[In the following excerpt from an essay in which he also discusses the work of John Cassavetes, Combs analyzes Raging Bull, attempting to reconcile the film's power with its marked avoidance of standard narrative techniques.]

To begin with, Raging Bull seems to have been made out of an impatience with all the usual trappings of cinema, with plot, psychology and an explanatory approach to character. A number of early scenes, conversations between Jake La Motta (Robert De Niro) and his brother Joey (Joe Pesci) about Jake's career, his intransigence, his violent behaviour outside the ring, even about a neighbourhood girl, Vickie (Cathy Moriarty), sitting beside a pool, have an intensity but a woolliness, an emotional fervour but a roundabout, elliptical, barely heard inconsequentiality that seem to frustrate any narrative function. They are also the first indication, in the linking of intimacy with casual obscenity, that the language of violence and the violence of language is itself going to be the binding element of the film.

In place of the narrative traps being sprung within the first few minutes of Taxi Driver, characters here appear to be finding themselves in their own time, or in real time, à la Cassavetes. It's an impression which Scorsese has strengthened by obscuring as far as possible the traces of the period film. La Motta's life from 1941, through his decade or so of success as a fighter, to the humiliations of the 50s and his end as an entertainer, the showman of his own notoriety, is recreated with a minimum of props, very few scenes outside the venues of home and ring, and none of the self-conscious artifice of New York, New York. Though spanning some of the same period, Raging Bull couldn't be further in style from Scorsese's last dramatic feature. For much of the time, Raging Bull is an unadorned window on the world, and even a shot which stirs memories of New York, New York—an overhead, from the point of view of an organist trying to restore order with a spirited rendition of the national anthem, as the ring disappears in a mêlée of flying chairs and bodies after an early decision goes against La Motta—has been reproduced directly from La Motta's autobiography.

Further neutralising the narrative, Scorsese has peopled it, De Niro apart, with unknowns—faces that are richly suggestive of time and place but don't seem to belong to actors, they stand for nothing other than themselves…. Which is not to say that the elements of the drama to come, the hooks, aren't being planted from the very beginning. A long track follows Joey as he argues with Salvy (Frank Vincent), errand boy of the local godfather, about Jake's refusal to sell out to the gangsters who control the fight game, which will eventually endanger his chances of reaching the middleweight championship; Joey's subsequent conversation with Jake leads from the latter's confessions of inadequacy (he has 'girl's hands', he'll never be big enough to fight Joe Louis) to his goading Joey into punching him until the blood starts from recent boxing cuts.

But the point of this drama will remain strictly interior, just as the violence—explosive as it is in the continual round of domestic quarrels paired with the more brutal but disciplined, aggressive but stylised exchanges in the ring—always seems to be imploding into significance. It is keyed to the dominant feature of La Motta's personality and his boxing style: his tendency, his need, to overcome simply by absorbing as much punishment as his opponent can dish out. La Motta flings himself against the wall of his fate: refusing to give in to the Mob, until he is forced to throw a fight in order to get his shot at the middle-weight title, almost sacrificing his career and his reputation in the process; losing his last fight with 'Sugar' Ray Robinson, but refusing to 'lose' by refusing to go down, instead just soaking up the other man's punches.

There is in this something not dissimilar to Harvey Keitel testing himself, his hand in the devotional flame, in Mean Streets. Except that, although the icons are present, the religious dimension of La Motta's struggle is not articulated. In a way, it has been assumed, absorbed into the film. It is there according to Scorsese: 'He works on an almost primitive level, almost an animal level. And therefore he must think in a different way, he must be aware of certain things spiritually that we aren't, because our minds are too cluttered with intellectual ideas, and too much emotionalism. And because he's on that animalistic level, he may be closer to pure spirit' (Mary Pat Kelly, Martin Scorsese: The First Decade). The animal is evident, in the caged images of La Motta in cramped tenements, in a netting-enclosed swimming pool, and in the prison 'hole' in Florida where he winds up at the nadir of his fortunes. The spirit it is only evident in its absence, in Scorsese's rigorously realistic black and white images, which refuse to pollute the concrete with the spiritual (or vice versa). Despite Taxi Driver's pretensions to the title, Raging Bull may be his most Bressonian film.

What also disappears into that scheme is any psychological, dramatic, or even narrative framework to La Motta's story. This, actually, is supplied in abundance by the boxer's autobiography, on which the film is loosely based. There La Motta explains his feelings of guilt and inadequacy, his sense that he didn't deserve good fortune and that Fate would one day be waiting with the bill, in terms of his religious upbringing and the notions of sin and redemption that permeated his early life of crime (not mentioned by the film). He hangs great psychological and spiritual consequences by one incident in particular: how he thought for many years that he had murdered a man, a bookie, in the course of a mugging for which he was never brought to account. One can imagine how Scorsese might have adapted such a story … into another Mean Streets. Instead, it is as if he had purified all the elements of that tyro film, stripping them of their melodramatic or operatic function so that Raging Bull could be a transparent vessel for La Motta's passion, which is also his violence, self and other-directed.

Simulated home movie footage, for instance, serves at the beginning of Mean Streets to complicate the film's impact and to suggest, perhaps, a multi-layered investigation to come. Here it has the opposite effect, interspersed with brief glimpses of La Motta's flghts in the mid-40s, and rendering the characters' lives down into their most banal, generalised terms: fooling by the pool; Jake and Vickie getting married; Joey and his wife getting married; playing with the kids. Given that this footage is in 'amateurish' colour, the rough, unstable textures of a world already slipping into memory—as opposed to the surrounding, crystalline black and white—it inevitably has a poignance. But it not only serves to summarise, it frustrates the biopic interest: these are areas that are unknowable.

Similarly, Scorsese never dramatises—at least, not in the usual way—the rise and fall of La Motta's career. The story is told in simple chronological units, starting with a fight La Motta loses in 1941, with most of the succeeding ring scenes anchored in his recurring bouts with Robinson (also lost in the main), and the montage of fights that interrupts the home movies mostly just a few 'frozen' moments, with titles giving names and dates. Again, what is lost is the exterior drama. La Motta's struggle to become champion (achieved in 1949 against Marcel Cerdan) is displaced into a struggle with interior demons—'interior' in this context, however, having to do with more than one individual.

Jake's relationship with Joey suggests an identification, a symbiosis, that goes beyond the fraternal. It is an intensification of Charlie's love-hate affair with Johnny Boy in Mean Streets, and in its closeness subsumes a sadomasochistic violence that also has a cultural and social dimension. There is an inevitable progression here: Jake, out of paranoid jealousy, asking Joey to keep an eye on Vickie to make sure she is not fooling around; Joey becoming enraged on Jake's behalf when he sees Vickie out with some of the local hoods, and viciously beating up Salvy; Jake then later assuming that if anybody has betrayed him with Vickie, it is Joey. He bursts into the latter's home, furiously assaulting him without a word, just as Joey is correcting one of his children's table manners by threatening him with a knife.

The roots of that jealousy and that violence are presumably locked in the sense of guilt and unworthiness that La Motta is at pains to explain in his book. Scorsese never attempts to explain them, but has set himself the more difficult task of making them manifest. What is most remarkable about the new rigour of Raging Bull is that it tells La Motta's story with both complete realism (the places, the circumstances, the events) and total subjectivity. In a way that leaves them difficult to disentangle and analyse, each is even made to seem a function of the other. The sequence of La Motta's fights has a kind of documentary flatness, but each bout is treated with visual and aural distortions to become a mini-Armageddon. Instead of shooting the fights with many cameras, Scorsese has said, he used only one, working in close enough to become a third antagonist. Even the fact that La Motta fought many engagements with Robinson has a different, internal truth: in his book, La Motta refers to Robinson as his 'nemesis'; here he comments, after losing their third match, 'Who knows, I'm a jinx maybe.' Scorsese's most persistent distortion, slow motion, used at times so briefly and infinitesimally as to make one doubt it really happened, renders La Motta's internal violence concrete by focusing on the confused objects of his adoration and aggression—Vickie, often dressed in white, as in their first, dreamlike excursion, and the invariably dark-clad gangster-businessmen who would take over his life—the constituent elements of his heaven and hell.

At the beginning of his autobiography, Jake La Motta recollects his tenement childhood and wild youth.

I feel like I'm looking at an old black-and-white movie of myself … jerky, with gaps in it, a string of poorly lit sequences, some of them with no beginning and some with no end. No musical score, just sometimes the sound of a police siren or a pistol shot. And almost all of it happens at night, as if I lived my whole life at night.

It might be tempting to apply this to the way Scorsese has filmed Raging Bull. Except that what La Motta is recalling seems more like the kind of B movie that Scorsese built on to make Mean Streets. On the other hand, there is in that description a generalised sense of the movie-in-all-our-minds—an equation of the excitements of the archetypal Hollywood movie with a romantic life beyond the law, an equation forcefully operating in the environment in which the La Mottas and the Scorseses grew up. Romantically, the options facing the young Scorsese have been summed up as: priest or mafloso. Instead, he made movies, sublimating the other two. Raging Bull then becomes the sublimation of a sublimation. It evokes that generalised movie mainly because, in purifying his technique, Scorsese has stripped away his references, reducing them to some essential experience.

Mainly this is to record how La Motta himself sublimated his history, his background, to become a boxer, then sublimated that self to become an entertainer (another stage, that of film actor, is not recorded here). The boxing ring, it turns out, was not that far from the streets, from the mafloso option. La Motta must fall in with the Mob to get his chance at the title; as fight succeeds fight, the flashbulbs going off in the arena sound more and more like gunshots; and as he sits in Miami with Vickie and his children in 1956, having just given up boxing and before embarking on his ill-fated night-club venture, a photographer's equipment is shown in action as if it were an assassin's rifle. The film both begins and ends with La Motta in New York in 1964, his boxing glory and his family gone, rehearsing his stand-up routine in a night-club dressing room. 'Give me a stage where this bull here can rage. And although I can fight, I'd much rather recite … that's entertainment.'

La Motta, alone at the end with his make-up and his mirror, conjures Cosmo Vittelli once more. But where the latter is mysteriously released, by an act of the director's will, La Motta apparently defies Scorsese's conception of him as a man who lost everything and was then redeemed, remaining locked in his failures, identifying with Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront: 'I could have been a contender, instead of a bum, which is what I am.' Unless, in Scorsese's religiously denuded new scheme, redemption, like the presence of the spirit, cannot be made visible—although it might be guessed at in the harshly contrasting tones of black and white in which the hero frequently seems immolated. What has also been immolated, purged, is Scorsese's own past: the genre cinema out of which he made Boxcar Bertha, Mean Streets, Taxi Driver and New York, New York.