A LOVE SUPREME

Let's have a toast for the douchebags
Let's have a toast for the assholes
Let's have a toast for the scumbags
Every one of them that I know
Let's have a toast for the jerk-offs
That'll never take work off
Baby, I got a plan
Run away fast as you can

Runaway (Kanye West)

You gotta have a dream; If you don't have a dream, How you gonna have a dream come true? 

Happy Talk (Rogers and Hammerstein)

IMPOSSIBLE DREAMS
SPOILERS AHEAD!

Kanye West's song Runaway from his My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy album became a prophetic anthem for a certain type of nihilistic, narcissistic celebrity living in the 21st century and, funnily enough, considering the proximity of actor Timothée Chalamet to West and his family via his own relationship with Kylie Jenner (half-sister to Kim Kardashian, West's ex-wife), it crossed my mind that the actor has just gone and made the cinema equivalent of the song in his latest feature.

I’d heard rumours about how much of an asshole the character of Marty Mouser, played by Timothée Chalamet, was prior to watching the new Josh Safdie film Marty Supreme, but compared to the hedonist stock trader Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) in Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, I found him practically heroic.

This cocky ping-pong player has little going for him but a dream to beat the best player in the world, Koto Endo (Koto Kawaguchi), and though it costs him a few beatings and near-death experiences, he finally accomplishes his goal. Do we really care whether he does or not? That depends on whether you’ve ever harboured a dream yourself that’s cost you along the way. And if that sounds a little glib, it’s probably because the underdog trope is a hoary cliché, one that many of us have been easily seduced by due to the romanticisation of the conceit frequently promoted in Hollywood movies for over a century now.

HEELS

If Marty Mouser had been an angry young man from the Alan Sillitoe, John Braine, or Kingsley Amis kitchen sink school of hard knocks, then he might incur a little more sympathy in his desire to break free from relative poverty in pursuit of his own American Dream. But there’s a kind of appropriated preppy arrogance that may be off-putting to some, reminiscent of Frank Abagnale in Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can. The “fake it till you make it” approach to life. Perhaps it's testament to Marty's contrived (possibly autistic) arrogance that you forget he's living by his wits and not by his wallet.

Unlikeable anti-heroes are not uncommon throughout the history of film, but typically they end up coming a cropper by the end of the stories they dominate. Surprisingly, Marty finds a redemptive ending for himself, which is unexpected as, up till the very final reel, everything he does seems grossly self-serving and undeserving of his dual victory in both sport and life.

Certainly, for a good majority of the movie, Marty spends most of his time firefighting with chaos as a by-product of his pursuit to be great. Funnily enough, there was a Werner Herzog type of madness to parts of this film that reminded me of Fitzcarraldo, starring Klaus Kinski, and Bad Lieutenant, starring Nicolas Cage.

As for two of Marty’s scoundrel predecessors on film, I personally didn’t care whether the social misfit Barry Lyndon ascended through the upper echelons of European aristocracy in Kubrick’s famously cynical period film, and neither did I yearn for Llewyn Davis to become a celebrated folk singer in the Coens’ equally cynical Inside Llewyn Davis, because you weren’t supposed to. Barry didn’t have a dream as such; the destiny of his tale is more accidental and spontaneous, and Llewyn was a consistent self-saboteur of his personal relationships and musical talent, constantly at odds with his peers and the time in which he lived. They were both heels whose fatal flaw was themselves, and in the end it is that which cements their fate for the tragic.

Marty, though, for all his sins, does have a vision, and he follows through with it to the point of near collapse and humiliation (kissing a pig in front of an angry Japanese public) in order to prove to himself that he can win at nearly any cost. It may not be pretty at times, but I can’t deny that I did root for him regardless of his obnoxious, narcissistic qualities. In fact, he reminded me of a few people I know who have spent their entire lives obsessed with some kind of ultimate victory in their chosen field, while failing to see the collateral damage it brings in its wake, trash-can Don Quixotes, you might say.

Of course, it's not so easy to escape yourself when your identity is wrapped up in an obsession and a dream, but once that dream is realised, Marty is released from his spell of fixation and free to embrace a bigger love than himself, in the form of his long-suffering love interest Rachel Mizler, played by Odessa A’zion, and their young baby. Whether his redemption is plausible in contrast to his asshole fictional counterparts, Barry Lyndon and Llewyn Davis, is certainly a reasonable question to ask once the final credits roll on Marty Supreme. But even if it’s only a momentary glimpse of something more meaningful than being the best ping-pong player on earth, it still offers more hope than we might initially expect at the outset of Josh Safdie’s Rake’s Progress of sorts.

BABY ZOOMERS

If I were to lean into a conspiracy-minded reading of Marty Supreme, I might believe that the message of the film is a government-sponsored drive to promote a population boom amongst Gen Z in order to prevent the alleged collapsing birth rate in America.

I wasn't expecting the pro-natalist aspect of the film, though the title sequence kind of gives it away, and it somehow made me think about these obnoxious social media personalities that dominate what is known as the 'manosphere', in which they talk about populating the earth with their progeny like Red Bull-fuelled "Genghis Khans".

Chalamet's performance as Mouser has a similar obnoxious arrogance to a lot of the influencer YouTubers, TikTokkers, and Snapchatters that dominate much of social media (Sneako, Myron Gaines, and the Paul and Tate brothers), but whereas they exist in the unreal online world of the 21st century, Marty very much is engaged with the real world of the mid-20th century. Though at first he's in denial about possibly being a father, which in turn fuels his avoidance of the reality of the situation with his on-and-off girlfriend Rachel, accelerating his need to realise his ping-pong supremacy before eventually calming down a bit and finding something to anchor his outrageous ego.

This is the real victory for Marty: letting go of the dream once it's been accomplished, emancipated from his own ambition to prove himself any longer.

It is that message that makes the film interesting, though one suspects the cocky little shit will find some other obsession to chase not long after the tears have dried on his face at the sight of his newborn child.

I guess we'll never know, though I would be up for a sequel with a middle-aged Marty.

Could even call it A Love Supreme.