Scorsese vs. Mailer: Boxing as Redemption in Raging Bull and An American Dream: Difference between revisions

By contrast, Mailer has consistently treated violent confrontation as a central metaphor for his own artistic and personal struggles for growth, fulfillment, salvation. During his youth and middle age, he was known for his refusal to avoid a brawl. This ethic has been evident for at least thirty years in his writing. In his powerful essay titled “Death” in ''The Presidential Papers'',{{sfn|Mailer|1963}} Mailer uses the first Sonny Liston/Floyd Patterson championship bout as a point of departure from which to develop a profound series of perceptions about the American national temperament, particularly that of blacks. In ''King of the Hill''{{sfn|Mailer|1971}} and more strikingly in ''The Fight''{{sfn|Mailer|1975}} he deals nominally with a specific fight but goes beyond journalism to find certain normative precepts in the sport. A more important level on which boxing informs Mailer’s vision is in his fiction, notably ''An American Dream''{{sfn|Mailer|1965}} and ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'',{{sfn|Mailer|1984}} in which boxing experiences help define the protagonists. Stephen Richards Rojack and Tim Madden respectively find “the reward of the ring”{{sfn|Mailer|1965|page=16}} applicable to their quests for identity. Thus, Mailer has found in this arena of ritualized violence a rich source of perception about the human condition.

Despite the pitfalls of biographical criticism, it’s difficult to ignore the similarities between Romalozzo and La Motta or the fact that Mailer drew upon personal experience in this scene. Each of Mailer’s biographers to date,{{sfn|Mills|1982|page=271}}{{sfn|Manso|1985|page=374}}{{sfn|Rollyson|1991|page=155}} recounts the story of how Mailer first met Beverly Bentley, who was to become his fourth wife and the prototype for Cherry in ''An American Dream''. Mailer and his friend Roger Donoghue, a world middleweight contender from 1946 to 1952 with whom Mailer frequently sparred, and who says “Tough writers ''can'' fight,”{{sfn|Manso|1985|page=677}} were drinking at P.J. Clarke’s on the East Side of Manhattan one spring night in 1963 when “a pretty blond actress, Beverly Bentley, walked in, accompanied by former middleweight boxing champion Jake La Motta.”{{sfn|Mills|1982|page=271}} Donoghue, who knew Bentley, introduced her to Mailer. According to Donoghue,

<blockquote>I don’t know what happened to La Motta that night, but a couple of years ago, in fact, I ran into Norman and asked how the divorce from Beverly was going. He says, ’. . . It’s goin’ tough.’ Then we got talking about the movie ''Raging Bull''—it had just been released—and he cracked, ’Maybe I shoulda married Jake La Motta.’{{sfn|Manso|1985|page=374}}</blockquote>

No better actor could have played La Motta than Robert De Niro in his Academy Award-winning performance in ''Raging Bull'', and the film itself rises far above the Hollywood stereotypes described by Romeo. Yet the peculiarly American quality of the story as told in bald outline echoes the deceptively simple surface of Rojack’s tale, that of a man who murders his wife, meets a beautiful blonde and survives the American experience intact. Thus, both Scorsese and Mailer are able to take hackneyed situations and transmute them into true art that transcends the trite and predictable.