Carnage as a Beautiful Thing

Posted on March 2, 2005 in Atrocity Film

Mel Gibson, John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, Ahnold — they’re all the same. They’ve never seen war. When they go to battle hand to hand, the men they fight are stunt men. No one really dies. They don’t lunge their swords into chests or crack open heads. They live in special effects. And the infection they spread in their films is nonchalance about violence. They have no clue of what a pop to the mouth can do the bones and the dignity of a man. Not a single one of them has made a truthful film about bludgeoning and killing. They are simply not capable of it.

I finally got around to seeing Martin Scorcese’s Raging Bull. I think the film got Jake LaMotta’s story right. Boxing has often been glorified, worshipped from the ringside. Robert DeNiro portrays a man for whom violence is a way of life. He has trouble distinguishing between the ring and the home, the athletic club and the real world. His wife, his brother become contenders. He must punch them out. And then there is what happens when he fights: plenty of blood being squeezed by fists out of the nose and the forehead.

It was better that this film was in black and white. Gibson or Eastwood would have turned LaMotta into a hero who just wasn’t understood. There would have been a tale of glory, of virtue triumphant. We love Rocky. Stallone told a pretty lie about boxing in that one. But Scorcese and deNiro told the truth in Raging Bull.

Technicolor blood can be too pretty. Audiences love it. In black and white you see it for the shock. In black and white, you hear the blows landing better. In black and white, you can’t make a carnival out of it. This is one of the primary reasons why Raging Bull succeeds where the others fail. Boxing isn’t a pretty sport. This is why the executives sit on the ringside and the poor boys take center stage.

The big names of action film aren’t just bullies: they are cowards who pretend that carnage is a beautiful thing.