BLOG #18: SAFDIE-FLAVORED HONOR

*THERE ARE HELLA SPOILERS ABOUT TO COME FOR MARTY SUPREME IF YOU PLAN ON SEEING THAT MOVIE DO NOT READ THIS UNTIL AFTER YOU SEE IT PLEASE THANK YOU*

Kima has been thinking a lot about the state of films, she tells me. And she thinks our present is best defined by a fundamental lack of emotion. While we’re talking I’m scared because I know it’s true. And, I say, to move it further, people confuse something crazy happening to characters in a movie, to characters feeling something about the situation, or themselves, or others. Cognitive dissonance, I say. And beyond that conversation, I think about that perennial problem of expressing an emotion in filmmaking, the nasty one where directors try so hard to say something that they end up saying nothing at all. The difference today, I fear, is an expansion of that cognitive dissonance, where an increasing level of situational extremes—sex, violence, cruelty—are not only misinterpreted as real stakes for the story, but in fact, understood as a backward emotional core of the film. As if you can interpret feelings in the negative spaces where feelings are…absent. Ah yes, it’s there because it’s not there. Brilliant. 

 

Yes, this is about Marty Supreme, which I did not like one bit. The movie has simple motivations, like the previous offerings from the Safdie duo (this is Josh’s debut as a lone brother separate from their former joint venture Elara): scammy guy with questionable morals needs money, goes through a ringer of anvils-dropped-on-head cartoony series of events that increase in severity, gore, and stakes of life and death, and in the end, they get it; but at what end? In Good Time, it’s Connie (RPattz) in the back of a cop car with that gorgeous long shot through the cage. In Uncut Gems, it’s the hole in Howard’s (Adam Sandler) eye turning into a wormhole that mirrors the prismatic opalescent wonder of the magic gem all the kerfuffle was about for the entire movie. In Marty Supreme, it’s a twerpy kid named Marty Mauser (Timothee Chalamet) who is an intrepid-verging-on-scammy guy who needs money, but he needs money so he can accomplish his very simple goal, set up rather formulaically in the first act of the film: he wants to be the best table tennis player of 1952, when the movie is set, and he wants to be the one who takes the sport global. He doesn’t want money because he wantsmoney, he wants money because he wants to be the best, and to be the best he needs to be able to travel globally so he can win. The movie, which is very much so a two-and-a-half-hour watch, establishes this motivation, shows Marty gently rob the shoe store he dayjob-works at to be able to travel to the global championship where he loses only to Endo, Japan’s winningest athlete and now, Marty’s principle foe, takes 90 minutes and some change to show Marty not licking his wounds back in America in a traditional display of pity, but rather cruelly comedy-of-errors-ing his way to Tokyo for a vanity rematch with Endo set up by Mr. Rockwell (Kevin O’Leary aka Mr. Wonderful on Shark Tank??) to sell more of his Rockwell ink products, and finally, winning. Oh, and by the way through all of this he was fucking Rockwell’s wife, famous actress Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow), after he got his friend Rachel Mizler (Odessa A’zion) pregnant in the opening scene of the movie; the beginning of the too-long title sequence is an ’80s-graphic animation of Marty’s sperm fertilizing Rachel’s egg, and the end of the movie is Marty seeing his son (questionable if it’s his or not) and, finally, expressing emotion: he cries. And this happens. In the last scene. Of a movie. That is. Two. And a half. HOURS. Long. 

 

I saw MS (this abbreviation shares an acronym with multiple sclerosis, a chronic and painful autoimmune disease and yes I am doing it on purpose) with a gaggle of my friends the Sunday before it came out; we had formed a group chat to organize post-game discourse and share pre-game tweets about Timmy’s latest PR antics. And the response to this movie was a pretty even split across the group in terms of reaction: the boys loved it, my girls and I really did not like it. This is fundamentally interesting to me, because I read the film less so as a rally-all-the-boys cry than moreso a treatise of specifically and culturally Jewish male honor, something the Safdies, both as a directing duo and as individuals, seem to root a lot of their work in. 

 

The whole last 45 minutes of the movie lost me, and so Kima and I got on our phones (this was the very first time I’ve ever used my phone in a movie theater…which really shows how done I was). I was writing notes, she was beginning a Letterboxd post. Sharing my initial questions straight from the source, my Notes app: 

 

Why is Safdie so obsessed with honor? Specifically male honor, specifically Jewish male honor? It’s boring. Thinks he is Roth or Bellow but he flops. The strength of the movie is not the script. It is not the performances. It is DARIUS KHONDJI and the quirky 80s music choices in a movie supposed to be set in the 50s. Annoying tbh. 

 

I’ll start with the technical stuff because it’s easier. A lot of people who aren’t familiar with all of the different roles that go into making a movie and what they’re responsible for will attribute formal aspects of the movie to the director, when really, it’s the DP. Same as Eddington, a movie I also thought was horseshit. Coincidentally, both MS and Eddington are DP’d by Darius Khondji, who is just that fucking guy with the camera. Angles, perspective, all of that. Even that hokey moment when Wally (Tyler Okonma) and Marty hop out of the moving car to dance to a song on the radio. As much as I hated the content of the scene, I thought it was beautiful. I even muttered under my breath in the theater, “Fuck you, Darius.” So, I would like to encourage a lot of the people who “love” this movie and who think it’s “a vibe” to think: do I like the movie, or do I like the way it looks? And if you like both, consider which one you like more. If the formal aspects are more impressive to you, please please please. Make sure you are not crediting Safdie as the mastermind, because that’s not how it works. 

 

One of the biggest questions I have is: is this a period movie, or is this a movie that uses a period like the ’50s as a container for loftier ideas about humanity, and therefore can create its own story logic that doesn’t have to abide by period specificity? On a podcast episode of Crew Call with Anthony D’Alessandro, Safdie says it’s the latter: “I am not a historian. But I often find these wormseyed narratives inside of historical context to be more exposing of culture and humanity than reading a dry objective textbook; the subjective is far superior to the objective.” There are also personal stakes for him in his family’s relationship to post-war Japan and their history in New York, each of which we can see in the mid-century Japan v. America narrative in the film, as well as through the table tennis hall that operates like an island of misfit toys for Marty, Wally, and other minorities (remember: Jewish people weren’t white yet in 1952!) Makes enough sense, right? While you see this, you don’t feel it. And that isn’t to say “I want a dialogue loaded with expository ‘It’s so hard to be a minority’” type shit is needed, but to point out that this objectively rich conceptual background Safdie is talking about on a podcast about the movie contains more depth than the actual movie. As an audience member, I can’t understand the history of the table tennis hall and the Japan v. America bits as they relate to table tennis in this particular story when I am not made to care. As overused as this phrase is: there are no stakes clearly established. That, and the use of “Forever Young” in the first scene sets the movie up to be annoying (sorry sorry sorry). The needle drops on the 1984 Alphaville track while Marty provides arhythmic backshots to Rachel in the stock room of a shoe store—right after the movie is established to be set 70-some year ago, you hear a song from 40-some years ago. There’s another ’80s moment with “Everybody Wants To Rule The World” by Tears for Fears. So, what feels like a movie considered in and of a time period, with this rich history that Safdie backpedals on a podcast, is represented by music…40 years later? Now, there is a world where that choice can actually work; and I think that if this movie was narratively structured 1. At all, and 2. More broadly set up as a take on American intrepid spirit over the years told through Marty rather than about him, it would work. But, also as said in the same podcast episode by Safdie’s co-writer Ron Bronstein, they were interested in the “deep psychology” of Marty, the character. The result is a world that is only half-considered. And, that focus makes what could be a dope non-linear-time music selection choice come off as pointless anachronism. Just, you know, because they can. And that’s what makes it cool! Just guys doing stuff, cus like, whatever, you know?  

 

 

Stills from MS

When I think of mid-century era Jewish guys, I think of Philip Roth, and I think of Saul Bellow. These are two of my favorite male American writers of the period (along with Pynchon and some other guys who aren’t Jewish so they aren’t the point here). Both men were notable writers of their time, they were compatriots (my Penguin edition of Bellow’s Herzog has a wonderful introduction written by Roth), and today, they’re both famous for their writing which centered certain stereotypes attached to Jewish people at the time (and tbh still today), namely those of insecurity, neurosis, and a sexual characteristic best described as pathological. Their work is a part of a tradition of detailing the plight of the Jewish intellectual in a time when Jewish people were only beginning to be respected as white. My point is, within this really dope point in history that Safdie and Bronstein wrote MS, there is an injection of what feels like a new permutation of the Jewish guy trope, made modern through all the one-liners so clearly engineered so people will talk about Marty’s “aura” on the internet later, like a bastardized version of what Bellow and Roth and any other Jewish writers and thinkers you can attribute to the mid-century did. Asking my question again about why Safdie is so obsessed with male Jewish honor, what do he and  Bronstein want to say in this movie about that modern experience, as it relates to the time in which Bellow wrote Herzog or Humboldt’s Gift, or when Roth wrote Goodbye, Columbus? What is being added to the conversation beyond a couple quippy references to the Holocaust, which, in the movie, was only a decade removed from when our “story” takes place? One of those moments is quite beautiful; when Marty’s friend Bela who survived the camps talks about how he once covered himself in honey so his cellmates could lick it off him to avoid dying of starvation. The other moments are irreverent to a point of meaninglessness, or just for the lols: when Marty’s touring the world with Bela as a halftime act for the Harlem Globe Trotters, he ends up in Egypt, where he chips off a chunk of stone from the pyramids and gives it to his mother as a gift with note that says “we built this.” It feels like that Drake clip from that one time the Toronto Raptors won. And I think there’s a level of awareness on the contemporary-leaningness of Marty as both a modern and historical portrait of a Jewish man seeking honor and retribution, in the decade immediately following the holocaust; today. At least, that’s what the structure is saying to me. 

 

And it’s weird to me, to see the simultaneous anachronism of the movie placed in the context of the dace immediately following the holocaust, because it feels less historical than it reads like a way to draw parallels between Jewish men then, and Jewish men now. Obviously, there are a number of differences, the main one being a socioeconomic ascension and, while no one is denying the very real existence of present-day antisemitism, how that class ascension has led to a stratification within Jewish people between haves and have nots. In essence, a lot of y’all are white now because you have become white over the past 70 years. And yet, the “I’m-proving-myself” dialogue from Marty feels aggressively contemporary, with an “I’m him” mentality, shoved into the ’50s where the fact that we’re not so far removed from the holocaust is, story-wise, what Marty uses to get away with a lot of the wild shit he says. 

 

If we’re looking at the ’50s like this, one of the more telling pieces of literature known to have outlined the overlooked Jewish perspective of the time is Goodbye, Columbus by Roth. The novella is known to this day as a somewhat satirized glance at middle-class Jewish American life, a very pointed critique of WASP-assimilation as tied to class-ascension from the perspective of sex. Young working class Neil Klugman falls in love with Brenda Patimkin at the Green Lane Country Club on the nicer side of New Jersey, spends time with her wealthy family making all these observations between how they move compared to how his family does. The rest of the plot rests entirely on Neil’s pathological desperation to fuck Brenda and to be loved by her, where the two intertwine via a diaphragm; a contraceptive device that, during this time, you could only have inserted if you were married otherwise you make your family look bad. So, there’s this drama where Neil wants to marry Brenda but he’s afraid to ask so he asks her to get a diaphragm instead as a way to half-ask the question because he’s being a pussy about it, she doesn’t want to, he says that she must not care that much about him if she won’t do that for him, so eventually they go to hippy-dippy NYC where no one knows their name, they get the diaphragm, Neil says “I love you” for the very first time, and then summer’s over; Brenda goes back to school in Boston, Neil goes back to his job at the public library. But, they later break up because when Neil visits Brenda in Boston during a break, she tells him that she left her diaphragm in a drawer in her family home where her parents found it, and how surely she’d never be able to bring him home ever again. They agree to end it, and Neil ponders all the maneuvering between them that he considered the relationship; the if-you-do-this-then-I-do-this-to-get-you-to-do-what-I-originally-wanted-you-to-do-the-whole-time, only to get outplayed by Brenda. 

 

I mention Goodbye Columbus in such detail because in the podcast I mentioned earlier, Safdie and Bronstein cite Marty as a “pathological dreamer,” and it feels akin to the canon of Jewish thought that was being explored in the ’50s by authors like Roth, to dig up something about the male psyche. The parallel I see in the maneuvering that Neil does with Brenda, is the maneuvering that takes up the majority of MS; it’s Marty getting into a whole bunch of situations, and then getting in more situations trying to undo the previous ones, and so on and so forth, only to get outmaneuvered in the end, get paddled by Kevin O’Leary, and save as much of his ego as he can—not by actually winning a national title, but by turning an exposition match into a battle for his own honor. The difference though, isn’t that Roth = good Safdie-Bronstein = bad; it’s that Roth was presenting a story so clearly satirical, so openly emotional, manipulative, and layered. There’s this standout moment when Mr. Patimkin, Brenda’s father, speaks to Neil, and he calls his children “goys” because they have too much privilege compared to when he was brought up; he says “It’s a hard thing to be a Jew…it’s a harder thing to stay one.” With that one line, Roth makes the theme of his book clear. There was no movie-equivalent version of that line, whether or not the connection to the Jewish experience is as salient as I personally see it; there is no thesis statement, other than Marty maneuvering. 

 

A tweet I found funny

Ok last bit using Goodbye, Columbus; I see the sex-obsession that exists in the novel as satire in the movie, but as somewhat intentional (? I wasn’t on set nor in the cutting room floor so I can’t claim that with my chest) and gross-feeling cruelty towards women characters. So, in Columbus, Brenda finally lets Neil hit after she makes him stay and watch her little sister Julie, whom he absolutely destroys in a game of table tennis (…). Julie actually doesn’t even finish the game because Neil lit her ass up so bad, he was one point away from officially winning and she runs away crying. Later, Brenda comes home, and she and Neil fuck in the family TV den after dark. He talks about it in the context of competition: “… soon there we were, Brenda falling, slowly but with a smile, and me rising. How can I describe loving Brenda? It was so sweet, as though I’d finally scored that twenty-first point.” Klugman, lemme get this straight: this beautiful girl lets you fuck, and you’re thinking about…how awesome it would feel to have officially scored the twenty-first winning point and beat her little sister in table tennis? Roth’s answer: yes. Because the whole time, everything is about winning. All the tenderness, all the parts where you feel for Neil, it is about winning; all of which is heightened when considering his minority identity as a Jewish man. That heart is a vehicle to understand the satire, the silly parts, the superficial parts of Neil’s character that embody the negative stereotypes used to discriminate against Jewish people of that time. That is the satire. 

 

In MS, all you get is the silly parts, with no clear connection to…anything, once again. And, considering the role women play in the movie, they might as well have not existed. The most important role is Rachel Mizler, a young Jewish woman, who only exists to be Marty’s emotional punching bag and carry his child (her most important roles in the movie are in the beginning, where he gets her pregnant, and then in the end, when maybe-his-maybe-not-his son is born). In between, Rachel lies about getting abused by her husband to manipulate Marty (unnecessary; serving nothing) which is revealed just when you start to actually hold him accountable for how awful he’s being to her, literally gets shot for him—in this scene, the edit very unnecessarily includes a moment where Marty rips her shirt open to find the bullet entry wound but we linger a little too long on the jiggling tits, in a pretty obvious and DUMB way—and, after giving birth to his child, is denounced as “just a friend.” So, parallel to this class ascension thing, the object of Marty’s affection is Kay Stone (played by GP), a thin blonde movie star, and perhaps most importantly subtextually, a shiksa. Still, he doesn’t love her; he wants what she has not as an aspiration, but he seeks to outmaneuver her, like Neil views fucking the more gentile-Jewish Brenda like winning a game of table tennis. And outmaneuver her he does, several times; in the beginning, he negs her into creating just enough intrigue that she lets him hit. The second time, she follows the breadcrumb trail of manipulative curiosity he’s laid out for her. They abscond to hotels while she rehearses a Broadway play, and Marty opportunistically unclips what he thinks is a diamond necklace only to later retrieve it from the drain and, to his chagrin, realize it’s a fake when he tries to pawn it. Stone’s story with Marty ends when her play is panned, and distraught, she abandons Marty in the foyer of her palatial apartment instead of getting him a real necklace for him to pawn. She gets away unscathed because of her status, whereas Mizler does not. Both women are made victims of Marty, where the difference in their treatment clearly reflects an intersection of women’s roles; one Jewish, one blonde WASP; united by Marty’s ego, as it reflects class aspiration in that Rothian-adjacent vein. 

 

Now, “Rothian-adjacent” is even too kind, because my principal takeaway of MS as a movie is that it presents a whole bunch of things that could be maybe the beginnings of ideas, does nothing with them, wraps it all up in some weird tale of hustler mentality and calls it “emotional.” When, there is nothing there. Where I see Roth, I see intention in the pattern of Safdie’s movies to kind of rewrite the Jewish American man for today, and I ultimately see failure—not just to complete that idea, but to complete any idea. The effect is over-emphasizing the superficial, because that’s all there is: Marty’s one-liners. How he charmed his way into some pussy from an older movie star because of his aura. How, with the cards stacked against him, he set out to win and then he did because winners win no matter what they have to do to win because he’s a winner and he was born that way. 

 

This is Proud Boys filmmaking. There are (alleged) Proud Boys initiation rituals where groups of men strip each other down and play more intricate forms of soggy biscuit, paddle each other (like in the film), and degrade one another as a means to show allegiance. There is no explanation as to why, they just do it, because…boys. Fraternity (not to mention univertisty-level fraternities and high school boys sports teams) is based on this kind of unexplained violence it seems, and it’s something that’s supposed to happen under cover of darkness, so it may give you a secret drive, or hustler’s mentality that only brothers can understand. And that’s real! I would LOVE to see movie about that, not just showing me images of the same cruelty I already know to be true, or dogwhistling to men’s basest instincts to battle-cry “I’m him! I’m him!” pounding on their chests like a bunch of idiots. This is what the state of filmmaking feels like to me. 

 

Me on the train home after hating the movie

I think it’s dangerous when people only write things for attention. To some degree writing is meant for that, but it’s meant to serve a greater purpose which is to convey a point of view, and to communicate with others more than to tell others. Movies work the same way, and it feels like we’re seeing movies that, yes, show versus tell (as in they aren’t overly didactic to a point or theme; Gaby calls this Linklater-ing which I adopted from her in college because we hate being handed an idea as if we’re stupid); but what do these movies show us beyond a slog of images cut together at a pace best described as entertaining, worst understood as just a montage of events with no emotion, no consequence, no believability? The possibility that an idea could exist that is critical of masculinity, aware of Jewish mysticism (why is it that the tweets about this movie are more interesting than the actual movie itself?), somewhat reverent of the fact that ego only inspires increasingly melodramatic situations with fruitless payoffs, is not an idea. It’s an overblown slideshow that puts the legwork on the audience to assume the two and a half hours you just watched must matter simply because it was made. That is not emotional, it does not make me want to go see a movie. It actually makes me lose a bit of hope. 

 

On this New Year’s Eve, I am locating hope elsewhere. In the abundance of love that has both entered and grown in my life over the last year, in the wonderful opportunities I have been given and have been able to make for myself, in the truly crippling bouts of sadness and madness that taught me how to write fiction. All my witty one liners, jokes, and shallow abuses of marginal power, like Marty Mauser’s in MS, weren’t indicative of character development, they were an elaborate ego defense. And who wants to watch a movie that lauds ego defense as a somehow noble, stoic, steadfast approach to an intrepid guy “hustling” his way to the top? Well, men. A sad state of affairs.