Salvy coerces Joey to convince Jake to cooperate with the mob, resulting in tensions between the three men. He has an unpleasant relationship with both Jake and Joey. SalvyĪs a small-time mobster, Salvy has connections to powerful organized crime figures who live in the same Bronx neighborhood as Jake, Joey, and Vickie. She’s icy, withdrawn, not afraid to rebuff Jake’s suspicions about her infidelity, and expresses some frustration over her husband’s disinterest in sleeping with her.
Defined by her outward allure, Vickie remains enigmatic to us-she’s characterized alternately as victim and sex object. Vickie feels an attraction to Jake, who presents himself as an up-and-coming hotshot with a lavish car Their flirtation evolves into a long, thunderous relationship pervaded with domestic abuse, sexual inadequacy, and mounting paranoia. When Jake meets Vickie, she is a 15 year old “neighborhood girl” and the object of Jake, the mobsters, and Joey’s lust. Joey threatens his young son at the dinner table with a knife and smashes Salvy’s head inside a taxi door, leading us to deduce that the furious need to assert a masculine authority runs in the LaMotta family. While Joey sporadically reasons with Jake and successfully calms him down, he shares critical similarities with Jake: they’re both violent and explosive. Namely, he acts as a liaison between Jake and the local mobsters, introduces Jake to Vickie, and organizes Jake’s fights-all the while attempting to alleviate some of Jake’s anger and paranoia. Joey LaMottaĪs Jake’s brother and manager, Joey finds himself in the precarious position of controlling Jake’s private and public life. The film doesn’t encourage us to like Jake or sympathize with him, but we occasionally feel some compassion toward him-we can’t help but pity a man who doesn’t understand his self-destruction, brutality, and perpetual rage. As such, jealousy and violence become his automatic responses to external stimuli. Jake is also masochistic he induces others to inflict pain on him, from goading Sugar Ray to beating him to a pulp, bullying Joey into hitting him in the face, to pouring ice water into his shorts to deny himself sexual gratification.
Jake has basic emotions-he often complains about his body and “little girls hands”-and lives a life without introspection or self-analysis. In the ring, he efficiently releases his inner demons, and when that’s not enough, he abuses the people around him, most notably Vickie and Joey. Raging Bull centers on Jake’s primal and violent tendencies, as well as his turbulent suspicions about his wife Vickie’s infidelity.
Jake LaMotta briefly reigned as the world's middleweight boxing champion, delivered Sugar Ray Robinson his first professional loss, became a stand-up comedian, and was jailed for inappropriate contact with a underage girl.
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