At first, we may think that we're going to find out what makes Jake La Motta's life special and why ["Raging Bull" has been] made about him. But as the picture dives in and out of La Motta's life, with a few minutes of each of his big fights …, it becomes clear that Scorsese isn't concerned with how La Motta got where he did, or what, specifically, happened to him. Scorsese gives us exact details of the Bronx Italian neighborhoods of the forties—everything is sharp, realistic, lived-in. But he doesn't give us specific insights into La Motta….

"Raging Bull" isn't a biographical film about a fighter's rise and fall; it's a biography of the genre of prizefight films. Scorsese loves the visual effects and the powerful melodramatic moments of movies such as [Renée Daalder's] "Body and Soul," [Robert Wise's] "The Set-Up," and [Rouben Mamoulian's] "Golden Boy." He makes this movie out of remembered high points, leaping from one to another….

Scorsese appears to be trying to purify the characters of forties movies to universalize them. Vickie is an icon—a big, lacquered virgin-doll of the forties…. Sitting at the edge of a swimming pool,… Vickie is a Life cover girl of the war years. (p. 217)

Scorsese is also trying to purify forties style by using the conventions in new ways. If you look at forties movies now, the clichés … may seem like fun, and it's easy to see why Scorsese is drawn to them. But when he reproduces them, he reproduces the mechanical quality they once had, and the fun goes out of them. The cardinal rule of forties-studio style was that the scenes had to be shaped to pay off. Scorsese isn't interested in payoffs; it's something else—a modernist effect that's like a gray-out…. Scorsese's continuity with forties movies is in the texture—the studio artificiality that he makes sensuous, thick, viscous; there are layers of rage and animosity in almost every sequence.

"Raging Bull" isn't just a biography of a genre; it's also about movies and about violence, it's about gritty visual rhythm,… it's about the two "Godfather" pictures…. (p. 219)

The picture seems to be saying that in order to become champ, Jake La Motta had to be mean, obsessive, crazy. But you can't be sure, and the way the story is told Jake's life pattern doesn't make much sense. (p. 220)

At the end, before going onstage for his public reading, Jake recites [Marlon] Brando's back-of-the-taxi speech from "On the Waterfront" while looking in his dressing-room mirror. Scorsese is trying to outdo everything great, even the scene of [Travis] talking to himself in the mirror in "Taxi Driver." What does it mean to have La Motta deliver this lament that he could have been a contender instead of a bum when it's perfectly clear that La Motta is both a champ and a bum?… The whole picture has been made looking in a mirror, self-consciously. It takes a while to grasp that La Motta is being used as the fighter, a representative tormented man in a killer's body…. It's all metaphors: the animal man attempting to escape his destiny. When Jake, in jail on a morals charge, bangs his head and his fists against the stone walls of his cell and, sobbing in frustration, cries out, "Why? Why? Why? It's so f—king stupid! I'm not an animal!," it's the ultimate metaphor for the whole film.

The tragedy in Scorsese's struggles with the material in both "New York, New York" and "Raging Bull" is that he is a great director when he doesn't press so hard at it, when he doesn't suffer so much. He's got moviemaking and the Church mixed up together; he's trying to be the saint of cinema. And he turns Jake's life into a ritual of suffering. (pp. 220-22)

Scorsese likes movies that aren't covered in sentimental frosting—that put the surliness and killing and meanness right up front. But "Raging Bull" has the air of saying something important…. By making a movie that is all guilty pleasures, he has forged a new sentimentality. "Raging Bull" is about a character he loves too much; it's about everything he loves too much. It's the kind of movie that many men must fantasize about: their macho worst-dream movie.

Scorsese is saying that he accepts totally, that he makes no moral judgment…. Scorsese doesn't care about the rhythm and balance of fighters' bodies. There's no dancing for these fighters, and very little boxing. What Scorsese concentrates on is punishment given and received. He turns the lowdown effects he likes into highbrow flash reeking of religious symbolism.

You're aware of the camera positions and of the images held for admiration; you're conscious of the pop and hiss of the newsmen's cameras and the amplified sound of the blows—the sound of pain. Scorsese wants his B-movie seaminess and spiritual meaning, too. He wants a disreputable, low-life protagonist; then he suggests that this man is close to God, because he is God's animal.

By removing the specifics or blurring them, Scorsese doesn't produce universals—he produces banality. What we get is full of capitals: A Man Fights, A Man Loses Everything, A Man Bangs His Head Against the Wall. Scorsese is putting his unmediated obsessions on the screen, trying to turn raw, pulp power into art by removing it from the particulars of observation and narrative. He loses the low-life entertainment values of prizefight films; he aestheticizes pulp and kills it. "Raging Bull" is tabloid grand opera. (pp. 222, 225)