Raging Bulls, Tigers "Burning Bright," and Other Animals in ...

Raging Bulls, Tigers "Burning Bright," and Other Animals in Boxing Literature

and Films

FRANK ARDOLINO

sports have always used animals as logos, mascots, nicknames, and metaphors. Baseball has teams named the Cubs, Tigers, Bluejays, Orioles, and C ardinals.1 The mascot for the San Diego Padres is the Chicken who plays pranks and prances around the field before the game. There have been players nicknamed "Bull," "Mule," "IronHorse," "Cat," "BigCat," "Moose," "Goose," "King Kong," and even "Penguin." Basketball has teams named the Bulls, Bucks, Hawks, Hornets, and a dancing gorilla as a mascot. In football, the animals multiply and become more ferocious, for the most part, befitting the combative nature of the game. There have been players with the nicknames of "Bronco," "Bull," and "Bulldog," and teams named the Bears, Bengals, Broncos, Colts, Eagles, Falcons, Lions, and the Rams. College football is a veritable animal kingdom filled with teams named after Lions, Tigers, Badgers, Bruins, Gophers, and Longhorns, among many others. Fans have been known to kidnap the opposing team 's mascot such as the Army mule or the Navy goat in an attempt to gain the upper hand.

However, in the nicknames and outfits of its athletes, in its structure and purpose, and in the metaphors and words used to describe its action, boxing stands out as the sport most indebted to animal imagery. Boxers have had colorful nicknames designed to represent their ability to administer and absorb punishment in the ring. Mickey "Toy Bulldog" Walker defeated the "Nebraska Wildcat" Ace Hudkins and the heavyweight "Bearcat"—a double menace—Wright in 1928 and 1931, respectively (Heller 76). Over the years, we have seen "Tiger" Flowers, "Tiger" Jones, Jake the "Bull" La Motta, Archie "Mongoose" Moore, Aaron "Hawk" Prior, Donald the "Cobra" Curry, Gene "Mad Dog" Hatcher, Lady Tyger Trimiar in her tigerish attire, and most

48 Aethlon Vl:2 / Spring 1989

recently Hector "Macho" Camacho, who struts around the ring in a leopard skin loin cloth.

Boxing's appeal for its participants and proponents has been described in animal terms. It is celebrated as a brutal ritual which reduces man to his most primitive and elemental self and forces him to participate in "an atavistic rite or a g o n the dram a of life in the flesh" (Oates 116). Budd Schulberg eulogizes the atavistic physical prowess exhibited in the struggle for the heavyweight championship:

a contest for the heavyweight championship is more than a fight, it is a celebration, a ceremony, a profound rite, as truly a blood ritual as the sacrifice of the fighting bulls . . . . these two man wars have magic . . . , recalling the myth of man as simple, indomitable fighting animal, the most capable of all such animals on e a rth ___("The Heavyweight Championship" 149)

Similarly, Norman Mailer values boxing because it shows a part of what man is like, "his ability to create . . . artful movement on the edge of death orp a in ___There is knowledge to be found about our nature, and the nature ofanimals, of big cats, lions, tigers, gorillas, bears, walruses (Archie Moore), birds, elephants, jackals, bulls" (Presidential Papers 247-48). In his description of the epic first battle between Ali and "Smokin'" Joe Frazier, Mailer depicts the latter as a primitive man, "a w ild . . . beast, man of will reduced to the common denominator of the will of all of us back in that land of the animal where the idea of man as a tool-wielding beast was first conceived" ("Ego" 60). Mailer's encomium of the beast in the savage pugilist recalls Jack London's panegyric to the "abysmal brute," the pre-intellectual instinct for life and survival which surfaces when the fighter is pushed to his limits in the heat of battle:

By abysmal brute I mean the basic life that records deeper than the brain and the intellect.. . . It i s . . . the very stuff of life— movement; and it is saturated with a blind and illimitable desireto ex ist___It is lower down on the ladder of evolution than isintelligence . . . . When the intellect goes it still remains—the abysmal brute. (London Reports 254)

In addition, London maintains that when the spectators respond to the display of courage and aggressiveness displayed by the abysmal brute, they experience "the ape and tiger in us" (278).

The structure and purpose of boxing contain inherent analogies with animal behavior as conceived and promoted by men. Boxers are trained, measured, and evaluated for their physical specifications, pitted one-against- one in a 20-foot square ring, "an elevated platform enclosed by ropes as in a pen

Ardolino / Animals in Boxing Literature and Films 49

beneath hotcrude, pitiless lightsin the presenceof an impatient crowd" (Oates 4), which bets on the outcome and incites the boxers to greater violence. In his prizefight novel Cashel Byron's Profession, George Bernard Shaw has Lucian, who is opposed to boxing, describe the animality of the profession:

the combatants are trained as racehorses, gamecocks, or their like are trained, they meet and beat each other as savagely as they can until one or the other is too much injured to continue the combat. This takes place in the midst of a mob of such persons as enjoy spectacles of the k in d ___(124)

Many analysts maintain that the essence of boxing is a Darwinian survival of the fittest, a war which results in the production of elemental truths about man in extremis. As W. C. Heinz says, through his surrogate the sportswriter, in The Professional:

there i s . . . the remnant of the animal in man and the law of life is still in the . . . survival of the fittest. As long as that's true,I find man revealing himself more completely in fighting than in any other form of expressive endeavor . . . . I've seen Zale andG raziano. . . literally trying to take one another a p a rt__ It waslike two prehistoric monsters, knee deep in the primeval ooze ready to fight to the death and with the jungle all around them echoing the noise and horror of i t ___(239-40)

When writers describe the action within the ring, they often use animal metaphors to express their vision of how the boxers react to each other. Because of their feinting, bobbing, jabbing, and plodding motions, fighters have been compared most often to bulls and big cats such as tigers, panthers, and leopards. The analogy with the bull fight is made easily as the fighters "bull" their way inside, charge straight ahead, and parry each other's fists or horns. When one fighter is more aggressive and the other more agile, the contest can be viewed as Mailer saw the fight between the brilliant m atador Ali and the charging George Foreman, a "dangerous bull [whose]. . . gloves were out like horns":

. . .[Ali] flying back as Foreman dove forward, tantalizing him, maddening h im ,. . . now banishing Foreman's head with the turn of a matador sending away a bull after five fine passes were made, and once when he seemed to hesitate just a little too long . . . , something stirred in George like th a t . . . knowledge of the bull when it is ready to gore the matador rather than the cloth . . . . (The Fight 179,196-97)

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Fighters have been compared to big cats because of their musculature, graceful movements, powerful punches, and flurries of blows. The famous anecdote concerning Red Smith and Sugar Ray Robinson illustrates this type of comparison:

Smith was reminded of Robinson while visiting the zoo one day. When the columnist stood transfixed at the cage where the jaguar paced back and forth, he gazed at the superbly muscled predator and said, 'Good morning, Ray. You're looking good,Ray.' (Wiley 71)

At the height of his pugilistic prowess. Jack Dempsey, the "Manassa Mauler," was described as having a "body muscled like a panther cat's [which] seems to ignite with malice, to bum and flash . . . " (Gom 76).

In sum, boxing is a sport filled with animal energy as employed by writers describing the action and projected by the fighters as part of their ferocious images. Basically, writers use animal imagery because it fits and communicates immediately and vividly the physical action of the fight. Consequently, readers receive a sense of the primitive and elemental nature of the struggle when animal images are applied to the fighters in their various postures. Further, fighters promote their images as animals because such ballyhoo makes them colorful and, perhaps, more intimidating and, most certainly and importantly, helps to boost their box office clout. For example, Frank "the Animal" Fletcher has cultivated a hyperbolic animalistic persona orchestrated by "his mother, whose . . . displays of maternal care included leading crowd chants of "Animal! Animal!"' (Levao 59-60).

On a deeper level, the appearance of animal imagery and personas in boxing represents an attempt to invest the boxers with the power of the animal and then to have the spectators worship the display of animality in action. We want to see the fighter as primal man devoid of the debilitating aspects of rationality, of civilization, of physical limitations. We see the animals as more capable of a freer, simpler, instinctive, and therefore higher level of existence, as William Gass has explained:

we track the lion to and from its lair, or watch the tiger in the tense alertness of its stalk; and we envy h o w . . . th e . . . animals . . . seem always to express the essential; they know nothing, we think, of distraction, guilt, excess, anxiety, delusion, pride, shame . . . , and how lucky these creatures are, we imagine in such moments, because each of them possesses the superior efficiencies of its species; they fit without their measure being taken; whereas we perceive a painful inexactitude in our forms and functions-----(40)


Primitive man worshipped totemic animals, tutelary spirits whose powers were invoked in initiation ceremonies during which the initiates wore animal masks to achieve a higher being. As Erich Neumann has explained: "One of the basic phenomena of totemism ... is that the totem ... is reincarnated in the initiate, findingin him a dwelling place and at the same time constituting his higher self" (1:244). Totemism occurs throughout history primarily in martial contexts. When men went to war they often donned the skins associated with the tutelary animals to gain their mana and magic. The Romans dressed their standard bearers with leopard and lion skins, just as British Dragoons were festooned with leopard skin turbans and bear crests, not for ceremonial reasons but to enhance their martial prowess (Popp 26-27, Owen 27). In an act of communion with their totem, African tribesmen ate the heart of the leopard "to gain courage, and portions of the animal were scattered over the warriors by m agicians. . (Thomas 521 A).

In some cultures, men dressed as animals engaged in bloody fights to bring fertility to the crops and strength to their warriors. The Aztecs staged fights between men in jaguar outfits as propitiation of their animal gods, and in modern Mexico such animal fights are continued, as Bart McDowell has described:

Each May, on the Catholic Day of Santa Cruz, in what was the Aztec month of Huey Togozth, men don spotted jaguar costumes and heavy leather masks . . . to fight each other with w hips. . .—a penance to bring rain, 'If we do not do th is . . . God will n o t . . . send the sacred w aters.'. . . we must fight to save all the world. (743)

In a Jungian sense, such identification with the totemic animal represents the hope for the exaltation of the self through immersion in the primal sources of life (Cirlot 13).

However, despite their positive identification with the animal as sourceof mana, magic, fertility, and martial prowess, men have also been contemptuous of animal analogies. To call someone an "animal" is to insult him as a gross, savage, and uncivilized being. As Mary Allen points out, men and animals have a paradoxical relationship; we desire their powers but we do not relish being called an animal (3-4). Furthermore, animals can also symbolize victimization by uncontrollable forces.

I would like to explore m an's paradoxical relationship with animals in boxing narratives, which, for purposes of this article, include fiction, essays, and films. In order to give focus to the analysis, I have developed five categories which express the narratives' perspectives on the positive and negative aspects of boxing as established through animal imagery. The narratives treated here areclassified according to the ways in which they present the


boxer as an animal: whether he is a noble animal who is in touch with his most basic self as a result of his physical exertions in the ring or whether he is brutalized by his life and boxing experience into being a vicious predator or a hapless victim. The five narrative and thematic categories are: 1. The world is thoroughly corrupt and boxing is a microcosm which exploits and destroys boxers; 2. the ring offers man the opportunity to exercise his viciousness in an organized and rewarded fashion; 3. boxing is thoroughly exploitative, but there is a better life beyond the ring; 4. boxing is vicious and brutal like life itself, but it gives man the chance to be in touch with his primal self; 5. boxing is an exalted profession and it elevates man to success as the noble animal in the ring and as a wealthy and exemplary citizen in society.

These categories are not mutually exclusive; some of the narratives contain elements from most categories, but I will classify works according to their primary thematic emphases. In the case of Raging Bull, I treat La Motta's autobiography in class two and the movie version in the fourth one because Scorsese emphasizes different aspects of La Motta's life. Moreover, the categories are not arranged chronologically, although the fifth one concerns the most contemporary narratives, the Rocky series (1977-85). Rather, they follow a thematic order moving from the most pessimistic to the most optimistic boxing narratives. Accordingly, the categories also can be expressed succinctly as five proximate conditions experienced by boxers in these narratives: 1. victimization; 2. predatoriness; 3. escape from victimization and confinement; 4. primal release and awareness; 5. transcendence and apotheosis.

The first and second categories represent opposite sides of the same coin. Victimized fighters are beaten by vicious boxers and exploited by corrupt controllers of the system. These categories are illustrated respectively by Schulberg's novel The Harder They Fall and by London's novel The Game and La M otta's autobiography Raging Bull. The third and fourth classes are related in their emphasis on escape from victimization and confinement; fighters either flee the fight game (London's novel The Abysmal Brute and Serling's T.V. play Requiem For A Heavyweight) or gain awareness through primal release in the ring which causes them to escape the system tragically through death (March's long poem The Setup) or happily through love and increased self-consciousness (the movie Body and Soul and the movie version of Raging Bull). In the fifth category, the boxer experiences many of the negative elements of the preceding narratives, but he transcends all obstacles to gain an apotheosis inside and outside the ring. The Rocky tetralogy graphically presents boxingas the reason for Rocky Balboa's regeneration and deification.

Generally speaking, most boxing narratives have been dominated by themes of biological, environmental, and ideological determinism which are represented by the forces impinging on the boxer as imperiled individual. As Messenger explains:


They [the narrative strains] move out from the crisis of the threatened and damaged physical self to the contingent and precarious life in the economic and social sphere of the collective, then to the wounding of the spirit. The emphases in the strains roughly correspond to those of the individual hero (the physical self), the collective hero (the boxer in a controlled sports setting),and theantihero (the boxer as victim, martyr). ("Mailer"87)

All the narratives under consideration contain such elements of determinism and various stages of the boxer's victimization and predatoriness, but those belonging to the last three categories show how the individual conquers these impediments.

II

The first category depicting the pervasiveness of corruption outside and in the ring is best represented by Budd Schulberg's The Harder They Fall (1947), which concerns the crooked promotion of a massive Argentinian Toro Molina, "the Giant of the Andes," who has no boxing talent at all but is raised by Nick Latka with the help of sportswriter Eddie Lewis to be a contender for the heavyweight championship. Through a series of fixed fights, Toro becomes a big gate attraction, but he is brutally defeated in the honest and vicious bout with the champion. Subsequently, the badly disfigured Toro is deprived of his money by the syndicate, and is sold to another manager to continue his physical degradation. Only Eddie seems to care for this big, dum b brute, but in the end Eddie takes his cut and fails Toro who has no money and means to return to his country.

Schulberg uses extensive animal imagery to express the viciousness of boxing and the society surrounding it. Toro is depicted as a trained ape, or monkey, a circus pachyderm, and a gored and doomed bull. When Eddie first hears of Toro, he remarks sarcastically "'Captured alive in the jungles of Argentina—Gargantua the Great'" (34). After Eddie meets the ponderous Argentinian, he sees him as a circus monkey:

I remember having theimpression of seeinga trained monkey of nightmare proportions dressed up like a man mechanically going through his act under the watchful eye of the organ- grinder. Toro hesitated a moment, just the way you've seen them do ithundredsof times in the animal act, and then obeyed.... (74)

During his first workout, Toro Reminds Eddie "of an elephant th a t . . . slowly, mechanically . . . executes every command the trainer gives it" (100).


But Toro—as his name states—is most frequently depicted as a doomed bull. Acosta, Toro's original discoverer and owner, describes Toro's physique: "heisgigawfesco, with theneckand the shoulders of a fighting bull and muscles in his arms as big as melons and legs as strong as the great quebracho trees of the Andes" (60). However, despite his apparent strength, Toro is pliable, pitiful, a born victim whose size represents the magnitude of his vulnerability: "Toro wanted to go down to the ring with the patient amiability of a prize Guernsey standing by to make its appearance at the country fair" (297).

When Toro fights the vicious champion Buddy Stein, he becomes a victim whose only function is to suffer pain. Buddy, who is no buddy but has a heart and fists of stone, bloodies Toro with his crippling punches as if he were the arrogant matador sticking the dying bull with swords: "It had ceased to be a contest; it was a bull-fight, a . . . demonstration of m an's superiority over the beast..." (329). At the end of the slaughter, Toro has been thoroughly reduced to a victimized beast:

Toro toppled over. He fell so awkwardly that his ankle twisted under him. With horrible con- centration, he lifted himself to his knees. He crawled forward . . . slipping in his own blood, like a dying beast. (333)

After the debacle, the battered bull Toro is sold to Vince Vanneman who announces that he has Molina booked to fight Dynamite Jones in the Bull Ring at Tijuana. Nick Latka, who operates out of the syndicate night club the Bolero, has succeeded in degrading the Giant of the Andes to the state of a circus animal and a bloodied, emasculated bull.

Toro's degradation also provides an ironic parallel with Samson Agonistes, the biblical strongman blinded by deceit and lust who is enslaved to his enemies but through divine providence and the regaining of his physical and moral strength becomes God's champion when he defeats the Philistines by tearingdown the temple of Dagon. AsMerritt Hughes has explained, Agonistes means an athlete struggling to win an Opympic prize, a champion of truth, and finally the Christian athlete armed, as St. Paul says (Ephesians 6:11,13), "with the whole armor of Christ" (Hughes 541). However, Toro is an ironic Samson who falls and is never resurrected. He does not bring down the temple of corruption upon the demonic Nick and his Philistine associates, but remains a brutalized spectacle.

Schulberg announces the Samson analogy in the epigraph: "I sorrow'd at his captive state, but mi nded / Not to be absent at that spectacle" (1603-04). The messenger speaks these lines when he describes Samson's destruction of the temple, but Schulberg is using them to suggest Eddie's passive role in witnessing the spectacle of Toro's victimization and being unable or unwilling to prevent it. Eddie first uses the Samson analogy when he imagines writing the publicity copy for Toro's rise to fame:


Great son of a peasant barrel maker leaves village in Andes to be strong-man in traveling circus. . . . I could start with a mention of the Jews of Pales- tine and . . . Samson. . . . What mighty feats would giant perform equalling those of Samson who came down from the hills to champion his subjugated peop le .. . . (64)

Samson was blinded and enslaved by the Philistines who made him

To grind in Brazen fetters under task . . . Eyeless in Gaza at the Mill with Himself in bonds under a Philistinian yoke. . . . (Hughes 552,1.34,40-41)

Toro's last name is Molina, the Spanish word (molino) for mill, which also, as noun and verb, refers to boxing. The connection between these definitions is that boxing involves moving around in a ring with the combatants trying to grind down each other. Molina is being ground by the system inside and outside the ring; he is the natural object, the foreigner as alien, the boxer as hapless victimized animal being reduced to nothing. After the brutal beating from Stein, Toro is nearly blinded and is sold into further degradation.

The movie version, directed by Mark Robson in 1956 and starring Bogart, in his last film appearance, as Eddie, softens the u tter pessimism of Schulberg's novel by inserting a "happy" ending. Toro is sumam ed Marino, and Eddie, possessing greater integrity, gives Toro his own share of the purses Toro has been cheated out of, allows Toro to escape further exploitation by helping him to return to Argentina, and defies Nick Benko and the corrupt system to write a searing expose of corruption in boxing entitled The Harder They Fall.

The second category of boxing narratives, which is the obverse of the first one, involves the depiction of life inside and outside the ring as vicious, with boxing offering the fighter the opportunity to exercise that predatoriness within an organized and remunerative context. Jack London's The Game (1905) and Jake La Motta's autobiography Raging Bull (1970) exemplify this category in their presentation of the brutal fighters as destructive animals who prey on their opponents and, in La Motta's case, on his family and friends as well.

In his novel The Game, London presents boxing as a brutal analogy with life, which is cruel, unpredictable, and dominated by the ethos of the survival of the fittest. London contrasts the brutal masculinity of the boxing ring with the feminine sensitivity of boxer Joe Fleming's fiancee Genevieve. Joe and she plan to marry, but Joe will fight one more time, and he allows Genevieve to peep through a hole in the dressing room wall at this savage ritual which is depicted as an animalistic contest. Joe's opponent Ponta is described as a savage animal:


heavy-jawed, bull-necked, and the short, straight hair of the head seemed . . . the stiff bristles on a hog's back. Here were coarseness and brutishness—a thing savage, primordial, ferocious his body was covered with a hairy growth that mattedlike a dog's on his chest and shoulders.. . . He was an animal, lacking in intelligence and spirit, a menace and a thing of fear, as the tiger and the snake are menaces, better behind the bars of a cage than running free in the open. (45)

Appropriately, Ponta "shook Joe. . . in the clinches as a terrier might a r a t . . ." (55).

When Joe is beating his opponent, Ponta had "nothing human left in him. He was the beast incarnate, roaring and raging and being destroyed'" (60). The excited crowd fills the air with "the howling of wolves" as Joe is winning, but he twists his ankle and Ponta smashes him with ferocious blows which send him crashing to the canvas so violently that his skull cracks and he dies. Joe and Genevieve have been shown through boxing the nature of the "game of life." One false step and Joe is down and killed by his savage opponent:

Besides Joe's 'fight game' and the 'courting mating game' of Genevieve and Joe, London had them unknowingly play a larger 'life-and- death game,' a game externally imposed whose 'irony and faithlessness' made i t . . . the overriding force in a hostile universe. Thus did boxing provide a realistic bottom line to London's descanted harsh theme of naturalistic irony and despair. (Messenger "London and Boxing" 70)

Jake La Motta's autobiography Raging Bull is an unsparing look at a sociopath, a street punk, thief, near-murderer, rapist, betrayer of friends, wife- beater, crooked fighter, middleweight champion, philanderer, convict, slob, and bit comedian and actor. La Motta presents himself, for most of his narrative, as an unregenerate brute who uses the viciousness he developed during his life to become a sado-masochistic fighter. He beats his opponents to a pulp, and he turns the same rage against his family and friends, who, he believes, have betrayed him.

Jake is sent to prison as a teenaged armed robber and there he begins organized boxing with the encouragement of fellow inmate Rocky Graziano. Jake is annihilated in his first match with the prison champion, but in the rematch after learning to box Jake tears into him viciously and then analyzes why he was so enraged:

I felt that if I didn 't destroy him, he would destroy me, and that for some reason he had a right to destroy me. And that


enraged me more— the fact that somehow I felt he had that right.And that's what 1 went out to fight to kill. (83)

This is boxing as psychodrama. Jake has an overriding sense of guilt and worthlessness which drives him to destroy others because he thinks they have the right to kill him. Jake's entire ring career is built on his guilt and inferiority complex which dictates his plodding delivery and absorption of punishment. This malaise also produces his extreme jealousy of his beautiful blonde wife Vickie, who, he thinks, cannot love someone as worthless as he, and therefore must be having affairs, for which she m ust be beaten.

Because of his straightahead style, taking one punch to give a punch, Jake became known as the "Bronx Bull":

the nickname that was hung on me early in my fighting career. . . was 'the Bronx B ull'. . . because of the way I fought— chargeoutof the com er,punch,punch,never giveup, take all the punishment the other guy could hand out but stay in there, slugand slug---- the bull, of course, is also the all conquering male....(9 2 )

As Jake's boxing career soars, his cruelty outside the ring also increases, indicating that the two facets of his life are inextricably linked. When Jake irrationally believes that his best friend Pete has slept with Vickie, Jake runs into Pete's factory like "some kind of wild animal" (168) and beats him nearly to death. Vickie screams at Jake,

I don 't care whether you kill me like you killed (sic.) the only guy who was stupid enough to think there was something to y o u ,. . . instead of just being the kind of animal that you reallyare___And you're not only an animal, you're a stupid animal!'(168-69)

After Jake's career ends, he opens a bar in Miami but is arrested for serving underage patrons and for having prostitutes on the premises. His marriage and life in a shambles, he is thrown into the hole for fighting with jail guards and there he experiences the epiphany his life has been moving toward. He is in a small, confined room, an enclosed space somewhat reminiscent of the ring, and he begins to do the only thing he knows how to do when trapped—punch at the wall:

the wall closest to me became the whole stinking world___the adrenalin was gushing through me like an animal all keyed up for the kill.. . . I screamed 'W hy?. . . Why th is? . . . You know


I'm not what they say I am !. . . I'm not an animal!' (237)In this fight with the animal side of himself, La Motta discovers his

overriding fear, not of physical pain, but of punishment from God for being alive. It is this motivation that has made him the despicable animal as husband and prizefighter, the bull-man, but now, knowing that he has sunk as low as possible, he feels liberated from fear and from his compulsion to beat and be beaten:

the fact was that Jake La Motta, the so-called toughest guy that ever jumped into a ring, . . . had always been afraid ofeverything in life__ Most of all I'd been afraid of God, fate, life,. . . something getting me all my life, and it finally h a d .. . . I felt paid up completely to man and God, and I had stopped being afraid. (237-38)

La Motta's autobiography differs from The Came, because within the narrative of Jake's predatoriness there are themes of atavistic exaltation achieved in the prize ring and moral regeneration gained through psychological awareness.

Ill

The third category concerns the flight of the boxer from the exploitative and predatory boxing system to the achievement, with the help of a sympathetic woman, of a better life. Jack London's The Abysmal Brute (1913), and Rod Serling's T. V. play Requiem For A Heavyweight (1956), and Jack Ritchie's short story "Ape Man" (1955) present the boxing system as corrupt and brutal; but, indifferent ways, the respective heroes Pat Glendon, "Mountain" McClintock, and Robert Westwood (a.k.a. "Brute Brown") are able to escape and to enter a more humane and fulfilling way of life.

Young Pat Glendon has been blessed by nature with a magnificent physique and has been trained by his father, a former heavyweight contender, into becoming a superman, who is able to dispatch opponents easily and dispassionately. When his future manager Stubener first meets him, the young fighter "seemed a creature of the wild, more a night-roaming figure from some old fairy story or folk tale than a twentieth-century youth" (77). Glendon is dubbed the "abysmal brute" by sportswriters who wrongly see him as nothing more than "an ox-muscled and dumbly stupid brute" (97). But Glendon is a unique combination of superior animality and intelligence and sensitivity. He is the "abysmal brute" in the positive sense that London gives to that description in his boxing articles, "the will of life itself" (257), joined with a love of poetry, art, and science.

Glendon meets the skeptical Maud Sangster, who is hostile to the boxing system, but she quickly discovers that he "was n o t. . . the abysmal brute of the


prize-ring, the great, fighting, stupid bulkof a male animal who hammered up his fellow males of the same stupid order . . . " (103). As they become closer, Glendon's disenchantment with the system becomes greater; he discovers that all of his fights have been "fixed" in some fashion to earn money for the people controlling the game.

After marrying Maud, Glendon signs for one last fight, which he wants to be honest. Before the fight, he causes an uproar by telling the people just how corrupt the system is, and, in short order, he manages to dispatch the outraged champion with one punch in an unscheduled fight as well as knockout his scheduled opponent in one round. With such heroics, London's Hercules bo ws out of the fight game, which could be "a good game too, if it were square" (137), and retires from the ring forever to a life of the higher sensibilities. Unlike the doomed Joe Fleming who is killed by the basely animalistic Ponta in the ring, Pat Glendon escapes unscathed having exhibited his physical, mental, and spiritual superiority to the sordid system corrupted and controlled by mercenary men.

Pat Glendon's victimization by boxing does not involve his physical abuse but rather the suppression of his superior pugilistic skills. The enclosed ring as the embodiment of the "cabined and cribbed" system does not afford the superman ample room and broad enough canvas to express his transcendent physicality. By contrast, Harlan "Mountain" McClintock is physically, mentally, and economically exploited by fourteen years of hard labor within the 20 foot square ring. In some ways, heresembles the pathetic and emasculated bull Toro Molina who has had his life ground away by his labors in the mill. Mountain fights his last fight, and all he has to show for his loyal and loving service to the profession and his father-figure manager Maish is sclerotic damage to his eye, about fifty-eight bucks, and the pride of having been ranked number five in the heavyweight division. Maish bet $3000 that Mountain would not last seven rounds, but in dum b loyalty to his personal credo of endurance, Mountain fought into the eighth round. When the play opens. Mountain is carried from the place of his crucifixion by his loyal trainer Army; Mountain is the battered and victimized boxer as crucified Christ trying to achieve a resurrection from the brutalizing fight gam e.2

The animal imagery in the play depicts Mountain as a mount, a horse who is ready for the glue factory having been ridden into the ground. Maish says to the next fighter approaching the ring after McClintock's defeat, "Don't get impatient, Jock, that's a fast track out there.!" (1,119). When the doctor tells Maish, Mountain is finished, the manager says caustically, "He's fourteen years in this business. Suddenly he gets a cut, and we've got to put him out to pasture?" (1,121). Later, when Army objects to M ountain's poor status after years of boxing, Maish disavows any responsibility: "All I do is curry the horses. I'm one of the stable boys. I don't set the rules" (1,136).

Boxers are also treated like dead meat by exploitative managers and

60 Aethlon VI :2 / Spring 1989

promoters. The cynical doctor describes the fight game as a meat-grading assembly line:

it's like a guy who grades meat in a packing plant. They roll the carcasses down the line in front of him and he stamps them Beef. Understand? . . . Just a hunk of something inanimate. (I,121)

This dehumanizing theme is brought out in the scene with the disbarred manager Fox, who is promoting a has-been fighter Menzey as a comer and is described as a "little mousy g u y . . . with a face like a weasel" (1,126). Menzey walks with the stiff gait of an old rooster," (1,127), and Maish crudely says, "put him on the block. Let's take a lookat him." Fox asks if the fighter reminds Maish of Max Baer, and Maish replies scornfully: "Yeah, a big brown one with a ring in his nose" (1,128).

The problem for Mountain is that he is too loyal to Maish, who wants to turn him into a clown wrestler now that he can no longer earn any money as a boxer. Mountain believes in Maish's love "like a pet dog desperately needing reassurance" (1,138). Army, who truly cares for Mountain as a person and not a battered meal ticket, tries to make Maish see the fighter as a decent man worthy of respect:

This is a slob to you, Maish. This is a hunk. This is a deadweight has-been___This is a decent m an .. . . You can't sell thison the market by the pound, because. . . you'll rot in hell— (II,157)

Mountain's major hope of escaping the enclosed masculine world of the boxing and wrestling rings and the analogous 20-foot square sports bar lies with Grace Carrie, the sympathetic employee at the New York State Employment Agency. Grace humanizes and ennobles the bedraggled, beaten boxer by showing him that he has a future beyond boxing and wrestling. She teaches him that he is a human being who does not have to be beaten to have value. With Army, Grace forms a union that helps Mountain renounce his role as the mountain man-hunter-wrestler, who is actually the hunted object. In the dressing room Maish holds the Long Tom rifle that Maish will carry into the wrestling ring, and Army asks him what he is hunting: "I'm huntin' a wrestler named McClintock" (III, 159). However, Mountain walks out on Maish when he discovers that he bet against him. He returns to Tennessee and then moves on to his job as a camp counselor teaching self-defense, an art he is just beginning to learn in a psychological sense, to little boys like Jeffey.

Thus, the t.v. script ends happily with Mountain escaping his debilitating past to move into a more optimistic future, but in 1962 Serling revised his


original script for the movie version, which, like the play, was directed by Ralph Nelson. Serling changed the play into a film noir in which Mountain never escapes Maish's influence but ends by sacrificing himself as an Indian chief wrestler. Like Toro Molino, Mountain remains the exploited fighter in a totally corrupt world, and thus the movie version can be included within the first thematic category of total victimization. But since the movie contains few animal images and adds primarily the new dismal ending, I have chosen to discuss it as an addendum to the analysis of the play.

One new scene shows the continued exploitation of Mountain as the battered animal dominated by M aish's definition of him as a boxer and wrestler. Maish conspires to defeat Grace Miller's plan to have Mountain, now sumam ed Rivera, meet the Riordans at the Hotel St. Moritz for an interview concerning the counselling job. Maish takes Mountain to Jack Dempsey's Restaurant and gets him drunk while they reminisce with the great champion about the past. When Mountain goes to the hotel for the interview, he stumbles around the lobby and barely gets the number of the room for the interview, which he promptly forgets. On the elevator, in which he is framed against the back wall as if he were against the ropes in the ring absorbing punishment, he meets a lady who is carrying her darling white poodle and being very affectionate toward it. Mountain looks quizically at the pampered dog and asks if the woman has any kids. She answers that her dog is her child and is a champion. The dog is being treated better than Mountain; the dog is a champion, but Mountain is a chump, a broken-down beast of burden who ends up wrestling in a demeaning Indian costume for his manager Maish, who he knows is a fake for whom he sacrifices himself anyway. He "dies" in the ring for a bankrupt father who continues to sacrifice his son for money.

"Ape Man" by Jack Ritchie fits this category of victimization and escape because the boxer leaves behind his brutal ring identity to achieve a more humane self. The dichotomy present in the title expresses the theme of the story; Robert Westwood, alias "Brute Brown," is a predatory animal in the ring known for his ferocious strength and seeming brutishness. Outside the ring, the Brute changes to Robert Westwood, who is, in fact, intelligent, sensitive, and repelled by his battered visage and animalistic persona as displayed in the ring. When people see him in the street, they are revolted by his scarred and misshapen physiognomy. He is interested in reading and goes to the library where he startles a pretty librarian when he emerges from the shadows of the stacks, but she quickly offers to send him a library card at his hotel. She represents his claim to another identity, his higher, non-brute, thinking self.

When he fights young Barlow, Barlow's handlers assure the scared kid that Brute is "hum an .. . . Human" (146). However, Barlow remains terrified until he realizes that Brute is not fighting back. Westwood is tired of being a brute, and he refuses to retaliate until the now cocky Barlow taunts him as

"Ape Man." This taunt and the screams of the crowd for his blood bring


out the brute in Westwood and he gets off the canvas to stalk Barlow. The narrative voice of the story changes from Westwood's first person to third person as he now describes his other brutal boxing self coming to life. As the Brute he makes short work of Barlow, and after the fight, a rapacious woman approaches the victor to come into contact with his animality: "B rute,. . . . Come downstairs with me. Just one drink, Brute. Please, Brute'" (148).

Westwood decides to quit boxing and retire to an island. Before he leaves, he revisits the librarian and tells of his retirement plans, but he promises to return one day to her because "her eyes... saw something no other woman had ever seen in me. She was looking at a man" (150). W estwood's victimization in the ring consists of the necessity for him to be a brutal animal and to suppress his higher self, which he now intends to express outside the ring.

IV

The fourth category of boxing narrative is marked by the ambivalent perspective on boxing as a vicious sport analogous to life itself, which, nevertheless, provides the boxer with the opportunity to express his primal animal talent and basic integrity. In Joseph March's narrative poem The Setup (1928), the black boxer exhibits animal grace in winning a crooked fight, but is crushed by the forces controlling his life; in the film Body and Soul (1947), Charlie Davis regains his integrity and his tigerish animality in a crooked fight which he was supposed to throw, but which he wins, thus freeing himself from corruption and the mob-controlled system; and in Scorsese's Raging Bull (1980), Jake La Motta attains a vicious but at the same time exalted animality in the ring which earns our d isgust and ad miration, and which he finally leaves behind when he emerges into a new life as actor and self-conscious human being.

In its delineation of the naturalistic victimization of the helpless black fighter Pansy, The Setup has strong affinities with Schulberg's The Harder They Fall, but in its depiction of Pansy's achievement of primal prowess and dignity in the ring, March's long narrative poem belongs in the fourth category in which boxing is presented as the means to a more vital animality and greater self-awareness. The Setup consists of six chapters representing the six rounds of Pansy's final fight with Sailor Gray, which the gallant black fighter wins, only to be crushed to death afterwards. Pansy Jones is the ironically named superb black fighter who is crushed by the forces which discriminate against him outside and in the ring. The Setup refers not only to his last bout but to the fight game and life itself which are set up to destroy him. Pansy is described as a powerful animal who has the misfortune to be black:

Pansy had the stuff, but his skin was brown;And he never got a chance at the middleweight crown.


Mean as a panther, Crafty as a fox;He could hit like a m ule ,. . .A jungle jinxWith eyes like a lynx___(3)

However, in his prime he is convicted of bigamy—a charge he denies and which we never know the truth of—and is sent up for five years, thus depriving him of a shot at the title that had continually been denied him because he was too good and black.

Two years pass and greasy promoters of the rising career of Sailor Gray, who is about a year away from a title shot, need a setup fight to make Gray look good. Pansy is chosen as the opponent, but his handlers do not tell him he is supposed to lose, because they are sure Pansy will be slaughtered. However, Pansy fights bravely and with powerful animality, but he is not a vicious animal like the brutal Sailor Gray who is a despicable brute:

Bull neck;. . .Green eyes,Like an alley cat___Gray looked aggressive—And he looked mean.Something in Pansy grew suddenly tight.He felt he was in for a nasty fight. (99-100)

Pansy perseveres and wins a hard-earned victory, but he is seen as a dou- blecrosser by Gray's men who wait for him in an alley where Pansy manages to escape only to be trapped on a train station. He is knocked into the path of the on-rushing train and is killed as if he were in a last fight with the unalterable laws of the system. Pansy achieves a measure of animal integrity through his prowess in his last fight, which is rigged, but then he is killed outside the ring on the tracks he has been knocked onto by life's setup.

March's work was made into a film noir in 1949, which was directed by Robert Wise and starred Robert Ryan as the doomed fighter Stoker Thompson, the thirty-five-year-old washed-up fighter who still believes the heavyweight championship is "one punch away." The movie lacks the racial element of the original, but the fight world depicted is as sleazy, corrupt, and deterministic in its maintenance of an economic system which needs poor-sack fighters who dream they can win the prize but are maimed and killed in going for it.

The next work in this category is Body and Soul (1947), directed by Robert Rossen, written by Abraham Polonsky, and starring John Garfield, all of who were investigated by the HU AC in the same year as the film's release. Body and Soul is hard-hitting social criticism with film noir shadows and angles established by James Wong Howe's cinematography. Charlie Davis is a young


Jewish man from New York's lower east side who wants to earn lots of money fast and boxing represents his only way to do that.

Charlie wins an amateur fight and as his prize he is given a dance with Peg Born, an artist played by Lili Palmer, who represents honesty and the possibility for rebirth as her surname indicates. Charlie visits her studio, and she draws his portrait, picturing him as half-man, half-tiger. To express what she sees as his essential character, she recites Blake's "The Tiger." After his father's death, his mother applies for a welfare loan, but Charlie is angered by the sanctimonious welfare worker and orders her from the apartment. Seething with rage, he runs up to the roof and shouts out that he wants money so that he can rise above the life of his parents. Again, Peg recites Blake's poem and exhorts him to fight for what he wants.

However as Charlie succeeds and gets money, he becomes corrupt and "swims" in an increasing supply of materialistic pleasures, new clothes, car, and apartment. Scenes fly by in a series of montage images, showing Charlie's growing corruption and indebtedness to Roberts, who controls the fight game. Charlie leaves Peg for the tawdry singer-slut Alice, who wears a leopard- striped coat as a sign of her jungle-like greed. A number of dream-like scenes show Charlie floating in a world of weightless money which he showers upon Alice in payment for her services.

Charlie is scheduled to fight Jackie Marlowe, the up-and-coming contender that Roberts is promoting. Roberts wants Charlie to lose, and the aging fighter, who has not been training and needs the sure thing for one last pay day, agrees to throw the fight. Charlie "dogs" the fight, until Roberts doublecrosses him by having Marlowe go out to kill him in the thirteenth. Charlie takes a beating, but he recovers and decides to win despite the setup. He regains his tigerish self, his original honest animality, and in the fifteenth round he stalks the badly frightened Marlowe, as the announcer indicates: "I've never seen anything like it in my life. A silence has descended. He's like a tiger stalking his prey." When Charlie regains his animal self, the "tiger burning bright" of Blake's poem, he is cleansed and disavows Roberts and the fixed system by winning. Peg returns to his side, and Charlie leaves the ring unafraid of Roberts' threat: "What are you going to do, kill me? Everybody dies."

The third work in this category is Scorsese's movie version of Raging Bull (1980), written by Paul Schrader and Mardik Martin, photographed by Michael Chapman, edited by Thelma Schoonmaker and starring Robert De Niro, both of whom received Oscars for their work. La Motta's autobiography primarily emphasizes his viciousness inside and outside the ring, but Scorsese, while certainly acknowledging Jake's brutishness, also concentrates on his elemental animality as displayed through his ferocious fighting in the ring and the pride he feels at being a great fighter. Jake himself refers to this pride at the conclusion of the autobiography when he describes how he endured his stay


in the hole:

I remember that when I picked myself up off the floor, I thought about how I'd been a champion. That was something noone could ever take away from me___I was the middleweightchampion of the world, a n d . . . everyone.. . cheering. . . me, the slum kid from the Bronx. (249)

Scorsese concentrates on La Motta as predatory animal and as elemental and regenerate man.

The paradoxes inherent in La Motta's character are introduced in three scenes. The prefatory slow motion opening shows Jake's balletic shadow boxing in his trademark leopard skin robe with Mascagni's music serving as elegiac accompaniment. La Motta seems powerful, primitive, elemental, and beautiful. Next, the scene shifts to La Motta as a bloated, misshapen figure practicing before going onstage as fledgling actor. Then after we see Jake cheated out of a victory against a black boxer, we move into the story of his life and how he became that face in the mirror. In the dilapidated Bronx tenement, Jake and his bedraggled wife fight over her preparation of their steak dinner. His neighbors object to their usual screaming, calling them animals, but Jake retaliates by saying that he will eat their dog if they don 't mind their own business. Later, when Jake first sees the beautiful blonde Vickie, he asks Joey, his brother, if he has had her, and when Joey says no, Jake says, "She knew you were an animal."

Subsequently, Jake appears as the struggling boxer, telling his brother to keep hitting him so he can learn to withstand pain, crying that his small hands will prevent him from fighting Joe Louis, and then gallantly fighting in the ring but receiving some unfair decisions. Concurrently, we see his mad Othello-like jealousy, which causes him to beat his wife and ruin their lives. He becomes so incensed by his wife's praise of Tony Janiro as good-looking that he goes crazy in the ring and destroys Janiro's face. Because Jake has refused to play along with the mob, he has not received a title shot, until he agrees to throw a fight after which he weeps in frustration. Finally, he wins the championship by defeating Cerdan.

The championship does not sate Jake's violence outside the ring, however. He viciously beats his loyal brother for supposedly having an affair with Vickie. But in his last fight with Sugar Ray Robinson, Jake achieves a kind of apotheosis as primal man when he allows Robinson to pound on him while he taunts him about his not being able to knock him down. Jake retires to Miami to open his bar, but he is arrested for promoting prostitution. After his denial of being an animal, Jake works his way back slowly, becoming an emcee in a seedy bar, reconciling with his brother Joey, and giving acting performances, significantly as Brando-Terry Molloy in On The Waterfront.


The movie raises the fundamental question about La Motta: what kind of animal is he? He has been presented as a brutal animal outside and in the ring, and at the same time as a noble pugilist, fighting with an eruptive and pure violence that makes him the image of man as fighting animal. Scorsese has said that La Motta was so in touch with his animality that

'H e's on a higher spiritual level, in a way, as a fighter. He works on an almost primitive level, an animal level. And therefore he must think in a different way, he m ust be aware of certain things spiritually that we aren't, because our minds are too cluttered with intellectual ideas, and too much emotionalism.' (Wiener 31)

When Jake says he's no animal, he echoes two other characters from movies in which the hero must assert his humanity against the degrading definition of himself as an animal. In Stanley Kramer's Spartacus (1960), Spartacus, the proud slave, is put into a Roman jail by his sneering captors who want him to become a gladiator. They provide him with a female slave and proceed to monitor their couplings. Spartacus screams out "I am not an animal," and later leads a rebellion against his antagonists. In David Lynch's The Elephant Man, released in the same year as Raging Bull, the grotesquely deformed John Merrick is chased by a crowd of tormentors who force him to run into a public bathroom where he confronts them with his dignified assertion, "I am a man." Similarly, in the hole Jake asserts his manhood in the face of his own ugly animality and society's classification of him as an animal. Pauline Kael, although scoffing at the sentimentality of Scorsese's vision of La Motta, nevertheless accurately captures the theme of Jake as spiritual brute, which is "the ultimate metaphor for the whole film":

Scorsese is out to demonstrate that he can have for his hero a brutish hardhead . . . , and make you respect him— he wants us to respond . . . to Jake's energy. . . p a in . . . integrity— We're supposed to think, Jake may be a pig, but he fights— He wants a disreputable, low-life protagonist; then he suggests that thisman is close to God, because he is God's animal___Jake is theBrute Life Force.. . . (218-19)

Joe Flaherty concludes that after La Motta renounces his vicious animality, he raises himself to a higher level of self-consciousness:

La Motta is what he is today because he has made intellectual decisions Through reading, self-hypnotism and study ofvarious religions, through grooming himself as a lecturer. . . he


has found some grace in his life. (95)

Although Kael mocks Scorsese's depiction of La Motta as a redeemed animal, her acerbic comments address the theme that emerges from La Motta's scenes as neophyte actor:

At the e n d ,. . . Jake recites Brando's back-of-the taxi speech from 'On The Waterfront' while looking in his dressing-room mirror. . . . What does it mean to have La Motta deliver this lament that he could have been a contender instead of a bum when it's clear that La Motta is both a champ and a bum ?. . . The whole movie has been made looking in a mirror, self-consciously. (218)

Her last line is the key to Jake's resurrection as presented by Scorsese. Jake turns from being the degraded and predatory animal to a more reflective person with greater self-awareness gained through role-playing. This transformation is established in the mirror-reflection scene when De Niro as La Motta as seen by Scorsese plays Kazan's Brando as Schulberg's Terry Malloy in On The Waterfront. Scorsese is not saying that La Motta is exactly like Malloy who lost his chance at the title because he played along with Johnny Friendly and the mob by losing the fight to Wilson and then becoming a union goon instead of a contender. Jake did not become involved with the mob until he threw a fight in order to get a title shot which he won. In addition, Jake never allowed his brother to ruin his life as Terry permitted his brother Charley "the Gent" to control his career. The point that Scorsese is making in the acting rehearsal scene is that because Jake is now aware of his own consciousness, he is thus released into playing more roles, into being a larger self through the assumption of different personas. He is no longer trapped within his negative identity as raging bull. La Motta has assessed his growth in similar terms:

'I was like one of those dogs that go to war. They're trained to be vicious, they're rewarded for it. But when the w ar's over and they're back with their civilian masters, they can't understand why they're punished when they attack people. That's theway I was, and I had to figure it out myself__ I had to adjust bym yself.. . . ' (Schulian 239)

At the end of Raging Bull, Scorsese adds some further variations on the theme of La Motta as the regenerate animal-man. In the credits, he includes a biblical quotation from John 9:25 concerning the blind man who was cured by Jesus and was questioned by the scoffing Pharisees, who did not believe Jesus could have cured him, whether he knew that Jesus was a sinner. The blind man

68 Aethlon VI :2 / Spring 1989

answered: "Whether he be a sinner or no, I know not: one thing I know, that, whereas I was blind, now I see." After the quotation, Scorsese dedicates the film to his teacher at NYU who was instrumental in helping him become a director. In sum, Scorsese is saying that his teacher cured him of his blindness or ignorance, and similarly that La Motta, an inveterate sinner, helped Scorsese, through his direction of Raging Bull, to understand some elemental truths about the animal nature of man. Finally, there is the implication that La Motta was cured of his blindness through analysis of himself as a sinner and the assumption of acting roles.

V

The Rocky saga by Sylvester Stallone, who also wrote the novelizations for Rocky II and IV, represents the most optimistic presentation of boxing and the most extensive useof animal imagery in boxing narratives. The story of the rise of the seeming loser who is fighting away his crude life in a series of brutal smokers contains the negative elements of the categories we have discussed. Rocky is victim and predator in the brutal fights he has; he is trapped in a sordid world of poverty, crime, and failed promise. But in honor of the bicentennial year 1976, the champion Apollo Creed chooses Rocky Balboa as his underdog opponent, and the rest as they say is history. Rocky narrowly loses an epic fifteen-round slugfest with Creed and becomes a hero for himself, Adrian, Philadelphia, and the United States. Rocky transcends his brutal and confined background, and in the succeeding narratives, despite some reversals, he rises to the championship of America and then the world when he defeats the Russian dragon in the fistic equivalent of World War III.

Stallone's conception of Rocky as the ultimate underdog and loser who rises through boxing to an apotheosis as culture hero is indebted to the story of another dead-end prizefighter named Rocky—Rocky Graziano in Somebody Up There Likes Me. His autobiography was made into a movie in 1955 by Robert Wise, the director of The Setup. Graziano's real name is Rocco Barbella, and like Rocky Balboa he was raised in a slum and engaged in criminal activities, which earned him a prison term at Coxsackie where he met La Motta. Graziano was also in deep trouble as an army deserter, but when he began fighting professionally, he left behind his checkered past and went on to win the championship, to marry a beautiful, Adrian-like sweetheart, and to be rewarded with a civic parade that parallels Rocky's achievement of community acclaim.

The animal imagery in Rocky I is at first brutal and depressing befitting Rocky's status as broken-down club fighter and quasi-bum living in a Philadelphia slum. In Rocky's first fight with Spider Rice (or Spider Rico in the movie), there is an emphasis on the boxers as raw meat, a foreshadowing of Rocky's later training sessions in the frozen meat locker. Rocky's body "felt as if it had been reshaped with a meat mallet," and Rice came at Rocky "like a


hungry bear for its meat" (1,3). After the brutal fight, Rocky returns to his seedy neighborhood, which is described as a kind of shoulder-to-shoulder shantytown where the poor lived and died like link sausages from the mainstream of other link sausages" (5). Gazzo's bodyguard, the ironically named Buddy, hates Rocky and calls him "meatbag" (15). At this point in his career, Rocky Balboa is somewhat like Mountain McClintock, the fighter as pounded meat, although Rocky at least wins some of his dead-end fights.

However, after Rocky is chosen by Apollo for the title shot, the meat imagery changes from the negative depiction of Rocky's depressing world and boxingstatus to the presentation of him asa primal animal-man who expresses his best self through boxing. Rocky has been dating Adrian, Pa ulie's repressed sister, and Paulie wants Rocky to get him Rocky's old job as labor goon for Gazzo, so that Paulie can quit his job in the frozen meat locker at the packing company. When Rocky visits Paulie at work, Paulie turns vicious after Rocky again refuses to ask Gazzo, and to show his anger Paulie begins to hit a hanging beef torso, hardly moving it. Enraged by Paulie's action and his crude remark about Adrian, Rocky pounds the hanging meat ferociously:

The punching of the beef was a muted challenge to Rocky, and he responded by slamming his fists into the bri ttle ribs of the side of beef. This time the grotesque object swung in a wide arc like a hanging corpse___(80)

Rocky goes on a rampage moving into the "dark recesses of the refrigerator" (81) and delivering pulverizing blows to the meat, with the result that Rocky was "drenched in blood—up to his elbows in blood—his . . . and the bull's" (81).

Rocky acutally trains for the Creed fight in the meat locker and receives a television interview during which the reporter asks him why he trains this way. Rocky replies that he invented it, but "It d idn 't occur to him that in the ring, it was raw meat that was being pounded . . ." (93). Then Rocky demonstrates his bloody prowess, after which he "stood there with his hands dripping blood: a primitive spectacle, a gladiator who would rip out his agressor's guts with his bare hands." The reporter Diane Lewis is so unnerved by this display of savagery that she bites her lip and blood oozes over her red lipstick.

Stallone explains that the pounding of the meat is "a m etaphor for the fighter's point of view while training. . . . his opponents become nameless meat—indifferent, meaningless, dangerous meat" (Official Rocky Scrapbook 47). But the meat metaphor means more than this; it represents Rocky's emergence as primal man, animalistic, and savage in a positive sense. Rocky enters a frozen meat locker and pounds raw meat with bloody fists, actions which symbolize his initiation into an ice age atavism as the gladiator, hunter,


the blood-soaked animal-man. As Mailer says about the violent religion of boxing in his analysis of the fatal Griffith-Paret fight: "It was an older religion, a more primitive religion which mocks the understanding to approach it" (Presidential Papers 245). The meat imagery reaches a bloody climax in the fight with Creed. The "Italian Stallion" (Stallone) Rocky Balboa roams like a wounded, wild animal in the ring and attacks Creed's ribs as if he were a frozen carcass:

. . . Rocky . . . caught Apollo with a pair of terrific bodypunches__ A loud crack was heard— Rocky.. . imagined thatApollo was a frozen side of beef just waiting for Rocky totenderize its dark flesh. Creed took the punishment---- He hadpicked the Italian Stallion, and now that horse was running wild, stampeding all over him, it was up to him to tame the wild beast or kill i t . . . . (130-131)

Rocky's achievement of a therapeutic animality not only heightens his humanity and redeems his past but it also rescues the people and pets he loves. Adrian, a thirty-year old loser, as her brother calls her, works in the Animal Town Pet Shop which is filled with caged animals. In the movie whenever Rocky comes into the store to talk with her, she is either surrounded by cages or has her head nearly in one. She is unresponsive to Rocky's overtures because she is afraid of him, of being interested in another person sexually. She is caged within her repressed personality. As Stallone says, "Her [Adrian's] characterization was an absolute reflection of the dismal, depressing atmosphere of that pet shop" (Official Rocky Scrapbook 42).

Adrian and Rocky's confinement within their stunted lives is physically represented by the caged bull mastiff Butkus, the toy mouse, the discarded Thanksgiving turkey, and the turtles, Cuff and Link. Named after the Chicago Bears' great linebacker Dick Butkus, who was known for his ferocious play, Butkus has been left at the store by his owner who is three weeks overdue. The pet store is not responsible for pets left over thirty days—Rocky and Adrian are thirty—and time is running out for Butkusand them. When Rocky asks Adrian if she wants him to walk her home, she squeezes a toy mouse in embarrassment. She is a mousey woman who will be made real and vital by Rocky.

On Thanksgiving, Paulie invites Rocky to date Adrian, but he neglects to tell her. When she refuses to go out with Rocky because she has been slaving over the turkey, Paulie maniacally throws the bird out the window:

If ever a bird needed wings, that bird did. It dropped like a fragrant stone into the filthy back alley, landing on a pile of oldmattresses, beer cans, vermin, and a dead cat---- Paulie yelled,'Ya want the bird, go out in the alley and eat the bird.' (49)


The turkey represents Rocky and Adrian's failed past, their lives trapped in the filthy alley of their neighborhood; but together they will leam to fly—es a ma ture and successful couple—as the Bill Conti theme song "Gonna Fly Now" promises. They will ascend from the slum alley populated by scavengers to achieve transcendence through boxing as the expression of Rocky's primal self.3

When Rocky gets his second chance, Mickey, the grizzled ex-fighter and owner of Goldmill's Gym where Rocky trains, visits Rocky in his apartment, which has the appropriate number two. Mickey has been contemptuous of Rocky's abortive career and sloppy fighting and lifestyle, but now he sees an opportunity to manage a title contender. He tells Rocky of the indignities he suffered as a fighter:

'when I was fightin' it was the dirtiest racket g o in '__ Pugslike me was treated like fightin' dogs—throw ya in the pit an' for ten bucks ya try to kill each other.' (73)

As Rocky listens to Mickey's plea for a second chance, we notice that Rocky is wearing a sweater with a bird design. He will accept Mick as his manager, begin his training accompanied by Butkus, the released mastiff, have Adrian move into his apartment after Paulie throws her out, and leam to ascend the stairs to the top of the Philadelphia Art Museum where he will raise his arms in triumph. Unlike Toro Molina who is ground to nothing by the boxing mill, Rocky will discover gold at Mickey Goldmill's gym.

The final animal image of Rocky and Adrian's personality involves the turtles Cuff and Link which Rocky bought from Adrian and installed in his apartment. Adrian is linked with the turtles:

She worked in the pet store and had sold Rocky his turtles.She was about as shy as a turtle herself, and plain-looking, but she had something: sensitivity, intelligence. (8)

The turtles are also like Rocky, hard on the outside, soft on the inside and slow- moving but tenacious.

In Rocky II and Rocky III the animal imagery centers on the comparison of Rocky to a tiger as befitting his status as a champion capable of ferocious physical prowess in the ring. After recovering from the injuries sustained during the war with Creed, Rocky proposes to Adrian at the zoo as they walk past the tiger's cage. This scene was ironically prepared for in Rocky I when the sardonic Buddy had told Rocky to take Adrian to the zoo on their first date because "Retards like the zoo" (41). Now Rocky proposes to her in the winter time at a deserted zoo in front of the tiger's cage. In the screenplay, Rocky says he likes the silence and purity of the zoo during the winter, and when Adrian


accepts his ingenuous offer, he shouts that he will invite the tiger to the wedding (Best of Rocky and The Complete Rocky II, unpaged). Rocky is the tiger at the zoo in the winter: he had his first date with Adrian at the ice-skating rink; he trained in the frozen meat locker, and he proposes in the coldness of winter at the zoo. Rocky is the ancient tiger-man burning bright in the Ice Age.

Next we see Rocky in the ersatz world of advertising where he is attempting to sell Beast aftershave, dressed as a bogus version of himself, a caveman with tiger-skin garb and headband. However, he can't fake it; he is a real pri mi ti ve not an artificial image of savagery. With his fight money, Rocky buys a jacket with a tiger insignia on the back.

But Rocky soon suffers severe reversals as he attempts to gain a living outside of boxing, which he is forced to do because of the eye damage sustained in the fight with Creed. Rocky is forced to work at Paulie's job in the packing plant, but he is the first to be let go when business is slack. He returns to Mickey's gym as an all-purpose clean-up flunky, laughed at by fighters who see him as a "chicken," as Apollo has characterized him in a newspaper cartoon. Rocky is taunted and ridiculed, becoming a Samson figure, with his bad eyes and his low status at the Goldmill gym. Similarly, Adrian has been forced to return to work at the Animal Town Pet Shop to help support their growing family. But Rocky overcomes all of his obstacles to return to the ring against Apollo where he regains his animal intensity and becomes heavyweight champion:

'I went like an animal, an' I grabbed him around the waist an'I pushed him into the corner an' un- loaded with everythin' Ihad___ Creed was in . . . a frenzy. If we was real animals, wewoulda spit the mouthpieces out an' tried to rip each other's throat.' (II, 172)

Rocky and Creed knock each other down and the title goes to the one who can climb to his feet first. In the movie we see Rocky and Apollo pull themselves up rope by rope in an image of men trying to climb the social ladder. Rocky gets to his feet, while Apollo remains hanging onto the second rope with one knee on the mat.

In Rocky IH, Rocky faces a new threat to his by-now long-held championship in O ubber Lang, who recalls the earlier theme by screaming at Rocky, "* Dead meat! Dead meat!"' (Hoban 88). Lang defeats Rocky, and Rocky teams up with Apollo who tells him that he has to regain the "eye of the tiger":

'Hell, when we fought you had the eye of the tig e r. . . , the edge. Now you have got to get that back, and to do that we've got to get back to the beginning We could get it back, man.' (103)


The "eye of the tiger" refers to a certain hunger, a primitive animality which Rocky had when he was a tigerish nobody but has lost as a pampered champion. The expression is found in the movie Kid Front Brooklyn (1946), when the milktoast Burleigh Sullivan comically imitates the "action of the tiger" by ducking all blows thrown at him in the ring. Ultimately, the image comes from King Henry V's heroic speech at Agincourt when he exhorts his men on to a great martial effort against the French:

. . . when the blast of war blows in our ears,Then imitate the action of the tiger;Stiffen the sinews, [conjure! up the blood,Disguise fair nature with hard-favor'd rage,Then lend the eye a terrible aspect;Let it pry through the portage of the head Like the brass cannon___(III. i. 5-11)

Apollo takes Rocky to Los Angeles to a seedy Main Street gym where he can regain the eye of the tiger by training among the hungry black fighters. Apollo is going to put their spirit back into Rocky's arsenal as a fighter:

'See the look in their eyes— When we fought I trained hard, but I d idn 't have that look in my eye. You did, and you won. You need it again! The eye of the tiger, man.' (115)

Finally, immediately before the rematch with Clubber Lang, Apollo looks at Rocky and sees "a flicker in the blue of the iris that just might be the hunger, the eye of the tiger" (139). When Rocky floors Lang, he looksout at Adrian "his eyes wild as an animal in the heat of battle" (148). Rocky has regained the eye of the tiger.4

In the final installment of the Rocky saga, Stallone ups the ante to invest boxing with cold war significance. Apollo is in uneasy retirement, and he leaps at the chance to fight an exhibition bout with the colossal Russian heavyweight Ivan Drago, the Russian bear and Red dragon. When Rocky discourages Apollo from making a comeback against the Russian Superman, trained on inhuman m odem machinery and nurtured with drugs and other artificial stimulants, Apollo delivers his warrior credo in lupine terms:

'You can dress a wolf to look tame, but under- neath he's still a wolf and he'll tear you apart! We're born with a killer instinct that can never be tamed. . . . We have . . . to have the action because we're the warriors!' (IV, 53)

After Apollo trains hard, Rocky does see in him the resurgent eye of the


tiger (53), but Apollo is killed in the Las Vegas exhibition, which is sponsored, ironically, by Tiger Eye Promotion (89): "He [ApolloJ had walked into the bear's cave and he was going to pay the price" (93).

To avenge Apollo's death and regain American fistic preeminence. Rocky goes to Russia to train for his Moscow fight against Drago. Rocky acquires a number of natural and animal associations. He is Rocko, the rock-hard fighter who trains in the humble, earthy surroundings of a rural Russian bam. He practices being a hum an horse pulling a sled filled with stones (135), chops wood, and bales hay: "He seemed to be drawing his strength from the land while Drago was being directed further into scientific technology" (134). Rocky becomes the image of the stone lions that flank the driveway of his palatial American home, but Drago is the modern blond Frankenstein created by Russian technology and deception.

The bout between Rocky and Drago is invested with political significance. Rocky isassociated with revolutionary America through snake imagery which recalls the Revolutionary War flag showing a coiled snake ready to strike with the slogan "Don't tread on me." In the movie Rocky gives Adrian a snake bracelet for their anniversary, and Paulie wears a snake insignia on his shirt at the fight with Drago. When Rocky pulls the loaded sled, "the cords of his neck were bulging like cobras preparing to attack" (136). Finally, in the promo for the fight, Rocky and Drago's gloves look like hooded cobras which explode like nuclear weapons upon impact.

Many critics have attacked Rocky IV as the expression of Stallone's simple- m inded blend of fascism, militarism, and chauvinism. Jack Neufield says thatDrago " is . . . a robot-like extension of the Evil Empire---- The worst featuresof Stallone's nationalism are . . . racism, violence, militarism and simplicity. The convergence of these emotions makes war and foreign intervention seem like a sporting event" (190). Marcia Palley calls the climactic boxing match in Rocky IV "our little proxy war" (34), which has "a dragon worth slaying" (32). J. Hoberman categorizes Rocky IV as fascist art, as defined by Son tag, in which Stallone combines egomania and servitude, depicts suffering as ennobling, and thinks "with the blood,' as Goebbels put it" (Hoberman 45).

Whether Stallone does or does not create fascist art in Rocky IV, he is heir to London's cult of the superman and the abysmal brutes of boxing when he makes Rocky, Apollo, and Ivan Drago exemplars of animal ferocity and machine-like efficiency in their transcendent ring avatars. Gone are the images of the seedy boxing clubs; the over-the-hill fighters being beaten and exploi ted; the corrupted, vicious, and predatory pugilists who delight in sadistically punishing their opponents; the fighters betrayed by the sordidness of the system who m ust escape its confinement to achieve a better life. Stallone's heroic boxers are dedicated to their animality which they express through primal release in the ring. They get rich, perhaps a little soft, but they can go back to their roots and regain the liberating eye of the tiger. They live to fight


and once in the ring fight to live. In sum, Stallone changes the confined limits of boxing narratives into the resurrection and apotheosis of the masculine principle as depicted by powerful animal images.

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Notes

1. For purposes of this article, birds, reptiles, insects, and fish will be included in the category of animals.

2. See Frank Ardolino, "Christian Symbolism in Rod Serling's Requiem For A Heavyweight,” Arete 2 (1984): 159-69.

3. For the use of bird imagery in a resurrectional context. Rocky draws upon the bird symbolism in Budd Schulberg's screenplay (1954) and novel (1955) On The Waterfront.

4. Survivor's recording of the theme song of Rocky III, "Eye of the Tiger," became # 1 on the popular music charts (Rovin 154).

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