2/1/2022
In Raging Bull, Vickie is racialized by characters and camera alike. The camera’s focus on her whiteness guides the viewer to an understanding of Jake LaMotta’s relationship with Vickie and with his own Italian identity.
When the film first introduces Vickie, it is ostensibly from Jake’s perspective. He first sees bits of her from around an Italian guy, then the camera focuses on her face. Her pale skin and hair take up most of the screen. Vickie’s beauty does not show in such an extreme close-up, only her whiteness.
The film continues to racialize Vickie by bookending her image with that of swarthier pool-goers. When she appears again she is being kissed by a dark man, a dark woman cut off at the side. The camera keeps moving, focusing on Vickie alone until it swerves to the mob guys, and back again to just Vickie. Yet we only hold her image for a second before the shot moves to include the dark woman’s arm. Soon her entire side, and part of her face, are present. This sequence as a whole presents Vickie in relation to Italians. It shows contrast between white and Italian in one frame, and then presents white alone, then Italian alone, then just white again, until the contrast creeps back into the frame as the camera retreats.
Later, Joey tells his brother that Vickie “ain’t the kind of girl you fuck and forget.” He is implying that she is different from the other girls, the presumably Italian girls, that Jake has fucked and forgotten. The introduction of whiteness into Jake’s world throws Italianness into contrast. Jake reacts badly to the term “fuck”, criticizing his brother for cursing. Jake’s sudden recognition of his brother’s animalistic behavior is in response to his fetishization of Vickie’s whiteness. The camera “treats [Vickie] like golden meat,” in the words of critic David Thompson, in order to trigger the same response in the viewer. A viewer may not realize how Italian the movie is until the “long lens… studies the flush of light on [Vickie’s] body” (Thompson). When, in contrast to Vickie’s purity, the viewer comes to associate Italian men with swearing, spitting and boxing, they are tuning into Jake’s own anti-Italian fantasy.