B0041VYHGW EBOK (180 page)

These lines do not
create
the film’s ideology, which has been present in the narrative and stylistic devices throughout. The dialogue simply makes explicit what has been implicit all along. (Compare this with the line “There’s no place like home” in
The Wizard of Oz
—another MGM musical, made five years earlier.)

The fair solves the problems of the future and family unity. The family is able to go to a French restaurant without going away from home. The ending also restores the father’s position as at least the titular head of the family. Only he is able to remember how to get to the restaurant and prepares to guide the group there.

Understanding a film’s ideology typically involves analyzing how form and style create meaning. As
Chapter 2
suggested, meaning can be of four general types: referential, explicit, implicit, and symptomatic. Our analysis of
Meet Me in St. Louis
has shown how all four types work to reinforce a social ideology—in this case, the values of tradition, home life, and family unity. The referential aspects of the film presuppose that the audience can grasp the difference between St. Louis and New York, and that it knows about international expositions, American family customs, national holidays, and so on. These address the film to a specifically American audience. The explicit meaning of the film is formulated by the final exchange we have just considered, in which the small city is discussed as the perfect fusion of progress and tradition.

We have also traced out how formal construction and stylistic motifs contribute to one major implicit meaning: the family and home as creating a “haven in a heartless world,” the central reference point for the individual’s life. What, then, of symptomatic meanings?

Generally, the film expresses one tendency of many social ideologies in its attempt to naturalize social behavior.
Chapter 2
mentioned that systems of values and beliefs may seem unquestionable to the social groups that hold them. One way that groups maintain such systems is to assume that certain things are beyond human choice or control, that they are simply natural. Historically, this habit of thought has often been used to justify oppression and injustice, as when women, minority groups, or the poor are thought to be naturally inferior.
Meet Me in St. Louis
participates in this general tendency, not only in its characterization of the Smith women (Esther and Rose are simply presumed to want husbands) but in the very choice of a white, upper-middle-class household as an emblem of American life. A more subtle naturalization is evident in the film’s overall formal organization. The natural cycle of the seasons is harmonized with the family’s life, and the conclusion of the plot takes place in the spring, the time of renewal.

We can also focus on more historically specific symptomatic meanings. The film was released in November 1944 (just in time for Christmas). World War II was still raging. The audience for this film would have consisted largely of women and children whose male relatives had been absent for extended periods, often overseas. Families were often forced apart, and the people who remained behind had to make considerable sacrifices for the war effort. In a time when women were required to work in defense plants, factories, and offices (and many were enjoying the experience), there appeared a film that restricted the range of women’s experiences to home and family, and yearned for a simpler time when family unity was paramount.

Meet Me in St. Louis
can thus be seen as a symptom of a nostalgia for prewar, pre-Depression America. In a 1944 audience, parents of young fighting men would remember the 1903–1904 period as part of their own childhoods. All of the formal devices—narrative construction, seasonal segmentation, songs, color, and motifs—can thus be seen as reassuring the viewers. If the women and others left at home can be strong and hold their families together against threats of disunity, domestic harmony will eventually return. From this perspective,
Meet Me in St. Louis
upholds dominant conceptions of American family life and may even propose an ideal of family unity for the postwar future.

1980. United Artists. Directed by Martin Scorsese. Script by Paul Schrader and Mardik Martin. From the book
Raging Bull
by Jake La Motta, with Joseph Carter and Peter Savage. Photographed by Michael Chapman. Edited by Thelma Schoonmaker. With Robert De Niro, Cathy Moriarty, Joe Pesci, Frank Vincent, Nicholas Colasanto, Theresa Saldana.

In analyzing
Meet Me in St. Louis,
we argued that the film upholds a characteristically American ideology. It’s also possible for a film made in Hollywood to take a more ambivalent attitude toward ideological issues. Martin Scorsese’s
Raging Bull
does so by taking violence as its central theme.

Violence is widespread in American cinema, often serving as the basis for entertainment. Extreme violence has become central to several genres, such as sciencefiction and horror films. Such genres often rely in part on making their violence very stylized, usually thanks to special effects, and hence minimally disturbing.
Raging Bull
uses a different tactic, drawing on conventions of cinematic realism to make violence visceral and disturbing. Thus, even though it’s in some ways less savage than many other films of its era—not a single death occurs, for instance—it contains several scenes that are hard to bear. Not only the brutal boxing matches but also the equally harsh quarrels in everyday life bring violence to the fore.

Scorsese’s film is loosely based on the career of boxer Jake La Motta, who became the world middleweight champion in 1949.
Raging Bull
uses the boxing scenes (based on real fights) as emblematic of the violence that pervades Jake’s life. Indeed, he seems incapable of dealing with people without picking quarrels, making threats, or becoming violent. His two marriages, especially that with his second wife, Vickie, are full of bickering and domestic abuse. Although his closest relationship is apparently with his brother Joey, who initially manages his career, Jake eventually thrashes Joey in a jealous rage and permanently alienates him. Moreover, while Jake’s actions hurt others, he also wreaks havoc on himself, driving away everyone he loves and leading him to a pathetic career as an overweight stand-up comic and then as an actor reciting speeches from famous plays and films.

How are we to understand the ideology of a film that makes such a vicious bully its hero? We might be tempted to posit either/or interpretations. Either the film celebrates Jake’s murderous rage, or it condemns him as a pathological case. Yet in settling on one of these simple notions, we would fail to confront the film’s uneasy balance of sympathy for and revulsion toward its central character. We suggest that
Raging Bull
uses a variety of strategies, both of narrative and style, to make Jake a case study in the role of violence in American life. Scorsese thus creates a complex context within which Jake’s actions must be judged.

This context can be best approached by examining the formal structure of
Raging Bull
’s narrative. If we were to segment the film into its individual scenes, we would come up with a long list. Although there are some lengthy sequences, most are quite short. In all we arrive at 46, including the opening credits and the closing quotation title, but these can be usefully grouped into 12 major parts:

1. The opening credits, shown over a lengthy shot of Jake warming up alone in a boxing ring.
   
2. Backstage in a nightclub, 1964. Jake practices a poem he will recite. Flashback begins:
   
3. 1941. Expository scenes of Jake losing a match, fighting with his wife, seeing Vickie, and having his first date with her.
   
4. 1943. Two matches with Sugar Ray Robinson, separated by a love scene between Jake and Vickie.
   
5. A montage sequence alternating a series of fights, 1944 to 1947, and home movies of Jake’s private life.
   
6. A lengthy series of scenes in 1947, including three in the Copacabana nightclub, establishing Jake’s jealousy over Vickie and hatred of the mob. He ends by throwing a fight for them.
   
7. 1949. An argument with Vickie, followed by Jake’s winning the middleweight champion bout.
   
8. 1950. Jake beats up Vickie and his brother Joey in an unjustified jealous rage. He defends his title and fights Robinson again.
   
9. 1956. Jake retires and buys a nightclub in which he does comedy routines. Vickie leaves him, and he is arrested on a morals charge.
   
10. 1958. Jake does his comedy act in a cheap strip joint; he fails to persuade Joey to reconcile with him.
    Flashback ends.
    
11. 1964. Jake prepares to go onstage to perform his recital.
    
12. A black title with a biblical quotation and the film’s dedication.
    

The beginning and ending of the film are vital in shaping our attitude toward Jake’s career. The first image shows him warming up in the ring before an unspecified fight
(
11.104
).
Several filmic devices create our initial impressions of the protagonist. He bounces up and down in place, in slow motion. This slow tempo is accompanied by languid classical music, suggesting that his boxing warm-up is like a dance. The deep-space staging places the ring’s ropes prominently in the foreground and makes the ring seem huge, emphasizing Jake’s solitude. This long take continues through the main credits, establishing boxing as both a beautiful and a lonely sport. The image remains abstract and remote: it is the only scene in the narrative that does not take place in a year specified by a superimposed title.

A straight cut to
segment 2
shows Jake, suddenly fat and old, again practicing. He is going over his lines for a one-man show that consists of readings from famous literature and of a poem he has written about himself: “So give me a stage / Where this bull here can rage / And though I can fight / I’d much rather recite—That’s entertainment!” This episode takes place quite late in the story, after the long struggles of his boxing career. Not until segment 11 will the plot return to this moment in the story, with Jake continuing to rehearse his lines. In segment 11, as the manager summons him onstage, he does some boxer-style warm-up punches to build his confidence, muttering rapidly over and over, “I’m the boss, I’m the boss.”

By framing most of the story as a flashback, Scorsese links violence with entertainment. Jake’s gesture of spreading his arms as he says, “That’s entertainment!” in
segment 2
resembles the triumphant raising of his glove-clad hands whenever he wins a fight in the lengthy central flashback. Correspondingly,
Raging Bull
ignores Jake’s early life and concentrates on two periods: his boxing career and his turn to stand-up comedy and literary recitations. Both periods present him as trying to control his life and the people around him. “I’m the boss,” the last line spoken in the film, sums up Jake’s attitude.

The plot structure we’ve outlined also traces a rise-and-fall pattern of development. After segment 7, Jake’s high point, his life runs downhill and his violence appears more and more savagely self-destructive. In addition, certain motifs highlight the role of violence in his life and the lives of those around him. During a rest period in his very first prizefight (
segment 3
), a fistfight breaks out in the stands—suggesting at the outset that violence spills beyond the ring. Domestic relations are expressed through aggression, as in the tough-guy shoving between Jake and Joey and in Joey’s disciplining his son by threatening to stab him.

Most vividly, violence is turned against women. Both Jake and Joey insult and threaten their wives, and Jake’s beating of both his wives forms a grim counterpoint to his battles in the ring. During the first scene at the Copacabana, women emerge as targets of abuse. Jake accuses Vickie of flirting with other men; he insults a boxer and a mob member by suggesting that both are like women; and even the comedian onstage mocks women in the audience. Scene by scene, the organization of incidents and motifs suggests that male aggression pervades American life.

Scorsese puts Jake’s violence in context by means of film techniques. In general, by appealing to conventions of realism, the film’s style makes the violence in
Raging Bull
disturbing. Many of the fights are filmed with the camera on a Steadicam brace, which yields ominous tracking movements or close shots emphasizing grimaces. Backlighting, motivated by the spotlights around the ring, highlight droplets of sweat or blood that spray off the boxers as they are struck
(
11.105
).
Rapid editing, often with ellipses, and loud, stinging cracks intensify the physical force of punches. Special makeup creates effects of blood vessels in the boxers’ faces spurting grotesquely. Scorsese treats the violent scenes outside the ring differently, favoring long shots and less vivid sound effects.