Within the first few minutes of Marty Supreme, synths swell behind a billion sperm racing toward one egg. A crescendo as the winner burrows into the microscopic lattice.
All of life is a furious competition, this film tells you. Each of us alone won the race to be born and so we were born to continue to win, alone. To lose is to betray your birthright and forfeit the privilege to exist.
The egg smooths itself into a ping pong ball. Timothée Chalamet, himself famously striving to “be one of the greats,” plays table tennis with genuine mastery after six to seven years of real-life practice (motivated, no doubt, by a synchronist meta-hope of winning the Oscar). He plays the character Marty Mauser, who is based on a real-life Jewish international ping-pong player from the 1950s.
“I’m Hitler’s worst nightmare,” the character says to a group of reporters.
Already we are made to understand the meaning of the film: Marty is the pure embodiment of the mythos of post–World War II America: a group of loosely associated individualists, each working toward his own actualization, somehow overcame the tyrannical unity of Nazis.
Fundamentally, we all believe in the sacredness of the individual over the group. Outwardly, we say we believe in the radical equality of those individuals. Privately, we know this means we each must be better than all of them. This film is going to shock you by revealing to you your own private beliefs:
Just a few seconds after the Hitler comment, when asked about his rival and an older Jew who survived the concentration camps, Marty says he will be “wishing he was back in Auschwitz.” When the shock lands, he adds, “Don’t worry, I can say that. I’m Jewish.”
We’ve been telling and retelling more rose-colored versions of this story, constantly, since the end of the war: the rebels versus the empire, margin against the middle, the underdog against the jock. And although this one is set chronologically nearer the beginnings of that storytelling tradition, Marty Supreme is its purest distillation and its end. Only possible to conceive of today, really, after decades of incremental intensification.
Really, Chalamet’s impossibly modern rizz contrasted with 1950s America is what makes the movie so thrilling. Hapless mid-centenarians are shocked and bamboozled by who could conceivably be a time-traveling hustler from 2025.
Unconsciously, we feel they deserve whatever he can manage to do to them because they don’t yet accept the ramifications of their own worldview. That is, except for the childless famous actress, the only one able to keep up: “I don’t care if you stole from me because I would have done the same to you.”
Contrast that with the poor girl carrying his child, Rachel, who loves him helplessly no matter how much he lies and manipulates and cheats. We sympathize with that love because of the blinding swagger produced by the coherence of his worldview. (I was sweating I wanted Marty to win so bad.) But she can’t commit herself to how he operates, as much as she wants to. The mere fact of her female fertility partly foists a more ancient purpose onto her: with more biological urgency than a male, she must rely on other people and take care of the people who rely on her, including Marty. Marty finds this repulsive.
She would do anything to help him, to be like him, to hide her dependency, but this only works to prove she is trying to “trap” him. “I have a purpose,” he finally tells her. “You don’t.” By this he means, I can accept the implicit rules. You have to pretend.
From the perspective of our revealed values, Marty is the most honest man alive. All his actions are unusually “true” to his goals. As Kierkegaard wrote, purity of heart is to will the one thing.
My heart is nowhere near as pure. I want to be one of the greats. But I also have theological beliefs and feelings of compassion and so on. Not only are these complex, they sometimes inappropriately shift levels. Meaning, I’ll sometimes put social comfort over truth. Or money over integrity. These frame-shifts weaken my “charisma.” Marty would never do that. He merely fabricates forensic details in service to “his truth.” In the grand scheme of his worldview, those are white lies. In an important way, Marty is a revealer of the hypocrisy of our age by being the perfect embodiment of what we desire to be but can’t admit. Our involuntary celebration of this in the unironic marketing of Marty Supreme reveals these implicit beliefs.
We can’t help it. He puts his pursuit of greatness at the top of his hierarchy and won’t move it for anyone. We only wish we had the ping-pongs.
The movie also reveals, however, that even in the case of obsessive total commitment by a genius with hyper-fidelity, it doesn’t work. Every single one of Marty’s hustles backfires. He gets into the nice hotel, but has to foot the entire bill; he gets the money he needs to fly overseas at gunpoint, but is arrested by his uncle when he gets home; he beats Endo, but he doesn’t get to compete in the tournament. And that’s the thing, too: Marty is truly great at his game. He could conceivably win.
So, why doesn’t it work?
The counterpoint to Marty is his Jewish rival who was in the concentration camps. While defusing bombs outside the camp, he followed a bee back to its hive. He smoked out the bees with his cigarette and then covered himself with their honey. In one of the most shocking and genius images of the film, he allows his starving friends to lick honey from his body. It is the inversion of the opening image: Instead of devouring honey for his personal gain, he allows it to be consumed from his very flesh.
Maybe Marty doesn’t believe the moral of the story because he’s better at table tennis. From his perspective, old-school Jewish morality doesn’t get him where he wants to be. But if you’ve been paying attention, the opposite is happening: despite the genius of his game and hustle and ability to manipulate others in real time, nothing ever works out for Marty.
You could think of information, attention, status, money like meta-calories: the information required to obtain food. It turns out, his pre-WWII friend knows something he doesn’t: “food” is best stored in the bodies of others, in the form of reputation over time.
What Marty is doing, then, is wrecking his ability to obtain “meta-calories” from others in exchange for small amounts for himself, now. This doesn’t work out in the long run, no matter how much rizz you have. Trust is more valuable than any particular resource—even talent—because trust is the ultimate meta-resource.
Our post–World War II culture fears and denies this because our founding mythos demands that we deeply distrust group affiliations and hierarchies of any kind—you don’t want to be a Nazi, do you? We also fear losing our private pursuit of greatness, our “dreams.” So much so that we even admire Marty for destroying his life and everyone around him for a small chance to be rich and famous. He’s good at it. We fail to notice that it’s like a circus trick: only impressive in a very isolated way and destructive in every other way.
“Everybody wants to rule the world.” With that ethos, social trust decreases slowly over the decades. Loneliness increases. In a vicious cycle, the need for a singular identity; to “find ourselves;” to be great, becomes an ever more urgent necessity to make up for the gnawing spiritual isolation.
The resulting existential dread sometimes feels cosmically romantic, like we’re the first beings in history to float alone in a sea of stars. Really, though, selfishness is nothing new, as the Shark Tank guy reminds Marty: “I’m a vampire. I’ve been around since 1601. You will never be happy.”
After the endless waterfalls of compounding and interlaced stressors that you expect of a Safdie movie, Marty is finally presented with what irrevocably and forever connects him to other people: His child.
Family, particularly for men the birth of a child, reveals that we are never fully separate from each other. This moment cascades through Marty’s belief system, breaking him open in an instant: everything we aim to achieve is hopelessly interconnected. The opening image of the egg and sperm is undone by it’s human manifestation and the final image of the movie: Marty weeping at his smiling baby through glass.
Chalamet says he wants to be one of the greats. He also claimed it isn’t something people aspire to much anymore. Maybe it’s not. Maybe the reason is that aiming at greatness above all means you end up alone.
Gen Z is splitting into two factions, with about half of them doubling down on their looksmaxxing grindsets to a clownish degree and the other half going trad and starting families. Whichever way, the previous age seems to be coming to an end. We have no idea how the next one will start. Tensions are high for everyone.
This film manages to appeal to both groups. And maybe it is possible for a synthesis. To strive for greatness from within a family. For the sake of a family. I don’t know. That’s pretty much what I’m trying to do, so I hope so. If not, at least I got the family.
When a culture is in the midst of a great transition, we sometimes produce media that has this strange Schrödinger’s cat effect: people thought “Fortunate Son” was a celebration of the American military in the 70s. In the same way, people think Marty Supreme is a celebration of a personal greatness above all.
It is, but it is also the opposite.
Great insight in this article about trust.
A guy like Marty is legitimately great, but he doesn't trust it and so fear hijacks his goals by way of lying, cheating, and manipulation. Fear is pervasive, but it's weak, taking us out of the moment by dangling future consequences or past failures as bait. In the moment, he's a great ping pong player; right now. But he's more concerned with legacy.
And this greatness is squandered when it's not recognized as a gift. Something to be shared (like the honey example). Otherwise, it becomes vampiric, like an ego with fangs. Vamps literally suck life energy out of others, just like a baby, except they don't ask, just take. No trust. And what is more utterly trusting than a human child?
The best take on Marty I've read -- and I wrote one.