The Legacy of Martin Scorsese: From Raging Bull to The Wolf of Wall Street
Martin Scorsese is a master at writing complex characters, from the notorious Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver (1976) to the most recent addition to Scorsese’s lineup of gangsters, Frank Sheeran in The Irishman (2019). Scorsese might be most known for his contribution to the gangster film genre, nonetheless, among his strongest works are his biographical adaptations of real life figures. Two prime examples are Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull (1980) and Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street (2013). Both biopics were adapted directly from the written source material of the titular character—LaMotta’s Raging Bull: My Story and Belfort’s memoir of the same name. Made over thirty years apart, these films not only exemplify two of Scorsese’s greatest achievements in character study, but also gives us a glimpse into Scorsese’s journey in his auteuristic style in relation to the changing zeitgeist of the times.
The opening of Raging Bull has to be one of the most memorable and chilling opening scenes, which goes to show Scorsese’s masterful ability to introduce and establish his characters from the very beginning. We see LaMotta in the boxing ring by himself, fighting no one but his own shadow. The ring is surrounded by fog, making the audience invisible. Scorsese denies La Mott an audience and forces him to really face himself. But we know there is an audience from the occasional camera flashes. He’s being watched, but not seen. The opening scene foreshadows the rest of the film by telling us right off the bat that LaMotta is fighting an endless battle with himself. His self-perception is rooted not only in toxic masculinity but in self-punishment, and most of all, insufferable loneliness. Scorsese refuses LaMotta a grand introduction, yet it is this simplicity that makes the opening scene so effective.
Throughout the film, it becomes evident that LaMotta is incapable of separating his personal life from his professional life; he fails to distinguish where life in the ring ends and where life in the real world begins. His controlled violence in the ring is juxtaposed against his uncontrollable violence outside of it as he continuously inflicts violence onto those around him, sparing not even his wife and brother. Scorsese establishes LaMotta as a near psychopath, determined to get to the top no matter what it takes or what he loses in the process. To him, the ends justify the means. Scorsese’s artistic approach in this film strengthens his auteuristic style because even though the character study revolves around the psychology of the character, Scorsese does not psychologize LaMotta’s unhinged behavior. This does not mean the film is not void of psychology; Scorsese effectively depicts a consistent logic of behavior that turned him into a raging bull, not to justify, but to rationalize and humanize him.
The world to which LaMotta belongs and thrives in is a man’s world; in this world, women play only supporting roles and are dispensable. His victory comes at the expense of the women in his life, namely his wife Vickie. His abusive relationship with Vickie fuels his animalistic tendencies, and it becomes clear that his aggression is inherently sexual. He gets jealous when Vickie catches other men’s attention; this jealousy becomes so overwhelming and unfounded that he manages to convince himself that his wife would sleep with his own brother. Like many men, his jealousy manifests in the form of violence. But ironically, he neglects her sexual needs because he believes in the tradition that abstinence improves his performance in the ring. He’s aroused by this sexual frustration and perpetuates it to his own benefit; he fails to consider the fact that in his own self-denial, he denies her, too.
The Madonna-whore dichotomy is prominent in many of Scorsese’s films, and this dichotomy is often embodied by the same female character. In Raging Bull, Scorsese depicts this dichotomy through LaMotta’s inability to grasp the complexities of a woman beyond the only two ends of the spectrum that he knows: whore or virgin. From the moment he lays his eyes on Vickie to the moment she leaves him, he only views her as an accessible or inaccessible sexual fantasy. Upon meeting her, he begins to fantasize about her as an innocent, untouched virgin, and he’s aroused by his inaccessibility to her, seeing it as a mere challenge to testify his masculinity. But once he has possessed her, his accessibility to her body no longer serves as a sexual fantasy, rather the opposite. She becomes a whore, tarnished in his eyes by the very sexual fantasy created by him. Obsessed by jealousy and insecure in his own manhood, he fails to identify his woman as anything other than a whore or a virgin.
Fast forward thirty years later, and to much controversy, The Wolf of Wall Street turns the Madonna-whore dichotomy on its head with a feminist portrayal of a millionaire’s trophy wife. The Wolf of Wall Street presents similar themes about success and failure that we saw in Raging Bull. The film follows Wall Street stockbroker Jordan Belfort throughout his career as fraud and corruption ultimately destroy his life. Although some aspects of the Madonna-whore dichotomy are still at play, The Wolf of Wall Street embraces the idea of a trophy wife and subtly strips away the tradition of male domination in the home. Scorsese gives Naomi the power to reverse this gender dynamic as she is seemingly the only person who has control over Belfort and ultimately becomes much more than just a trophy wife. The depth and complexity of Naomi’s character development far exceeds Vickie’s, which gives the film an unexpected feminist voice that stands out amidst the rampant misogyny.
The opening scene of The Wolf of Wall Street has a completely different tone than of Raging Bull. The film opens with an advertisement for Belfort’s firm, Stratton Oakmont, then cuts to a large group of stockbrokers engaging in a debauched game for money. In the center of the crowd is the man of the hour, Jordan Belfort, who introduces himself to the audience. Unlike in Raging Bull where there is no narration, which gives the audience the power to form their own impression of LaMotta, here, Scorsese strips this autonomy away from the audience by giving Belfort control over his own narrative through a voiceover. Belfort tells the audience everything we need to know about him as a person—the excessive number of luxury properties he owns, the numerous drugs he uses, the hookers that he engages with multiple times a week. He attempts to redeem himself by telling us about his smoking hot wife and “two perfect kids”—at least we think he’s a family man? In contrast to the simplicity of Raging Bull, the opening scene of The Wolf of Wall Street not only introduces the audience to a completely different world, but also a different time period that now has new rules for what it means to be a man.
It feels counterintuitive to call The Wolf of Wall Street a feminist film simply due to the story being an overdose of blatant sexism. Quite frankly, it’s hard to call any of Scorsese’s films feminist because of his notorious lack of complex female characters. Still, one might argue that The Wolf of Wall Street is Scorsese’s most laudable attempt at creating a powerful female character who evolves in a far more complex and intriguing journey than that of the protagonist himself. Similar to Raging Bull, the Madonna-whore dichotomy is ever present as the men still only know to view women as either whore or virgin; and in Belfort’s world, there are more whores than there are virgins. In this dichotomy, Naomi already starts off as a whore since she has an adulterous affair with Belfort while he was married to someone else. Not only does the film embrace the trophy wife trope, it also deals with the idea of “the other woman”—both are what society would consider a “whore”. However, these identities are not given a negative connotation as both were embodied by Naomi, who is able to disrupt the dichotomy and sends a message about female empowerment that many tend to overlook.
In the beginning, Naomi is presented through the male gaze and objectified as a sexual fantasy; one of the first scenes we see is her fully nude as she seduces Belfort knowing that he is a married man. As the film progresses, she effectively breaks the boundaries of the Madonna- whore dichotomy because she proves that a woman can exist beyond those two identities on screen, and more importantly, she proves that she can still be a whore and a complex woman. Against Belfort’s aggression and manipulation, she refuses to relent and proves herself to be more than a match for him. As he spirals out of control, she holds more and more power over him as she leverages her authority as his wife and the mother of his children. She makes it clear that she doesn’t need him and can take his children away from him at any moment. This isn’t to say she’s a good person by any means; many times, we see that she can be just as toxic as him; and arguably, this makes her character even more powerful because she represents all the complexities and intricacies of what it means to be a woman.
The audience’s perception of both women is strengthened when we see that they know their worth to leave their abusive husbands and take custody of their kids. Despite Vickie’s limited character development, the audience still gets a sense that she is a strong-willed woman because she actively fights back against him, as evident in the scene where LaMotta physically assaults her after confronting her about her infidelity. Similarly, we understand Naomi’s complexities as a woman as Scorsese deliberately provides us glimpses into her thought process as she considers leaving him. The handful of fight scenes between the couple gives the audience insight into their gender dynamic, and Scorsese masterfully dissects this dynamic in a way that subverts traditional power relations in the domestic sphere. Interestingly, while LaMotta’s sexual frustration towards Vickie manifests in the form of violence inflicted against others, Belfort’s sexual frustration towards Naomi manifests in the form of self-destructive violence. Because Naomi is able to stand her grounds, Belfort has no choice but to take his frustrations out on himself and further slips into a cycle of endless self-destruction.
It’s difficult to view Vickie and Naomi through the same lens because they represent different time periods that have different rules governing how a woman is supposed to be. Scorsese’s portrayal of the two women and their relationships with their husbands is a reflection of the time in which they were created. This can be read as Scorsese’s commentary on our reality; when it comes to gender relations, everything has changed yet nothing has changed between the 1970s and the 2010s. Apparently, men still find it hard to grasp the complexity of femininity; and ironically, one of these men is Scorsese himself. More often than not, Scorsese tells his stories through the lens of the male gaze and often gets criticized for his lackluster depictions of women; even to this day as evident in the infamous case of Anna Paquin’s character in The Irishman. Nevertheless, despite this shortcoming, there is still much value in Scorsese’s unparalleled ability to study the flaws and crises of masculinity, and through this study of what it means to be a man, we too can understand what it means to be a woman. Scorsese could do much better for the women in his films, but his subtle critique of gender relations in his explorations of masculinity should not be overlooked.
Just as chilling as the opening scene, Raging Bull ends on a depressing note. Sitting in front of a mirror in the backstage of a nightclub, LaMotta recites On the Waterfront. The irony here is heartbreaking because we know that he never redeemed himself, but in his eyes, he has found redemption. The On the Waterfront quote is evident that he still views himself as the victim and he foolishly relates to Terry Malloy; instead of taking responsibility for his actions, he defends himself while still convincing himself that it was the world that ruined him. The story goes full circle as we see LaMotta once again shadowboxing, but this time, there is no audience. Not only is he boxing with his own shadow, he’s also fighting his own reflection in the mirror. Scorsese effectively uses the mirror as a visual device to reveal to the audience that LaMotta is his own worst enemy, since the “Charlie” that he’s speaking to is himself. It’s a meta-cinematic moment that goes to show how masterful of an auteur Scorsese truly is. In the end, LaMotta chants, I’m the boss, which indicates that he is still as egotistical as he ever was; his perception of self never changed; he’s lost his identity without even knowing it.
Jordan Belfort ends up no less pathetic than Jake LaMotta, which seems to be a recurring theme in Scorsese’s films and demonstrates his authorial consistency no matter the time period and genre. Scorsese makes films with ambiguous but not so ambiguous endings that forces us to think and consciously decide how we feel about the trajectory of character. The ending of The Wolf of Wall Street shows Belfort in prison, and later, hosting a seminar on sales techniques. The idea of self-redemption once again comes into question as Scorsese challenges the audience to decide for themselves whether Belfort has redeemed himself. Belfort asks the audience members to sell him a pen as a trick to establish the power dynamic between himself and his audience. One could argue that the audience in the seminar is representative of the audience watching the film. As we watch the events of the film unfold, just like how Belfort’s audience is watching his seminar, Scorsese poses the question: are we going to fall for it and want to be just like him even after knowing full well how fucked up of a person he is?
Scorsese has made exceptional contributions to cinema that validate him as one of the greatest auteur filmmakers to come out of the New Hollywood. In navigating the evolution of the Hollywood system from the 1960s to present day, Scorsese successfully married the commercial film with the independent film and positioned himself between the mainstream and the avant-garde. He effectively incorporates his personal vision within the commercial feature film through his unmatched ability to create personal and artistically powerful films that can still attract mass audiences and be commercially profitable. Rather than rejecting the tradition of mainstream narrative cinema, Scorsese learns to embrace commerciality as he understands that it is essential to bring his personal vision to life. Many of his films have been met with much controversy, yet it is this controversy that audiences come to realize the ingenuity and cultural significance of his films. From Raging Bull to The Wolf of Wall Street, Scorsese has established himself as a true auteur of modern cinema and built a legacy that transcends content and form.
