Raging Bull

The locution “the revival of Raging Bull” is quaint when you think about it. But the movie is indeed making a comeback, like its subject made when he reinvented himself as a performer—a transition that, at least according to Scorsese’s film, didn’t come as easily to him as his stalking style of fighting. There is a term in boxing called “walking your man down,” which is what Jake LaMotta did in the brilliantly recreated Sugar Ray Robinson bouts, which are right up there with Foreman and Ali, Ali and Frazier, Hagler and Hearns and, most recently, Gatti and Ward. Parenthetically, there is something about Arturo Gatti’s tragic end (was it suicide or homicide?) that is reminiscent of the decline of LaMotta that Raging Bull depicts. Fighters pay a price. Jerry Quarry suffered brain damage and one wonders if Ali’s Parkinson’s, like LaMotta’s severe paranoia, was a result of all the blows he took. In his last bout with Sugar Ray, he simply dropped his hands and endured the fury of his opponent’s punches. He couldn’t win that fight, but his victory was to walk over to Sugar Ray’s corner and taunt him with the fact that he never went down. In one scene in the film, the then new-comer and Scorsese discovery Cathy Moriarity, playing LaMotta’s bride-to-be, says to Robert De Niro’s LaMotta, “Nice car.” “Like that car?” LaMotta responds. “It’s nice,” she says. The exchange takes place through the fence outside a public swimming pool in the Bronx. The romance takes off, but the lines, which were plainly improvised, are like the reverse of the expression “a picture speaks a thousand words.” In this case, a few muted words conjure a thousand images. At the end of the film, the once trim LaMotta is now an overweight has-been, rehearsing Marlon Brando’s famous lines from On the Waterfront, “I coulda been a contender.” The words are comparatively pithy, but the great genius of De Niro, practicing in front of a mirror like fighters shadow box (and reminiscent of his performance in Taxi Driver), is in communicating so much more than what is said. 

Lives of Our Leaders: The Republic

Plato believed that poets had no place in his Republic, and he had a point. Would you have wanted Ezra Pound or Marinetti, both fascist sympathizers, making decisions for you? Would you have wanted Eliot, an anti-Semite, as your minister of culture, or Lowell, a resident of McLean Hospital, as your secretary of state, despite his poetic stature and erudition? We love the beats⎯Ginsberg, Baraka, Ferlinghetti and Corso⎯but they were all plainly nuts. Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Bishop were our high priestesses, but they loved poetry more than life itself. Anne Sexton, John Berryman and Sylvia Plath all killed themselves, and the Secret Service is better trained to deal with assassination than suicide. OK, Wallace Stevens sold insurance and could qualify as bridging the gap between imagination and reality, but would we really have wanted him as Treasury Secretary or Federal Reserve Chief? (Not that any of the recent occupants of these positions⎯Geithner, Bernanke, Greenspan or Volcker⎯have done better for lacking a muse). And then there is dear old wizened Robert Frost (who turned out to be not so dear) speaking in the snow at JFK’s inauguration. Where would he fit in our less-than-ideal republic? Yes, he knew something about the inner life and the road less travelled, but would that have really qualified him to be Secretary of the Interior or of Transportation? Yes, you have a point if you bring up Yeats. He understood something about the price we pay for our passions, but in the end he was too caught up with his Maud Gonne. Dante, who drew a map of hell with Virgil as his guide, and Homer, who wrote the greatest epic, seem to have possessed divine knowledge, but when push came to shove, would they have been able to apply it to commerce? And then there’s Cassius Clay, aka Muhammad Ali, the Ogden Nash of fighters. He became an elder statesman and prince, but can we ever forgive him for the way he talked to Joe Frazier?