The Favorites - Raging Bull (#84)

The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love, to find out what makes them - and me - tick. Raging Bull (1980/USA/dir. Martin Scorsese) appeared at #84 on my original list.

What it is • Jake La Motta (Robert De Niro) slowly punches his way to the top in the 1940s, and quickly falls to the bottom in the 1950s. Most of the film chronicles his boxing career and troubled marriage as a young man, with the infamously overweight De Niro only clocking in for the final half-hour - but all the seeds for his downfall are planted during that long period of hunger, aggression, and paranoia. During the eight long years between the opening fight and his championship bout in 1949, the Bronx Bull's life is frequently a mess. He is abusive to his first and second wife (whom he seduces when she is still a minor), frequently frustrated by missed opportunities and his own missteps, and resistant to the criminal milieu around him, which demands he must take a fall before he's allowed to get his shot. But there's a prize to keep his eyes on and somehow that holds everything in place and gives him a purpose. Only after he is crowned middleweight champion of the world does everything begin to crumble. Raging Bull is often described as a tale of redemption, but that's a stretch given what we actually see onscreen and how it's structured. Jake's attempts at reconciliation are pathetic at best (the same old "let's be pals now" routine he gave his first wife at the beginning of the movie), his self-awareness still seems incredibly dim, and the world around him is pretty unblinkingly unforgiving - at least in the two or three post-downfall scenes we get. Better to call this a tale of survival ("You never got me down, Ray"), of a man who is still standing after fifteen grueling rounds with his most brutal opponent: himself.

Why I like it •

Raging Bull, the Last of the Consensus Classics

This is an entry in "The Big Ones," a series covering 32 classic films for the first time on The Dancing Image. There are spoilers.

There is some irony in Raging Bull being called “the best American film of the 1980s.” Its placement in that decade is a mere accident of chronology – and critics calling it the best of those years are essentially saying what (little) they think of them. Peter Biskind, by naming his book on 70s American cinema Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, acknowledged an important fact: when Raging Bull came out in 1980, it was closing out, rather than ushering in, an era. To this day, it remains a kind of fault line in cinema history – before it come the acknowledged classics, after it a number of films up for grabs, many possible masterpieces or potential classics, with their adherents and detractors, but few with the kind of immediately obvious weight Raging Bull carries. It is the last of the "consensus classics," a generalization (even Citizen Kane has its critics) but a helpful one in determining the shape of critical and popular opinion, and thus a kind of cinematic historiography.

Among popular Hollywood touchstones there’s E.T., maybe Raiders of the Lost Ark. Lynch’s unique voice has been recognized in the cautious canonization of Blue Velvet and (to a lesser extent) Mulholland Drive - though the "Lynchian" seems to transcend a single film. Do the Right Thing has its advocates, while Goodfellas and (more controversially) Pulp Fiction were huge gamechangers as far as style goes, informing everything that came afterward. Schindler’s List is probably the only post-Raging Bull film to seem just as “unavoidable,” as unquestionably important to the conversation – although it has many major detractors in a way Raging Bull does not. In recent years, only the one-two punch of 2007 (No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood) seem to contend that same throne.

What happened? It would require many more posts to explain in detail why consensus becomes less clear after Raging Bull. But the phenomenon is real, not imagined, and it is not a matter of time passing before the dust settles on reputations – consider that from 1962 to 1982, recent films did not have trouble making the international Sight & Sound lists: indeed, Raging Bull cracked the top three “all-time greats” within a dozen years of its release (back in 1962, L'Avventura made an even quicker jump, #2 after two years). I think there have been plenty of great films since then, but my list differs substantially from everyone else’s, as do everyone else's from one another. A certain common ground has been lost (the advent of DVD and the internet will either reverse or hasten this stasis in canonization, perhaps both; the 2012 Sight & Sound list should be interesting). What interests me here is why Raging Bull does make the cut, and what that means.

'Neath the Marquee Moon 1976 - 1980 • "32 Days of Movies" Day 23

Twenty-third chapter in "32 Days of Movies", an audiovisual tour through 366 films
(2015 update: included Vimeo embed after the jump)

View "Chapter 23: 'Neath the Marquee Moon"

'Neath the Marquee Moon

A decadent chapter for a decadent decade, but whereas disco, leisure suits, and cocaine excess dominated late seventies pop culture, these clips have a bit more class. Okay, coke features a couple times, but so do lush color (and even lusher black-and-white), artfully nightmarish imagery, and killer music. There's an otherworldly feel to today's selections, from the blue lasers of a final concert to the surreal, almost lunar landscapes of two different warzones to the Manhattan skyline twinkling like an earthbound Milky Way...indeed the (original, thank you) scene with an actual alien may be the least far-out of all. Though we only see the Moon once (or twice, if you want to be clever about it), it seems to exert a tidal pull on the zeitgeist, at least as represented here.

(continued below, along with NSFW & spoiler warnings)

Remembering the Movies, Dec. 17 - 23

Every Friday, we look back at films released 10-100 years ago this week.
Visit Remembering the Movies to further peruse the past

We've got quite a few classics this week (camp or otherwise). As we get within a few days of the big holiday, surprisingly there is only one Christmas selection - and it's the oldest of the bunch. Again, as with last week, I'm unable to offer a capsule review but I do have some recollections surrounding the 10- and 20-year-old films, both of which I saw in theaters.