Yesterday I sat down once again to watch Martin Scorsese’s 1980 masterpiece Raging Bull, taking my viewings somewhere into double figures. I consider it to be the director’s finest film (just edging out Mean Streets), and De Niro’s titular Bull, Jake LaMotta, the actor’s premier performance. It is a film that exercises an extraordinary hold, drawing me in time and again in search of new meaning. And it never fails to deliver. But as the credits role I always ask myself the same question: “Why does the film industry have such an abiding love affair with the sweet science?” Like a punch-drunk journeyman surviving on a mix of experience, gut instinct and crude reflex, the fight film, despite its often indelicate and rough-edged familiarity, continues to bewitch filmmakers and confound audiences with an Ali-esque dexterity.

From noir-ish The Set Up, On The Waterfront, The Harder They Fall and Fat City to the more recent Rocky, Raging Bull, Million Dollar Baby and Cinderella Man, pugilism, and the galaxy of charismatic characters that orbit around it, has retained a mesmerising and grotesque fascination for directors. Filmmakers as acclaimed as Scorsese, Elia Kazan, John Huston and Robert Wise have all turned to boxing for a canvas on which to project a narrative of men, and women, living at the very limits of existence. No sport but boxing reduces men to such a precarious, solitary and emotional condition. Boxing is all drama, heightened optimism and tragedy. As Joyce Carol Oates writes in On Boxing, “In the brightly lit ring, man is in extremis, performing an atavistic rite or agon for the mysterious solace of those who can participate only vicariously in such drama: the drama of life in the flesh. Boxing has become America’s tragic theatre.”

For the filmmaker this betrayal of emotion offers the perfect backdrop against which to fashion an unfettered analogy for the human struggle. In Raging Bull, certainly the most barbarous boxing film of all, the sport itself is central to the narrative and yet, in many more significant ways, it acts as a subliminal adjunct, a prop against which the director can master a rich fable of lust, power and self-loathing. Only in the ring can LaMotta subject himself and his opponents to the brutal, unremitting assaults that vindicate his odious behaviour beyond the peculiar sanctuary of the ropes.

Scorsese films LaMotta’s fights in a pyric imagining of hell-on-earth, saturated with sweat and Catholic guilt, placing him on trial for all his sins. In his hyper-real, visceral depiction of a society’s exoneration of controlled violence, he precisely understands the power of boxing to analogise descent and salvation, conscious that no other sport can offer such a powerful, public stage for man’s collapse into a cancerous, private abyss.

Yet where Scorsese saw one boxer’s life and career as a compelling insight of deep, personal psychological infliction, others have utilised boxing’s redemptive qualities in a more straightforward victory-against-the-odds format. John G. Avildsen’s Rocky, written and directed at the height of the post-Nixon Watergate fallout, represented all that America, in a desperate search for its own lost soul, sought to unearth. Rocky Balboa’s rise from the poverty ravaged slums of a nation’s once proud blue-collar cityscape, in this case Philadelphia, to the brink of the world Heavyweight title is superficially the fairytale parable of individual aspiration and all-American fortitude. Aligned to the consequences of Nixon’s national deceit and a depressed economy, however, the film transcodes white, male working-class fears, suggesting the potential for national deliverance under a determinedly, if anomalous, conservative capitalist ethos. Further, it intimates the possibility for the transcendence of working-class life, although does so on a purely personal level to reinforce the founding values and legitimating ideology of the class system. Indeed, writers, from Swift and Pope to Plimpton and Mailer have all recognised the paradigm that exists in the sport, the reduction of life’s extraordinary complexities into one simple, symbolic, Darwinian action. Filmmakers have understood this too.

For Hollywood studios, stories of realisation and triumph are fertile territory and clearly films such as Rocky and Cinderella Man fulfill a pleasurable, idealistic function. In its often antithetical role as both entertainer and self-appointed moral helmsman, however, the film industry flourishes by feeding off public anxieties and manipulating civic opinion. No sport is more powerful, physical or more direct than boxing, and certainly no sport can offer the instinctive drama accessible in its twelve three-minute acts. Simultaneously, no sport volunteers the kind of forbidden, vicarious pleasure, a kind of retarded gratification, which one receives from eavesdropping in on this willing, Dostoyevskian cultivation of a pain/serenity exchange.

When watching Raging Bull or Million Dollar Baby we are participating in a long heritage of art acknowledging the beauty of brutality, a dark hinterland in the tradition of Caravaggio, Moby Dick or Hamlet. Now we can add Scorsese, Huston, Eastwood et al. to a lengthy list of cultural heavyweights that includes Nietzsche, Hemingway, Miles Davis, among others, all enthralled by the pain, violence, suffering, moral chaos, triumph, humiliation and pathos of the sport.

Whether the emotionally affirmative, conservative, social narratives of Rocky, or the darker, tragic allegories like Raging Bull, there can be little argument that boxing, in spite, or even because of it’s brutal simplicity, continues to hold a rich fascination for American cinema. As one of only a handful of truly global customs, transcending geographical and emotional boundaries, the minimalism and honesty of its language make it a prolific colliery for communicating the predicaments of human life. Boxing films may often be bleak and morally ambivalent, but as with life, as the ex-welterweight champion, and one of the dirtiest but bravest fighters of all, Fritzie Zivic, famously remarked, “You’re fighting, not playing the piano, you know.”