Robert DeNiro, Bang the Drum Slowly and Raging Bull - Essay Example

Robert DeNiro The history of Hollywood has been one in which many actors have achieved an iconic status by virtue of establishing an identity that corresponds to the social atmosphere of the time in which they rose to prominence. James Cagney and Clark Gable represented the masculine strength that audiences looked for during the darkest days of the Great Depression. Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando and James Dean each caught the collective imagination of young movie audiences stifled by the conformity of the 1960s. Almost all actors who establish the highest echelons of stardom succeed also in establishing a connection with audiences that reach a primal state of their consciousness (King 147). Audiences respond to John Wayne and Clint Eastwood because they tap into community desires for security and protection. Audiences connect with Jimmy Stewart and Tom Hanks because they project a sense of the Everyman who still manage to sometimes deal with the darker aspects of their lives. Cary Grant and Robert Redford achieved superstar status by virtue of offering romantic fantasy (deCordova 88). Robert DeNiro perhaps best exemplified that mode of actor that exploded after the social upheavals of the 1960s when the traditions and values and morality of the past were breaking down all around. DeNiro’s constant and continual reinventing of himself on camera embodies the search for individual self-identity that arrived with these wide social changes. A moviegoer who is asked to watch Bang the Drum Slowly and Raging Bull may find it difficult to immediately accept that the same actor is playing Bruce Pearson and Jake LaMotta. There is the shock of metamorphosis in following DeNiro from role to role for adults that is analogous to the first time a child realizes that a beautifully ornamented butterfly was once a creepy crawly caterpillar. The shock of the realization that the slow-witted and bumbling baseball player is played by the same graceful, cocky athlete in Raging Bull represents an extraordinary leap from the tradition of actors who always looked and sounded the same regardless of whether they were playing a 20th century businessman or a Renaissance painter; a cowboy or a pirate; a hero or a villain. What makes Robert DeNiro stand out from the pack as the quintessential cinematic commentator on his times is that he is willing to forego the development of a strong identity that carries him throughout all his multiple roles. In doing so, DeNiro’s career represents more than any other actor the fracturing of the self-assurance of identity that social movements such as Women’s Lib, Civil Rights and the Gay Awareness wrought upon the stage of contemporary life beginning in the late 1960s. Is it not by coincidence that not only did Robert DeNiro’s career begin during this tumultuous period in American history, but that his career began with a series of films directed by Brian DePalma notable for their shattered order and surreal qualities that mocked every aspect of that tradition of assurance from weddings to television. Essentially, DeNiro almost seems to have sprung full force into the consciousness of cinema as an actor who questions his own identity and becomes a proxy by which society has come to question established perspectives. The argument that DeNiro’s career represents an attempt to somehow put together a whole identify out of the shattered remnants of traditional expectation is answered by back to back films released in 1973. The two characters he plays in Bang the Drum Slowly and Mean Streets could not be farther apart. For such a young and unknown actor attempting to find a foothold in the public’s consciousness, such a rejection of a easy identification with the audience seems almost as crazy as Johnny Boy himself. And if, in retrospect, DeNiro as a crazy New York gangster wannabe does not seem like a terribly big stretch, even today DeNiro’s complete immersion as a slow-witted Georgia baseball player still has the power to amaze. DeNiro has become legendary for the steps he takes to prepare for a role, and those steps have been adopted by actors ever since (Brady 129). At the time, it was not conventional preparation for DeNiro to drive down to Georgia to locals speaking so that he could acquire not just some vague Southern or even Georgia accent, but the accent from a specific spot (American Film). The result is arguably the least classically “DeNiro character” in his entire body of work. The jump from Bruce Pearson to Johnny Boy is an example of the manner in which the search for identity became omnipresent in the 1970s. Pearson searches for identity in a game, whereas Johnny Boy makes a game out of Charlie’s search for identity. But Johnny Boy, despite sharing a milieu of sorts, is equally equidistant from Jake LaMotta. LaMotta, in Raging Bull, represents the ultimate achievement of Robert DeNiro in the arena of recreating himself on film. He may have learned how to speak with a Georgia accent for Bang the Drum Slowly, and he may have learned to play the saxophone for New York, New York, but Bruce Pearson and Jimmy Doyle still physically resemble Travis Bickle or Vito Corleone. In Raging Bull, DeNiro literally disappears physically and becomes not just a different person on the inside, but on the outside as well. The transformation that DeNiro underwent to play Jake LaMotta is usually focused upon the tremendous weight gain in order to play the older LaMotta but in reality his transformation into a muscle-bounded middleweight boxer is far more impressive. The combination of the hard work required to achieve that magnificent physique, the conscious decision to destroy what so many American men spend their entire lives hoping to achieve in a gym, the subsequent loss of that weight and the regain to play Al Capone in The Untouchables, then the re-loss of extra weight followed by yet another impressive workout regimen to play Max Cady speaks volumes about America’s obsession with weight gain and weight loss. Everywhere people try to recreate themselves physically in a search for identity: dieting, exercise, plastic surgery, hair styling. DeNiro’s trajectory through the late 1970s and 1980s is a mirror image of this obsession with searching for identity. Beginning in the late 1990s Robert DeNiro’s search for identity led him to recreate himself in a new way; not by shocking physical transformations by undergoing the equivalent of a transgendering: a transgenre-ing. Hi topsy-turvy role as a funny gangster in Analyze This is the centerpiece of the late period of DeNiro. The fragmented self-consciousness is still very much in evidence, but like society as a whole, the aging process brings about a shift in the manner in which identity is searched. By middle-age, most people put aside hair coloring and the weight machines and turn inward, acquiescing to the reality that identity is found within. As Paul Vitti, DeNiro appears to be looking inward rather than outward; playing a gangster character for laughs is constructed around searching for what exists on the other side of himself. The physical and psychic transformations of Robert DeNiro throughout his long career have reflected the disjointed quality of America since the late 1960s. Just as all conventions were ignited by the social upheavals of that era and created a doubt of identity, so has DeNiro’s career been based on renovating himself with each role in a desperate attempt to find the core of his soul. Works Cited Brady, Robert. "The Problem of Monopoly." In Gordon Watkins, ed., The Motion Picture Industry, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Nov. 1947, v. 254, 125-136. DeCordova, Richard. "The Emergence of the Star System in America." Wide Angle 6, no. 4 (1985): 4-13. "Dialogue on Film: Robert DeNiro." American Film Mar. 1981: 39-48. King, Barry. "The Star and the Commodity: Notes Towards a Performance Theory of Stardom." Cultural Studies May 1987: 145-161. Read More