Summary:
PELHAM PARKWAY Bronx, New York 1947. Jake walks around his home in boxers and a muscle tee, looking slightly overweight. In the kitchen, he criticizes Joey for arranging a fight with Tony Janiro, an inexperienced boxer. Jake doubt he will able to shed 13 pounds off his 168 pound weight, which will result in him losing some of his fortune (“I don’t know if I’m gonna make it down to 155; I don’t know if I’ll make it down to 160. On top of that, you sign me up for a fight at 155, and if I don’t make 155, I lose $15,000?”). Joey claims the Janiro fight is necessary for Jake’s to earn a chance at a title shot; he reasons that “there’s nobody left for you [Jake] to fight. Everybody’s afraid to fight you. OK. Along comes this kid Janiro, he doesn’t know any better. He’s a young kid, up and coming, he’ll fight anybody.” Jake rebuffs Joey’s argument and says he’s still worried about his weight, to which Joey replies, “Let’s say you lose because of your weight. Are they gonna think you’re not as tough as you are—you’re not the same fighter? Good! They’ll match you with all those guys that were afraid of matching with you before. What happens? You’ll kill them. And they gotta give you a title shot.”
Jake interrupts Joey to ask Vickie to bring him coffee, in a commanding tone. After a few moments, Jake condescends to Vickie, asking, “How long I gotta wait?” Meanwhile, Joey continues to assert his view on the Janiro fight, which he views as a win-win situation (“If you win, you win. If you lose, you still win”) and urges Jake to lose weight.
Vickie agrees with Joey and makes an innocuous comment about Janiro’s physical appearances; she describes him as “an up-and-coming fighter, good-looking, popular.” Vickie’s comment enrages Jake, who suspiciously begins to interrogate her—“Excuse me, excuse, what do you mean, ‘good-looking?’ ...What, who are you to say about good-looking or popular?...What, are you authority or what?” Jake then orders her out of the room with the baby.
When Vickie exits the kitchen, Jake asks Joey how Vickie knew Janiro was good-looking. Joey’s wife Lenora interjects and defends Vickie: “She didn’t mean nothing.” Joey looks at his wife with a biting disdain, tells her that it’s none of her business, and, like Jake, commands her to leave the kitchen. Joey then urges Jake to go to a training camp to limit outside distractions. Jake voices his obsessive curiosity about Vickie, asking Joey if he ever notices “anything funny going on with her.” Jake then requests Joey to keep an eye on her, but Joey doesn’t want to interfere with their marriage and begins to defend Vickie. Jake ignores Joey and says, “We both know any woman given the right time, the right place, the right circumstances would do anything. I mean, anything’s possible.” Joey says he understands Jake’s concern, adding that Jake’s mistreatment of Vickie gives her any excuse to go out. Jake can’t move on from Vickie’s comment about Janiro, but Joey has a simple solution—“make him [Janiro] ugly” and take Vickie out. Jake walks to the living room and smothers Vickie with kisses.
Inside the Copacabana nightclub, a comedian introduces Jake as a special guest and “the world’s leading middleweight contender.” Vickie and Jake sit inside a booth with Joey and Joey’s guest, a woman named Janet. Vickie leaves the spot for the bathroom, and on her way, she runs into one of her old acquaintances, Salvy, who kisses Vickie on the cheek. Perceived in slow motion from the point of view of Jake, Jake focuses his gaze on Salvy, a male rival. Salvy then walks over to the LaMotta table and invites them to have a drink with him and Tommy. As Salvy converses with Joey, Jake doesn’t pay attention and looks at Tommy’s table, which soon briefly becomes occupied by Vickie. Vickie warmly greats all the older men at the table and returns to Jake’s booth immediately afterward. As Vickie leaves, Salvy insults Jake, describing him as a “fucking gorilla.”
Unsurprisingly, the jealous and self-destructive Jake asks why Vickie took so long, and, more tellingly, if Vickie is interested in Salvy. Vickie denies any sort of attraction or interest to Salvy, and Jake continues to press her—“In other words, you’re not interested in him, but you could be interested in somebody?” Vickie tells Jake, “don’t start, huh?” to which Jake responds with a threat: “Hey, shut up, or I’m gonna smack your face.” Tommy sends drinks to the LaMotta table, which finally persuades Jake and Joey to visit the table full of mobsters.
Tommy asks Jake how he’s doing, and the conversation quickly centers on the Janiro fight. Salvy comments on Janiro’s physical appearance, claiming, “[he’s a] very attractive guy. All the girls like him. No marks. Clean.” The comment clearly makes Jake anxious. Tommy then asks how much money he should bet on Jake winning the Janiro fight, and Jake responds, “I’d say bet everything you got. Everything.” Jake says he’s “going to beat his [Janiro’s] hole like this. I’m [He’s] gonna make him suffer” before acknowledging Janiro as “a pretty kid,” remarking, “I don’t know if I should fight him or fuck him.” Jake then trades sexual, masochistic comments with Salvy.
Salvy: You’re really liable to get fucked with this kid. Watch out.
Jake: By who?
Salvy: Janiro.
Jake: You want me to get him to fuck you?
Salvy: Me? No, I don’t want him to fuck me.
Jake: I could do that easily.
Salvy: How you going to do that?
Jake: Because I’ll get you both in the ring; I’ll give you both bothing a fucking beating, and you can fuck each other.
Salvy: Ah, I’ll get all full of blood.
Jake: You’re used to that.
The men at the table continue to drink and wish good luck to Jake. Then, later that night, Jake enters his bedroom. Vickie is sleeping, yet Jake wakes her up and asks if she ever thinks of other men when they have sex. A jaded Vickie replies, “Nobody. I love you.” Jake proceeds to ask why she said Janiro has a “pretty face.” Vickie asserts that she doesn’t even know what Janiro looks like and tells Jake to go to sleep.
LaMotta vs. Janiro New York 1947. We then abruptly cut to the LaMotta-Janiro fight. In a series of savage, brutally bloody consecutive blows to the face, Jake pulverizes Janiro. His nose becomes re-adjusted on his face, and blood squirts from his cuts; soon, he plummets to the ground. After the bell clings, Jake struts around the ring with his arms triumphantly raised in the air. The camera cuts to an uneasy Vickie, who is clearly aware of the underlying reasons for the brutality of the fight: Jake projected his sexual, enraged jealously onto his opponent. Tommy tells the man next to him, “He [Janiro] ain’t pretty no more.” Jake is declared the winner of the fight, and we immediately cut to him on his intense regime at training camp. His trainer reveals that he has to lose four more pounds (until he presumably meets the 155-pound mark).
In a second scene at the Copacabana, we see Joey (without Jake) discussing the Janiro fight with another man. They share a disbelief over the exceptional cruelty of the fight, with Joey remarking, “He knocked his nose from one side to the other. Fucking thing was hanging off.” Someone else declares that Jake deserves a chance at the title shot. While the men converse, Joey spots Vickie entering the club with Salvy and other wiseguys. Joey takes her away from the table; in the hat check area, Vickie begins to defend herself. Tired of Jake’s paranoia, she laments, “I feel like I’m a prisoner. I can’t walk; I look at somebody the wrong way and I get smacked...I’m tired of having to turn around and have both of you [Jake and Joey] up my ass all the time...I’m twenty years old, and I gotta go home and sleep by myself every night?” Joey asks why Vickie married Jake, and Vickie says, “I love him [Jake],” while also revealing that her husband has lost all sexual desire for her: “What am I supposed to do? This guy—he don’t even wanna fuck me.” Joey attempts to defend Jake, and says he will return to normalcy once he receives his title shot. Brutally, Vickie responds, “Jake’s never gonna be champ. Too many people hate him” and returns to the table.
Because Joey promised to watch over Vickie, he wants to defend Jake’s honor without telling him that Salvy took Vickie out. Joey walks over to the table, attempts to pull Vickie away from the table, and tells her that she’s “making an asshole of my brother.” Salvy attempts to intervene, but Joey commands him to “mind your fucking business and shut up.” Vickie leaves the table, and Salvy continues to insist the harmlessness of the night—“There’s nothing going on over here. This is innocent. We’re only having drinks.” Joey smashes a glass in Salvy’s face, thus beginning an arduous, prolonged fight between the two men. Outside the nightclub, Joey knocks Salvy over and repeatedly slams a cab door into his body. Spectators attempt to take Joey off Salvy, but a persistent Joey continues his vicious assault.
The next day at the Debonair Social Club, Tommy organizes a truce between Joey and Salvy, who has a sling around his left arm. Tommy demands the men to forget about the incident and shake hands with “no grudges.” The men reluctantly shake hands, and Joey has a private aside with Tommy.
Tommy expresses his frustration with Jake—“this guy’s [Jake] become an embarrassment. He’s embarrassing me with certain people, and I’m looking very bad. I can’t deliver a kid from my own goddamn neighborhood...Why does he have to make it so hard on himself?” He also claims that Jake would easily receive a chance at the title shot if he let Tommy influence his boxing career. Joey attempts to defend Jake, saying that his brother respects Tommy, but he’s “gonna do what he wants to do. He wants to make it on his own.” Tommy scoffs at Joey’s defense; he asserts “he’s [Jake] got no respect for nobody. He doesn’t listen to nobody” and argues that Jake could “beat all the Sugar Ray Robinsons and the Tony Janiros in the world, but he ain’t gonna get a shot at that title—not without us he ain’t.” Joey looks conflicted, and we then cut to him running in the rain toward Jake at the neighborhood swimming pool.
Jake recollects on the first time he saw Vickie at the pool and communicates his powerless suspicions about her infidelity (“I know she’s doing something. I just wanna catch her once. Just once”). Joey urges Jake to either beat Vickie and “throw her out,” or “live with her and let her ruin your life.” They then turn the subject of the conversation to Tommy. Joey reveals that Jake will have a shot at the middleweight title, as long as he agrees to “throw” (ie, purposefully lose) a fight with Billy Fox. Jake simply responds, “ya win some, ya lose some.”
Before the LaMotta-Fox fight, the fight promoter Jackie Curtie talks with Jake and expresses his suspicions over how Jake, once a champion, is now a “twelve-to-five underdog.” Jackie declares that “people are talking” and “the bets are off on this one.” Jake performatively disagrees with Jackie; he replies, “I’m gonna win. There’s no way I’m going down. I don’t go down for nobody.” The three men then go their separate ways.
La Motta vs. Fox New York 1947. The match between Jake and the undefeated Fox is a blatant sham. Jake stands still and allows Fox to hit him with a series of blows to the face; Jake appears to even physically help Fox beat him. The fight outrages spectators, and Joey chastises Jake for not “going down”—ie, surrendering and plunging to the ground—as this makes the fight appear all the more fake. Fox wins by TKO (technical knockout) and Jake, at his peak emasculation, sobs in his handler’s arms in the locker room. Frustrated, his handler tells Jake, “Don’t fight anymore. It’s a free country; don’t fight anymore.”
In the following scene, a still of the New York Daily News reveals that the boxing board suspended Jake for the feigned LaMotta-Fox fight. Outraged, Jake laments, “I take the dive, what more do they want? They want me to go down? Well, I ain’t going down, no, not for nobody!” Joey says the suspension could have been avoided if Jake let go of his pride and went down. He later reminds Jake that Tommy won’t forget him and will secure his title shot.
Analysis
After Part 2’s emphasis on Jake’s relative personal and professional triumphs, Part 3 centers on the gradual deterioration of his life. His sexual paranoia ruptures his marriage with Vickie, whereas his defeats in the ring lead to professional disgrace and emasculation.
Vickie’s casual, innocent remark about Janiro’s appearance arouses Jake’s pathological obsession and paranoia. As we see in Part 1 and 2, Jake internally struggles with his self-image, confidence, and sexuality. He complains about his “little girl’s hands,” worries about his weight, frets over his chance at receiving a middleweight title, and denies himself sexual pleasure; he also lacks the introspection to process and articulate his own identity crises. Thus, to Jake, Vickie’s observation about Janiro simply affirms his own feelings of inadequacy and experiences of his sexual anxiety. After her comment, Jake’s internal struggle manifests both in his obsessive and delusional suspicions about his wife’s infidelity, and his excessive brutality in the ring.
Throughout the film, the use of slow motion taps into Jake’s subjective point of view to show us not only what he sees, but how he interprets what he sees. The Copacabana scene particularly employs slow motion to reveal the extent of Jake’s self-inflicted paranoia. For instance, we watch Vickie greet Salvy in slow motion; the shot emphasizes Salvy, one of Jake’s male rivals. The slow motion conveys Jake’s heightened awareness of the two acquaintances, and his jealous perceptions of their supposed affair by extension. To Jake, Salvy and Vickie’s innocent interaction actively defiles his dignity and masculinity, and the slow motion emphasizes his mounting anger as a result of attempting to process the image in front of him.
Later in the scene, Jake conflates the concepts of fucking—an emblem of his personal world—and fighting—an emblem of his professional world. When sitting with Tommy, Salvy, and the other mobsters, Jake fronts a good-natured friendliness. After Jake says he’s going to destroy Janiro, he presents a macho, pseudo-self-confidence and boosts his masculine capacity for aggression and violence. Immediately after Jake’s self-aggrandizing comments, though, he jokes about Janiro and not knowing whether to “fight him or fuck him.” His fight or fuck comment is an apt example of a Freudian slip—an unintentional reveal of subconscious feelings. Jake slips from macho locker-room talk to a palpable homosexual paranoia, illuminating his hysteria over both the possibility of Vickie’s affair and his inability to come to terms with his own sexuality. This is the first, and perhaps only time, Jake outwardly suggests a link between sexual anxiety and violence, but his actions constantly intermingle them. His personal life becomes corrupted with violence; his emotional baggage and sexual jealousy damage his boxing career.
Jake’s failure to separate sexual anxieties from violence surfaces in the Janiro fight, where Jake displays his peak monstrosity and sadism. As proved in previous fights, Jake is always an aggressive fighter, However, he treats Janiro with an unparalleled barbarism and excessively disfigures his “pretty” face. Janiro is the natural target for Jake—due to his wife describing the young fighter as “good looking” and the mobsters’ subsequent appraisals of his physical appearance. In Jake’s addled mind, Janiro represents all of the male rivals fueling his paranoia, insecurity, and rage; thus, to Jake, it’s only sensible that he directs these inner demons at Janiro. After the fight, Tommy observes, “He [Janiro] ain’t pretty no more,” an apt summary of Jake’s destruction of Janiro's face. Jake transforms Janiro into a hideous, unrecognizable victim of his rage. In doing so, he punishes Vickie for her harmless comments and demonstrates his ability to eradicate those who help nourish his own sexual insecurity.
Notably, Part 3 features an extended scene without Jake, our central protagonist. The second Copacabana scene deepens the characterizations of Vickie and Joey. Vickie admits that Jake won’t have sex with her, which reveals how Jake’s suspicions about her infidelity has led to his impotence and a stagnancy in their marriage in turn. Because we are usually so confined to Jake’s subjective point of view, we aren’t offered any real insight into Vickie’s personality, but this scene confirms how Jake’s biting distrust prompts Vickie's experiences of oppression and imprisonment.
Additionally, Joey unveils his hot-headed, explosive temper. Previous scenes hint at Joey’s aggression, especially when he see him crush the chair after Jake’s loss to Robinson. Nonetheless, we have viewed Joey as the more calm, pragmatic LaMotta brother, since he often successfully redirects and alleviates Jake’s anger. However, this characterization destabilizes once Joey brutally attacks Salvy in the Copacabana. Joey is outraged at Vickie for spending time with Salvy and wants to defend Jake’s honor, so when Salvy attempts to defy and subdue Joey’s anger at Vickie, Joey projects all of his built-up frustration onto Salvy. This attack prompts us to deduce that Joey has the same fundamentally enraged personality as Jake. Clearly, male aggression runs in the LaMotta family; violence is the sole answer to their anxieties and frustrations.
