York (1977), Scorsese was on the rocks and decided to give Jake LaMotta another look. He didn’t understand sports, but De Niro was persistent that they tell this story together. These were movies he didn’t even realize were hacked to bits in the editing process when they were prepared for television. Scorsese grew up as an asthmatic who locked himself away in movie houses and in the confines of his living room, where he would watch late night Italian neo-realist features. He kept insisting to Scorsese that they should make this film together, but Scorsese couldn’t find his way into the text. Shortly after Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese began their career together with 1973’s Mean Streets, De Niro read Jake LaMotta’s autobiography and became obsessed with the boxer.
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