a grand unified theory on the american supreme

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When I stumbled out of Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme, my body felt like a jellyfish, all nerve endings and no joints. My ears rang as if I’d just spent hours in front of a Marshall stack. I’m not a Timothée Chalamet stan, but I am an occasional Timothée Chalamet enjoyer and it is true, he does something singular here. He’s all petulant ego and manic ambition, which makes you want to both applaud and shove him into traffic. It’s exhilarating, it’s kinetic.

**Marty Supreme spoiler in the next two paragraphs**

There’s a scene midway through where Rachel—Marty’s childhood friend, sometime lover, the woman pregnant with what is almost certainly his child—gets shot during a botched attempt to steal money from a dead gangster’s pocket, and Marty rushes her to the hospital where she’s bleeding from a gunshot wound while simultaneously going into premature labor. Despite her yelling at him to stay with her while she’s in the hallway he walks out of the hospital to catch his flight to Tokyo for a ping pong exhibition match.

The film doesn’t soften this choice with a lingering shot on him looking conflicted, it just gives you a man refusing to let anything get in the way of his paddle, of performing a cold, calculating operation of what matters more and what needs to be sacrificed. When he eventually comes back after the match having hitched a ride home with the American soldiers who watched him play, he tells Rachel he loves her for the first time in the entire movie, then goes to see the baby through the nursery glass and breaks down completely, then sobs in a way that suggests something in him has finally cracked open.

**Spoiler ends here**

I went home and did what I always do when a movie stays with me: I went looking for the discourse. The discourse was, to put it mildly, an absolute disaster. Some saw it as a savage parody of American narcissism in its truest form; others found themselves aching for Marty, swallowed by the dream machine which was rendering him into a perfect object of aspirational fantasy.

My take was somewhere inbetween: the fact that he comes back doesn’t negate the fact that he left, nor does it undo the math he did in that hospital corridor when he decided his shot at being Supreme was worth more than being there while the mother of his child might bleed out from wounds incurred helping him steal money for his athletic career.

As I watched my next-seat-neighbor wash the movie out of his eyes with a Gatorade Zero, Chazelle’s Whiplash and Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood immediately sprung into mind. It was at this moment that I realized, yes, I was thinking about Marty, but I was also seeing Andrew Neiman in Whiplash with his hands shredded and bleeding onto a snare drum. I was also seeing Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood collapsed in an oversized bowling alley yelling that he was finished into the space of his accumulated wealth.

Why did these three men—a mid-century ping-pong player, a contemporary jazz student, a turn-of-the-century oil baron—suddenly feel like kindred spirits?

This proposition might seem ridiculous at first. Their eras are too different. Their genres are too divergent. But the more I tried to compartmentalize them, the more they blurred into one horrifying composite: they perform the same surgical procedure.

So what if, and I’m genuinely asking here, the ping-pong paddle, the drumsticks, and the oil derrick are actually the same scalpel?

a grand unified theory on the american supreme