INTERPRETIVE KEY:

Jake LaMotta achieves all the goals he sets for himself: he wants the world championship belt, he wants the beautiful Vickie, he doesn’t want to submit to the local mafia. He pursues everything with method and determination. He trains hard, abstains from sexual relations with his wife before matches, and avoids drinking to not gain weight.

Then, with the same methodical approach, he loses everything. He loses the championship title to Sugar Ray Robinson, Vickie leaves him, he breaks ties with his brother Joey, gains weight, and is imprisoned for corrupting a minor.

His story ends with him in front of a mirror, preparing to perform a monologue. The final lines are a loose interpretation of a monologue from On the Waterfront (1954, directed by Elia Kazan):

“You was my brother, Charlie. You should have looked out for me a little bit. You should have taken care of me just a little bit, so I wouldn’t have to take them dives for the short-end money.”
“I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum… which is what I am.”
“Let’s face it… it was you, Charlie.”

Jake LaMotta’s words are not really a critique of his brother Joey, because unlike in On the Waterfront, the responsibility for the broken relationship is entirely his own. He is also responsible for everything he has lost.

This is the central point of the story we want to highlight. By watching Jake LaMotta’s trajectory, the viewer clearly realizes that achieving one’s goals in life requires great “strength,” expressed in terms of talent, determination, and drive, to overcome the obstacles that separate us from what we want. In Jake’s case, this means rising to the championship from the bottom, from being nobody—a boxer like many others in the Bronx. He wants to reach the top, to have the best, including the most beautiful woman in the neighborhood.

What allows him to achieve his goals is primarily his rage, already suggested by the title. His anger and fury function like superpowers, and as such must be managed.

In Raging Bull, the Shadow is not external—like the Joker for Batman in The Dark Knight (2008, Christopher Nolan) or Darth Vader for Luke Skywalker, especially in the original Star Wars trilogy, particularly in The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Return of the Jedi (1983)—but internal. LaMotta’s very angry character is the Shadow, which makes the film, from one point of view, less symbolic than the examples just mentioned, but certainly more human and powerful. It tells us that our strength is also our weakness, and our weaknesses can be our strengths.

When Jake LaMotta is imprisoned for corrupting a minor, he calls himself stupid; he realizes he has acted foolishly. But can the Shadow be controlled or eliminated? Obviously not, because doing so would also eliminate the “propulsive” part—the force we need to achieve results.

Jake LaMotta’s transformation arc concludes with him learning to manage the Shadow, after experiencing a symbolic death represented by losing everything, including his physical form.

We find him at the end of the film once again in a ring—this time a stage where he is about to perform a monologue. This fulfills his primary passion: performing and putting on a show, something he also did as a boxer.

After the brutal final fight with Sugar Ray Robinson (where Jake LaMotta definitively loses the middleweight title), Jake—beaten and bloody but still standing—approaches Robinson and says a now-famous line:

“You never got me down, Ray. You hear me? You never got me down.”

Even in the face of defeat, Jake does not give up performing, refusing to stop putting on a show.