For Fans of Raging Bull

Scorsese shot Raging Bull in black and white partly to distinguish it from other boxing films of the era and partly to stop the footage from dating itself. But the real effect is moral: black and white removes the comfortable distance of colour. The blood looks like shadow. The sweat looks like light. Everything becomes graphic in the original sense, reduced to shape and tone. When the camera goes inside the ring for those extraordinary slow-motion sequences, it is not aestheticizing violence. It is making you feel the weight of it.

Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler (2008) is the closest any film has come to replicating the specific ache of Raging Bull. Mickey Rourke's Randy 'The Ram' Robinson is LaMotta thirty years later, still addicted to the punishment, still unable to exist outside the arena that defines him. Where Scorsese's film is almost operatic in its stylization, Aronofsky's is deliberately rough and immediate. Together they form a diptych on what it costs a person to be built for a single thing.

No game has taken the Raging Bull question (can a broken person be redeemed, or are they just broken?) and embedded it into its systems as thoroughly as Disco Elysium. Your detective is a man who drank himself into amnesia because he could not survive his own feelings. Every skill check is an argument between the different parts of his damaged psyche. The game does not reward the player for fixing him. It rewards honesty about what he is. LaMotta would recognise the loop immediately.

Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian is not about boxing, but it is about violence as a condition of existence rather than a moral failure, and about whether a person shaped entirely by brutality can be said to have any interior life at all. The Judge and LaMotta both exist in a register where the question of whether they are evil or simply extreme is never resolved. McCarthy's prose has the same quality as Scorsese's black and white: beautiful in its rendering of things that should not be beautiful.