march 2010 stanford university Masculinity and Violence in American Cinema christina carroll brad garcia erin graham yessica hernandez james johnson derek knowles tenyia lee nia-amina minor jeff norman will northup roxanne paul tatum payan rodrigo pena alfredo sabillón darienne turner introduction karla oeler 4 will northup Smoke and Mirrors in Body and Soul 6 nia-amina minor Fat City vs. Body and Soul : 11 A Look into the Deconstruction of Masculinity alfredo sabillón The Look Your Heart Can’t Disguise : 16 Oma and the Malaise of Masculinity in John Huston’s Fat City brad garcia Knocking the Boxer Down 21 roxanne paul Opportunity vs. Difference : 26 The Final Fights in Fat City and Body and Soul james johnson The Realism of Fat City 31 darienne turner “Clothes Make the Man” 36 derek knowles Hustonian Humanity : 41 Musings on the Human Condition in Fat City erin graham Reflections In Deep Space : 46 Visions of Urban Prostration and Anonymity In Fat City tatum payan Lifting the Veil : 53 Hidden Homosexuality in Scorsese’s Raging Bull yessica hernandez Raging Bull : Constructing Identification 59 christina carroll Raging Bull : Fighting the Performer Within 65 rodrigo pena Raging Cinema : Raging Bull’s Audience Aggression 72 tenyia lee The Shadow of De Niro : 79 Meta-cinema in Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull jeffrey norman Challenging American Optimism : 85 Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and Taxi Driver Masculinity and Violence in American Cinema

introduction This book consists of the work of Stanford undergraduates who took the course Fundamentals of Cinematic Analysis in the winter quarter of 2010. This was a Writing-in-the-Major (WIM) course, which means that it stressed the process of writing and revision using discipline-specific language and concepts. The course approached the practice of cinematic analysis through a focus on masculinity and violence in American cinema. Students brought many methodologies to bear on this theme, including genre criticism; auteur theory; feminist and psychoanalytic film theory; and ideological analysis. A glance at the table of contents will show that two foci of the course were the boxing film subgenre and the films of Martin Scorsese. Most importantly, the course, in keeping with its purpose, stressed attentiveness to film form. This attentiveness to form appears in Will Northup’s subtle analysis of the use of mirror reflections inBody and Soul (Robert Rossen, 1947). Nia-Amina Minor and Roxanne Paul contrast Rossen’s studio-era film with Huston’s “Hollywood renaissance” revision of the boxing subgenre, Fat City (1972). In this latter film, Erin Graham and Brad Garcia discover surprising visual rhymes that significantly, and paradoxically, tie together city and farm, bed and boxing ring. Also writing on Fat City, Alfredo Sabillón demonstrates the intricate structural function of the character of Oma (Susan Tyrrell), Derek Knowles explores the meaning of the surprising freeze frame in the final scene, Darienne Turner discusses costumes, and James Johnson examines the film’s realism. Turning their attention to Martin Scorsese’s boxing/art film hybridRaging Bull (1980), Tatum Payan and Yessica Hernandez explore the film’s tricky gender politics; Rodrigo Pena shows how the film produces some of its disturbing effects through framing, editing, and sound; and Christina Carroll and Tenyia Lee emphasize the importance of performance, with Lee making the strong claim that the film’s 4 self-reflexivity cues us to give more attention to De Niro’s extreme method acting than to La Motta’s character. Finally, Jeffrey Norman’s paper shifts attention from the boxing film to Scorsese as auteur, with astute analyses of Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and Taxi Driver, which place these very different films in dialogue with one another. The authors of these essays and I would like to thank James Thomas. As Teaching Assistant, he led section discussions, read and critiqued multiple drafts, graded final papers, and generously helped with the organization of the end-of-quarter conference, which gave contributors to this volume an opportunity publicly to present their work and receive feedback. This book would not exist without Davey Hubay, who first proposed it as a possibility and has taken responsibility for its final formatting, design, layout, and printing. We were able to engage Davey’s services (she designed our conference poster as well) thanks to the generous funds given to all instructors of WIM courses by the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education. We are grateful to the Department of Art and Art History, especially to Rachel Isip, Events and PR Manager, who saw to it that we had sustenance for the film conference that led to this book. Our deep gratitude also goes to the Art and Architecture Library, specifically Reference Librarian Katie Keller, who led a section designed to help students become familiar with several useful databases. Finally, we would like to acknowledge the importance of the graduate students in the course, Darci L. Gardner, Derisa Grant and Jason Sussberg, who contributed their quickness and eloquence to class discussion and the conference.

Karla Oeler Visiting Associate Professor Department of Art and Art History Stanford University 5 Masculinity and Violence in American Cinema

Smoke and Mirrors in Body and Soul

will northup The sport of professional boxing has always occupied a uniquely ambivalent place in the American psyche. It is both the manly art and a brutal blood sport, an opportunity for the meanest immigrant to earn wealth and fame through his physical prowess and an opportunity for organized crime to cheat thousands of working-class men out of their income through fixed fights. This ambivalence is mirrored in the genre of boxing films. The boxing hero is initially attracted to the world of prize fighting because of the opportunity for financial independence it presents him only to become embroiled in the inevitable underbelly of vice and corruption that accompanies such a morally ambiguous source of wealth. In his essay “Body and Soul,” Leger Grindon identifies four fundamental conflicts that operate throughout the genre: body against soul, opportunity against difference, market values against family values, and anger against justice (Grindon, 54). These can be further reduced into a single fundamental conflict between the illusory goals a character is led to believe he wants, such as virility, opulence, and the respect of his peers on the one hand, and the goals the character actually needs to fulfill to be happy such as love, stability, and respect for himself on the other. The 1947 boxing drama Body and Soul plays out this conflict by constructing pairs of diametrically opposed characters to mirror each other as they each play out one half of the opposing possibilities. The parallels between film and boxing go back to the creation of the medium of motion pictures. One of Edison’s most popular exhibitions shown on his kinetoscope was footage of a sparring match between two prize fighters (Streible, 236). Movie spectatorship and sports spectatorship are both forms of mass entertainment historically associated with the working class. Genre theorist Rick Altman writes of genre films that “critics increasingly recognize their role in a complex cultural system permitting viewers to consider and resolve (albeit fictively) contradictions that are not fully mastered by the society in which they live” (Altman, 24). As such, the genre film serves a social function similar to that of boxing itself. According to Elliot Gorn, “a good match focused [working class] conflicts through the transparent symbolism of two heroes meeting under equal terms and orderly conditions. Whereas the divisions of 6 will northup the streets were shifting and chaotic, the ring created meaning from the chaos of existence, and the outcome of a fight offered cathartic if temporary resolution of deep social problems” (Gorn, 136). Both the genre film and the boxing match serve as a venue through which the viewing public can vicariously enact the conflict between their individual ambition and aggression and the demands of polite society in a framework safely contained by familiar stories or rules and fair play. Perhaps it was inevitable that genre films about boxing would examine the very fictions and mechanisms of projection that fuel the audience experience of both venues. Both the narrative and the visual subtext of Body and Soul invite viewers to compare the myths of success surrounding the boxing industry, the misplaced aggression the boxers are encouraged to direct at each other, and the disparities between the original, pure motives of the boxer / hero Charlie Davis (John Garfield) and the incentives used by the gangster Roberts (Lloyd Gough) to subtly twist him into something corrupt. The primary narrative technique used to achieve this comparison is the trope of doubling, which is reinforced and counterpointed by the repeated use of the visual trope of reflecting objects and characters through mirrors. Establishing parallels between two characters on opposite sides of an ideological divide is a common device in genre films. Altman again: “Constantly opposing cultural values to counter-cultural values, genre films regularly depend on dual protagonists and dualistic structures” (Altman, 24). This device is especially appropriate for the boxing film as boxing revolves around a conflict between two men who have been selected specifically because of their physical resemblance to each other by means of the weigh-in process. Body and Soul employs doubling throughout the film but the effect is most pronounced with two pairs in particular: Peg and Alice, Charlie’s competing love interests, and Ben and Marlowe, his two opponents in the film’s championship bouts. The dynamic of mirroring is introduced in the same scene in which Peg (Lili Palmer) makes her first appearance. The scene begins with a medium shot of Charlie’s mother (Anne Revere) standing in front of the stove. The camera zooms out to give an establishing shot of the kitchen just before Charlie enters the house through the kitchen door. Charlie’s mother stands by the empty table in the foreground of the shot, and Charlie himself occupies the mid ground. The empty guest room where Peg is staying occupies the background, separated from the kitchen by a 7 Masculinity and Violence in American Cinema

wall running across the mid ground of the space. Despite the fact that the action of the scene takes place between Charlie and his mother in the mid ground and foreground of the shot, the camera repeatedly returns to a deep-focus, deep staging shot that gives a clear view of Peg’s room, which is dark and obscured except for a small light source coming in from the window in the extreme background of the shot that defines the space of the room and emphasizes through contrast the room’s emptiness. When Charlie first enters Peg’s room the camera remains in the kitchen with his mother standing still in the foreground. The wall running through the middle of the shot dramatizes the emotional separation of the estranged family members portrayed on screen. The first shot from the room itself is a medium-long shot of Charlie standing in the mid ground and looking at an object just beyond the lower border of the frame. A mirror in the background reflects this object into the shot and allows viewers to see that it is a woman’s dressing gown (fig. 1). Charlie reaches down to grasp it, at which point there is a match-on-action cut to a close-up of a man’s hand caressing the garment, then another cut back to the medium-long shot. Charlie is never in the same frame as the object of his desire, but is rather shown only with a phantasmal reflection that is forever out of his reach. Peg returns to the house to find Charlie in her room, silently listens to his apologies, and breaks down into tears. Charlie leaves his mother’s house to go to the bar where Alice (Hazel Brooks) works and finds her singing a blues number that perfectly expresses Peg’s wordless heartache from the preceding scene. The uncanny parallels between Peg and Alice will continue 1 throughout the film. During Charlie’s first championship bout Alice cheers him on ferociously as Peg shrinks away from the violence of the ring. By his last fight they have switched roles, and it is Alice who cringes and Peg who cheers as they both realize that he intends to renege on his arrangement to throw the fight. The other pair of note is comprised of Charlie’s pugilistic opponents, Ben Chaplin (Canada Lee) and Jack Marlowe (Artie Dorrell). Joyce Carol Oates, while ruminating on the misdirection of the protagonist’s aggression in the typical boxing film, notes that “The boxer faces an opponent who is a dream-distortion of himself” (Grindon, 61). This holds 8 will northup particularly true for Ben and Marlowe, who both represent Charlie’s career refracted through the prisms of the future and the past respectively. Both the Charlie vs. Ben fight and the Charlie vs. Marlowe fight are fixed, and in both cases the fixer, Roberts, has deceived the current champion by telling him to hold back and lose on decision while simultaneously telling the challenger to fight for a knockout. The personality traits they both display in the scenes in which they are respectively introduced establish them as natural foils for each other. Marlowe, who is addressed exclusively by his last name, is an attention-seeking loudmouth who spends the whole weigh-in before his bout boasting to the press and insulting his opponent. Ben, addressed exclusively by his first name, is present but off screen in his first scene for almost an entire minute before the camera cuts to him, during which his managers and promoters discuss his future as if he were not even there. The effect is achieved through a deceptive establishing shot at the beginning of the scene which appears to show the entire room but in fact leaves out the half that Ben occupies. Roberts and his associate enter his office from a door framed on the far right of the screen and the camera pans left to follow them as they join the two boxing managers already seated across the way, then settles into a familiar shot /reverse shot pattern for their discussion of Ben’s massive debt and dangerous medical condition until Ben’s manager looks across the room away from the other characters and the subsequent eye line match cut reveals that Ben had been in earshot of the whole conversation. This in part demonstrates Ben’s status in their eyes as a commodity rather than a person – which is troubling, as Ben is the only nonwhite in the entire film – but also establishes Ben as a man of action over words and therefore contrasts him to the loudmouthed Marlowe. The impression is achieved by the staging of the mis-en-scene when Ben finally does speak. When Roberts threatens to cash in on Ben’s forty- thousand dollar debt all at once if he refuses to fight, the reaction shot of Ben is not the close-up of his face that would normally be employed but rather a medium shot which frames him as he sets down the newspaper he was reading, stands up from the couch, and walks across the room before at last agreeing to the bout and uttering his first words of the film. The camera is more concerned with Ben’s actions than his reactions. The shot of Ben crossing the room also brings back the mirror motif as it reveals a previously unseen mirror set into the wall through which Ben’s reflection appears in the frame several moments before Ben himself 9 Masculinity and Violence in American Cinema

(fig. 2). The context of the scene, in which Ben agrees to a fixed fight only to be betrayed and nearly killed, creates associations that retroactively give new meaning to the mirror shot of Charlie and Peg’s gown, which takes place after Charlie’s decision to take a dive drives a wedge in their already tenuous relationship. It is not that his desire for Peg is false or illusory but rather reckless and ruinous pursuit of opulence. The thematic material of Body and Soul, such as greed, corruption, and the young boxer’s fall from grace, is all standard fare for the boxing genre film. What sets this work apart is its use of a flashback structure to subvert the usual order of the boxing picture. Instead of beginning with an innocent young man and chronicling his gradual descent into debauchery and fiscal irresponsibility which leaves him vulnerable to coercion from fixers and gangsters,Body and Soul begins in medias res with a character already in the thrall of organized crime who has already agreed to take a dive. The imagined purity of the sport, which is usually threatened by the activities of the criminal element, is in this case absent altogether. From the get-go the rules and regulations which ensure fair play and elevate boxing 2 from barbarism to sport are challenged. Charlie attacks Marlowe during the only weigh-in ceremony to take place on screen. Gangsters conspire to undermine the sport for profit and fail to honor even their own shady backroom deals. The trip from the locker room to the ring, the introduction of the fighters by the announcer, the sounding of the opening bell, and all the other pageantry associated with the sport is not even portrayed until the last fight of the film, by which time Charlie’s actions have made a mockery of the compact of sportsmanship between boxers and fans that said pageantry is supposed to represent. In Grindon’s words, “in the boxing genre the ceremonial weigh-in, the impersonal referee, and the bare ring speak of equality, a rule-bound competition emblematic of the culture of opportunity. But these films constantly unmask the trappings of fairness and express the liability of difference. Everywhere the fix is on, the fighter is cornered, the game is rigged” (Grindon, 55). The overall effect is to change the moral overtone of the film away from the usual cautionary tale against the corruption of excessive wealth unwisely spent, creating instead a story of redemption. Professional boxing is clearly placed on the side of crime and greed by 10 the film’s ideology, but the boxers themselves are portrayed as victims rather than criminals. The film is thus able to simultaneously pander to the populist stance of siding with the working stiff against the duplicity of the wealthy and the elitist stance of siding with Puritanical morality against the excesses of the working class. The ultimate solution to the quandary posed by America’s ambivalence towards boxing is for the boxer hero to look into his heart and remember why he began to fight in the first place. Charlie, and the audience with him, ultimately turns his back on the illusory promises of wealth and status and instead re- embraces the laudable goal of taking control of his own destiny and taking simple pride in his own skill. Bibliography and works cited Altman, Rick: Film/Genre. London: British Film Institute, (1999). Streible, Dan: “A History of the Boxing Film, 1894-1915,” 1989; Film History, Volume 3 (1989). Grindon, Leger: “Body and Soul: The Structure of Meaning in the Boxing Film Genre,” Cinema Journal 35 No. 4 (1996). Gorn, Elliot J.: The Manly Art: Bare Knuckle Prize Fighting in America 1986. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986.

Fat City vs Body and Soul : A Look into the Deconstruction of Masculinity John Huston’s subversion of the conventional structure of the boxing nia-amina minor film genre allowed him to depict and reveal subjective truth in the filmFat City (1972). By manipulating mis-en-scene, Huston created a realistic portrayal of the life of a boxer, positioning his film against the romanticized image of masculinity and success that is offered in the filmBody and Soul (Robert Rossen 1947). Huston not only guides our attention to specific details that are customarily overlooked within the boxing film, he also rejects and problematizes the conventions of the boxing film genre, thereby deconstructing traditional performances of masculinity and success. 11 Masculinity and Violence in American Cinema

Body and Soul offers a construction of masculinity that is relatively conventional for Hollywood. At the time it was filmed, boxing, as a combat sport and sphere of opportunity for the working class athlete, was part of a social discourse aimed at “revalidating male identity in the face of a perceived “feminization’ of American culture” (Studlar, 178). The main character, Charlie Davis (John Garfield), becomes a boxer against his mother’s wishes after his father is killed. Provoked by oppression and the possibility of poverty, Charlie decides to become a boxer to help his mother avoid welfare, simultaneously satisfying a personal sense of masculine pride. As a representation of ideologies of the time, Body and Soul associates women with family responsibilities and the burden of lack of economic opportunity. As a boxer, Charlie quickly achieves success but debauchery eventually separates him from family values. “Marriage, domesticity, and family mean giving up the diversions of fighting (and) in order to cultivate his soul the boxer must take on attributes associated with the female, 3 otherwise he will perish with his body” (Grindon, 61). The women in Charlie’s life represent moral and family values, while boxing surrounds him with shady company that leads him astray. Body and Soul portrays the “crisis of masculinity” by focusing on the estrangement of the boxer from his family. However, true to form, this films ends with a classical Hollywood resolution, reconciliation between Charlie and his family. Body and Soul follows conventional narrative structure in its portrayal of “the crisis of masculinity.” The mood of the film becomes clear in the opening scenes as the audience is introduced to Charlie in the establishing shots. Through a craning shot of an empty boxing ring during the night, we are able to observe the surrounding environment. Low- 4 key lighting creates a somber atmosphere, implying that something is wrong; the problem is set up. The boxing ring is lit with stark contrasts of black, white, and gray in the shadows, creating a noir- like atmosphere. As the camera cranes, we see the swinging shadow of a punching bag suggesting that there was recent movement within 12 the ring; a presence is no longer there (fig. 3). Our attention is guided nia-amina minor to a window that exposes Charlie while he is sleeping. Maintaining consistent rhythm of motion, the camera steadily zooms into a medium shot of Charlie on the bed. He suddenly wakes from a nightmare and says the name Ben twice. In this medium close-up, the audience can see distinct cuts and scars on his face signifying that this character is probably a fighter (fig. 4). In this shot, director, Robert Rossen presented an affliction of body and soul, as Charlie appears uneasy and anxious. The audience can presuppose from costume and the actor’s physical appearance that he is a boxer who is still fighting. These establishing shots develop the narrative for the film, a problem will be solved or a situation will be reconciled. This is hardly the case in Fat City where Huston presents an uncommon view of the boxing world and the hopelessness that can often surround an unattainable dream. When compared to Body and Soul, Fat City provides contrasting representations of gender roles, investigates different tensions within the fundamental structure of the “boxing film,” and provides a pragmatic view of the romanticized boxer’s life. The plot follows the decline and ascent of two boxers’ careers: Billy Tully (Stacy Keach), a boxer who is past his prime but tries to convince himself, and those around him, that boxing will change his alcoholic, unemployed, lonely, and unsuccessful life; and Ernie Munger (Jeff Bridges), a young man who is beginning his boxing career with hopes of attaining success. Fat City’s opening sequence begins with a series of pans and superimpositions revealing the tough-edged city of Stockton, California and the struggling down-and-outers who live there. Unlike Robert Rossen, John Huston subverts the romanticized image of man and exposes gritty reality. In the opening sequence, Conrad Hall, the cinematographer, achieves great impact through a series of medium long shots to medium close -ups of people sitting and standing, alone and in groups, surrounded by the decaying city (fig. 5 and 6). The camera is not motivated by action, and most of the characters he exposes appear to be waiting for something to happen. He establishes the setting with a shot of Stockton from a bird’s eye view, and the next shot is a superimposition that brings the audience to Stockton’s city limits. In this introduction, the audience is positioned as outsiders looking in and the superimpositions provide a sense of realism, because the audience can observe the depressing nature of this city. Body and Soul’s opening sequence implies 13 Masculinity and Violence in American Cinema

a psychological uneasiness and emotional affliction whileFat City presents a realistic representation of the imperfect and vulnerable human condition. After the opening sequence, the camera focuses on a large run-down motel and zooms into a dissolving shot of a motel room where Billy Tully is lying on a bed, in his underwear. A hopeless image of man, this is our introduction to the main character. Unlike Body and Soul, where the audience can see Charlie through the window and he suddenly wakes up and 5 becomes active, this scene of Fat City has a lethargic and inactive tone. Tully initiates camera movement as he gets up to look around his small hotel room for a match to light his cigarette, but he is never presented as a useful or valuable object. After an unsuccessful search for matches, in a medium shot, the non-diegetic music fades and the audience is given a silent look at Billy Tully as he puts on his pants. Cinematographically, there is already refusal to glamorize the male body’s potential as Huston exposes Tully’s imperfections. This detached camera style is present throughout the entire film 6 and helps in Huston’s resistance to transforming the male body into spectacle. The audience is introduced to Billy Tully well past has his prime and as a result we miss his journey as a boxer. However throughout the film, we constantly hear about his failures when he begins to drink, which is often and heavily. The opening sequence offers an exhausted, weary, and tired image of man and it isn’t until the next scene when Tully meets Ernie for the first time that the audience is exposed to the potential and refreshing energy of a younger man. The plot follows both men as Ernie rises into the mediocre ranks of the boxing world and Tully works toward a comeback that ultimately fails to happen. Associating the idea of American masculinity with obtaining money, success, and pursuing happiness is common to both films, but 14 nia-amina minor Fat City offers a more complicated position on the issue of masculinity. Neither Ernie nor Tully appear to be aggressive fighters like Charlie in Body and Soul. As they train to fight or desperately attempt to make money by picking crops, it seems success is obtainable by using their only commodity; their bodies. Billy Tully appears to have no family or sense of community, presenting an image of complete masculine failure. Indeed, many of the characters in Fat City are portrayed with flawed attributes that deconstruct traditional performances of masculinity and femininity. Tully’s life is in shambles due to alcoholism and lack of motivation but unlike Body and Soul, Fat City rejects a clear division of good and evil. There appears to be no agency and no one to identify as the cause of lack of economic opportunity or oppression and there is also no clear distinction or categorizing of market values and family values. The closest expression of family values is in Ernie’s relationship with his girlfriend Faye (Candy Clark). Tully, on the other hand, sparks a love interest with Oma (Susan Tyrrell), a woman who also turns to alcohol to fill the void in her life. He courts a drunken Oma in a bar, during the middle of the day, after picking crops. Unlike the relationship between Charlie and his girlfriend Peg Born (Lilli Palmer) who provides a moral nest, Oma’s moral ambiguity and shrill behavior creates an unhealthy and unstable relationship. By the end of their relationship, Tully is not able to satisfy even Oma, another mark of masculine failure. Fat City focuses on man’s “quest for material success (as the) problematic heart of the ideological construction of American male identity in the 20th century” (Studlar, 183) Masculinity is never celebrated because this film denies the pleasurable role of male violence, undermines the illusion of American masculinity that depends on the powerful image of the male body, and demystifies the romanticism associated with boxing films. Exposing more weakness and inhibition than male dominance, Fat City gives the audience an unconventional view into the boxing world. By deconstructing the conventions of the boxing film genre, John Huston imparts greater levels of realism. The crisis of masculinity in Body and Soul may be romanticized, and more appealing, but by allotting greater levels of depth to flawed characters inFat City, Huston also creates what appears to be a more authentic presentation of social reality. Huston did not present the fortunate achievement of success and masculinity 15 Masculinity and Violence in American Cinema

so clearly offered in Body and Soul. Instead he portrayed boxing as another form of physically damaging, unrewarding labor that traps impoverished men.

Works cited Leger Grindon, “Body and Soul: The Structure of Meaning in the Boxing Film Genre,” Cinema Journal 35:4. Studlar, Gaylyn. Reflections in a Male Eye: John Huston and the American Experience. Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1993.

The Look Your Heart Can’t Disguise : Oma and the Malaise of Masculinity in John Huston’s Fat City alfredo sabillón In her essay “Fat City and the Malaise of Masculinity,” Gaylyn Studlar understands the quest for material success to be at the “problematic heart of the ideological construction of American male identity in the twentieth century” (183). She is talking about capitalism. This is why the sense of defeatism that permeates Fat City (1972) is so disturbing. The men in this film adhere to a masculine code in which hard work and perseverance are the keys to upward mobility. This ethic’s most succinct articulation, as well as its most naïve, is made by Buford (Wayne Mahan), a fifteen-year-old boxer who believes he will become a champion by the age of eighteen. Before Ernie’s (Jeff Bridges) first fight as an amateur boxer, Buford gives him a pep talk in which he claims that in order to be successful “you gotta wanna win so bad you can taste it. If you wanna win bad enough, you win.” But by the end of the night, all four fighters from Lido’s gym (which is where they train) find themselves in a bar, each having lost their fight, realizing that willpower is not enough to win. The outcome forced them to confront Studlar’s “malaise of masculinity,” and is indicative of a pattern in the film characterized by an “ironic stance toward the relationship between masculinity, violence, and American success” (182). Just as the ideals of hard work and perseverance tend to serve as a front for inequality in a capitalist society, so does the boxer’s mask 16 of confidence when entering the ring, a stage on which takes place alfredo sabillón what Leger Grindon calls “a rule-bound competition emblematic of the culture of opportunity” (55). In this paper I will explore what lies behind this societal mask by focusing on Oma (Susan Tyrrell), whose stance is firmly in opposition to the malaise of masculinity, but simultaneously reveals her folly. Publicized as a film that explores the life of boxers outside the ring (the DVD cover says “life is what happens in between rounds”), it is crucial to understand the role of women in Fat City. Women in the boxing film genre tend to be pillars of domesticity and morality. But just as Huston infuses masculinity, violence, and American success with irony, so are his women portrayed ironically despite their critical stance to the aforementioned concepts of masculinity, violence, and American success. In his essay “Body and Soul: The Structure of Meaning in the Boxing Film Genre,” Grindon notes that the woman “challenges the exclusive male world of the ring” (61). This applies to Fat City. But the strongest female role in the film, the role of Oma, is that of a drunken woman whose folly has trapped her in a cycle of unhealthy relationships with men. Her presence among men allows the viewer to peer into the masculine malaise, which the ideals of hard work and perseverance have rendered opaque. In this way Oma maps out the ills that the men in her life either ignore or fail to recognize. Since the idea of opacity is central to my thesis, I must discuss the look. I use the “look” to refer to two different things. First of all, I use it to refer to a person’s appearance. I don’t just mean the boxer’s swollen eyelids, his twisted nose, his busted lip — all signs of physical deterioration that cannot be concealed — but the psychological condition that the face simultaneously veils and reveals as well. I also use the “look” to refer to the network of gazes within a shot. As I will show, the importance of this exchange of gazes lies in who each character does not look at. I’m talking about averted gazes, not Laura Mulvey’s feminist-psychoanalytic conception of the pleasure of looking in cinema. Not that her ideas aren’t relevant to the discourses with which this paper comes into contact. They merely fall outside the scope of what I wish to discuss. There are only two female roles in Fat City: Oma’s and Faye’s (Candy Clark), Ernie’s girlfriend. The latter appears in three scenes, and is something of a half-character. In two scenes, she sits in the passenger seat of Ernie’s car. Driving through the rain, her face is only illuminated 17 Masculinity and Violence in American Cinema

by the headlights shining through the windshield, while the rest of the screen is dominated by shadows. Completely isolated from Ernie’s life as a boxer, she has been closeted from the male-dominated ring space, and so she is never audience to the spectacle of male violence. As a matter of fact, after Ernie and Faye marry, Ernie’s role in the movie becomes secondary; the film resumes his plot line when Tully (Stacy Keach) runs into him in the last scene of the movie. But even then, the encounter leads only to a vague conversation about life, a conversation which Ernie tries to avoid. Having spotted Tully first, he averts his look so as to slip quietly back into his car. Faye represents something like the pillar of domesticity that was typical of studio era boxing films. Unlike Oma, she hardly penetrates her lover’s emotional territory, but not out of lack of trying. In one of Huston’s many revisions of the studio era boxing film, their thread in the narrative remains unresolved. Instead of using the union of man and woman to mark reconciliation, the opacity of this marriage raises questions about the role of womanhood in this film that only Oma’s confrontational nature is left to answer. Early on in the film, Oma proves to be fully capable of contending with men in verbal sparring. She is a source of anxiety to the men around her because she pays attention to precisely what men do not say, thereby incorporating body language into everyday conversations, whereas men seem to restrict all corporal engagement to the boxing ring. Oma replicates a brand of the ideal of equality that Grindon associates with the ring space into everyday conversations; not a “rule-bound” equality, but one that engages the other in the here and now to subvert the past and future (past glory, future upward mobility) that serve men as masks to their present condition. Men cannot be opaque around Oma, for this is precisely when she becomes more aggressive. Producing this tension in the men she surrounds herself with, the audience is allowed to see the weakness inherent to the male façade. Oma is explicit about her criticism of masculinity in a scene where she complains about her second marriage. After being widowed by a full-blooded Cherokee, she married a white man and considers it the biggest mistakes of her life. “He had unnatural desires,” she says of him before digressing into a rant against white patriarchy. Albeit drunk, she says, “The white race is in its decline, started downhill since 1492 when Columbus discovered syphilis... White men are animals... White men are 18 alfredo sabillón the vermin of the earth!” Whether in her manners or her statements, she is a foil to the masculine code of silence. This scene’s setting is important for analyzing the two kinds of “looks” I mentioned above. We are in a bar: stools surround the counter, and so customers can avert the look of either neighbor; they may buy a drink for someone, but this must be mediated through the bartender. Other than tables scattered throughout, the only other kind of table in a bar is the pool table, which is itself a rule-bound space of competition. In this scene, it is daytime, and so a pillar of light illuminates Oma (for this is truly her scene), but otherwise the bar is shadow-ridden. In addition to being a space where alcoholics are prone to congregate, the bar, in its physical arrangement, is built to harbor a masculinity beset by malaise, a sickness that is only temporarily lulled by the music playing from the jukebox. The bar is set up in such a way that one can moan and cry, while all the others sit isolated in their emotional bubbles. When people share each other’s troubles, the conversations are usually about the past or the future, even for Oma, because in the bar, the malaise of masculinity abounds. When Tully asks to sit next to her after finding her in tears, Oma replies that “It’s a free country.” Oma eventually gets to talking about her second marriage, cued by the words “I don’t consider my second marriage sanctified,” after which the shot abruptly changes. The next shot captures Oma from behind the counter, upon which we see an ashtray, her hand holding a cigarette, and a tall mug of beer. Oma’s face glows with drink, her hair is disheveled, and she looks only at her mug (fig. 7). This shot is essentially a portrait of Oma in which Huston seems to infuse even her criticism 7 of white patriarchy with irony. Here is revealed the look Oma cannot hide: the defeated look on her face, yes, but also the alcoholism that perpetuates her folly. Oma is the strongest critic of masculinity in this film, but Huston undercuts her criticism by revealing the traits that result in her constant return to unhealthy relationships. Even her relationship with the sympathetic Tully, who moves in with her after this scene, proves to be unsustainable. 19 Masculinity and Violence in American Cinema

As melancholy as Oma’s look is, it serves the important function of mapping out men’s ills. By this I mean her explicit criticism of white patriarchy, but also something more specific. Though physical abuse of Oma is not manifest with bruises, she admits to Tully that Earl had raped her out of jealousy. I should mention here that Oma describes Earl as “an even-tempered man...the nicest guy in the world” throughout the whole film – an obvious contradiction given her admittance. Having brought up the unfortunately ubiquitous phenomenon of rape, a parallel between the boxer’s body and the woman’s body can be identified. In her book On Boxing, Joyce Carol Oates writes that boxing is “the most tragic of all sports because more than any human activity it consumes the very excellence it displays” (16). In one of her most powerful lines in the movie, Oma’s strength simultaneously reveals its vulnerability and the forces that deteriorate her body. Being a white man, Tully is angered by Oma’s criticism of white men, and threatens to backhand her off her stool. She responds by daring him to do so, shouting “come on get it out of your system, if it’ll make you feel good, punch me in the face!...Come on, what are you waiting for, it’s just a thing you need!” By provoking Tully to satisfy that “thing [he] needs,” Oma lays herself out to his abuse. In the same manner that the boxer directs his anger at his opponent, Oma offers herself as a receptacle for Tully’s anger as though to mock men’s tendency to misdirect rage. But because boxers so often unleash violence on not just their opponents, but also on their female companions, the bruising on a woman’s face, or Oma’s look, which is emotionally bruised, reveals a truth that cannot be hidden. These truths — her drunken look, her unkempt disposition — reveal the deteriorating forces that Oma perpetually contends with, not always through faults of her own, but which she must nonetheless absorb. Oates has written an apt judgment of the malaise of masculinity in capitalist society, though she does not use Studlar’s term. Studlar writes that there is “no political system in which the spectacle of two men fighting each other is not a striking, if unintended, image of the political impotence of most men (and women)” (63). To articulate this judgment cinematically is Huston’s project. It is precisely the impotence of men and women under capitalism that Huston reveals by constantly infusing either manly bravado or Oma’s criticism of it, with irony. The audience can see the folly that sustains the masculine malaise even as it is directly 20 criticized. But Huston doesn’t bother to provide a solution for this problematic. Some have called him a defeatist for this reason. But instead he has brought to the foreground the thin façade of a society that promises equality, but that hardly pulls through.

Works cited Grindon, Leger. “Body and Soul: The Structure of Meaning in the Boxing Film Genre” Cinema Journal 35.4 (1996): 54-69. Oates, Joyce Carol. On Boxing. London: Bloomsbury, 1987. Studlar, Gaylyn. “Shadowboxing: Fat City and the Malaise of Masculinity.” Reflections in a Male Eye: John Huston and the American Cinema. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993.

Knocking the Boxer Down When John Huston’s 1972 filmFat City opens, we are introduced to a brad garcia fighter on his way out. Many boxing films incorporate a montage that features a fighter winning fights and depicts his rise to prominence. The opening of Fat City is a montage but it is not of a fighter winning fights. Instead, it is a montage of the poor milling about the streets of impoverished Stockton, California. While we watch the montage, the music to the Kris Kristofferson song, “Help me make it through the Night,” plays without the words. The music combined with the montage establishes a slow cadence and depressing mood as we absorb the squalor of the streets of Stockton. As the montage ends, we zoom in on one of the nondescript windows of a rundown brown building behind a dirt lot. We then dissolve into the scene taking place in a room of the building. We see a man whom we later learn is former fighter Billy Tully (Stacy Keach) waking up alone in a seedy motel room. Our first shot of Tully is taken from the foot of a white bed on which he lies. The bed features a black metal railing at its head and its foot. In our initial shot of Tully, the railing at the foot of the bed is in the foreground, separating us from him (fig. 8). The image of us separated from Tully by dark thin bars as he lies 21 Masculinity and Violence in American Cinema

on a white square is a parallel to later scenes in the movie featuring the boxing ring. Like Tully’s bed, the boxing ring also has a white floor and in Fat City, scenes involving boxing are often shot with the dark ropes of the ring in the foreground and the boxers fighting behind them (fig. 9). The similarity between the composition of most of the boxing scenes in the movie and the composition of the opening shot of Tully on the bed makes it so that we can almost picture him not lying in bed, but lying in the boxing ring as if knocked down by an opponent. He wears a blank dazed stare and doesn’t move for a few seconds, much 8 as a stunned boxer might. His arm is draped around a pillow, in the way a husband would drape his arm around his wife. The positioning of his arm serves to emphasize that he is alone, with only a pillow to hug close to him. The lighting in the room is low-key and the fill light is used sparingly. The result is that the room is full of shadows and lacks the glossy, crisp look characteristic of most generic boxing films. We soon become accustomed to the unusual lighting scheme because it persists for the remainder of Fat City. For example, we later see that instead of the boxing ring being brightly lit and the boxing 9 audience shrouded in darkness as is typically the case in boxing films, inFat City the boxing ring is only slightly brighter than the audience. The result is that the typical sharp delineation between where the ring ends and the crowd begins is gone. Instead, the divide between the crowd and the ring are nothing more than the ropes of the ring. The unusual dim lighting scheme serves to give the film and the opening scene an authentic, grimy feel. After a few seconds, Tully rises from the bed and begins to move about the room. At multiple junctures he pauses, unmoving, with a blank, dazed stare on his face. This serves to emphasize the slow cadence of the film. Paradoxically, 22 brad garcia as soon as Tully begins to get dressed for the day, the words to “Help Me Make It Through the Night” begin. Like the music to “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” the lyrics are anything but energetic: “Yesterday is dead and gone. And tomorrow is out of sight. And it’s bad to be alone. Help me make it through the night” (Sing365.com). The lyrics deepen the feeling of irony as we later learn that Tully is a burnt-out boxer who almost achieved greatness but fell short. After he failed to achieve greatness, Tully’s wife left him, leaving him all alone. The lyrics to the song foreshadow the information we will later learn about Tully as his yesterday is indeed dead and gone. He also has little hope for a future but instead is an alcoholic who works as a field hand to make ends meet. Throughout the film, he always discusses getting back in boxing shape but repeatedly turns to the bottle whenever he starts making progress. For Tully, his tomorrow is out of sight. The lyrics, “It’s bad to be alone,” emphasize his aloneness. Although the sun is shining through the window of Tully’s room, between the mood and Tully’s circumstances it seems that for Tully, life really is as “dark as the night” (Sing 365.com). This scene is only a small example of how John Huston uses Fat City to break the traditional mold of the boxing film. By doing so, he takes the boxer off the pedestal erected for him by movies like Body and Soul and Rocky and forces us to view the boxer not as a heroic, invincible, god- like figure, but instead as an average human being. To understand how Huston goes against his genre, let’s examine the features of the typical boxing film. According to Ledger Grindon, the typical boxing movie features a number of key elements. These elements are “the promise” as a young (promising) boxer is “discovered” and shows signs of greatness, “the rise” of this boxer as he wins fights and gains notoriety, the boxer’s “first big fight,” the boxer’s fall into “debauchery” due to his newfound riches, “the dive” as the boxer throws a fight to continue the flow of mob money and support, the boxer’s “second big fight,” and the “resolution” of the boxing film (Grindon, 59). Huston integrates some of these elements into his film, but with his own unique style. One element of the traditional boxing film that Huston integrates into Fat City is the promise. After Tully leaves his motel, he goes to the YMCA where he spars with a young, white man he meets there. This young 23 Masculinity and Violence in American Cinema

man, Ernie Munger (Jeff Bridges), tells Tully he saw him fight once. Tully hopefully asks Ernie if he won when Ernie watched him. Ernie’s reply is no. The reply is a bit of a shock as instead of Tully having an aura of greatness and a swagger about him as the fighters in typical boxing movies do, he instead appears to be a mediocre boxer who is far from invincible. Tully then tells Ernie that he thinks Ernie is talented; he encourages him to talk to his former manager, Ruben Luna (Nicholas Colasanto). We might expect that this is the conventional “promise” from the generic boxing film and that we will soon be watching a montage of Ernie’s rise. Our expectations about Ernie’s potential continue to rise after he goes to see Ruben. Ruben has Ernie spar with another boxer. As the scene ends, the film dissolves to a scene of Ruben sitting in bed with his wife (fig. 10). The lighting of this scene is low key and the principle source of light is a table lamp on the far right side of the room. The lighting causes the room to be filled with shadows. The opening shot of the scene is taken from the left side of the bed. Ruben is sitting up, facing the foot of the bed giving us only a side shot of his figure. His wife, on the other hand, faces the camera but is lying down with her eyes closed. The orientation of Ruben and his wife 10 serves to emphasize the fact that Ruben’s wife is asleep and is not listening to Ruben. Our eyes are drawn to the face in the frame that is facing us, that of Ruben’s sleeping wife. Nevertheless, Ruben is enthusiastically talking about Ernie and the success he can have as, “A white… good-looking fighter.” The only response Ruben receives from his wife is a sleepy, unenergetic “That’s good.” Ruben continues his excited chatter saying that Ernie will be successful, “If only he would listen to [Ruben] and [Ruben] could put everything [he] know[s] into him.” Once we have gotten a good look at Ruben’s wife ignoring him, the camera zooms in on the side of Ruben’s face and he continues talking. We then pan to Ruben’s wife, giving us a close up of her sleeping and reemphasizing the fact that she is oblivious to her husband’s excitement. This mise-en-scène reveals that Ruben is not the typical trainer from the generic boxing film. According to Ledger Grindon, in the generic boxing 24 film, “The trainer usually assumes a subsidiary role as the caretaker to the brad garcia body…[and] also the minister to the soul” (Grindon, 59). He usually is a wise counselor whose opinion is respected as is the case with the character Ben in the 1947 Robert Rossen film,Body and Soul. The fact that the cinematography in this scene makes it painfully obvious that Ruben’s wife is not listening to him discredits Ruben and shows us he is not the typical trainer whose counsel is respected. Ruben’s wife’s reaction affects our own. When Ernie’s first bout does arrive, our hopes are buoyed that he is going to succeed. Ruben scouts out Ernie’s opponent and makes it sound like Ernie will have no trouble beating him. Before the fight, Ernie also receives a pep talk from another one of Ruben’s fighters, a black fighter who is under the age of eighteen, the minimum age to fight. This underage fighter, Buford (Wayne Mahan) tells Ernie that the key to boxing is, “…wanting to win bad enough.” If a fighter wants to win, then he will. The speech is inspiring and sounds awfully similar to a description of the American dream. Ernie says that he wants to win and his victory seems almost certain. Not only does Ernie lose, all of Ruben’s fighters lose. We learn this not by seeing each of their fights but instead by seeing them all sitting around a table in a bar afterward. Each fighter is bloodied and beaten and Ruben is making excuses for their losses telling them they were inches from victory or had the fight stolen from them due to poor officiating. It seems like Ruben doesn’t know how to train fighters or else why did all of his fighters, including the supposedly promising Ernie, lose? At this point, we feel as if we have lost the fight. We are as crushed as the boxers are. The familiar elements of a boxing film are nowhere to be found. Ruben looks like a fraud. Moreover, we feel as if the plot is now careening out of control because unlike the typical formulaic boxing film, we have no idea what will happen next. Moreover, why isn’t the American dream coming true for these boxers, especially our champion Ernie? Ernie has gone through Grindon’s “discovery” but has been discovered to be a failure, not a champion. We realize that in Fat City there will be no familiar resolution and no good triumphing over evil. There will just be men living their pathetic lives and trying to scrape by. The reason that Huston paints this picture is that he wants to give us a realistic view of boxing. The majority of boxing films are about the tiny sliver of boxers who become champions. Huston wants us to feel the frustration faced by the majority of boxers 25 Masculinity and Violence in American Cinema

who are stuck in the same old jobs, all the while trying to convince themselves that one day they will make it big as boxers when we and they both know they never will. He wants us to know that most trainers are not all-knowing sages. They are normal people. He wants us to be confused and uncertain about Tully and Ernie’s futures just as most boxers are. Only by humanizing Ruben, Ernie, and Tully to the point that they appear pathetic, can Huston make us understand that boxing is not a sport that is all about glamour and success. For every fighter and trainer that rises from the masses to become the champion of the world, there are hundreds who are left behind, unable to accomplish the same feat.

Works cited Leger Grindon, “Body and Soul: The Structure of Meaning in the Boxing Film Genre,” Cinema Journal 35:4. Fat City, DVD, directed by John Huston (1972; Culver City, CA: Columbia Pictures, 1997). “Help Me Make It Through The Night Lyrics,” Lyrics 365, http://www.sing365.com/music/lyric.nsf/help-me-make-it-through-the- night-lyrics-kris-kristofferson/66aa9e090d20195a48256a8c000b43de

Opportunity vs. Difference : The Final Fights in Fat City and Body and Soul roxanne paul In “Body and Soul: The Structure of Meaning in the Boxing Film Genre,” Leger Grindon lists the genre’s characteristic tensions. One of these, “opportunity vs. difference,” pertains to the common theme, within the genre, of an ethnically marked character finding opportunity in a world biased against him. Body and Soul (Robert Rossen, 1947) displays this theme: Charlie Davis (John Garfield), a Jewish amateur boxer, rises to fame. Fat City (John Huston, 1972) deviates from this traditional boxing film formula by showing a white, ethnically unmarked man’s inglorious attempt to get back in the game. Due to the lack of ethnic identity in Billy Tully’s character, played by Stacy Keach, Grindon’s concept of opportunity 26 roxanne paul vs. difference is ultimately subverted, and replaced with a sense of opportunity lost, and listlessness. Tully is not the triumphant hero that Charlie Davis embodies; instead he is a sad figure, with whom we do not easily identify. He becomes a very different boxing protagonist. This difference causes the fights involving the main characters – Charlie in Body and Soul and Tully in Fat City – to take on completely different tones and meanings: Charlie’s is climactic and glorious; Tully’s pointless and bland. Body and Soul’s Charlie Davis lives in a ghetto-like slum of a big city with his parents who own a candy shop. It is clear from the beginning of the film that Charlie’s family is not wealthy and that if he were to continue in his father’s footsteps and manage the store, he would only scrape by. Grindon explains this as “ethnic identification intersected with class difference, characterizing the boxer as a poor worker selling physical labor in an industrialized economy, which [finds] little value in his skills” (Grindon, 55). Charlie is set up as a member of a socially immobile class. His family’s profession is shown to be unstable and unprofitable when his mother comments on the futility of the shop due to the location. His financial straits are contrasted with the success of Roberts (Lloyd Gough), the unethical fight promoter, who is clearly wealthy. Charlie’s success as a boxer becomes an integral part of the story, for he is presented with a challenge that speaks to his economic and ethnic background: “can the opportunity be seized? Will difference be overcome by money?” (Grindon, 56) In the final fight, Charlie ultimately fights for his humble background, and against the tempting riches that Roberts represents. He is fighting against money, which he has found leads to debauchery, and he refuses to throw the fight. This is what makes Charlie’s final fight so meaningful. Aside from the fact that Charlie is fighting against the system that has “fixed” the fight, Charlie is also fighting against the ethnic bounds that hold him back. His social background, coupled with his ethnicity, sets him apart from Roberts, and shows a clear class barrier. As he gets into the ring, he fights for his background as well as his dignity and himself. This struggle heightens the meaning of the scene, and raises the stakes of the fight. The viewer cares a lot more about what happens in the ring, because it is representative of many levels of 27 Masculinity and Violence in American Cinema

conflict. This is reflected in the cinematography. The camera follows Charlie’s moves in such a way that the fight seems realistic and dramatic. As the fight gets down to the last rounds, Charlie, who has been down and out almost the entire time, starts to turn the fight around. Previously, the camera has been behind the ropes, watching the fight; the camera’s perspective was aligned with that of the diegetic audience. As Charlie starts to win, the perspective changes: all of a sudden, the shots are close-ups of Charlie and his opponent Jack Marlowe (Artie Dorrell), looking directly at the camera (fig. 11-12). These direct close-ups make the viewer feel as though she is in the ring. This closeness with the boxers heightens the suspense, and also helps the viewer identify with 11 Charlie. The high-contrast lighting picks out Charlie and Marlowe, and renders the rest of the space black; they are the only two important objects in the shot. When these close-ups appear, the characters seem to almost be alone, with nothing there but the two men who must fight. Finally, Charlie knocks out his opponent, achieving a definitive win. The movie ends shortly after this, leaving us with the glory of the fight and the triumph of the boxer. The viewer is satisfied that Charlie has won, because she has identified with him through this cinematography, and because Charlie has defeated social differences that have held him back. The fact that Charlie is victorious in the end is crucial. In Fat City, things are different. The whole film centers on two hapless characters: Tully, a washed up aging 12 boxer with little motivation in life except alcohol, and Ernie Munger (Jeff Bridges), a young up-and-comer who is given a shot at the “small time.” The film is a boxing film, for sure, yet many aspects do not fit into Grindon’s binary oppositions. In particular, the main character(s) do not fit the general stereotype of the boxing film protagonist. Unlike Charlie, Tully and Ernie are ethnically unmarked. Ruben Luna (Nicholas Colosanto), their trainer, emphasizes their whiteness: “Anglos don’t want to pay to see two coloreds fight, they 28 wanna see a white guy [Ernie] fight.” These characters lack the roxanne paul ethnic identity, which is a part of the ‘difference’ to which Grindon refers. Yet this adds an interesting aspect to the film. Although they are “Anglos”, they are still poor, like Charlie in Body and Soul. This is evident in the scene where Ernie and Tully wake up early and go to find work. It is established here that Tully is a day laborer, and therefore most likely poor and of a lower social class. This would seem to fit the ‘difference’ side of “opportunity vs. difference.” Yet, unlike Body and Soul, there is no Roberts to show the class structure. Where Roberts and Charlie are clearly of different backgrounds, Ruben and his fighters are indistinguishable, class-wise. We see Ruben’s home and Tully’s home; although Ruben’s home is obviously nicer than Tully’s one-room apartment, there isn’t a large difference. It’s as if there is not a very high standard of opportunity to which the boxers can strive. For Ernie, he can struggle as a boxer, but there is no standard of richness present in the movie to act as a motivator. Although he is poor, his class means very little, because there is no richer class present with which to contrast. The only other boxer featured in the film is Tully, who has seen success, but is currently not living a privileged life of any kind. There is little opportunity present in the film, which makes the class difference, the poverty, impersonal. Although Tully hopes to regain his family and success, and Ernie hopes to support his family, the film does not focus on boxing as the answer. Ernie must supplement his winnings with odd jobs, and Tully complains about the meager amount in his winnings; clearly, although boxing is a source of opportunity, it is not adequate. The fact that true opportunity does not exist in their world distinguishes the film from Body and Soul and the boxing genre more generally. This lack of opportunity lowers the stakes of Tully’s final fight. While Charlie’s fight is the climax of the film, Tully’s fight at the end holds little suspense. The camera rarely takes a point-of-view shot and mostly maintains a distance from the fighters. To heighten this, most shots show Tully and his opponent Lucero (Sixto Rodriguez) behind ropes that are in the extreme foreground of the shot. It places the viewer in the crowd, and not within the ring (fig. 13). The few close- ups of Tully are in profile, or as he sits at the side of the ring; there are no point of view shots, and no full-face close-ups. This helps lessen the identification with Tully. Aspects of the narrative add to 29 Masculinity and Violence in American Cinema

this effect – the audience knows his opponent is sick, for the film shows that Lucero has blood in his urine. Consequently, the win seems less of an achievement. In addition, the fact that when Tully wins, he only wins by decision, and is not happy with the amount of money he receives from winning the fight, points to the bout’s lack of consequence. There is no glorious finale ,as in Body and Soul, but rather an anti-climactic, unhappy ending. All of these elements, coupled with the absence of opportunity and difference, strip this final scene of excitement. Because of the lack of opportunity, and the 13 resulting lack of meaning in this final fight, Fat City as a whole seems to be almost a parody of the boxing film genre. While a large part of the draw of a film like Body and Soul is the suspense in the last fight, Fat City takes this energy away. There are only worn-out bodies at stake – not dignity or temptation. An important aspect of such a structured genre is the possibility of altering aspects within that genre, and these changes can come with great consequence and meaning. Perhaps we can read into Huston’s decision to deviate from a genre norm as a conscious choice, to show the pitfalls of the traditional boxing film. Although a success story of a disadvantaged youth is exciting and appealing, the more likely realistic story is that of an already fallen star who has given up much of his success, and has turned to drink. Huston seeks a reality that challenges the non-reality of the typical genre film and shows a desolation that is missing from Rossen’s fairytale ending. This allows for Fat City to feel more realistic, while also being sad and drab. Rossen’s film, although exciting, seems almost fake in comparison. These two films therefore serve as a prime example of genre revision.

Works cited Leger Grindon, “Body and Soul: The Structure of Meaning in the Boxing Film Genre” in Cinema Journal 35:4, 54-69. 30 Fat City : Revising the Boxing Genre through the Prism of Urban Blight

John Huston’s 1972 filmFat City offers an unsparing account of reality. james johnson While on the surface it may appear to be a depiction of individuals who start nowhere and go nowhere, on a deeper level one finds that the film is bursting with thematic, aesthetic, and societal narratives. In Fat City, a close analysis of the story of Billy Tully (Stacy Keach) serves as a social commentary on the unglamorous failures of masculinity within the economically stagnant locale of Stockton. Houston’s fatalist treatment of this setting is honest. The director captures the static and idle conditions of Stockton not only in his cinematic depiction of the town, but also in his situating each character within the environment. These realist aesthetics offer insight as to why the characters must behave the way they do, and why they ultimately wind up nowhere. Huston establishes the mood accurately in the opening montage, portraying the long impoverished city of Stockton and the troubled characters residing within this community. On dusty sidewalks, unemployed men from all ages and backgrounds idle about in tattered clothes, with weary faces and little movement. They loiter around abandoned, boarded-up storefronts. A few men hold half-empty bottles of alcohol, and others pass time by smoking cigarettes. Among these unfortunate citizens is Billy Tully, an unemployed boxer past his prime. Huston’s treatment of Tully is not dissimilar to that of his treatment of Stockton early on in the film. Tully first appears in a cheap hotel room. The lighting is low key and the camera slowly follows his lethargic movement as he ambles around the room in search of a match to light his cigarette. He is sloppily dressed in undergarments, unshaven and disheveled, much in the same way that his hotel room is shabby, stained, and disorderly. And it is suggested that Tully has a tendency to return to alcohol whenever he can produce the funds. Though Tully’s initial prospects seem sour, his status as a boxer initially subverts the socioeconomic background of this setting, hinting at the promise of Tully as a potentially successful athlete. Eventually, the viewer is made to feel as if Tully will rise above and escape this impoverished society through resuming his training, rekindling his relationship with the local boxing 31 Masculinity and Violence in American Cinema

manager, and finding relative romantic stability despite being separated from his wife. However, as the narrative unfolds, we see that Huston is more concerned with the truths that films often choose to neglect, returning Tully to the sour state in which he is introduced. This neglect is essentially the product of the problematic situation of the masculine figure within a defeatist setting like Stockton. Viewers attempt to project studio-era expectations for male boxing heroes onto Billy Tully, but John Huston’s decision to set Fat City in such a hostile environment subverts the classic masculine success story of decades previous. Asbjørn Grønstad of the University of Bergen maintains that the dynamics of life in Stockton serve to “deglamorise the world of boxing and machismo in a way that few, if any, films in the genre have done before or after.”1 While it may have been a convention of Hollywood cinema to place an unambiguously masculine boxer within a context of social hardship and have him graduate to fame and riches, Huston plays with the more realistic Stocktonian option, in which the protagonist’s decay is married to the decay of his environment. One can correlate this deterioration to the uncomfortable position of traditional empowered masculinity within this unglamorous world, as Grønstad holds. This analysis is shared by theorists like Gaylyn Studlar, who suggests that the film “refuses to celebrate a male world” and that it plays with the impossibility of masculine idealism “based on the cult of the body even as it reveals the pernicious force still exerted by that necessarily aggressive ideal” within the context of working and bottom class males.2 Studlar raises an interesting point in that Huston does not deliberately attack the physicality of the male body, but instead refuses to treat it with the respect and the preeminent influence that it receives from more traditional filmmakers and writers. We see depictions of the exposed male body at several points throughout Fat City, and it is important to note that in none of these scenes is the body itself aesthetically equated with the disrepair of Stockton. Tully, despite having aged, is still muscular and healthy. Fellow boxer Ernie Munger’s 1 Grønstad, Asbjørn. “Topographies of Defeat: Masculinity and Desolation in Fat City and Junior Bonner”. University of Waterloo. http://www.kinema. uwaterloo.ca/article.php?id=167&feature 2 Studlar, Gaylyn. “Shadowboxing: Fat City and the Malaise of Masculinity”, in Gaylyn Studlar & David Desser (eds.), Reflections in a Male Eye. John Huston 32 and the American Experience. Washington: Smithsonian Institute, 1993. james johnson (Jeff Bridges) figure plays well to the youthful, flamboyant, attractive physical ideal, and even Lucero’s (Sixto Rodriguez) physique is visually appealing, despite its troubled inner condition. What Huston instead chooses is to situate these bodies within defeatist narratives, as we have seen. Essentially, these bodies are powerless outside of the ring, which is a very conscious critique of the traditional Hollywood boxing drama, where physical triumph in the ring parallels emotional and financial triumph outside the ring. For Tully and Munger, physical prowess fails them financially, and for Lucero, his chiseled core is useless against the relentless march of disease. When Billy Tully rekindles his relationship with his former manager and trainer, it appears that he will enjoy a renaissance, financially and emotionally, and perhaps will enjoy the comforts of the traditional Hollywood treatment of masculine prowess. However, viewers understand that all of these positives will be uprooted in the end. Even early on, Huston captures the essence of the whole narrative in a single shot of Lido’s gym. A stark off-white wooden siding fills the entire frame, three times higher than Munger, who is seen walking in solitude across this enormous structure (fig. 14). The boxer is dwarfed by the very place in which he is expected to blossom. The viewer then sees the failures to which Ruben (Nicholas Colasanto), the manager, has subjected his group of “talented” young amateurs. A particular scene of note is the locker room scene prior to Ernie Munger’s first bout, a classic display of masculinity by both Munger and fellow boxer Buford (Wayne Mahan), who has aspirations of being world champion by eighteen. The scene offers a traditional depiction 14 of the powerful male body, but it is perhaps more meaningful in its dialogue. The younger boxer’s words suggest that a fighter’s mental desires are by every measure as important and decisive in determining victory as corporeal power. In a twist of irony, this conversation about mental preparation disregards the fact that Munger is physically unprepared, and he is given a painful technical knockout despite both boxers’ vociferous confidence in pulverizing their opponents.The unfolding plot undercuts the success promised by the young, fit male 33 Masculinity and Violence in American Cinema

body, and by Buford’s strong assertion of willpower. After all of Ruben’s boxers suffer bitter defeat, it becomes clear that the masculine ideal was essentially only gilded, an idea Huston subtly expresses when Munger dons his new silver and gold robe; He has the look of the winner, but is lacking in substance. He has the motivation to succeed, but motivation cannot supersede reality. He has a solid core, but was upended by a bleeding appendage. This is not dissimilar to the problematic condition of Stockton boxing. An untalented manager negotiates a society of losers who want to succeed but are anchored by the cold reality of amateur boxing. A critical narrative moment comes after Tully defeats an ailing Lucero in a closely contested match. Lucero is seen to be in a state of inner decay, abandoned by his management in a foreign country without proper medical support, just as Tully was years earlier in Panama. This is a difficult reality to deal with, as the viewers are constantly reminded that boxing in Stockton is indeed on a small-scale, short of the million-dollar entourages and medical staffs associated with prominent champions. Lesley Brill claims that the cinematic diegesis in Fat City reinforces notions of mediocrity, failure, and the mundane, affirming thatFat City “meditates on the common humanity expressed in ordinary people, gestures, and events.”3 Huston’s obsession with honest reality sets the tone much differently than a film likeBody and Soul, as the former is riddled with such instances that dwarf the importance of beautiful and perfect man. Indeed, within the cinematic space and the depressed environment, Huston downplays man’s role within the grand scheme of things, whether it be an individual who is dwarfed by an ominously large building, the sloppy cooking of a humble meal, the knocking over of boxes and bottles, or the frustration of finding a cigarette light.4 In this context, Tully and Munger, extensions of their environment, are doomed from the beginning to the mediocrity that surrounds them. From the beginning, the viewer understands the social conditions in which the story is set, but is unaware that these characters will ultimately fail to graduate on to something more grandiose. Whereas Body and Soul was set in the promising urban bustle of New York City,

3 Brill, Lesley. John Huston’s Filmmaking. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. 195. 34 4 Brill, 195. james johnson the characters in Fat City are constricted by a lack of choices. Tully and Munger are forced to work in the fields, and Tully is forced to fight. Munger is forced to marry, and Ruben is forced into staging an unfavorable pairing of Tully and Lucero. This desperation plays on the environment by feeding it, as each character always seems one step away from developing into any of the anonymouspeople we see in the opening montage. For Asbjørn Grønstad, Fat City “conceives of urban decline not as a condition eventually to be overcome by the slum dweller but as a lasting externalization of the plight of the characters that are products of the city…The city for Huston thus becomes an extension of the protagonist, or vice versa, and not an antagonistic structure that the hero must conquer or escape from.”5 The film is unique in this respect, as viewers have been accustomed to figures embodying Hollywood glamour more often than not. While Fat City is indeed a fictional narrative, it has an unquestionable air of cinematic reality. In relation to the opening montage, we can see how any of those downtrodden figures could have shared the life story of Huston’s characters. Indeed the genre of the boxing film itself is called into question in Huston’s critique of working class suburban struggle. Boxing is a sport classically marked as ethnic and undignified, and Huston is well aware of this. Huston explores what a film likeBody and Soul neglects: setting a boxing film scene in a luxurious New York City hotel ignores the sport’s specificity, as its recruits come from working class families, hardly those associated with posh hotels. Huston’s commentary suggests that boxing should remain tied to its roots in settings like Stockton, which capture the reality of the sport. John Huston’s Fat City is brutal in its honest views on failure. Though Billy Tully is a marked as a failure, he is not the only failure. If we are to contextualize Huston’s work on setting within a framework of perpetual “failure”, then we see how professor Norman Holland would reach the conclusion that any of the characters in Fat City are virtually interchangeable.6 None of these characters is powerful enough to leave Stockton, and for this reason the entire film is framed in seedy hotels, dilapidated streets, and low class bars. Even the promising Ernie Munger must win his fights by decision. While it appears that young 5 Grønstad, Kinema Online 6 Holland, Norman. “Seeing Huston’s Freud”. University of Florida. http://www.clas.ufl. edu/users/nholland/huston.htm 35 Masculinity and Violence in American Cinema

Munger’s life may be stable at the end of the film, the final trifecta of characters, Munger, Tully, and the elderly waiter hint that at any point these characters can find themselves following any of the other’s stories. Tully was once successful and married, now reduced to homelessness and unemployment. Munger is becoming a successful boxer and himself married, but once again by virtue of his environment could any day come crashing down and wind up like Tully. And while both characters are still relatively young, the elderly waiter stands as a symbol and a reminder that one day, they may both wind up in their “golden years” far short of riches, fame, or glory.

“Clothes Make the Man” darienne turner This quote taken from the filmFat City contradicts the idea that character cannot be reliably reflected through outward appearance. Unfortunately, with a simple glance, we can extrapolate a person’s social standing as it is suggested by his or her look. The idea that a man does demonstrate his character through appearance comes to life in John Huston’s filmFat City with the main character Billy Tully (Stacy Keach). In Fat City, John Huston presents an unglamorized former boxer and uses the transformations of his appearance to highlight the societal standards for males as they existed in the 1970’s. Throughout the course of the film, Tully’s appearance clearly reflects his current emotional state and social status, and with the information derived from the way he looks, members of the audience can see Tully’s ultimate status as a failure. Tully strives to transform the way he appears through working for material wealth and strengthening his body through exercise. These corporeal changes mirror his attempt to amend his position in the social order and adhere to the societal standard for American males. His ultimate failure to change his appearance to that of a successful man by the end of the film signifies that he has failed in changing his place in society as well. By the closing credits John Huston has demonstrated that within the world of the film, successful 36 social mobility manifests itself through physical and material gains, and darienne turner therefore, based on appearance one can judge whether or not a man is successful. The film begins with a languid montage sequence of the run-down areas of Stockton, and eventually introduces us to Billy Tully in his transient home, a cheap hotel room. The scene begins with a medium-long shot that reveals the main character Tully listlessly reclining on a bed (fig. 15). Although at first the view is partially obscured by the bed frame, the audience can clearly identify Tully’s objective as the camera slowly follows his movement around the room while he searches for matches to light his cigarette. The content of the scene remains 15 rather simplistic, but the cinematographic subtleties at play shed light on Tully’s place in society. One of the most notable characteristics in the opening scene is the lighting. Broad daylight streams in through the window, and from this the audience can gather that Tully does not have daytime responsibilities and, therefore, does not currently hold a steady job. With this assumption based on the visual characteristics of the scene, the audience has already begun to judge Tully’s character. The significance of the scene extends to the camera’s slow movement that mirrors Tully’s lethargic nature (fig. 16). The camera unapologetically reveals Tully’s physique, which is non-athletic despite his status as a former boxer. Gaylyn Studlar, in her essay “Fat City and the Malaise of Masculinity,” expands on this idea. In reference to the opening scene, Studlar states that, “spread-eagle on his bed in his T-shirt and jockey shorts, Tully is displayed for the spectator’s curious gaze . . . there are no fetishizing close-ups of taut muscularity to promise the power and excitement of physical action. Tully’s listless form is not an erotic spectacle or a cult ideal, but the object of the camera’s detached, distanced, almost clinical gaze” (Studlar 186-187). Tully appears unlike many main characters in boxing films that embody masculinity, strength and success. Studlar continues her analysis: “the [alcohol] bottles and the image of Tully’s distended belly immediately convey the boxer’s deteriorated physical condition and its apparent cause” 37 Masculinity and Violence in American Cinema

(Studlar 187). Tully’s appearance as such in this scene makes a profound impression on the audience and helps shape opinions surrounding his personality. In both physical appearance and physical surroundings, Tully is established as a failure. He does not have a wedding ring or a true home, which indicates his failure to become a good husband and family man. Additionally, his unfit body signifies failure on a professional level, because he is obviously no longer working as a boxer. These visual traits combine to construct the audience’s view of Tully and establish him as a failure in terms of 16 the masculine standards of his society. After this particular moment in the narrative of the film, Tully demonstrates a renewed interest in resuming his professional boxing career. Around the same time that Tully begins training, he also begins working as an agricultural field worker. With these actions, Tully demonstrates his desire to achieve the societal male standard through two avenues: both an ideological one and a physical one. Tully embraces his masculinity in an ideological sense as he resumes his pursuit of material wealth. Within the American capitalistic paradigm in which Tully exists, the masculine identity rests largely on the visible acquisition of material wealth, and as such, his reestablishment of this pursuit indicates his assumption of male responsibility (Studlar 183). In several scenes, Tully forlornly discusses his former life of modest comfort and hints at his desire to attain such status again. By beginning his boxing career again, the audience can safely assume that Tully hopes to reclaim his former status defined by a wife and a home. If he were to achieve such goals, he would embrace the male ideal and visually announce a revolution of character for the better. Tully’s rediscovered interest in boxing and working also indicates his desire to elevate his place in society by announcing his masculinity through his physique. Considering the fact that professional boxing was, “the ultimate spectacle of manliness, with half-nude, lower-class men confirming the energy, [and] brute power…”, the jobs of a boxer and that of a field worker seem to complement one another in terms 38 darienne turner of their sheer physicality (Studlar 178). One can further connect the two areas of work through an examination of their exploitive attributes. Leger Grindon explains in the article, “Body and Soul: The Structure of Meaning in the Boxing Film Genre” that throughout history the world has viewed boxers as “poor worker[s] selling physical labor in an industrialized economy which found little value in [their] skills [and] as a result, the boxer generally represents an oppressed underclass struggling to rise” (Grindon 55). Both of Tully’s jobs perceptibly possess a rather exploitive nature, however they also provide a route for him to achieve the masculine ideal by providing him with money and promoting his transformation into a physically fit man. The corporeal changes exist as markers of achievement and large strides toward the masculine ideal, although they are short lived in Tully’s case as he soon gives up his ambitions. As the film progresses, the audience watches Tully fail to achieve a higher rank in society. One scene that captures this fact particularly well presents Tully’s negative experience surrounding his “big fight” at the end of the film. During the fight, Tully receives a cut near his eye, and although innocuous in its physical nature, the cut represents a much larger psychological message. The cut is located in nearly the exact same spot as a cut that Tully received in a big fight years before in Panama, where he received the cut from an opponent’s hidden razor blades. In the scene after the fight Tully tells his trainer (Nicholas Colosanto), “you know where I got this cut Ruben? It’s the same place that I got cut with that razor blade when you sent me down to Panama to fight all by myself cause you were too tight to come down and work in my corner” (Huston). Tully’s trainer Ruben responds by telling him that the cut is not from old scar tissue, but Tully simply dismisses the idea. Tully claims that his experience in Panama ruined him. Whether or not Panama was the cause, we know he quit boxing, rejected his male societal duties and fell into reclusion. The fact that here he receives a similar cut, in combination with his obscenely small winnings for the fight, instigates his subsequent withdrawal from society. The symbolism of the cut acts as an accurate method of foreshadowing Tully’s repeated future as a failure, as shortly thereafter he gives up on the acquisition of the male ideal and once again allows his body to fall into decline. 39 Masculinity and Violence in American Cinema

Tully’s failure comes fully to light within the final scene of the film. The scene reveals Tully with his protégé Ernie Munger (Jeff Bridges) months after Tully quit fighting. The two grab a coffee in a run-down diner, however, there is much more at play within the shots of this sequence. According to Studlar, the visual dynamics of the scene “register Tully’s isolation, his loneliness, his realization that this world of male ritual play is as meaningless as the violent ‘play’ that has dominated and depleted his own life. Perhaps Huston is attempting to provide the audience with a visual indicator of Tully’s alcoholism, his neurological as well as psychological distress” (Studlar 195). The cinematography utilizes a medium close up that zooms in on Tully’s eyes to reveal Tully blankly staring off into space. This stylized shot leaves the audience wondering whether or not Tully recognizes his evident failure. Tully has failed to meet the masculine ideal on virtually every level, and therefore, failed to represent the prototypical successful boxer present in the boxing genre. The larger implications for Tully’s demise parallel the contemporary trajectory of the contributor, if not establisher, of the masculine ideal: America itself. At the time of the film, America is currently involved in the polarizing event of the Vietnam War. As Tully represents the common lower-class American man, he directly parallels America’s “ . . . exploitation of lower-class white males and minorities in an effort to prove America’s “manhood” in a symbolic struggle for international dominance” (Studlar 181). The nation’s initial aspirations paralleled Tully’s own, but in the end they both fell short of achieving the ideal. America did not win a sweeping and glorious victory in Vietnam, and Tully did not win his battle to achieve a higher societal status as clearly demonstrated by his disheveled appearance and visual mental reclusion at the end of the film.

Works cited Fat City. Dir. John Huston. Perf. Stacy Keach and Jeff Bridges. Columbia Pictures Corporation, 1972. DVD. Grindon, Leger. “Body and Soul: The Structure of Meaning in the Boxing Film Genre.” Cinema Journal 4 (1996): 54-69. Studlar, Gaylyn. “Fat City and the Malaise of Masculinity.” Reflections in a Male Eye: John Huston and the American Experience. 40 Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1993. 177-98. Hustonian Humanity : Musings on the Human Condition in Fat City Over the course of a prodigious career spanning several decades, legendary derek knowles director John Huston has crafted and maintained a style unique to him. With his notable contributions to film culture that have spawned a long line of followers, Huston is certainly deserving of the auteur label. Unlike perhaps a Hitchcock or a Ford who soared to critical and popular acclaim with the seizure and subsequent mastery of a particular genre, Huston is a more difficult filmmaker to categorize, because of the seemingly wide range of subjects he tends to engage. And yet, in spite of the apparent outward diversity of his films, all of them share something characteristically Hustonian, either thematically, cinematically, or diegetically. Whether undertaking film noir inThe Maltese Falcon (1941), the western/action/ adventure saga in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), or the romantic comedy in The African Queen (1951), Huston consistently displays a fascination with exploring universal humanity as it resides in the “lower” rungs of society. His decision to tackle the boxing film, a genre “about exposing the body in order to reveal the fundamental struggles of the soul” (Grindon 63), with 1972’s Fat City, is congruent with the thematic content of Huston’s prior filmography. Depicting characters living near the margins of society and grasping perilously to a tenuous existence, Huston’s Fat City allegorizes the human condition against the backdrop of pugilism in a painstakingly realistic fashion, as well as engendering the viewer’s identification with said characters so as to convey the inescapability and universality of life’s “fight.” Ultimately, Huston seems to be suggesting that, in the end we have only one another, and it is this human connection that sustains us. From the very opening shots, Huston reveals that, while the film concentrates predominantly on the exploits of certain characters, the experiences of these characters can be applied to anyone else, ranging from other minor players in the diegesis to the audience itself. As a series of fluid panning shots of Stockton, California greet the viewer, we see people of multiple ethnicities and ages hanging out together on street corners, in front of shop windows, and along run-down roads. In fact, Huston’s treatment of race and ethnicity in Fat City serves as a further signification of the common, interlinked humanity of the film’s characters. We might consider 41 Masculinity and Violence in American Cinema

here Oma and Earl’s relationship and the diversity of Ruben’s fighters and the residents of Stockton. Several shots later, an aerial view of the town dissolves into a sequence of multiple exposures that blends together these different people and places, marking them as indistinguishable and implying their inter‑connectedness. These images of a decaying Stockton are an apt metaphor for the various physically and psychologically battered characters in Fat City. It is through Huston’s juxtaposition of these characters, placing them via basic filmic techniques in similar circumstances or illustrating their shared struggle against the hands of fate, that the universality of the human condition is implied. Early on, a shot of Tully walking to the gym dissolves to one of Ernie working the punching bag, followed by a cut to Ruben. Later, the pitiful congregation of Ruben, Babe, and the fighters sitting downtrodden in a restaurant after their embarrassing and emasculating performance in Monterey precedes a shot of Tully entering a bar. The perfect symmetry of these two settings is not coincidental. There is the cut from one bar to another (or the exterior of it), a meaningful location in its own right and within the film, as it is the locus of the acting out of characters’ pain and struggle. Furthermore, Huston presents Ruben and his troupe, fresh off their own fight and outwardly defeated, and Tully, walking into a “ring” of his own, soon to be conquered by the fists of the drink. We are provided another example of the interchangeability of characters in Fat City when Tully, having left Oma to concentrate on his return to boxing, stops by her apartment, only to find that she is back with Earl and that Earl has taken his place, a realization further accentuated by the fact Earl is wearing Tully’s shirt. To label Fat City a boxing movie would be to ignore its substantial inclusion of elements of other genres (namely straight drama), as well as to dismiss the fact that little pugilism actually occurs in the film. Nonetheless, boxing functions throughout as a metaphor for the human condition, a backdrop against which Huston’s running commentary on the cruelty of life and how we try to palliate the struggle by seeking solace in one another is played out. Fat City’s most extensive boxing scene (Tully’s return to the ring against Lucero) perfectly encapsulates this idea. During the match, the two engage in a simultaneous contradiction, on the one hand attempting to hurt and weaken the other, but on the other, finding themselves united by their shared fates, by their physical wear, by their parallel roles in a more 42 derek knowles cosmic fight. Throughout the scene, we are presented with images of the two boxers literally clutching one another, the same blank, exhausted, beaten-down expressions on their faces. At no other point in the film is this paradox between the need for intimacy in the face of overwhelming ostracization better visually illustrated. It is in the ring, Huston suggests, that life’s drama is acted out. In this vein, Fat City plays on a classic motif of the boxing film, the body versus the soul, to promote its message of the commonality of human suffering. Such a tactic is accomplished in the ubiquity of physical deterioration displayed by several of the film’s characters. The viewer is first introduced to Tully as he lies in his cramped apartment, his balding hair, modest clothing, untidy room, and overall disheveled state as he searches lethargically around near-empty bottles of alcohol for a lighter, marking him as a figure of considerable physical and psychological entropy. Later, Ernie epitomizes a similar decline in bodily strength as he earnestly struggles in the mud to free his car, a precursor, perhaps, to his penchant for getting knocked out in the ring. At one point, Babe mentions that he is unable to breathe through his nose on “wet” days, the result of one punch to the face too many. Of course, there is also the (intentionally) comedic scene following the many boasts of Ruben’s brigade of fighters before their matches, where we witness them post‑fight, physically and egoically bruised, battered, and beat-up. In almost all these cases, the physical deterioration or failure each character experiences occurs despite his repeated attempts to prevent it, through no real fault of his own. It is as if Huston is implying that such is the way of the world, of life — c’est la vie — and there is naught to do but accept it. Ultimately, it seems, Huston is suggesting that life is suffering, suffering is life, and we need each other to get through it all, a point reinforced and further developed by the film’s final scene. This sequence, of particular importance to Huston’s overall commentary on the relationship between humanity and suffering and the manner in which we negotiate our fate, among other things, brilliantly brings full circle the opening montage of Stockton’s residents. Having been unable to escape unnoticed after being spotted randomly on the street, Ernie sits with Tully at a café counter after Tully has convinced him to humor him with a quick cup of coffee. As the two sit, mostly silent and somewhat awkwardly, Tully, considering the Asian waiter getting their coffee, rhetorically asks, “How’d 43 Masculinity and Violence in American Cinema

you like to wake up in the morning and be him?” After a brief moment, Ernie grunts, “God,” and Tully continues, “Jesus, the waste! Before you can get rolling, your life makes a beeline for the drain.” Tully, for his part, looks every bit the prototypical, aged, worn-down prizefighter, which makes his mixture of condescension and pity towards the old man all the more ironic. While the implication that Tully is a younger manifestation of the waiter, and certainly not his superior, is lost on him (and perhaps Ernie as well), such a realization is apparent to the audience. For in Tully, this agent and symbol of human fate, Huston challenges the viewer’s own inclination to do to Tully what he does to the waiter — that is, to project our own failings onto him and believe we are “better” than him. As the old man brings Ernie and Tully the coffee, the two thank him, and Ernie offers, “Maybe he’s happy.” Staring resolutely at a fixed point offscreen, Tully simply responds, “Maybe we’re all happy.” Whether Tully is being sarcastic or sincere in his statement is ambiguous. Tully then speculates whether the waiter was ever once young, and again Huston reintroduces the idea of everyone’s interconnectedness, for although Ernie cynically answers in the negative to Tully’s question, we of course know that the old man was young at one point, just as Ernie is and Tully was. Tully then turns in his chair and stares around the room, as we get an extreme close-up of his face, wearing a longing, weary, sad expression (fig. 17). This simple technique (the close-up) 17 is especially critical because, as Gaylyn Studlar argues in “Shadowboxing: Fat City and the Malaise of Masculinity,” it deviates from the detached camera style of the rest of the film. That is, prior to this moment, Huston rarely indulges the viewer’s desire to observe the film’s characters on a personal level: throughout almost the entirety of the picture, Huston keeps Fat City’s characters at a considerable distance from the camera. With the myriad of long shots that litter the film and portray characters so that they are hardly distinguishable from their backgrounds, Huston introduces (recall the early scene of Tully and Ernie sparring) and maintains an impersonal camera, a tactic that supplements Fat City’s running commentary on the universality of the human condition. 44 derek knowles Thus, as the camera pulls in on Tully’s face, this has a somewhat startling effect on the viewer, indicating the importance of upcoming shots. At this point, all sound, both diegetic and non-diegetic, is removed, and in a match-on-action shot (implying that the viewer is seeing what Tully is), the camera captures the events at a nearby card table. The mise-en-scene of this shot depicts a group of men playing cards, and in this moment, all movement in the frame seemingly halts. There are then cuts in the same freeze-frame style to two other card tables, and, significantly, to tables inhabited by people of differing racial complexion. The camera next returns to Tully’s face and sound is re-injected. What, then, can we make of this sequence? Perhaps we should be hesitant to assign any particular significance to Huston’s pausing of the action, seeing as it may simply be a clever, but symbolically meaningless, mechanism to convey the inner-workings of a brain damaged by years of fighting. Alternatively, this moment can be read as a sincere insight into the sense of utter isolation and loneliness that Tully is experiencing. The following exchange between him and Ernie would seem to confirm this. As Ernie begins to leave, Tully faces him, Stacy Keach’s face perfectly capturing the level of desperation his character is experiencing, and asks Ernie to “stick around” and “talk awhile.” For several moments, the two stare at each other, before Ernie relents and agrees to stay. Tully contentedly smiles and the two sit, wordlessly sipping their coffee as the end credits roll. As Huston concludes on this startlingly anti-climatic note, we are left wondering what to think, overwhelmed by this lack of directorial guidance and the absence of an ending that bowties the film. On the one hand, the terrible ambivalence throughout Fat City, particularly the freeze frame shot of Tully, cautions that connecting with others may be unattainable. But there is nonetheless an unmistakable, ineffable poignancy in the image of Ernie and Tully sitting silently together that permeates this final scene. In the end, Fat City is not about boxing or the travails of one man. Instead, it provides a nuanced commentary on fate and struggle, prerequisites, it argues, of being human, and suggests that we need one another to combat the incessant loneliness and isolation that pervade our lives.

Works cited Fat City. Dir. John Huston. Columbia Pictures Corporation, 1972. 45 Masculinity and Violence in American Cinema

Reflectionsin Deep Space : Visions of Urban Prostration and Anonymity in Fat City erin graham Leger Grindon, in his overview of the generic structures and conventions of the boxing film, argues that while the rules and iconography of the boxing match “speak of equality,” the boxing film subverts this ideology by “unmask[ing] the trappings of fairness…Everywhere the fix is on, the fighter is cornered, the game is rigged” (Grindon, 55). The movie Fat City (dir. John Huston, 1972), however, adopts a different course of subversion by questioning, and ultimately disputing, the intrinsic value of “equality.” In the context of this film, equality is interchangeable with anonymity; where everyone is equal, and equally deprived of agency, there is little to sustain the myth of either personal destiny or self-determination. Individuals are both physically and figuratively divested of identity and de-circumscribed, for in their shared entrapment, men are easily mistaken — or substituted — for one another. The frequent use of deep space and horizontal compositions in Fat City visually renders and reiterates the film’s thematic preoccupation with the alienation and anonymity that accompanies existence in the arena of the modern city. In a life marked by chronic stasis and a lack of distinction between young and old, boy and man, the film’s two protagonists attempt to achieve ascendancy and masculine status through the career of boxing; however, the motif of the horizontal trajectory, manifested in both narrative and formal elements across the film, ultimately undermines their ambitions and illustrates the inevitable failure that must restore them to the ranks of men devoid of age or face. In the process of tracing this course of failure, the film exposes broader existential truths and tensions that seethe beneath the surface structure of character and story. Fat City’s opening shot conveys the physical and psychological milieu that constitutes the world of the film and the characters within it. Immediately, the audience is stripped of any illusions or assumptions that the filmic metropolis may carry; this city is not a dynamic place of opportunity or upward mobility, but rather a horizontal wasteland, its most distinctive feature a series of level roads that extend into a hazy distance and underscore the flatness of the cityscape (fig. 18). 46 In lieu of a beckoning skyline, we see an endless landscape of squat erin graham buildings that starkly reveal the stunted range of the city’s ambition and potential. The ensuing series of shots, which divide and penetrate the city-space at the level of the street, enforces the sensation of horizontality and widespread uniformity, whilst also introducing the elusive occupants of this arena — the groups of shiftless men who populate, and in some ways ornament, the otherwise barren streets. Like the spaces that compose the opening montage sequence, these men are fragmentary, undifferentiated, and casually juxtaposed; as visually expressed through the formal features of montage, they are easily “dissolved” or replaced by subtle variation. This 18 ensemble of faceless male figures forms the constant backdrop of the entire film; from the street to the training gym to the bar, they are ever present, informing but never infiltrating the action of any given scene. The perpetual and simultaneously negated existence of these men both develops and extrapolates the motif of horizontality in Fat City; this stylistic element, in turn, acquires a thematic resonance over the course of the film. As the narrative progresses and the audience repeatedly encounters the spaces of this delimited world, the use of deep space, depth of focus and horizontal composition takes on new meaning, related to the broader existential concerns that surface in the film. The condition of these men within the frame — their stasis, anonymity and entrapment on the screen — is central to the film’s emotional drama, despite the structuring framework of a traditional, protagonist-driven narrative. Juxtaposed with this principal narrative, the human mise-en-scene serves both to depersonalize the protagonists’ circumstances as well as elevate their struggles to a systemic and, ultimately, existential level. While Tully (Stacy Keach) and Ernie (Jeff Bridges) dominate the foreground with their emotional and physical traumas, the motions of smaller and more diffuse tragedies continually draw the eye into the collective space that both defines and extends beyond their personal trials. The protagonists’ stories, their hopes and setbacks and despair, are physically expressed and silently duplicated in the bodies of other men, and the inclusion of 47 Masculinity and Violence in American Cinema

these men within the scene marks the camera’s refusal to privilege the protagonists and their respective situations. Even prior to his first boxing match, Ernie is not singled out among the other fighters in the room; rather, the camera bears witness to other men mirroring Ernie’s warm‑up routine in the background — recalling the literal mirror image in the scene where Ernie first enters the training gym, and the camera holds its focus on the boxing figures that are reflected in the mirror behind him. Both of these scenes, while marking important stages in Ernie’s boxing career, also imply that Ernie is simply one more body, a component of the kinetic mass of struggle and despair that characterizes manhood. It is likely no coincidence that the one man who is exempt from sharing the frame is the young boxer (Wayne Mahan) with the boastful self‑assurance in his own unique capacities. Ernie hopes to win his first fight, but even his hope cannot single him out or elevate him above the ranks of other men who aspire to success. The presence of the other boxers reminds the audience that Ernie is merely another participant in the endless rounds of homogenous masculine ambition; in this world, only a boy’s delusion permits a sense of special endowment or singularity. The film relies on visual metaphors and associations as a means of transposing the erosion of the individual into a “civilian” setting. The recurring long shot of men in rows reveals that Ernie and Tully are not the exceptions to the lot of poor urban manhood, but rather the rule. This is best exemplified in the scenes of Tully working alongside his fellow crop pickers. These scenes, like no other, emphasize the horizontality, anonymity, and stasis intrinsic to the poor man’s condition. The shot of the bus traversing a field border in the far distance recalls the very first shot of the movie; here, the flat, endless rows of crops are substituted for the roads of the cityscape (fig. 19). Even beyond the bounds of the city, there appears to be nowhere to go, and no heights to reach — the bare and level countryside is a grim reflection of its urban counterpart, thereby dissolving the classic and spiritually reassuring “opposition between the metropolis and the rural or village setting” which Grindon attributes to the typical boxing film (Grindon, 63). A straight-angle extreme long shot of the men at work shows an endless stretch of identical figures, composed in rows and uniformly hunched over their burlap sacks. In the far distance, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between the men and their bags, as if the man and 48 the commodity have acquired interchangeable identities. In this setting, erin graham as in the boxing ring, men are not men but simply labor, calculated and channeled through their sole asset of the body. In this sense, Fat City goes a step further than its predecessors in the boxing film genre, by literally depicting, rather than merely “characterizing,” its fighter-protagonist as “a poor worker selling physical labor in an industrialized economy which found little value in his skills” (Grindon, 55). Whether they are boxing or picking (or both), men sell themselves with the dream of some day exercising the power of consumer; however, in the process of doing so, they become the thing consumed. Despite the film’s insistence on viewing men 19 as a mass, one of Fat City’s greatest ironies is that men, though they mirror each other, do not identify with one another. Once again, this is indicated by the camera’s careful crafting of image. The men’s faces are frequently obscured, by shadow, angle or hat, both from the camera and from each other. As well, in group compositions, such as the scenes occurring in the field or the bar, they tend to look in the same direction — a visual suggestion of their unvarying ambition — instead of facing one another. In spite of their identical positions in the world, and their uniform aspirations of escaping from that world, they do not recognize their solidarity or seek support in one another. Men exist en masse but also in isolation; their similarities merely cultivate a sense of anonymity that furthers their alienation. Devoid of all sense of identity, they are unable to recognize what they share in contrast with what makes them unique; in order to acknowledge similarity, they first must know themselves as individuals. In its role as existential mediator, the camera precludes the possibility of individual agency by refusing to imply a subjectivity or partiality of camera-gaze; in observing this stylistic practice, Gaylyn Studlar writes, “the men are watched by the camera as despecularized figures who are engrossed in contemplation… They are objects of the camera’s inquiry rather than controlling subjects of its presence” (Studlar, 189). The camera is distanced from all men, and with this distance comes the loss of agency and the relegation to a status of figure, rather than character. 49 Masculinity and Violence in American Cinema

Just as there is no meaningful distinction between the men in Fat City, there is also no distinction between the stages or areas of life that lend a sense of progression to an individual’s existence. In a world where men “depend…on money as a sign of their achievement (and identity)” (Studlar, 184), the male underclass live their lives in suspension, regardless of their age; without homes, families, or steady work, the young and old are equally unanchored and undefined, likening them to the images from the opening montage sequence. The sole indicator of age is the extent of one’s physical deterioration, and in this sense men’s lives are a passage of diminishment instead of growth. The lives of these men, like the city they live in, are defined by a horizontal trajectory, and once more this is expressed in the compositional patterns of the film. The use of the long shot and deep space to capture the processional arrangement of male figures conveys their duplicate experience, but it also visually projects the linearity of their lives and the inevitability of their trajectory. Each figure is not only a reflection but also an anticipation of the man before him; as they age, these men will merely replace one another in the course of moving down the line. This is most evident and tragic in the specific context of boxing, where an aging fighter is inevitably and unceremoniously replaced by the next youthful up-and-comer. At the narrowest level of narrative, these two figures — the foreteller and the replacement — become Tully and Ernie, even as Tully struggles to retain his place as a competitor and not as a relic. Consistent with the film’s tendency to map the existential with the visual, their respective roles within this chain of being are clearly illustrated in the long shot of their first encounter. The audience sees Ernie and Tully in the same frame, but also separated across a flat expanse of empty space; even as Ernie’s movement concentrates the audience’s attention in the foreground, the white shape of Tully against the far wall defines him as a presence hovering over Ernie’s shoulder. In a reverse shot that follows, Ernie becomes the diminished figure while Tully occupies the foreground. Just as these shots are virtual reflections of one another within a spatial context, Ernie and Tully are reflections of each other across time. The pairing and paralleling of their stories provides the coordinates to plot a sharper course of shared male existence, but it also further undermines the illusion of self-determination or unique experience within the film. The two main protagonists offset their 50 own narrative dominance by serving as partial expressions of each erin graham other. Ernie and Tully are, both literally (in certain shots of the film) and figuratively, overlapping characters; they are incomplete and tenuous without one another. In other words, the spectator must know both characters in order to fully comprehend the tragedy of both their situations. Through forced juxtaposition and deep perspective, the camera leads the audience to perceive the true tragedy –– the fact that, in spite of their contrasting positions on the spectrum of young and old, beginning and end, there is a total absence of any distinguishing factor or element that marks Tully as “mature” or “manly” in contrast to Ernie. Ernie, unlike Tully, is the man with a family and a career; Tully is older, but like the other men who constitute the backdrop of the film, he has nothing to show for it save his physical deterioration. The existential principles that dramatize the relationship between Tully and Ernie also illuminate the uniform obscurity that enshrouds the separate lives of men. By thematically and visually associating the traditionally separate spaces of existence –– such as the fields, the home (or hotel room), the boxing ring and the bar –– the film demonstrates how the absence of work in turn impacts the experience of recreation, such that the planes of productive versus sterile action are leveled out and blended into a single static existence. Again, Fat City subverts a narrative and thematic convention of the boxing film, the “dichotomy between work and leisure” that frequently finds expression in the contrast between “the professional realm” and “urban entertainment sites” (Grindon, 63). While Tully unquestionably performs hard labor as a hired hand in the fields, the farm is also a site of socialization, where men exchange stories, commiserate over women troubles, and dream of money. Conversely, the bar is a not a space of raucous fun and relaxation, but of brooding and weary convalescence. The compositional similarities in the work and play arenas posit these traditionally separate spaces as two sides of the same devalued coin. In this world, work, like play, is but another form of waste and physical wasting, denying any opportunity of advancement or accrual. Consequently, without the counterpoint of industry or positive creation, the places and activities of recreation lose their edges of distinction and their sense of pleasure. Just as the camera implies an erosion of the boundaries between persons, it also frames the different settings in such a way as to visualize the absence of crucial delineations at the level of the individual. The paralysis of anonymity penetrates inward, and is most powerfully realized in the recurring image of Tully’s blank unfathomable gaze. 51 Masculinity and Violence in American Cinema

Nowhere is this intermingling of “work” and “play,” with its constant denial of progression and self-assertion, more apparent than in the realm of boxing. Here, some men go to work so that others may experience their labor as diversion. What to Tully is a career is to others purely spectacle, and the act of fighting is forever undermined and trivialized by its own status as entertainment. While fighting gives some illusion of ascendancy and purpose — the boxer is elevated above the other men within a specialized arena — it is, in reality, dramatic action packaged as escapist pleasure — an instance of two men performing on a stage. Studlar reverses the impression of virility or empowerment commonly identified with the “fighter” when she writes, “the ritualized violence of the ring is merely another way to commodify the bodies of lower-class, predominantly minority males” (Studlar, 192). To the audience (and, as Studlar suggests, ultimately to Tully) the boxing match belongs to the same culture of inconsequential recreation and “male ritual play” (Studlar, 195) as the card game or the afternoon beer. The high angle long shots of the boxing ring echo this sentiment by revealing the shabbiness of the arena, akin to that of the pool hall in the film’s final scene. This closing scene, in which the camera fleetingly assumes a subjective point of view, is both a striking departure from the formal conventions previously established, and a visual coalescence of the existential premises articulated throughout. The camera, adopting Tully’s perspective, finally turns on the background men and declares their role as subjects, rather than objects, in the scene. However, even in this position of sudden narrative power, the men remain faceless and undifferentiated — if anything, their aggregate existence is emphasized by their clustered arrangement around the centers of gravity, the card tables. A sharp pan to the left calls attention, finally, to the subjective physical sensation of horizontal movement; having witnessed, from a fixed point, men travel laterally across the screen, the audience is finally implicated in the primary motion of life for these men. It is as if, having grasped their existential condition at the distance of an observer, the audience is subsequently ousted from the sheltered position of spectator and forced to experience this condition at eye-level. As a final nod to its reflections on existence, the film reveals a new image of Tully’s duplication; he is not only a man like all other men, for he (and they) are also players in an unending game of shuffle and 52 reshuffle, before the final fold. Even in this last scene, however, the film withholds the figurative vertical motion achieved through a culmination of meaning or clarity; rather than close upon an instance of deviation or realization, the camera returns to a frontal shot of Ernie and Tully, the players are once again relegated to the background, and the scene, like the opening shot of the city, bares everything but yields nothing.

Works cited Leger Grindon. “Body and Soul: The Structure of Meaning in the Boxing Film Genre” Cinema Journal 35.4 (1996): 55. Gaylyn Studlar. “Shadowboxing: Fat City and the Malaise of Masculinity” in Reflections In a Male Eye: John Huston and the American Experience. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993.

Lifting the Veil : Hidden Homosexuality in Scorsese’s Raging Bull Upon first watchingRaging Bull, the “homo-ness” of it all was very tatum payan evident. But, upon a closer second watching, it became clearer to me that this was not merely a film in which there were slight homosexual leanings with the main male figures. The entire film can be read as an analogy for homosexuality. The film chronicles the struggle of one man and his efforts to succeed in the world of boxing and subtly hints at an internal struggle he is having regarding sexuality. Through dialogue, metaphorical scene construction, and scenes that speak to other events in the filmic world, we are taken through the life of a conservative, Catholic, Italian-American who is trying to come to terms with love, life, and sex. In the Mark Nicholls’ essay “My Victims, My Melancholia,” Nicholls discusses in depth the melancholic state of La Motta and periodically makes reference to a homosexual relationship that he may have with his brother Joey. I propose to elaborate Nicholls’s suggestion to see La Motta (in this film) as a representation of the struggling man that 53 Masculinity and Violence in American Cinema

is confused about his sexuality and the film as a representation of the journey he takes to hide it while simultaneously gaining his sea-legs, as it were. It is obvious just from an auditory standpoint that this movie does seem to revolve, at least partially, around the theme of homosexuality. In the span of 128 minutes, there are four references to a male figure being a girl or being feminine, seven instances of either the word fag or faggot, as well as nine statements pertaining to man-on-man fellatio, and a whopping twelve references to sodomy. It may seem a bit like overkill but each of these references packs a great punch. Whether it is Jake and Joey being called fags for the way they are sparring in the ring or Jake telling Joey that he punches “like [he] takes it up the ass,” the film is speckled with references to an alternative lifestyle. Every main character was raised in a Catholic environment in which homosexuality was one of the worst sins that a person could commit. Since it was so frowned upon by the entire community, it makes for the perfect insult. There is no better way to get under somebody’s skin than to make a statement involving them and some action, object, or person that is abhorred by the entire community of which they are a part. Such an emphasis on this particular type of dialogue serves as an auditory cue to the viewer that homosexuality can play a large role in the subtext of this film. The dialogue alludes to various kinds of love between men and it betrays the male characters’ misogyny. The majority of verbal interactions between a male character and a female character is derogatory or defamatory to the woman in some way. The words exchanged by men and women usually pertain to the man commanding the woman; many times the man is Jake himself. Be it yelling at his first wife Irma to bring over a steak before she burns it, or sniping at Vickie to hurry and bring some coffee, the verbal assault that is constantly made upon the female characters reveals them as nothing more than maidservants. They are given an archaic position that is one of mere servitude. The role of women in this film, even Vickie, is secondary. At many points in the film it appears that we are supposed to be seeing the world through Jake’s eyes. But, his gaze at Vickie suggests that he desires her less for sexual pleasure than for social prestige: by possessing a woman that other men desire he can assert his dominance. At one point, Vickie serves as an object of brief physical stimulation 54 tatum payan before the job is finished off by a pitcher of water slowly poured onto La Motta’s groin. At a point earlier in the film we are to believe that Jake and Vickie engage in intercourse on his parents’ bed. But, due to the way Scorsese has set up this film, sex between La Motta and Vickie wouldn’t necessarily mean anything. Any of the dialogue that Vickie has during either of these scenes is really of little to no importance to any of the goings on. It is as if Vickie is there simply to be a counter to La Motta, as if she is there just because she is supposed to be there, so that things look normal. One of the few lines of dialogue uttered by Vickie that is actually powerful is buried in a whisper among the diegetic sounds of the club around them when Vickie and Joey are arguing and Vickie complains that “[Jake] don’t even wanna fuck [her].” Right after this line, Joey retorts that it is only because Jake is a fighter and that it’s for the sport. A second telling detail appears right before Vickie and Jake’s first sexual encounter. Vickie is looking at a picture of Jake and Joey situated on a dresser in the master bedroom. A rosary near the photograph implies the Catholicism of the household. Jake moves close to Vickie and says that the photograph is of him and his brother, and that the two of them were fooling around. ”Fooling around” can suggest a sexual relationship as well as play. Nicholls writes that “a great deal has been written about homoeroticism in Raging Bull and…of particular interest in the homoerotic discourse…is Jake’s love and sexual desire for Joey” (122). The majority of the time that Jake and Joey converse, they bicker like an old married couple. Some of the things that they say to each other are statements typically made between people who are sexually intimate. The greatest example of this occurs late in the film when Jake is trying to fix his television while Joey sits on the couch. Near the beginning, their conversation focuses on the fact that Jake has really let himself go. Joey reminisces about the way that Jake looked long ago and wonders why it is that he eats the way he does now. The way that Joey makes these statements seems to evoke a longing for when Jake was in peak physical condition. It is not necessasrily sexual — Jake still has to “make weight” for his fights –– but Joey’s obsessive concern with Jake’s physical condition suggests his close attention to his brother’s body. Jake’s first wife accuses him and Joey of running out in the middle of the night and “going to suck each other off.” Her rage suggests that she puts up with a great deal from Jake and that she is at the point where she is even 55 Masculinity and Violence in American Cinema

questioning his fidelity. In this quick scene, Jake’s wife does not have enough time to delve into what she feels may actually be going on, but the fact that the only direct references she makes are of a homosexual as well as incestuous nature is crucial. A second major way in which this film is revealed to be one of homosexual struggle is through the use of metaphorical scenes that imply more than what the viewer directly sees. Very early into the film it is obvious that La Motta seems to have an issue with power. He must constantly be the top dog. He must constantly be pushing those around him down to a lower level. A perfect example of this is when he and Joey are seated in the kitchen of Jake’s apartment and he urges Joey to punch him. It is here that Jake’s control issue comes out. He wants to make Joey do things that he may not actually want to do. It takes a lot of convincing before Joey will even consider punching his brother. But, he is eventually egged into it after his sexuality comes into question. Jake seeks to emasculate his brother, and there is no better way to emasculate a man than by making him become involved in a gay sex act. This scene is obviously not one of sexual intercourse, but watching the scene closely it is revealed to be very sexually charged and can be seen as metaphorical of sex if looking at the film through a homoerotic eye. It is at this time that Jake is still uncertain about all the aspects of his sexuality, so he allows himself to be the receiver in this particular exchange. He wants Joey to “hit [him] with everything [he’s] got” and “fuckin’ lay [him] out.” Joey is uncertain and asks what he’s going to use as protection, Jake recommends a dish towel. The interaction begins slowly at first. Joey is unsure what he is doing and concerned about hurting his brother. Gradually, Joey gets more intense, he begins to enjoy the experience more. Jake keeps urging Joey to do it harder and finally suggests that Joey take off the protection that he was using. Joey does as his brother commands and it is here that he really gets into the exchange. He is pummeling his brother as hard as he can until he realizes that he has actually drawn blood from pounding his brother so furiously. He immediately stops and the camera remains on Jake, showcasing his look of supreme satisfaction (fig. 20). He may not have fully enjoyed the experience with his brother but he takes satisfaction in the fact that his brother will do exactly as he says. The actions directly represented on the screen may just be violence, but in many cases, there 56 is a fine line between violence and eroticism. tatum payan Perhaps even more symbolic than the last scene between Joey and Jake are the scenes of boxing that take place in the ring. Each of these encounters can be likened to a sexual encounter. In the fight with Jimmy Reeves, for instance, Jake masochistically leaves himself open to punches only to assault his opponent toward the end of the fight, knocking him out, but doing so too late to win. Jake and Vickie’s wedding is glossed over so quickly that one has to stop and wonder why that is. Their wedding is hinted at much earlier in the film than the home video sequence. After 20 meeting Vickie, Jake takes her to a miniature golf course on a date. There is a great deal of foreshadowing when the two reach the obstacle that is disguised as a chapel. Vickie hits her ball and it makes its way into the chapel. But, confusingly enough, the ball does not exit the other side of the chapel. Upon entering the chapel it becomes trapped. This is important because it seems to delicately nod at the confusion that Jake may be up against when facing organized religion with his predicament. This is further highlighted when Vickie asks what it means that the ball didn’t come out the other side of the chapel and Jake remarks that “it means the game is over.” Throughout the film Jake is very suspicious and paranoid about Vickie’s actions. There are several instances in which Jake is either asking a friend or Vickie directly if she has been fooling around with various guys from the neighborhood. It is similar to a child playing with a new ball. After a while he gets tired of it, so he throws it aside. But, the second another kid comes along and attempts to pick up and play with the ball, the first kid screams to get his ball back. He had absolutely no interest in it until somebody else desired it. This is exactly the type of relationship that Jake and Vickie have with one another. Jake usually shows no interest in Vickie unless there he suspects that another guy wants her. Jake may not show a great interest in Vickie at all times, but he still feels that she is his property. He may not fully and consistently desire her in a sexual manner, but that doesn’t mean that he accepts her infidelity. Each of the scenes that involve Jake questioning somebody about Vickie’s actions references some early scene in which Jake 57 Masculinity and Violence in American Cinema

felt that slight gestures by Vickie were inappropriate and hinted at a sexual relationship. In the most violent of these instances, Jake accuses Vickie of sleeping with his brother. This is the most intense explosion because Jake has a great emotional attachment to Joey and the two of them may share a sexual history. In a sense, Jake feels as if he is the owner of Joey as well. Since he feels that both of them are his property, there are few ideas worse to him than that of two objects he owns being together; to him it is a double betrayal. It is put best by Nicholls when he states that “despite all his actions to the contrary, the fact of Vickie’s lowly status as possession is…vital to Jake’s self-image and…Joey’s role…so long as he follows Jake’s orders and allows himself to be Jake’s possession” (126). After Jake beats Joey, they stop speaking. Years pass and Jake runs into Joey on the street. Joey ignores him. Still angry at the mistreatment, he acts as if Jake does not exist. Their actions are reminiscent of those between a previously battered woman and her supposedly reformed ex-lover: Jake leans in for a kiss from Joey and Joey refuses. It has reached the point at which all of their emotional attachments and possible sexual history are not enough to erase all of the abuse that the audience witnessed leading up to this moment. Joey has been able to take whatever homosexual experiences and feelings he may have had and put them all behind him in an attempt to try and live a full and rich life with his wife and his children by his side. Jake cannot do the same. In the end he appears to have lost everything. Raging Bull is a multi-layered film. La Motta is a hero, an anti-hero, and a villain. I saw him as a confused man struggling with his sexuality in a world of repression that would never offer him the chance to be accepted by his community and his loved ones. He chooses not to deny this part of himself, but he does not allow it to be all that he is. He is a man leading a double life and we are let into his world to see the progression and disintegration of that double life for ourselves. Boxing scenes being used as a stand-in for shots of sex make perfect sense because they assist in the further highlighting of the fact that dealing with such a secret takes a great physical and emotional toll. And the filmic practices of symbolism and disguise are great ways to showcase the immense dishonesty and secrecy that are so ever-present. Whether looking at this film through a homosexual lens or through a more typical one, it is La Motta’s secrecy and sexuality that lead to his ruin. Whether gay is there or not, we are witness to the destruction of a man, both inside and out. 58 Works cited Mark Nicholls, “My Victims, My Melancholia: Raging Bull and Vincent Minelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful” in Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull, ed. Kevin J. Hayes (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005), 116-134.

Raging Bull : Constructing Identification Martin Scorsese’s 1980 film,Raging Bull, introduces audiences to yessica hernandez the tumultuous life of boxer, Jake La Motta. Providing viewers with insight to La Motta’s life both inside and outside the ring, Scorsese’s film succeeds in demonstrating the destructive tendencies that would eventually envelope the film’s protagonist. Critique and analysis of Raging Bull varies in scope and direction; while many articles examine Scorsese’s cinematic techniques, one scholar, Peggy McCormack, analyzes Scorsese’s cinematic tendencies throughout the film in order to help us understand the construction of women within the film. McCormack’s analysis seeks to demonstrate how Scorsese’s cinematic tendencies relegate our sympathies towards Jake, yet this is not the case. The film’s subjective techniques actually enable us to distance ourselves from Jake and thereby prevent us from identifying or empathizing with him. From the outset of the film Scorsese’s camerawork does not fully demand our identification with Jake. With a medium close-up, Jake on screen right, the camera moves into the space of a small New York apartment. After the shot of Jake the camera cuts to a medium shot of Irma, behind the stove, and it moves closer and closer to her until it arrives at a medium close-up of her face. The close-up reveals her look of dissatisfaction and disgust at Jake’s comments. While in later scenes we’ll watch as Jake’s second wife takes his abuse silently, this is not the case with Irma. Although this is a fairly brief exchange, lasting less than two minutes, Irma nevertheless refuses to remain silent and her screen presence counts just as much as Jake’s. Throughout their whole confrontation, from beginning to end, she garners an equal amount of screen time as Jake; the camera may be focused on him at 59 Masculinity and Violence in American Cinema

the beginning, but it moves between capturing him and Irma an equal amount of times. What’s more, once Irma and Jake begin to fight the camera stays on both of them and does not cut to individual shots of them until after Irma walks into her bedroom (fig. 21). Interestingly, even after she has left the screen we can still hear her throwing stuff within the bedroom. From analyzing this scene we can gather how it is not only Scorsese’s cinematographic choices, but his use of sound as well, that contributes to our understanding of whether or not to identify with the protagonist. Not only does Irma get as much screen time as Jake, after she leaves the screen we continue to hear her. Because we continue to hear her, her presence, at least in these scenes, matters as much as Jake’s. Switching between the two individuals in this scene Scorsese’s camerawork does not blatantly attempt to align our sympathies with either of them. We see and hear from both of them and because of this Jake’s violent response does not appear justified. On the contrary, this scene makes evident his violent temper and inability to deal with problems in a civil and dignified manner. Interestingly, while our initial exposure to Jake’s behavior around Irma does not necessarily align our sympathies with him, the opposite can be said of his first interactions with Vickie. The film’s opening sequences do not provide us with any shots of Jake’s point of view, but this changes during the pool scene where Jake first catches a glimpse of Vickie. Soon after Scorsese allows us a peek at Jake’s domestic life with Irma the film moves outdoors, to a community swimming pool. During this scene, similar to the scene with him and Irma, we are first aware of Jake’s presence through a medium close-up that captures him looking off into the distance (fig. 22). After this shot another shot quickly follows and reveals what Jake so attentively looks at: an attractive, young blonde. The camera doesn’t only stay on Vickie; it slowly zooms in on her face. As Jake speaks to Joey his gaze lingers on Vickie while he probes for information about her. Unlike the relationship between Jake and Irma, the camerawork here does not place Jake and Vickie on equal footing. Vickie is clearly the object of Jake’s gaze and in a dissimilar fashion from Irma we cannot hear anything she says. She is clearly there to be looked at and anything she says or thinks is not meant to 60 be of importance because her beauty overshadows it. Jake’s longing yessica hernandez gaze is further emphasized by the slow motion camerawork that captures Vickie, in a long shot, as she sits by the side of the pool. The camera slowly zooms in on her as she sits by the pool to sunbathe, and the last point of view shot of her frames her legs in a close-up as she kicks the water. Scorsese’s introduction of Vickie is clearly presented from Jake’s perspective. Jake’s subjectivity is not limited to these scenes but continues in the subsequent scenes when he leaves Irma behind to attend a social in hopes of seeing Vickie. During the scene when Jake leaves Irma at home 21 we continue to see how she does not let Jake go without putting up a fight. As he walks through their living room she yells at him, “You fucking worm, if you go out I’m going out!” Regardless of her screams Jake chooses to ignore her and walks out the door. Even when she is no longer in the shot we continue to hear Irma’s protests and as Jake and Joey walk out into the street her struggle to make Jake stay continues. She even throws stuff out the window and her voice continues in a sound bridge as we cut to a shot of a poster advertising the dance they’re heading off too. Once again this interaction with Irma differs from the presentation of Vickie; at the same time 22 Scorsese’s use of sound, particularly sound bridges, further emphasize the difference between the two women in Jake’s life. At the church dance the camera, in a medium close-up, frames Jake and we see him looking off into the distance, his attention clearly captivated by something or someone. After framing him the camera cuts to a point of view shot that gets closer and closer to Vickie. The camera not only zooms in during this scene, we are privy to the fact that this is Jake’s point of view because of other cinematic techniques employed by Scorsese. Aside from the slow roving camera, the audio in this scene sounds muffled, as if hearing were no longer important because 61 Masculinity and Violence in American Cinema

the mere sight of Vickie’s beauty is of utmost importance to Jake. The lighting in this scene further adds to the subjectivity of the shot; backlighting falls on Vickie’s back, emphasizing her beautiful platinum, blonde hair and further differentiating her from the rest of the women at the table. Even as Vickie walks out and down a staircase we continue to view her from Jake’s perspective. She continues to be shown in slow motion and when we see her drive away in Salvy’s car we not only get Jake’s visual point of view, at this point extra-diagetic music is also introduced (fig. 23). Upbeat drumming and whistling is heard as he watches Vickie drive away and we aren’t aware that this is extra-diagetic music until the ambient sounds of fighting and disorder cut through after Vickie is no longer within Jake’s sight. Scorsese’s use of extra-diagetic sound once again contributes to our overall understanding that we are no longer watching this film through an objective lens. Although one may argue that our introduction and consequent understanding of Jake’s relationship with Vickie can be understood through our alignment of sympathies with Jake, this is not necessarily the case. Although the camera’s tendencies add to our understanding that we view Vickie from Jake’s perspective, they don’t allow us to identify with him. More than allowing us to empathize with Jake, these scenes actually emphasize Jake’s obsessive desire for Vickie. By unveiling his fascination with Vickie, Scorsese’s cinematic techniques unveil Jake’s weaknesses. At first the camera’s subjectivity may help us better understand Jake’s desire for Vickie, but later the same techniques reveal his sexual insecurities. In revealing Jake’s sexual insecurity, especially when it comes to Vickie, Scorsese does not help align our sympathies with him; to a certain extent the camera’s cinematography distances us from Jake. Proof of this becomes evident when the film reveals to us what Jake does not know. The main example of this occurs when Jake questions Joey 23 about the incident at the Copacabana. As an audience we are aware of the circumstances surrounding the violent incident Joey embroils himself in on behalf of his brother. Unfortunately 62 Jake is not privy to the details of this incident and it isn’t until a scene yessica hernandez towards the end of the film that we become aware of this. During this scene Jake works on fixing his television set; the camera frames him in a medium shot and it never actually provides any subjective shots that might make us want to justify Jake’s violent actions (fig. 24). On the contrary, the opening shots leading up to the fight between Jake and Joey emphasize Jake’s delusional state of mind. Jake’s sexual insecurity brings about his questioning about the Copacabana incident; before he begins to question Joey about the fight at Copacabana he admonishes him for kissing Vickie on the mouth. This is of great importance to note because it highlights how his sexual insecurities set 24 off his ruminating mind. This scene also underscores, more than anything, Jake’s delusional state of mind when it comes to Vickie. During this scene the camera moves back and forth between shots of Joey and Jake as his questioning becomes increasingly aggressive. At first the camera frames Jake in a medium long shot and continues to cut back and forth between shots framing both him and Joey this way. Interestingly, as his questioning becomes more and more aggressive the camera begins to get tighter and tighter in its framing of both brothers. Joey, instead of encouraging Jake’s aggressive behavior, decides to walk away from the situation. Once Joey leaves the room the camera once again cuts out to a long shot and we see Jake standing in the living room and then moving upstairs to question Vickie. In this sequence the camera’s gradual transition from framing the brothers in a medium long-shot, to medium close-ups, continues to illustrate Jake’s ability to turn something as innocent as a kiss into an excuse for excessive amounts of violence. This scene does not allow us to empathize with Jake, but rather serves as an example of the ways that he is ultimately responsible for fostering a dysfunctional familial situation. Jake’s sexual insecurity continues to be revealed by the camera and the lack of subjective shots prevents us from attempting to justify his behavior. The choice to have this scene unfold while Jake works on a television set further adds to our understanding of subjectivity within the film. Similar to our understanding of the situation that unfolds, the television set seems 63 Masculinity and Violence in American Cinema

to be emphasizing what Jake does not see: while a television set may be able to demonstrate every facet of a problem through its use of various cinematic resources, such as cutting to a different sequence, or even flashback or dream sequences, the same cannot be done in everyday life. Instead of accepting this and moving on, Jake insists on knowing everything that occurs, and when his desire for this knowledge is left unsatisfied he unleashes his anger. In her article, Peggy McCormack emphasizes how Vickie’s decision to stay with Jake after he beats her and Joey, does not necessarily make us empathize with her, but rather with Jake; this is not necessarily the case. Up to this fight sequence Vickie was always represented from Jake’s perspective. Whenever the camera showed her she was either captured in slow motion, or by Jake’s side as he questioned her. In fact, unlike Irma who stood up for herself, Vickie rarely talked unless spoken to by Jake. It is immediately after Jake questions Joey, that Vickie finally speaks up against Jake. During this scene she not only locks herself in the bathroom, this time when he questions her she screams: “I’ll say anything you want me to say. I fucked Salvy. I fucked your brother. I fucked everybody! I sucked your brother’s fuckin’ cock!”. Her response demonstrates her exhaustion with Jake’s jealousy, only, unlike the earlier scene with Irma, her attempts to stop Jake result in physical abuse that is shown onscreen. Although Jake may have physically abused Irma, Scorsese does not incorporate any visual evidence to confirm this. Because of this, the violence committed against Vickie has that much more force. After Vickie admits, falsely, to having slept with various men, including Joey, Jake marches down the sidewalk, full of rage and ready to pulverize Joey, and a wide shot shows Vickie running after him. In her attempts to prevent Jake from inflicting harm upon Joey, Vickie jumps on his back. In his rage Jake pushes Vickie onto the sidewalk, literally out of the frame since a car blocks our view of her, and punches her. While his violence may previously have been limited to the intimacy of their home, this scene showcases how Jake’s violence escapes into the public arena as well. This scene, far from making us empathize with Jake in any way, actually achieves the opposite. Not only do we not identify with Jake, our sympathies actually lie with Vickie. Not only is she objectified throughout the entirety of the film, the one time she attempts to stand up against Jake she fails. 64 According to Peggy McCormack’s understanding of Scorsese’s determinist, objective, and subjective filmic techniques, the camera’s reluctance to capture the subjectivity of any of the women in the film aligns audience sympathy with Jake la Motta. While this could be one way to read the shot compositions, the camera also achieves the opposite effect: instead of aligning our sympathies with Jake, the cinematography offers viewers the freedom to distance themselves from the film’s protagonist. The film’s cinematography, in revealing Jake la Motta’s violent tendencies through subjective and objective filmic techniques actually disallows viewers from identifying with him. Instead the camera’s ability to highlight La Motta’s insecurities grants viewers the option to distance themselves from the film’s protagonist. Interestingly, it is not only Scorsese’s direction of the camera, but also the use of audio that further enables us to take an objective stance toward Jake. The scenes used in this analysis demonstrate how framing, lighting, and movements of the camera allow us to distance ourselves from Jake, but the audio in these scenes is just as important. Sound throughout the film not only lets us know when we are viewing a scene from Jake’s perspective, it is also used to demonstrate how Irma and Vickie are placed on unequal footing. Sound thus contributes to our understanding and construction of who to identify with in the film.

Raging Bull : Fighting the Performer Within “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Madison Square Garden’s feature christina carroll attraction.” This is what the announcer yells at the beginning of Jake La Motta’s fight against Billy Fox. From the announcer’s words, one can easily begin to understand the sport of boxing as a performance where spectators come to watch and bet on the best physical performer inside the ring. In his essay “Raging Bull and the Idea of Performance,” Michael Peterson discusses La Motta’s inability to find balance between life as a true fighter and life as a performer, viewing La Motta’s constant shift from “doer to actor” as representative of the “purity of his effort” to find balance (Peterson, 72). 65 Masculinity and Violence in American Cinema

Although Peterson’s essay uses the conflict La Motta sees as a performer to examine film as a “tragedy of macho purity,” its words ultimately draw attention to not only La Motta as the boxer/performer, but also to Robert De Niro the actor and Martin Scorsese the director. In the introduction of Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull, a collection that includes Peterson’s essay, author Kevin J. Hayes comments on the amount of time put into the film by De Niro and Scorsese. From the reading of Jake La Motta’s autobiography to the continuous rewriting of the script, Scorsese and De Niro treated Raging Bull as any playwright would treat a prized manuscript. It is the constant care that the pair showed the film, with attention to lighting, shot design, and dialogue, that allows the audience to feel as though they are not just watching the story of Jake La Motta’s life, but participating in a true theatrical performance of it. Two scenes that cause the audience to acknowledge Raging Bull as the performance and La Motta as its performer are La Motta’s fight against Billy Fox and his monologue at the very end of the film. Together, these scenes also reveal the negative impact that a performance like Raging Bull can have on its lead performer. When La Motta purposefully loses to Billy Fox for the opportunity to fight for the championship, Scorsese’s camera and lighting decisions continuously remind the audience that they are watching a performance. Scorsese wastes no time in creating an atmosphere similar to that of the theater. When the scene first begins, a medium shot of a section in the crowd shows the mob members finding their seats. As the mob members shuffle past individuals, who have already taken their seats, the image of them is very reminiscent of people looking for seats in the theater. Scorsese’s decision to show the mob members sit down places heavy emphasis on the fact that a show is about to begin. The presence of the head of the mob, who knows what the outcome of the fight is going to be, reminds the audience of two things: one, that they are about to watch La Motta under-perform in the ring and two, that they are about to watch De Niro perform as La Motta underperforming. When a cut takes the audience from the mob members to La Motta and Fox in the ring, the camera’s steady movement away from the ring places emphasis on the entire space of the room. The well-lit boxing ring in the middle of the shot is the stage and in its center are La Motta and Fox. 66 christina carroll As the fight begins, a cut brings the audience closer to the two boxers. For a minute, an idea of performance is forgotten when La Motta quickly swings at Fox, punching him hard in the face. However, after the opening blow, there is a drastic change in La Motta’s boxing, and the audience, both in the film and in the movie theater, can see that they are watching a performance. The lighting during this fight only helps to reinforce the idea of performance by causing a clear division between the two boxers in the ring and the crowd. When La Motta begins to let Fox win, a medium long shot reveals Scorsese’s strategic high-key lighting, seen in almost all of Raging Bull’s boxing scenes. Lights coming from a high angle on the right and left of the frame illuminate the bodies of La Motta and Fox respectively. The overall lack of shadow coupled with the camera’s steadiness allows the audience to watch as La Motta purposefully misses his opponent. The dialogue during this scene serves as another direct indicator that the audience is watching a performance. As La Motta continues to throw air punches, he yells to an unresponsive Fox, “What the fuck you doing? Hit me you fucking punk.” The exhortation draws attention to the fact that La Motta wants Fox to take his cue. La Motta’s missed punches serve as Fox’s cue to take advantage of the situation. Because Fox essentially misses his original cue and fails to respond to La Motta immediately, both the crowd in the film and the audience become aware of La Motta and Fox’s bad acting. In order to prevent the audience from feeling too much a part of the action, Scorsese takes stylistic measures to maintain a certain amount of distance between the movie’s audience and La Motta. One way that Scorsese does this is by giving the audience both the perspective of being inside and outside of the ring during La Motta’s boxing performance. Once it becomes clear that La Motta has decided to throw the match, a change in camera positioning immediately takes the audience from the perspective of the referee to that of the crowd. Placed behind one of the further rows in the room, the camera gives audiences a perspective of an individual sitting in the room. When a man jumps up and yells “What are you doing Jake? Box him!” his position in the bottom right of the frame ensures that the audience feels as though they are participants in the crowd. However, the dialogue being spewed from the onscreen crowd reminds the audience that they are more aware of what is going on than the crowd in front of them. This audience awareness only helps to ensure that the audience 67 Masculinity and Violence in American Cinema

knows that they are watching a performance; the audience knows more than the characters. Perhaps the main aspect placing an emphasis on performance in this scene is not the camera positioning or lighting, but Scorsese’s inclusion of flash photography. In this scene quick cuts of a cameraman taking pictures of La Motta happens at two significant points during the match. The first shot of a photographer occurs after the man in the crowd stands and yells, “What are you doing Jake? Box him!” The second shot of a photographer comes right before Fox is declared the winner of the fight. Looking closely at when Scorsese chooses to include cameramen in the scene, it becomes increasingly more apparent that cameramen are direct signifiers of performance. When a cameraman first appears in this scene, it is immediately after La Motta begins his performance as a fighter in the match. When a cameraman appears again, it is when La Motta’s performance as a fighter ends and when his performance as a loser begins. What is so interesting about each cameraman appearance is notably the quickness of their time onscreen. The cameramen appear just enough for their cameras to flash and take the picture. This quick in-and-out inclusion of cameras during crucial action in La Motta’s match encourage the audience to think not only about the cameras and action before them, but also about the director’s camera providing the action on the screen. In addition to serving as signifiers of performance, the flash photography experienced in the ring also signals the initial breakdown of La Motta’s character. Throughout the fight, La Motta tries to maintain a certain level of pride in his face. As he moves around the ring, he holds his chin up and keeps his eyes focused on Fox. The first camera flash highlights La Motta’s intensity in the ring. Once the photographer takes La Motta’s picture, the bell sounds and La Motta sits down in his corner of the ring. There, his trainer slaps him in the face. Despite the hard smack and shaking by his trainer, La Motta seemingly remains focused on the match. He never looks at his trainer, and instead, stares straight ahead, presumably to the center of the ring where his performance will continue. By the next camera flash, however, it is interesting to note the subtle changes in La Motta’s facial expression. After the second flash, the pride and focus that La Motta maintains at the beginning of the fight are no longer visible. Though a cut to a long shot of La Motta standing 68 christina carroll in the ring takes the audience further away from La Motta’s face, the high key lighting continues to draw attention to La Motta’s body language as well as his face. Even in the long shot, audiences can see that La Motta is ashamed of his latest performance as he holds his head down and stares towards the ground. It is the scene directly after the Fox fight that shows the negative influence that performance, and more specifically poor performance, is having on La Motta. Away from the boxing stage, La Motta immediately breaks down into tears. La Motta has not only lost his fight against Fox, but also lost the crowd’s respect due to his contemptible performance in the ring both as a boxer and as an actor. Audiences watch as a member of La Motta’s camp consoles the weeping boxer. Here, one must note that this is the first time that La Motta cries in the film, and consequently the first indicator that La Motta’s decisions as a performer are beginning to take their toll. “What’d I do?” La Motta repeatedly asks himself as the camera lingers on other members of his camp, highlighting the overall sense of shame in the room. No one’s head is raised for the camera to see, including Joey, who despite having talked La Motta into throwing the match, keeps his back turned to both the camera and his brother. The final scene ofRaging Bull affirms the heightened sense of La Motta’s loneliness as a self-alienated performer. In the final scene, La Motta’s solitude in the dressing room allows the audience to examine his character. As La Motta sits down in front of his mirror, his reflection calls for one last performance, except this time La Motta will not be performing for a sold-out audience, but solely for himself. Here, Scorsese’s construction of the shot only emphasizes the performance that is about to take place by allowing both La Motta and his reflection to appear onscreen. As La Motta sits facing the mirror (front right), his reflection peers back at him (back right). The side angle that films the two La Mottas creates an image very reminiscent of the Fox fight when the camera places the audience behind the cheering crowd. In this shot, the real La Motta is that cheering crowd and his reflection is the performer. Due to the unique use of the mirror in this final scene, the audience, though placed in a position by the camera reminiscent to the Fox fight, is not able to join the performance as a supporter as in the earlier boxing arena scenes. It is the full reflection of the mirror that prevents audience participation. As 69 Masculinity and Violence in American Cinema

the camera films La Motta’s reflection, audiences can notice that La Motta is the only person being reflected. The only things in the mirror aside from La Motta are an ironing board, coat hanger, and empty clothes rack. These inanimate objects coupled by the clear absence of people suggest a new level of loneliness in La Motta’s life. Although the camera allows audiences to feel as though they are somewhat involved with the scene by placing their gaze slightly over the left shoulder of La Motta, it cannot prevent audiences from eventually realizing that even they, from their own absence in the mirror, are not fully a part of this La Motta performance. If anything, the audience is made to play the role of an eavesdropper, watching the real La Motta have a conversation with his performance self. Perhaps what emphasizes La Motta’s role as a lonesome performer most in this shot is not his reflection, but the words that appear to be coming from his reflection’s mouth. As La Motta watches himself in the mirror, he begins to recite Marlon Brando’s lines from Elia Kazan’s On The Waterfront. The decision to recite lines from the 1954 Hollywood classic immediately places emphasis on La Motta’s role as a performer. However, the dull expression on La Motta’s face as he speaks signals the weakness of his performance and the feebleness of his mind. “I could’ve been a contender,” La Motta voices with little to no emotion. It is La Motta’s lackluster attitude towards the lines that once again reminds the audience that they are watching a performance of a performance. La Motta, though paid to act, is not an actor. He is only a performer. La Motta’s attitude towards the lines also exhibits his downfall as an individual. He recognizes that he will never have the opportunity to contend in the boxing ring again and the realization that his boxing performance is over is almost too hard to confront. The heightened sense of La Motta’s withdrawal only continues as the scene progresses, stripping La Motta of his real identity by gradually placing an intense focus on his reflection. When La Motta first begins reciting lines in the mirror, both he and his reflection are fully present in the frame. This dual presence continues throughout the scene until the stage manager informs La Motta that it is his turn to go onstage. It is interesting to notice the slight camera change as the stage manager appears next to La Motta’s reflection in the mirror. While the stage manager talks, the camera actively avoids showing his face in its entirety. The camera’s blatant avoidance of the manager’s face as it shifts slightly right to keep focus on La Motta re-emphasizes the fact that the scene’s focus is entirely on La Motta. It 70 christina carroll also continues to highlight La Motta’s loneliness in the room. Without the presence of the manager’s face in the frame, it is almost as if the manager does not exist. Despite his dialogue with La Motta, it is clear that the manager is of little to no importance in the scene and that this performance is only La Motta’s. When the stage manager finally leaves the room, La Motta’s last moments with the mirror are what leave audiences with the impression that La Motta will never escape being a lonely performer. After La Motta gets up from his chair in preparation to go on stage, his body moves out of the frame, leaving audiences with only his reflection to watch. Without even the real La Motta accompanying it in the frame, La Motta’s reflection becomes the only person in on screen. It is La Motta’s reflection’s solitude that once again forces the audience to be critical of its appearance. Looking at the reflection, audiences can concentrate on the characteristics that make this performance of La Motta’s so much different from his others as a boxer. The most notable change is that instead of wearing an elaborate leopard print robe, La Motta is dressed in a traditional tuxedo. The obvious change in attire emphasizes La Motta’s downfall as a performer. La Motta is nothing particularly special by the end of the film, and both he and his audience can witness that in his reflection. In an attempt to save some level of his dignity as a performer, La Motta has one last boxing match, targeting his reflection as his opponent. At first when La Motta is told to perform, he physically leaves the frame, reflection and all. The leaving of the frame done by both La Motta and his reflection emphasizes that the two La Mottas are still in a 25 sense the same individual. However, when La Motta returns for one last round with his reflection, the camera position only allows for the real La Motta to be seen when he physically moves in towards the mirror to punch at his reflection (fig. 25). This in and out of the real La Motta on screen creates the illusion that La Motta and his reflection have finally become two separate individuals. And with the real La Motta off screen, it is apparent from the focus placed on the reflection that La Motta’s genuine nature has been stripped away. All that is left of La Motta is the illusion of him as a performer. 71 Masculinity and Violence in American Cinema

By the end of Raging Bull, it becomes evident that the film is doing more than just establishing itself as a performance and La Motta as its lead performer. It is also utilizing lighting and shot design to reveal to audiences what happens when the performers that they watch become lost in their roles either on stage or on screen. With every performance that La Motta puts on in Raging Bull, he unarguably loses a bit of himself by taking on personas outside of his natural character. La Motta loses sight of who he is, and it is only because of La Motta’s reflection and physical changes at the end of the film that audiences can somewhat begin to understand La Motta as more than just an actor. La Motta’s downfall serves as warning to the audiences, who so carefully watch and examine his life, to be careful of the performances that they themselves take on in in their own lives. If audiences are not careful, their lives, like La Motta’s, may change unexpectedly for the worst.

Works cited Hayes, Kevin J. “Introduction.” Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull. Ed. Kevin J. Hayves. Cambridge: Cambridge University, Press, 2005. Peterson, Michael. “Raging Bull and the Idea of Performance.” Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull. Ed. Kevin J. Hayes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Raging Cinema : Raging Bull’s Audience Aggression rodrigo pena Martin Scorsese’s1980 boxing film, Raging Bull, presents a devastatingly realistic view of the hardships Jake La Motta faced throughout his life. The film focuses on the pain Jake experienced, both in and outside of the ring, and it is stylistically constructed in order to do so. In order to communicate the full pressure of Jake’s experience, Scorsese does more than simply show events. He attempts to draw in his viewers by cleverly exporting that painful experience from the screen and into his audience. This is a large aspect of what ultimately makes Scorsese’s film so engrossing, especially when compared to other boxing films. The film’s power is not solely in its content, but also in its presentation. Through its unique style, the film 72 manages to directly assault its viewers, both visually and aurally. The majority of Raging Bull’s open aggression is confined to the many boxing scenes we see, but from very early on, the film’s unusual approach toward boxing matches is evident. In the first match of the film, we are introduced to an already bleeding La Motta midfight. The moment the sound switches from the old La Motta’s speech to the present time sounds of the boxing match, we hear the sound of a powerful punch as it makes contact with La Motta’s face. As Berliner points out, this cut brings us quickly “from quiet to loud, from dispassionate to intense, and from placid to brutal” (Berliner, 56). Until the bell rings, we are not given any kind of establishing shot, focusing instead on the continued attacks on La Motta. These aspects of the scene make little effort to ease the viewer into the boxing match. On the contrary, the viewers are almost thrust into the ring and left to fend for themselves, making the bell a welcome change of pace. Soon enough however, a shaky shot of a fight breaking out in the crowd jars the viewer once more, and then the fight continues. Because of this, we get the sense that one cannot actually escape the fight. A short break is followed by continued aggression both inside the ring and out, and the viewer follows along disoriented, forced to roll with the punches. In addition, this fight gives the viewers a first glimpse into several aspects of the film’s boxing scene style, which will then repeatedly return throughout the film. The first of La Motta’s matches with Sugar Ray Robinson provides a great example of the almost unnecessary brutality of Raging Bull’s boxing matches. As the two fighters race back and forth across the ring, we get a sense of the speed of these matches. Each attack consists of a series of punches delivered in quick succession, powerful enough to carry a boxer across the ring or off his feet. As they move, we see La Motta advance and attack while Robinson retreats, yet continues to be repeatedly punched in the face while doing so. This demonstrates another aspect of the film’s unusual boxing violence: its complete disregard for defensive maneuvering. Rarely, if ever, is a punch blocked or dodged or a prizefighter clinched in this film. Rather, the fights consist of repeated direct attacks, where the best defense is a good offense. As a result, matches are fast paced, blood flies left and right, and the sound of punching never quite seems to stop. The viewer is left to hold out for a break from the unforgiving attacks, cringing as the heated matches rage on. 73 Masculinity and Violence in American Cinema

No attempt is made to hide this tactic in La Motta’s final match with Sugar Ray, where La Motta is content to be brutally punished by his rival. The camerawork in this scene is in keeping with the film’s relentless approach to violence. Before the final vicious assault begins, we are treated to a beautifully composed medium shot of the imposing Sugar Ray Robinson as the noise is drowned out. The shot is backlit so as to intensify the boxer’s power. Finally, we see Robinson approach the camera as he prepares to attack. Robinson’s punches here, as in other parts of the film, are often shown to be approaching the viewer, who is placed in the receiving boxer’s point of view. Quick cuts following the punches disorient and frighten the viewer, who may be at any point surprised to see another approaching punch. In these shots, the viewer has clearly been placed in the position of the punished boxer, making the attacks seem that much more direct. In addition, the constant sound of punching, which is often accompanied by the hard sound of cameras going off, rounds out the assault on the senses. The metallic sound of the cameras gives the punches a much tougher feel, thus making the attack all the more violent. Much like the later thuds of Jake banging his head against the wall of his prison cell, these sounds make us uneasy because of the pain we already associate with hitting a hard surface. Spurts of blood shooting out from La Motta’s face as Robinson attacks seem to corroborate the unusual strength of these punches, and as the blood-soaked crowd gasps in horror, the moviegoer is likely to do the same. Thus, these sounds place the viewer close to the action in the ring, continuing the film’s aggression, but also allowing the viewer to identify with the match’s audience, whose space is often violated by fights breaking out, fighters being knocked out of the ring, or blood being sent onto their faces. Once again, we see no escape from the attacks of the film, certainly not for the viewer. These cinematic elements are crucial parts of Scorsese’s attack on the senses. Grindon notes that “the boxing sequences strive for a more physiological reaction to stimuli closer to Sergei Eisenstein’s behaviorialist concepts of montage that aimed to ‘plow the psyche’ of the spectator” (Grindon, 24). These scenes definitely do assault the spectator’s mind, as Grindon points out, because they “portray the inner feelings of the boxer” (Grindon, 23). The fights are constructed 74 rodrigo pena specifically to communicate pain to the viewer, since this pain is the defining sensation of the boxer’s experience. This is accomplished though Scorsese’s cinematography and sound editing. That Scorsese’s aim was to cause such a physical response in his viewers is thus plainly evident. As Grindon notes, Eisenstein largely influenced Scorsese’s approach in these sequences. Eisenstein theorized that each shot in a film builds “on top of the others,” and that the “collision” of these shots is what communicates an idea (Eisenstein, 49). In accordance with Eisenstein’s montage theories, Scorsese uses several conflicting shots to depict the brutality of his fight scenes. Berliner identifies this aspect of the film as well, commenting on Scorsese’s choice to “break the continuity rules of editing to convey a subjective impression of La Motta’s brutal experience” (Berliner, 48). In accordance with Eisenstein’s thinking, these shots come together powerfully to communicate an idea. In this case, that message is an overly violent experience which is conveyed psychologically to the audience, aggravating them personally. However, this “physiological reaction” that Grindon identifies is not relegated solely to the boxing sequences (Grindon, 24). In fact, the viewer witnesses several acts of violence not only outside the ring, but outside of the arena as well. The first of these is in Jake’s apartment, where he pressures Joey into repeatedly punching him in the face. This surprises the viewer because of the scene’s rapid escalation. Though these are brothers, Joey quickly agrees to punch Jake, and soon enough is punching him with his bare fist. As he frames Joey preparing to punch, Scorsese is sure to give us a clear view of the ring on his hand, which makes each punch elicit a cringing response. On Jake’s end, we can clearly see blood appearing on his face as the punches continue. Through this scene, the film is sure to violate the viewers’ safe space from the start of the film. This scene gives us violence outside the ring and inside the commonly safe sphere of the family and the household, which is shocking. As a result, the viewer is quickly conditioned to expect violence from Jake at any moment, which makes the overall film experience unusually taxing on the viewer. This sets us up for the film’s most glaring violation of the safety of the family space, when Jake attacks Joey while he eats with his family. 75 Masculinity and Violence in American Cinema

This scene begins with Joey threatening to stab his son with a knife unless he eats, which is particularly disquieting parenting to begin with, and then descends into complete chaos as Jake savagely beats his brother out of jealousy. Much of the tension of this moment is built through sound. Before the fight begins, the radio is clearly audible in the background, but once the punching begins, the radio is drowned out completely. Instead, we now hear Jake’s accusations as well as the women’s screams. Most interestingly, however, we can hear the distinct screeching of what appears to be a group of wild animals. These sounds with no identifiable source attack our ears and minds while highlighting the savagery of Jake’s outburst. Finally, as Jake leaves, the sound of the radio comes in once again as we get a shot of the children, silent. Through these choices, Scorsese has thoroughly ravaged the sanctity of the home for those children and for the viewers, who are now powerfully disturbed. Similarly, Joey’s fight with Salvy provides another frightening example of violence outside of the ring. Not only is this fight particularly violent, but it is a fight that does not directly involve La Motta. Here we see violence from other characters, signaling that maybe this stems from more than just Jake; this is the world they live in. While elsewhere in the film we can expect violence due to Jake’s nature, the few moments we see without him feel fairly safe. Joey’s fight with Salvy upsets this balance by stepping away from Jake’s point of view and showing us that the brutality does not stop with Jake. Though most of the film follows Jake, this scene pulls the film’s narrative closer to objectivity by abandoning Jake for an important moment. Thus, when we see the violence of the scene, we understand that it is a fact of these characters’ environment rather than ideas of one overly aggressive boxer. The scene therefore catches viewers off guard, throwing them right into a vicious conflict once again. In fact, the fight begins with the sound of glass breaking on Salvy’s face, which is already troubling. Yet once the fight bursts out onto the streets, it becomes another disturbingly personal scene of aggression for the viewer. This is accomplished through Scorsese’s choice to shoot from inside the car as Joey repeatedly closes the car door on Salvy. The fact that we cannot immediately see Salvy while Joey slams the door on what we assume must be Salvy’s head makes us 76 rodrigo pena imagine the worst. Thus, violence is placed in the viewer’s mind more effectively through simple suggestion. Placing the audience’s point of view inside the car in this scene is brilliant, because it makes these acts much more directly aggressive. Inside the car, we see a terrified woman screaming as Salvy reaches out to her for help. The camera then returns to its previous position and puts the viewer directly in the frightened woman’s place, letting her emotion carry over to the viewer. The viewer is too close to the action and with nowhere else to run. As the fight spills into the small space of the car, the viewer feels infringed upon and the violence pushed on the viewer is once again proven to be inescapably real. Even when violence is to be actively avoided, the film manages to keep its sense of aggression. Jake’s fight with Billy Fox in particular stands out because it does not treat boxing in the same way the other fights do. Since the fight is rigged, there is no real hostility displayed during the fight, and thus the scene lacks the screeching, steam, and rapid cuts present in other fights. However, Jake and the viewers are still unable to escape aggression as the boxer is punished for his actions during this non-hostile fight. In the corner between rounds, Jake is actively slapped and chastised for being too obvious. This hit is once again an act of violence in an area commonly considered to be a safe space. Throughout the fight, the sound is comprised mostly of booing and insults thrown at Jake. There is a sense that he is never truly allowed to escape aggression in his life, and it is overwhelming both for the boxer and for the audience. As he breaks down crying after the match, the viewer feels the effects of this aggression along with the boxer. Finally, La Motta’s episode in the county jail works in a similar way to bring about the deepest form of the film’s punishment on its viewers. In the cell, the fighter furiously slams his head against the wall, and then repeatedly punches it. This scene powerfully suggests feelings of physical pain just as much as it pains the viewer emotionally. We hate to see him hurt himself this way, but we also understand how he has been hurting himself already through the entire film. This scene thus drains the viewer emotionally, because as Grindon notes, “to experience compassion for this man” will “leave you exhausted” (Grindon, 34). This climactic scene therefore continues to inspire 77 Masculinity and Violence in American Cinema

feelings of physical pain in the viewer, but also takes that pain to a much deeper part of the audience. Despite the fact that La Motta is now clearly defeated, the film’s attack on its viewers has not eased; on the contrary, it has been working its way up to become an even more damaging assault, which is finally what makes this moment so memorable. These aspects of the film’s gritty presentation make it extremely powerful, if a bit difficult to stomach, for its viewers. Not only does the film portray unrealistically violent encounters within the ring through its staging of the fights and its camerawork, editing, and sound, but it allows this same violence to spread out onto other areas where its audience may not be so comfortable. The result is a film that allows little more than a moment’s rest for its audience between long stretches of apprehension. The viewer is often a witness to frightfully brutal acts in intentionally personalized ways, which make the film’s assaults extend past its characters and into its audience.

Works cited Berliner, Todd. “Visual Absurdity in Raging Bull.” Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull. By Kevin J. Hayes. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. 41-65. MyLibrary. Web. . Eisenstein, Sergei. Film Form: Essays in Film Theory. Trans. Jay Leyda. San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1977. Print. Grindon, Leger. “Art and Genre in Raging Bull.” Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull. By Kevin J. Hayes. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. 19-40. MyLibrary. Web. . Raging Bull. Dir. Martin Scorsese. Perf. Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci. United Artists, 1980. DVD.

78 The Shadow of De Niro : Meta-cinema in Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull From its inception, Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull had been the pet tenyia lee project of actor Robert De Niro, the film’s star and, I would argue, its protagonist. In its meta-cinematic aspects such as shot composition and the way these shots frame action, the film encourages in the audience an awareness of the camera and the actor’s presence. Ushered into and out of the film by opening and closing scenes whose cinematography hints at the camera and actor’s presence, the audience comes to view the story protagonist Jake La Motta as a mere fiction and the actor Robert De Niro as the film’s overshadowing reality. With this increased distance between spectator and story- world character, the audience becomes less inclined to judge La Motta’s character — not to forgive his faults, but to consider them insignificant in a film where the actor becomes the protagonist. The film begins with a prelude of a cloaked figure pacing about the boxing ring. Already from this beginning scene, the cinematic elements encourage the audience to identify the figure as the actor De Niro and not the character La Motta. The appearance of this figure is prefaced by a title card that credits actor Robert De Niro. We later learn that this silent boxer also goes by Jake La Motta, but our initial introduction to him as Robert De Niro puts the actor’s identity more forward in the audience’s mind. The boxing ring’s ropes section the shot into four strips divided by thick black lines, and are the first of a series of details that fit into the meta-cinematic motif of lines. These lines on the screen actualize the invisible guidelines camera operators use to frame a shot and thus remind the audience of the director’s hand behind the film, the actor’s person behind the characters. The figure bounces and dodges, feigning blows in slow motion as he moves around the ring. He stays more or less in one corner, except to walk closer to the camera and then retreat back again. This he does twice, each time approaching the audience before moving away again. His movement perpendicular to the screen, rather than from left to right across the shot, heightens viewers’ awareness of the actor. 79 Masculinity and Violence in American Cinema

He moves into the audience’s space and approaches us as if aware of our presence, an awareness that defies us to look at his figure merely as a fiction. His interaction with the audience thus raises our awareness of his reality, reality here being the actor De Niro. From the boxing ring, Scorsese takes us into the dressing room and forward in time, to 1964 and La Motta’s comedian days. Viewers have no reason yet to realize that the bloated man before them is the same figure they saw in the ring three shots earlier. The only clues that the unlikely man before us now was once a boxer are the words he recites, but in his delivery of them that past reality becomes a fiction. He recites boxing anecdotes in a flat voice, completely devoid of any feeling, as if the words belonged to someone else — as if they belonged to a character he were playing. The scripted quality of this scene makes it come across as a scene of an actor practicing to be a boxer, which it is on more than one level. But each way of reading the scene leads us to the same understanding that the man standing before the camera is not La Motta, but the actor playing La Motta. On the level of the story world, this is a scene of La Motta running lines for his comedy act. But the very fact that he has to practice his own life, to mime a hook when he says “a hook” and a jab when he says “a jab,” makes it seem like his past is not even real to him. He, too, is an actor playing out his own life, 26 a narrative situation that leads the viewer to recall the actual actor. The second level, in which the man is De Niro practicing at boxing moves, is thus simply a replica of the first. The two levels merge and bring us to the same awareness of the actor. More important for highlighting the presence of the actor in this first dressing room scene is the straightforward shot composition. The framing in the two shots that comprise this sequence come straight from a textbook, and thus have an obvious filmic quality to them that again alerts the viewer that they are indeed watching a film. The camera brings us into the dressing room with a medium long shot of De Niro, who stands so perfectly cheated out to the camera that it 80 tenyia lee looks as if he were posed there specifically for that purpose — which he was (fig. 26). From there the camera cuts to a tighter shot, taken from a straighter angle. De Niro’s shoulders are now almost perfectly squared, centered in the frame. This shot is paired with a title card that introduces this man to us as “Jake La Motta, 1964.” Indeed, introducing La Motta seems to be the only purpose of this shot; it holds no other narrative significance. The only action that happens in this shot is La Motta looking from right to left across what seems to be the bottom of the screen. He almost seems to be looking at his own title card, which brings about a whole other level of meta-cinematic awareness: a character who is aware of himself as a fictional character. His avoidance of the camera’s gaze also conveys a sense of shame, an inability to meet the audience’s eye when his title card announces a lie. On the subject of cinematography, we also see traces again of a cameraman’s guidelines that recall to us the camera’s presence. In the first medium long shot of De Niro and also in the closer shot of him that follows, the bar of a clothes rack runs along the screen perfectly at eye-level. The vertical lines in the wallpaper, corners, and the hanging curtains also seem to guide De Niro’s figure into its proper place in the shot. The sequence of self-reflexive shots leads us into the rest of the film. Having planted the actor in the audience’s mind, Scorsese takes us through the rest of the film with De Niro as a constant presence hovering just behind his character. The film ends with a scene that parallels this early scene in the dressing room, and before the screen goes black we are again reminded that what we witnessed was not the life of Jake La Motta, but a performance by Robert De Niro imitating that life. Scorsese parallels the opening and closing dressing room scenes by introducing them in a similar fashion. He ushers audiences into the dressing room in both cases with a close-up shot of a promotional sign. But the literal parallels end there. Nevertheless, from this scene audiences gather the same sense that the figure they see before them is not La Motta, but the actor De Niro playing La Motta. Whereas the opening sequence used straightforward shot compositions, guiding lines, and De Niro’s flitting eyes to convey the camera’s presence and La Motta’s fictitiousness, the ending sequence does the exact 81 Masculinity and Violence in American Cinema

opposite. In the one sustained shot in this scene, we see De Niro’s figure framed in a highly unconventional manner, breaking outside the guiding lines, and settling his gaze squarely on his reflection. The way in which the action of this scene moves around this one shot, and Scorsese’s clever use of a mirror, raise an awareness in the audience that we are looking through a camera’s eye. Scorsese frames the action of the ending scene entirely in a single shot that starts out as a medium close up of De Niro from the back with the camera over his shoulder to catch his reflection in the dressing room mirror. Having the actor’s back towards the camera directly contradicts the standard rules of cinema, and clearly contrasts the initial dressing room scene where De Niro so generously cheats out towards the camera. And unlike the earlier scene where the horizontal bar and the vertical lines trace out a proper place for the subject in the shot, the figures in this shot spill outside the guiding lines, and even outside the scope of the shot. The aspects of the scene I see as guiding lines in this shot are the mirror’s solid frame and the thin rectangle of border in the mirror’s interior. De Niro’s person careens from one edge of the mirror frame to the other, and frequently ignores them altogether. The camera is so inconsiderate as to let the lines cut directly through the middle of his face when he shifts to the left, and to decapitate him when he stands up (fig. 27 and 28). It allots Scorsese the same treatment when he arrives for his cameo, which consists of about three inches of his right shoulder. (Scorsese’s cameo in itself makes certain implications about the director’s hand in the film, and the presence of the actors and film crew over that of the characters.) In relation to Scorsese’s role, a good deal of the action he contributes to the scene takes place off camera, which again highlights the camera’s limited — and limiting — perspective. Scorsese barely makes it into the shot for his first line, then moves out of the shot again but continues the conversation from off-screen. His voice coming from off-screen and the sound of the door closing later on to indicate his actual departure bring to the audience a consciousness of what the camera does not allow us to see. We are similarly deprived of the privilege of looking when De Niro stands up and walks out of the shot, leaving us to contemplate the empty dressing room. In breaking the rules of how to properly 82 frame a subject, the camera in this scene seems almost to mock the audience by denying us the chance to see. Thus in this case, our awareness of the camera stems from our irritation with its stubborn, stingy perspective. Scorsese’s artful use of the mirror also heightens the audience’s awareness of the film as a film in this ending scene. The mirror works as a symbol, representing an indirect mode of perception. In this shot, we are meant to look at De Niro’s reflection in the mirror, not his figure directly. While at least part of his figure makes it into the frame of the shot, it is an incomplete view of him, and a view of his back. The 27 hostility of his turned back, along with De Niro’s steady gaze into his own eyes in the mirror, lead the audience’s gaze to that secondary image of him as well. Again, in an instance of intentional meta-cinema, Scorsese has the audience look upon De Niro through a secondary medium to make us aware of how we are doing so already. Like the mirror, the camera gives us a processed image of the subject, and like the camera, De Niro gives us a processed performance of La Motta. Our awareness of the camera’s artifice leads us to an awareness of De Niro’s artifice, which finally brings about an understanding of the figure before the camera as De Niro the 28 actor and not the character he plays. Due to the meta-cinematic aspects of the film such as those we see in the opening and closing scenes in La Motta’s dressing room, the audience goes through Raging Bull with an awareness of the actor’s presence. “It is not…the protagonist Jake La Motta, who is so posed on the cusp of fiction and efficacious performance…To be sure, the actor De Niro, is,” says Michael Peterson (Peterson, 70). In the fictitious story world of the film, De Niro becomes more real to us than the character La Motta. It could be said that Scorsese, in failing to fill a believable world with believable characters, fails as a 83 Masculinity and Violence in American Cinema

storyteller. I would argue, however, that reminding the audience of La Motta’s fictitiousness is the only way his story could succeed — the only way he could make audiences be receptive of the story’s hero. Raging Bull presents viewers with an unpleasant protagonist, a “hero” who rapes, steals, beats his wife and alienates his brother, a man who fights his way through life. Jake La Motta is, as the title so aptly conveys, a brute. No audience could be expected to feel sympathy for such an unpleasant protagonist, but neither is it easy for audiences to resonate with a film whose hero we loathe. In establishing the actor as the protagonist, then, Scorsese relieves La Motta from his difficult duty of winning over the audience. Our closeness to the actor distances us from the characters, and since we recognize La Motta as a fiction we refrain from judging him. The film’s priority, then, becomes its celebration of De Niro’s performance in his role as La Motta, and in that it succeeded beautifully. De Niro picked up an Academy Award for Best Actor, reviews extol his astounding feats of method acting, and La Motta himself “suggested that De Niro, having trained with him, could be a ranking middleweight” (Peterson, 71) The protagonist of Raging Bull, it seems, is not Jake La Motta, but Robert De Niro.

Works cited Peterson, Michael. “Raging Bull and the Idea of Performance.” Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull. Ed. Kevin J. Hayes. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005.

84 Challenging American Optimism : Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and Taxi Driver Mean Streets (1973) may be known for its realism, but it and Martin jeffrey norman Scorsese’s two most notable films immediately afterward open with ostentatious artifice. Mean Streets opens with a voiceover and a series of jump cuts to the tune of “Be My Baby.” Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974) rolls its opening credits in a red ribbon font over a light blue satin background. It then depicts the location of protagonist Alice’s childhood as a woodsy wonderland, reminiscent of Kansas in The Wizard of Oz, with rich warm lighting and background facades that do not attempt to conceal their flat studio construction. Taxi Driver (1976) likewise presents a markedly stylized front in its opening shot. The very first frame of the film focuses on the vehicle of its title. An immense cloud of billowing steam spews from a pothole on a night-lit street. Through this appear front tires, a bumper, a grille, and a yellow hood. The body of the camera remains stationary as these components merge and suggest an automobile, brightly lit from the right. This car veers to the left; the camera’s eye lifts and pans slowly to see it pass, leaving the steam and the city lights in its wake. The percussive score buttresses the images to suggest the taxicab and its occupant may be embarking on a mighty quest. But Scorsese balances any dreaminess with devices of dissonance. Little Alice “swear[s] to God that [she] can sing better than Alice Faye,” and the folksy scene ends with a disturbing feedback loop of “Now” before leaping into the harsh light of present-day Alice (Ellen Burstyn) in the American southwest. The steam in Taxi Driver’s opening reveals city lights, suggestive of Scorsese’s choice city for celluloid, New York. One also sees a man’s eyes as they pass over scantily clad nightlife on a crosswalk. These films commence with situations that test their characters. One watches Alice to determine her staying power as she tries to make it as a singer and get to Monterey with her young son after being left widowed. Taxi Driver, as well, raises intrigue as to what the driver, Travis Bickle (Robert DeNiro), has against those outside his cab, what he will do to bring about a more acceptable life in this environment. These protagonists have goals that take place in classic American backgrounds: the city sprawl and the suburban open range. 85 Masculinity and Violence in American Cinema

Taxi Driver and Alice see Scorsese challenge American optimism by showing characters who possess it. Those in the hunt for the dream most often take to the wheel. Taxi Driver repeatedly frames the story world from within and through the windows of Travis Bickle’s cab. Five minutes and forty seconds into the film, for instance, the camera shows the car through detailed images, sequentially presenting shots of the car’s bumper in a left-side profile, the rear window meeting the trunk of the car (also from the left side), a head-on shot of a metal stand on the car’s hood (missing its brand insignia), a close-up of the right side mirror, and a panoramic view of street behind the car from the rear window. Travis’s initial encounter with presidential candidate Charles Palantine (Leonard Harris) also employs this viewpoint from within the cab. The viewer catches Travis’s glance back at Palantine’s assistant through the rearview mirror. One also sees the driver 29 through the viewpoint of a suspicious passenger, which heightens one’s own suspicion. Travis asks to confirm the candidate’s identity. “Yes, I am [Palantine],” he responds. The rearview mirror now catches Palantine staring back; the viewer resumes Travis’s position. The scene speaks for the film at large in that Taxi Driver does not withhold others’ perception of Travis. It nevertheless consistently allows the viewpoint of its protagonist to dominate. This prevents one from ever completely objectifying Travis as the loathsome psychopath that he will become in the course of the film. The viewer sees him as alone and as longing for someone to wallow 30 with him in the supposed filth of the town. That his morbidity is made personal leads the viewer to near sympathy for his mental state and morality. Travis’s taxi, then, tows the viewer along as his mind rides into madness. The vehicle in Alice maintains a more 86 distanced appraisal of its subject, a singer. jeffrey norman Alice mourns her husband’s death early in the film. The tragic event serves as a rude awakening as she experiences a new independence. The automobile, whose very name connotes a transportation of one’s self, acts as a corollary to this liberty. To observe the film’s first capture of a car, then, may offer insight into its method of portraying its protagonist. The first shot of a vehicle in Alice occurs eight minutes and thirteen seconds into the film. The camera, set several meters back, slowly moves its eye in as a station wagon pulls into the gas station from the right and from a fairly removed angle (fig. 29). This directly contrasts with the insular view of the vehicle which appeared early in Taxi Driver (fig. 30). The next shot, with a medium lens, is shown at 13:45, as her husband lies lifeless and bloody behind the wheel and destroyed windshield of his truck. Alice, her son and her friend are next seen dressed for a funeral inside a car, in the backseat, and with the camera filming from outside the windshield. Her tears inaudible, one only watches from afar as she weeps. The camera has disallowed any close proximity to her tears. Thus far, the film shows vehicles as dangerous and distanced–a promising source of contrast against a potentially saccharine portrayal of a widow attempting to make a new life for herself and her child. Alice and her son do receive special interior coverage from the camera when they leave Socorro for Phoenix; this moment arguably launches Alice’s liberation. From inside the vehicle one sees Alice at the wheel, her son seated next to her, and the open road in front of them (22:00). This intimate perspective only results after the camera, poised still on a bridge, catches the car pass underneath it and upward along the lengthy stretch of freeway. This distance results in an unexpected closeness to the characters. That the viewer receives a primarily objective perspective allows him to appreciate these occasional displays of nearness. Scorsese maximizes this principle when he specially depicts Alice’s dream of singing, carried over from childhood, as spectacle. Thirty-seven minutes into the film, Alice takes to a bar’s piano to audition for her first singing job in years. Scorsese opts to mount the significance of this event for her life by orchestrating the scene as her star vehicle. Immediately the viewer notices that the clinking and conversation at the bar stops; all diegetic sound ceases and we hear only Alice’s voice and song. Alice receives visual pressure and attention from the softly focused gazes of those in the bar that move 87 Masculinity and Violence in American Cinema

from their drinks to the lady at the piano. Though the scene takes place in the afternoon, Alice seems to bathe in a consuming top light, further focusing attention on her. She urges the bar patrons to “just go on and do whatever you’re doing.” But Scorsese orchestrates their focus on her. Her song – actually a suite of three cleverly collated classics – seems composed to make her audience, the viewer included, feel for her: “It seems we’ve met before, but I can’t remember where or / when you’re alone…when you’re lover has / gone with the wind…” The camera whips and swirls around Alice at the piano as she sings. At this moment, the camera revolves around her as if she were the star she has dreamed of becoming one day. Were the entire film shot with such ostentatious theatricality, it would disorient the viewer’s focus and undermine the plot by infusing sentiment. But Scorsese reserves such lavishness for Alice’s girlhood dream as it is realized in her adulthood. Alice does not sing particularly well or poorly. Yet as her fantasy takes place in reality, she is framed as if she were a great talent. Her voice’s lack of remarkability defines Alice’s dream as not realistic. The celluloid transforms it into the idealistic. Alice shows the importance of life as not where one is but rather where one would like to be. The headquarters for such ambition are found where you can make it anywhere – if you make it there. New York City is where a truly gifted Alice would venture for success. But both Taxi Driver and its psychopath are found in the Big Apple. Scorsese pays the same attention to Alice’s singing as to Travis’ equally built up, and undercut, voiceovers. The first journal-writing scene occurs five minutes and fifteen seconds into the film, showing Travis’s ordinary lived-in apartment with a pan shot that does not show the protagonist until it circles to him sitting at a desk near the window. In this way the shot disembodies his voice. This heightens interest in the viewer to visually confirm the owner of the voice and the apartment. When the camera does this by showing Travis as he writes, it then shows shots of the nightlife as Travis would encounter it in his taxi. “Whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies” is how Travis narrates footage of what to the viewer appear to be average city citizens. “Someday a real rain… will wash the scum off the streets,” Travis says next. Yet at the same time, the camera shows rather immaculate, freshly wet asphalt as the 88 street that Travis’s taxi drives on. Scorsese depicts a strong disparity jeffrey norman between the actual world and Travis’ impression of it. The film encourages the viewer to rely on his narration. Travis seems to aspire to a sense of virtue, albeit not pragmatic. “I’ve been going with a girl for several months. Her name is Betsy,” he writes in a letter to his parents (1:12:44). Yet the film has established Betsy’s (Cybill Shepherd) complete disinterest in Travis and the peep show he takes her to. The viewer here catches Travis lying. His already suspect understanding of his surroundings now takes on added duplicity. When his voice, overlaying a montage of pushups and pull-ups and bicept curls, claims that “from now on, it will be total organization,” one doubts that his mind will achieve such order. For its current state is more akin to the poster that decorates his room, misspelling the word as “organi-zized.” Soon afterward, the camera shows Travis seated in a movie theater, with groans serving as diegetic sound. He has returned to the peep show. Taxi Driver’s voiceovers grind against the images they overlay, creating events in the film that belie Travis’s puritanism as hypocrisy. Alice ends with similar affect. “I met David…and then I spent all the money that I had saved to get to Monterey… I got sidetracked,” says Alice to friend and fellow waitress Flo (Diane Ladd) in a crying fit toward the end of the film. Alice pointedly introduces Monterey as both the recollection of her warm childhood and the genesis of her strong-willed nature – reflected in her son’s surliness. But an agreeable bearded rancher named David (Kris Kristofferson) enters and his masculine placidity seems to reinstate Alice’s confidence in men. The fire for her Monterey has fizzled out. The viewer’s anticipation for the realization of her goal likewise crumbles. But the film establishes a precedent for such a letdown. Around 1:00:30, Alice returns to her one-bedroom motel apartment, telling son Tommy (Alfred Lutter) to “relax. I found a job.” But her new gig, at the local diner, has no piano. Tommy asks, “How are you going to sing?” She responds with the deflating truth. “I’m not. I’m waiting on tables.” The urge to live up to her dream demonstrated in her youth buckles under the reality that songs do not always spell employment. This same matter-of-fact sensibility colors Alice’s final scene with David in the diner. He says to her that singing “sounds like of hell of a gamble to me.” After Alice confirms her devotion to the dream, the viewer sees a triangle: Alice and David, with fellow waitress Vera (Valerie Curtin) in between them. Her remark that “it 89 Masculinity and Violence in American Cinema

feels like fall today” jars. It seems out of place with the context of the scene. Similarly, Alice’s steadfastness to singing also now appears to be misplaced. David consents to her singing aspiration. He next offers to sacrifice his ranch for her and Tommy, entreating them to live with him. Alice seems ready to cry. Her stint as a singer intact, Monterey on the horizon, and a pleasant man in tow, she appears to be having her cake and eating it too. The mise-en-scene, though, has been prepared to throw a piece of this cake in her face. Alice and Daniel embrace. The diner erupts in applause. And Alice’s seemingly uncompromising tendency is revealed as a show. The film has clarified her willingness to go it alone. This denouement exposes, though, that she would rather make it there with a man. Her idealism conflicts with her compromised self-reliance. Her familiarity with the comfort of family eclipses her feminist sensibility. The optimism of Alice may be uncommon, but its convenient conclusion comes off as uncompelling. Taxi Driver does away with such kid gloves in its ending that in turn saves a kid. Taxi Driver’s conclusion begins with a god’s-eye-view pan of the carnage brought on by Travis’s killing spree. He has “saved” Iris, a young prostitute, whom he believes deserves a better life. The camera fades to outside the bloody building to show a massive crowd intercepted by two police cars. With all that has happened, the viewer expects Bickle’s arrest. One instead sees newspaper clippings on a wall that read, “Taxi Driver Battles Gangsters,” “Taxi Driver Hero to Recover.” A handwritten letter ends with “our deepest thanks.” A voiceover accompanies the images of Iris’s parents thanking Travis for their daughter’s rescue. New York is celebrating Travis, once maniacal and now martyr. The viewer naturally wonders if what is playing is actuality or Travis’s imagined reality. This juxtaposition between the viewer’s expectation and the plot of the film finds a notable precursor at 1:07:19. Travis is shown at the right end of the frame, slowly turning toward the camera, as he narrates, “Here is a man who would not take it anymore, who would not… let…” The film then mysteriously offers Travis a retake. He restarts his narration, and the shot revises itself. Taxi Driver allows its protagonist to edit and mend his own representation. Travis serves as both cast and crew member. The ending that plays out in his favor, then, rings true with the film’s establishment of Travis as author. Because the protagonist 90 can so freely create his own reality, his morbid optimism frightens. jeffrey norman As shocking as its ending may be, Taxi Driver does not conclude pragmatically. The viewer is correct in his or her assertion that Travis’s villainy should be stopped. The shot of the police cars leads to such an expectation of the plot. But because Travis can correct his celluloid on a caprice, one sees the ending as satisfying the story in spirit. If the opening of Taxi Driver suggests a man on a quest, the film finishes – however ambivalently – by basking in the success of a crusade complete. Alice likewise rewards the sentiment of its characters. Alice and Tommy do not arrive in Monterey physically. But the film’s final shot presents the 31 pair in front of a sign that reads, “Monterey.” They walk toward it. Cinematically, they are portrayed as having arrived. Mother and son also walk in a very tight embrace, as the sun seems ready to set behind them. They appear to be as emotionally content as they believed they would be if they landed in Monterey. It is telling, though, that the Monterey sign before them is visually split into two halves by a tall pole in front of it (fig. 31). In the same vein, the hardly noticeable brief musical rewind, as Travis is caught looking in the rearview mirror at multiple angles, qualifies Taxi’s finale (1:50:33). These endings are fractured, not fixed. Travis famous “Are you talking to me?” is reiterated here as “Are you looking at me?” His glances into the mirror read as glances to the viewer, making him or her complicit in his ownership of the celluloid. All that ensued can occur again, at his whim; he need only cue a rewind. One can only watch, and wince, as the character plays his tale for his win. Alice’s victory vacillates. She has her real man, but no real Monterey. She finds happiness. But the viewer rooted for her autonomy. The viewer discovers that such autonomy is rooted in porous matter. Alice’s true dream, a family with room for reverie, quenches her desire. Scorsese’s films reveal the concept of optimism in his country as a mirage. As one nears it, it dissipates. If one is not careful, one will be left drinking sand in place of the water one craves. 91