We know them and yet we don’t, as perhaps too clear an understanding of their inner workings might upset the delicate balance of empathy and objectivity that allows Scorsese to keep his thematic plates spinning in the air.įor all these reasons, Scorsese might never again find a subject as ideal as Jake LaMotta, the Bronx-born boxing legend whose public bouts and private demons Raging Bull chronicles with such bruising acuity.

This contributes to that Scorsese distance: the emotional and intellectual space between us and the character that allows us to plug into their experience while always remaining a bit outside of it, all the better to question their destructive acts. Do we feel nauseous or vindicated when Travis Bickle takes out Harvey Keital’s brutal pimp at the end of Taxi Driver? Are we watching the implosion of a soul in Goodfellas, or is that bopping period soundtrack too intoxicating for us to notice?

To watch a Scorsese brawl or gunfight is to find a director working through all these multifarious ideas and attempting to get them all on screen-often in the same scene, sometimes in the same frame. And just as crucially, he finds a similar connection between the subjective experiences of those committing violent acts and the sociological factors that deem those acts acceptable (and often assumed). Scorsese sees the glamorization and moralization of filmic violence as irrevocably fused together, revulsion and fascination informing one another equally. (Combine it with some extended musings on John Ford’s conception of “masculinity” and you’ve got a full-proof narcoleptic for cineastes.) Then you re-watch Raging Bull and you remember that all those cocktail-party bloviations have their roots in one of American cinema’s most complex visions of physical brutality: its communal roots, hypnotic realization, and corrosive legacy.

Film criticism seemingly doesn’t get more banal than commenting upon Martin Scorsese’s “fascination” with violence.

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