I hadn’t seen Raging Bull (1980) in years. However, last week, in honor of the April 23 – May 3 Tribeca Film Festival (co-founded by Robert De Niro), the film landed in my Amazon.com shopping cart. I once unwisely lumped the sport of boxing into the “pay-per-view” category of media, along with the Word Wrestling Federation, hotel porn, and minor sports leagues, but Martin Scorsese’s depiction of Jake La Motta (Robert De Niro)—a tough New York boxer with a weakness for attractive teenage girls, who brawls his way through life both inside and outside the ring—changed that. Amidst the gore and glory of a career steeped in publicly broadcast violence, La Motta rises as neither a hero nor a demon. Or, perhaps, both spirits possess him. Marriage, domestic brutality, brotherhood, estrangement, championships, staged losses, abstinence, pedophilia, extreme wealth, incarceration—these sundry subjects define La Motta in Raging Bull. What makes De Niro’s performance so gripping is the ferocity with which he demolishes himself in the name of boxing.

Unlike Scorsese’s The Last Temptation (1988) in which Christ (Willem Dafoe) pontificates, “I am a heart!”, Raging Bull showcases the director’s remarkable capability for metaphoric subtlety. Take “ice water” as a figuration of Jake La Motta’s character. As early as the Greeks, sportsmen held superstitions that the male body was made temporarily weaker by ejaculation, so athletes would abstain from sex during competition cycles. La Motta abstains from sex as well, but his seductive teen-age love, Vickie (Cathy Moriarty), tempts him to the edge of this erotic sobriety. During one such encounter, in order to calm his urges, La Motta leaves the bedroom for the bathroom and pours ice water down his boxers. The water stains Vickie’s crotch—a symbol, I think, that she lost her virginity to a man paradoxically both virile and sterile. Later the ice water returns in a bucket. La Motta has just fought one of his most decisive matches. In a shot that lingers for more than a few moments, La Motta’s hands are seen buried to the wrists in the freezing cold water. The boxers’ hands are his occupational livelihood, in the same way that his genitals objectify his physical livelihood. To stifle either body part means stifling some crucial facet of his life, and it’s no wonder that in the most climacteric and decadent moments of his emotional and professional decline, La Motta founds a nightclub and surrounds himself with pretty young women and tinkling glasses.

Another artifact of Raging Bull is Scorsese’s aggressive use of slow motion. Physically caused by “over-cranking” a film camera at a rate higher than the normal 24 frames per second, the effect throws La Motta’s despair into high relief. The boxing ring exists as an almost mythological place, an unreal realm in which time expands and redemption is attempted by the scourge. La Motta’s fighting strategy is a figuration of his internal tumult: he waits until the final rounds of his matches before ripping into his opponent. By embracing pain, he purifies his sins. After Sugar Ray Robinson batters La Motta gruesomely, La Motta says, “You didn’t get me down Ray.” Even the punishment he received from others was bizarrely self-inflicted. Earlier in the film he asks his brother, Joey, to punch him in the face, for no reason in particular. The self-inflicted violence adds a Catholic aura to the film, which is typical of Scorsese, but is especially poignant here. The film opens with an aged La Motta reciting a speech.

I recall every fall / Every hook, every jab / The worst way a guy can get rid of his flab. / As you know, my life wasn't drab. […] Though I'd rather hear you cheer / When I delve into Shakespeare / "A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse", I haven't had a winner in six months. […] And though I'm no Olivier / If he fought Sugar Ray / He would say / That the thing ain't the ring, it's the play. / So give me a... stage / Where this bull here can rage / And though I could fight / I'd much rather recite /... that's entertainment.

During the painful rounds where La Motta taunts his enemies and allows himself to be destroyed, one sees the ring as his confessional. In a way, he returns there to recite his penitential “Hail Mary’s”—blows he receives to his kidneys and face. This violent ceremony is his religion.

The film concludes with La Motta shadowboxing. His enemy is unseen, metaphoric, untouchable, yet undeniably real. It is as much the universe as it is himself. I can’t help but envision a matador in a ring—the fluttering cape and the animal that stampedes after it. Raging Bull touches on one of the most intimate of human conflicts: the collision of our desire with the noumenon. The fact that what we seek lies in a beyond of the thing itself—the belt, the woman, or the brother. It’s these types of films that inspired Jane Rosenthal and Robert De Niro to found the Tribeca Film Festival in the wake of the September 11^th attacks.

Jason Harper is the film editor for Wunderkammer.