How Marty Supreme Unites Marginalized Groups Against Capitalism

After an intense viral marketing campaign, Marty Supreme, the latest film by acclaimed director Josh Safdie, was released on Christmas Day.

The sports thriller is centered around Marty Mauser, played by Timothée Chalamet, a young New Yorker who is chasing the glory of being the world’s greatest table tennis player. 

Mauser is a typical Safdie protagonist—a man who doesn’t care what he has to do or who he hurts to reach the top of the social ladder. Safdie tends to write deeply-flawed characters, not always expecting the audience to get behind them.

But this time, he wants the viewers to root for Mauser. The nail-biting table tennis matches portray Mauser’s victories as triumphant and his losses as devastating. That commitment to Mauser’s perspective has sparked conversation about the value of having an unlikeable main character. 

Critics of Marty Supreme say they can’t root for a selfish man who takes advantage of everyone.

Defenders of the movie believe that because Mauser changes his attitude about the people he interacts with, he is a compelling character.

Both arguments are flawed because they ignore the class and race dynamics that are central to the film’s themes.  

Marty Supreme is about an impoverished, Jewish young man just several years after the end of World War II. Much like the Irish and Italian Americans in the 19th to early 20th centuries, Jewish Americans were still seen as racially inferior to ‘true whites’ before World War II.

It was only after the world learned of the horrors of the Holocaust that Jewish Americans started to fully integrate into ‘white society’. 

This film is very conscious of its timeframe, contrasting Mauser’s socioeconomic status with that of his Jewish American girlfriend, Rachel Mizler, his black American best friend, Wally, and his Japanese arch-rival, Koto Endo. 

We see scenes where Mauser puts the first two characters in danger although he does not realize it.

In the film, Mauser and Wally run a scam on some young white men, but it quickly turns dangerous when the men get violent and chase them to a closed gas station.

The men attempt to break into their car while hurling racial slurs at Wally and threatening to harm the duo. This incident incites a much more intense, racialized fear in Wally than it does for Mauser, who takes far too long to realize his friend’s fear. 

There are many scenes like this that show the difference between what Mauser’s friends need to survive, as opposed to him. 

None of them are ‘good people’. They scam their way through life and harm others, but the film doesn’t pit them against each other or villainize them. 

The film suggests that the characters’ conditions force them to do these things to survive, and the antagonists’ shoes are filled by the rich people who hold the power of opportunity in their hands but are too selfish to give it.

Mauser believes he can convince one of the affluent people to give him a one-way ticket to riches, but, as he finds over and over again, they only care about poor people like him when they serve as entertainment. 

He learns that lesson when he’s made to put on a humiliating show in a final match against his rival, Endo, who Mauser realizes is an unlucky kid who learned to love something and chose to focus on that rather than the hardships. 

Marty Supreme shows you that finding joy in the simple things and the people you love is the only way to live a happy life—not capitulating to rich people who just want to see the people below them dance for their entertainment.