March 08th, 2025

                            The Fight That Takes It Out of You:
             Parallels Between Aesthetics and Athletics
There’s an interview with Quentin Tarantino in which the motormouthed auteur draws a parallel between filmmaking and boxing. In essence, he says that directors are like boxers, and they have a prime.
One needn’t be a diehard boxing fan (like yours truly once was) to appreciate the analogy, or to know what happens to someone who stays too long in the fight game.
This knowledge that one can overstay their welcome as an artist probably contributed in no small part to Tarantino’s announcement to retire after making his tenth film. Whether he keeps the promise remains to be seen. A boxer’s identity is very much tied up in fighting. In many cases he’s done it since childhood, and thinks of himself as a fighter before being a husband, father, a son. To give all that up one day is very hard. Lots of boxers tell themselves they’ll remain in the gym, training other fighters to satisfy their itch, but sometimes this vicarious living isn’t enough. Sometimes it makes things even worse.
Tarantino may tell himself now that he’ll keep busy with other things—producing movies, guest-directing series TV episodes, writing more novels—but he may find it’s not enough. And I imagine many of his biggest fans are frankly hoping he’ll renege on his promise.
Like any analogy, Tarantino’s—good as it is—can only be carried so far. A filmmaker is primarily driven by their creativity and how this matches up with the zeitgeist. Drive has something to do with how long a boxer can remain active, but it’s mostly a matter of physical reflexes. An athletic prime and an artistic prime are two very different things, as are the consequences of staying too long in either field.
The artist who ignores slippage in their work and continues working might write a very bad novel or make a very bad movie. A boxer who hangs around too long risks getting hurt or killed. Alas, “the Greatest” himself, Muhammad Ali, is a textbook case. For evidence of this, watch his post-prime absolute dismantlement at the hands of the subpar slugger Trevor Berbick. On second thought, don’t watch that fight, unless you want to watch a man already suffering the visible effects of Parkinson’s being repeatedly jabbed.
Ironically, in boxing it’s one’s “finest night” that can immediately put an end to one’s prime. The phrase “the fight that took it out of him,” is very common among commentators. “X Fighter went hell for leather that night, and it was a glorious spectacle, but he was never the same after that.” Fights that live up to the hype—Corrales-Castillo I, Ward-Gatti I, Ali-Frazier III, any Bowe-Holyfield title tilt—leave their principles permanently changed men. They win “Fight of the Year” honors and men bandy their names about in pubs for decades afterwards. But they also spend an unusually long amount of time in hospital after the fight, bedbound and getting multiple CT scans and saline drips and even dialysis. Years later they start to have severe cognitive issues, have trouble remembering their children’s names or how to sign their own autograph.
Getting back to the analogy, is there an artistic equivalent of the “fight that takes it out of you?”
To even begin to answer that question, it’s probably best to take a look at a case of an artist at his absolute peak, and what happened after that.
Ironically, the artist in question was an actor who played a boxer in his most impressive role. In 1980, Robert De Niro played Jake “the Bronx Bull” LaMotta in the film “Raging Bull.” His performance is widely regarded as one of the best in cinematic history, and he was rightly awarded the “Best Actor” Oscar at the Academy Awards.
De Niro, an Uda Hagen-trained method actor, went as deep into his character as any actor could while preparing for a role. Not only did he train with Jake until LaMotta was convinced he could box professionally, he gained a significant amount of weight to play postretirement Jake. Some of the scenes in the film’s third act are as uncomfortable and uncanny in their verisimilitude as any ever witnessed by an audience. They’re so skin-on-skin close that we’re made complicit in LaMotta’s infidelity, his heelish rages in which he breaks furniture and destroys old friendships. They show a man completely enslaved to his appetites—carnal and gustatory—slowly destroying himself and anyone else unfortunate enough to be in his orbit.
De Niro’s great achievement is to show loathsome behavior without judging it, giving us an unstinting and naked look at man at his most animal and afflicted. Because the film is made by Martin Scorsese, there is also a religious quality to the proceedings, and a desire evoked in the audience to understand, even forgive. To recognize that, no matter how far along the road to perdition, one can always turn around. That the blind can have their sight restored. The film even ends with the famous quote from the Book of John about a blind man being able to see again.
De Niro made many very good films after “Raging Bull”—even some great ones—but none after this one quite achieves this kind of awe-inspiring majesty. Especially in the early 2000s, De Niro had a proclivity to sleepwalk through his performances. There was the sense that he was phoning it in, to finance his ambitions as a hotelier and restaurateur, and later to finance his way through a nasty divorce.
In “Raging Bull,” he gave something of himself that he never quite got back, and also acquired some psychic scars he carried forever thereafter. In a sense, the experience left him punch drunk.
There’s an anecdote Vicky LaMotta (Jake’s ex-wife) tells about Jake calling her late one night during the production of “Raging Bull.”
He didn’t say much at first, but she knew it was Jake. It was in the way he breathed, in a labored way mostly through the mouth. This was caused by LaMotta’s nose being broken and incorrectly set too many times throughout the course of his very long and brutal career.
After a short time of talking to “Jake,” he confessed that he was in fact Robert De Niro. Vicky describes the moment as being eerie, and the first time she realized how deep into character Bobby was willing to go. It says something about Bobby’s dedication that he managed to take on Jake’s smallest mannerisms to the point where he was able to fool the man’s longsuffering wife.
Pay attention to De Niro even now and you will hear that same labored breathing. One might argue that’s because he’s getting quite old, which would be a fair point if the tic weren’t obvious twenty years ago as well. It’s the method acting equivalent of a cauliflower ear, or proud flesh leftover from a surgical scar that refuses to ever quite heal.
It isn’t just actors who suffer the effects of the “fight that takes it out of you.” Author Charles Bukowski once called Ferdinand Celine’s World War One picaresque “Journey to the End of the Night” the greatest novel of the last two thousand years. High praise, especially from a man usually so churlish and stinting in it. But Bukowski was always quick to add that Celine was never quite the same after that, that he had given too much of himself to that novel. That after staring so deeply into the abyss, the man was left in essence blind and staggering. It was the reverse, then, of the miraculous phenomenon depicted in the Book of John. Was sighted, but now am blind.
I imagine the postmodern “encyclopedic novels” like “Infinite Jest” or “Gravity’s Rainbow” also function much like torridly-paced pugilistic contests between two evenly matched men who refuse to yield. Maybe in this instance the “immovable object” meeting the “unstoppable force” might be the writer butting up against the Muse, refusing to submit or look away before some ultimate insight is obtained. In such cases the Muse obliges, giving the artist what they want, long and hard.
Having considered all this though, it’s important to remember what the great SF scribe Theodore Sturgeon once said: that “nothing is ever absolutely so.” Even if this “law of artistic primes” is mostly true, there are exceptions, those artists whose spiritual and creative stamina seem inexhaustible. Those who remain committed to their vision and inspired well after all their former contemporaries are in the rest home or buried in the ground.
What makes such men and women exceptions? What keeps them fighting long after the point when anyone else would take a knee? Why do their antennae remain so fine-tuned when time seems to dull the equipment of others who were equally receptive to the messages being broadcast in their prime? Why don’t they show the scars of attrition, the signs of having stayed too long, which afflict pretty much anyone else who takes such risks? Maybe there is a psychic equivalent of athletic stamina. The kind of thing that let veteran director Robert Altman, then eighty (and a recipient of a heart transplant) direct his final film.
It’s an interesting question, but probably one for another day, and another blog post.