Summary
Next we cut to Joey getting out of Jake’s convertible. He walks over to the pool where they first saw Vickie; she's there again. Vickie expresses an interest in Jake’s car, and Joey volunteers to introduce her to his brother. Jake walks over, and Joey identifies him as “the next champ.” Jake and Vickie exchange pleasantries; Vickie then compliments his car and Jake asks if she wants to “go for a ride” with him. Vickie agrees.
We then see a shot of Vickie and Jake in the car. Jake asks Vickie to adjust herself and sit closer to him; the two don’t speak another word to each other until they arrive at a miniature golf course. Vickie has never played the game before, so Jake shows her how to hit one of the gold balls under the course's obstacle—in this case, a miniature church. Vickie putts the ball, which vanishes under the church. Vickie and Jake crouch down and search for the ball to no luck. Vickie asks, “What does that mean?” and Jake replies, “It means the game is over.” They leave the course.
Immediately afterward, Jake brings Vickie to his father’s apartment, where nobody is home. Jake asks Vickie to sit down at the kitchen table; they drink water while sitting across from each other. Jake urges Vickie to move to a seat closer to him, reasoning that she’s “so far away, like on the other side of the room.” She moves, but he then encourages her to sit on his lap. With Vickie on his lap, Jake explains how he used his boxing income to buy the building for his father.
Jake then shows Vickie the rest of the apartment, which is full of religious iconography (churches, paintings of the Madonna). Jake points out a bird’s cage, and they head to the bedroom. Jake and Vickie rest on the edge of the bed, and Vickie stands up after Jake puts his arm around her waist. She walks over to the bedroom’s dresser and examines a photograph sitting atop of the chiffonier. It is a picture of Jake and Joey playfully raising their fists at each other, emulating a traditional boxer stance. Jake follows Vickie and remarks, “That’s me and my brother, foolin’ around” about the photograph.
With the picture dominating in the mid-ground, Jake flirtatiously asks Vickie, “You know how beautiful you are? Anybody ever tell you you’re beautiful? Yeah, they tell you all the time.” Jake then kisses Vickie on the cheeks and lips and strokes her neck. He escorts her toward the bedroom and they exit the frame, but the camera remains static on the photograph of Jake and Joey.
LaMotta vs. Sugar Ray Robinson Detroit 1943. We immediately cut to a fight between the primal, animalistic Jake fighting against the “speedy [Sugar] Ray Robinson, who is up on his toes—the dancing master.” In the eighth round, Jake brutally strikes Sugar Ray and eventually drives him out of the ring—the first knockout of Sugar Ray’s career. The fight scene takes on the subjective perspective of Jake, as seen in the slow motion and distracting explosions of light bulbs.
After ten rounds, Jake is declared the winner of the fight by unanimous decision. This marks the first professional defeat for Sugar Ray, which intensifies the extent of the fight’s triumph for Jake. The radio reporter announces, “LaMotta has proved himself a great fighter, and he shouldn’t be denied at a middleweight crown.”
We then abruptly cut to another love scene between Jake and Vickie. Vickie stands in the doorway wearing an elegant negligee, while Jake lies on the bed. Vickie asks Jake, “You sure we should be doing this?” Jake tells her to comes over to the bed, despite Vickie’s protests: “You said never to touch you before a fight.”
Vickie then reluctantly walks toward him. Jake commands Vickie to kiss the cuts and bruises that he received from the Robinson fight: “Touch my boo-boos...Give the boo-boo a kiss—make it better.” After Vickie tenderly kisses the cuts on Jake’s forehead and cheeks, Jake instructs her to remove his pants and then “the rest.” Vickie reminds, “You made me promise not to get you excited.” Jake tells her to proceed with the encounter, and Vickie (per Jake’s request) takes off her underwear, raises Jake’s white undershirt, and kisses the bruises on his stomach. Jake abruptly tells her to stop, reasoning, “I gotta fight Robinson. I can’t fool around.” He puts his underwear back on, kisses Vickie, and moves to the bathroom.
To eradicate his sexual desire for Vickie, he pours ice water over his erection. He shivers and gazes at his reflection in the mirror before Vickie emerges behind him. She kisses his cheeks and neck, and, after some hesitation, Jake passionately kisses her back. He then gracefully sends her back to the bedroom and closes the bathroom door.
LaMotta vs. Robinson Detroit 1943. The classic rivals—Jake and Sugar Ray—rematch each other only three weeks after their last fight, making it the third bout between them. Sugar Ray begins the seventh round “well ahead on points,” but Jake soon knocks him down for the second time in his career. As Sugar Ray lies exhausted on the floor, the lightbulbs flash, and Sugar Ray appears stunned in the slow motion.
We then cut to the ring announcer declaring the fight’s winner: Sugar Ray. In the dressing room, a furious Joey violently breaks a chair and laments, “They only give him that f—king decision because he’s going in the Army next week. That’s the only reason.” Meanwhile, Jake sits quietly and pensively; in a moment of rare introspection, he responds to Joey’s anger with, “I’ve done a lot of bad things, Joey. Maybe it’s coming back to me. Who knows? I’m a jinx maybe…” Jake doesn’t want to see Vickie and asks Joey to take her home. Alone in the room, Jake examines himself in the mirror; the camera then fixates on a closeup of Jake’s left hand soaking in a large bucket of ice water.
Then, from 1944 to 1947 a series of black-and-white still images and freeze frames show Jake’s string of victorious fights, which alternate with scratchy, colored home movies of Jake’s domestic life.
LaMotta vs. Zivic Detroit January 14, 1944. We see three stills of Jake brutally knocking his opponent down, followed by Joey, Vickie, and Jake posing and embracing each other in front of a new LaMotta car.
LaMotta vs Basora New York August 10, 1945. Two stills document Jake’s victory against Basora. We also see Jake and Vickie marry before a Justice of the Peace.
LaMotta vs. Kochan New York September 17, 1945. Step-motion and freeze frames unveil another triumph for Jake. The colored footage shows Jake and Vickie dancing and tossing each other into a pool. They kiss and hug, and, later, Vickie poses in a new white turban, sunglasses, and sunsuit.
LaMotta vs. Edgar Detroit June 12, 1946. Two additional stills of the LaMotta-Edgar fight. We see Joey and Lenore (Joey’s wife) celebrate their massive wedding reception on a rooftop. The LaMottas seem happy and carefree.
LaMotta vs. Satterfield Chicago September 12, 1946. An action still of Jake’s victory over Satterfield. Meanwhile, Jake carries Vickie into their house; Vickie, Lenore, and Joey play with their children outside. Vickie ties a cheeky “Momma’s little helper” apron around Jake as he barbecues.
La Motta vs. Bell New York March 14, 1947. A montage of five stills shows Jake victorious.
Analysis
Part 2 provides crucial insights into Jake’s relationship with Vickie, Joey, and his boxing career. The narrative structure of Part 2 employs a parallelism between Jake’s boxing career and his flirtation with Vickie. We alternate between scenes with Jake and Vickie and scenes of Jake’s fights with Sugar Ray. Likewise, the home movies show a string of Jake’s various victories leading toward the middleweight championship, as well as happy, candid scenes of his domestic life. After Part 2, Jake’s professional career begins to decline, as does his marriage with Vickie.
Critically, a chain-link fence physically separates Jake and Vickie in their introduction to each other. As mentioned in the Part 1 Analysis, barriers like rings, bars, and fences often visually constrain Jake, which is particularly true here. The dividing bar foreshadows the troubling dynamics of Vickie and Jake’s relationship—suspicion, depravity, paranoia, and miscommunication soon pervade their marriage, creating a fundamental disconnect and barrier between them in turn. Additionally, Jake humorously attempts to shake Vickie’s hand with the fence in between them, which hints at Jake’s forthcoming impotence. Soon, Jake’s masochistic tendencies and sexual repression will hinder an enthusiastic willingness to touch his wife.
Jake and Vickie’s first date at the golf course reveals Jake’s need to assert his masculine authority over her. Throughout the date, he tells her to move over, sit down, sit closer to him, sit in his lap, thus relegating her to a submissive role. Vickie doesn't protest to follow Jake’s instructions, but we nonetheless become familiar with Jake’s inherent need for control over women, which becomes all the more apparent in subsequent scenes centering on their marriage.
Along with Part 1, Part 2’s narrative and dialogue implies a sexual dimension to Joey and Jake’s relationship. Joey and Jake’s intimate relationship surpasses the intensity of typical homophilic social patterns in Italian-American families. For instance, Joey is intrinsically a part of Jake’s sexual relationship with Vickie. When Jake first spots Vickie at the swimming pool, he interrogates Joey about her, as opposed to initiating a conversation with Vickie himself. In other words, Jake relies on Joey to mediate between him and his potential romantic partners, which escalates when he asks Joey to “look after” Vickie later in the film. Joey and Jake’s conversation also unveils Joey’s past with Vickie, which comprised of a few dates and an unsuccessful attempt to have sex with her. Joey’s relation to Vickie and Jake’s marriage becomes more latent with sexual undertones during Vickie and Jake’s first date. The camera fixates on a picture of the brothers after Jake and Vickie move over the bed to make love, thereby implying Joey’s invading presence on the couple’s sex life. Moreover, Joey is an omnipresent figure in Jake’s home movies, he spends a majority of his time at Jake’s home, and, in Part 3, Joey joins Vickie and Jake’s date at the Copacabana—it appears as though Jake and Vickie don't have any time together without Joey intruding on their relationship.
In addition to Raging Bull’s narrative, the film’s dialogue also renders the sexual dimensions of Jake and Joey’s relationship. When Joey and Jake practice together at the gym, an onlooker remarks that Jake and Joey “look like two fags.” Later, Irma claims Joey and Jake are going to “suck each other off” when they leave for the dance together, before shouting, “You fucking queer! Faggot!” at Jake. These continuous comments impute Joey and Jake’s homosexuality; while the brothers never address these remarks or sexually engage with each other, the film’s narrative and other characters’ insights suggests that a repressed sexuality informs their intimate relationship.
Water emerges as a critical motif symbolizing Jake’s happiness with Vickie in Part 2. From her introduction at the neighborhood pool onwards, Vicki is constantly associated with water. She and Jake drink glasses of water at Jake’s parent’s apartment, an action symbolic of Vickie’s purity (as enhanced by her white dress) and fertility. At this point, Jake is transfixed with Vickie and anxiously excited to pursue a relationship with her. Unsurprisingly, water later conveys the jovial days of Jake’s domestic life, as proven by Jake and Vickie throwing each other and kissing in the swimming pool during the home movies.
All of the water related to Jake’s happiness is fluid, fresh, and inviting—pool water, drinking water—whereas ice-cold water signifies the anhedonia and misery of Jake’s later life. This freezing water, devoid of any life-giving power, first appears when Jake pours ice over his erection to deny himself pleasure and subdue his sexual desire for Vickie. After he loses the Sugar Ray fight, he refuses to have Vickie console him. Instead, he plunges his bruised fist in a large bucket of ice water—a familiar image paralleling the sexual suppression of the previous scene with the violent aftermath of the fight. The image cements Jake’s mounting coldness and aggression directed at Vickie, as well as the savage insensitivity toward his opponents.
Also, the dressing room scene illuminates Jake’s paranoia and self-examination. In this introspective sequence, Jake acknowledges to Joey that he’s done “bad things,” while examining his greatest opponent—himself—in the mirror. Ultimately, the major conflict of Raging Bull is an internal one; Jake is the subject of his own paranoia, envy, suspicion, and needless aggression, which catalyzes his damaged downfall as a husband and boxer. When Jake places his hand in the large bucket, it appears noticeably minuscule, pitiful, and tiny in comparison to the water surrounding him. In the beginning the film, Jake voices his anxiety over his small, “little girl’s” hands, an observation revealing his self-conscious paranoia over his more “feminine” and less aggressive physical features. This enigmatic shot, taken from the point of view Jake, reinforces his own dissatisfaction with himself. While we may think Jake is utterly oblivious of his own decaying moral character, shots like these remind us that Jake is cognizant of his often monstrous flaws.
