Hello and welcome back to On the Nose, the Jewish Currents podcast. I'm Arielle Angel, editor in chief of Jewish Currents, and I'll be your host for today. Today, we are going to be talking about Marty Supreme, the blockbuster that came out over Christmas, which I'm sure many of you saw on Christmas. When Uncut Gems came out, we did a roundtable that actually ended up being included in the Criterion Collection Blu-ray of the film, talking about the Jewish elements and, by some accounts—and I think we're going to talk about it—this is another Jewish film from Safdie. It's a mid-century period piece about Marty Mauser, a ping pong player, table tennis player, played by Timothee Chalamet, and his—well, I guess what it really is about is his battle to get to the world championships in Tokyo despite many setbacks, most of them financial and most of them of his own making. In the course of his quest, he gets entangled with a wealthy couple made up of a businessman, Milton Rockwell, and his wife, Kay Stone, who was a famous actress in the ’30s. But really, it's just about Marty and Marty's enormous confidence, hubris, narcissism, and entitlement as he strives to make it—to be the world champion table tennis player.
[Clip from Marty Supreme trailer]
Timothy Chalamet:I have a purpose.
Gwyneth Paltrow:Okay. Let me ask you something. Do you make money at this little table tennis thing?
TC:Not yet.
GP:Do you have a job?
TC:No.
GP:How do you live?
TC:Well, I live with the confidence that if I believe in myself, the money will follow.
GP:And what do you plan to do if this whole dream of yours doesn't work out?
TC:That doesn't even enter my consciousness.
GP:Maybe it should.
Larry Sloman:I can't support your mother for the rest of your life.
TC:You're not gonna have to. Because I’m going to step up. I'm going to step up in a way you can't even imagine.
Kevin O’Leary:Marty, I'm gonna make an offer.
TC:I gotta do it completely on my own. It’s every man for himself where I come from. That's just how I grew up.
AA:Joining me on the podcast is contributing writer Mitch Abidor, who you probably know from the Shabbat reading list, very prolific recommender at Jewish Currents. Hi Mitch.
Mitch Abidor:Hey, guys.
AA:Senior editor Nathan Goldman.
Nathan Goldman:Hi.
AA:And contributing editor Dave Klion.
David Klion:Hi, everyone.
AA:So I want to start with the same question that we started with when we talked about Uncut Gems, which is basically: Does Marty have to be a Jewish character? Or what does it mean that he is? I mean, when we talked about Uncut Gems, we came around to a few different answers to this question and landed on Howard Ratner as a Fagan figure. But with Chalamet and Marty, I really am not sure at all.
NG:Yeah. So I would start by saying, I think in some ways—similarly to Howard Ratner and Uncut Gems—there is a particular white ethnic structure to the way the movie is organized, in some ways all the more so because, whereas that movie was set contemporarily, this one is set in the ’50s—obviously at a very different moment of racialization for Jews and for other white ethnics. And so, I guess I'd start by saying that I think the film is motored by his monomaniacal desperation for success, and there is a quality to what I think it's doing that does speak to a particular post-war, white ethnic American experience, in terms of grappling with the American milieu and with success in assimilation. I think that's where some of its Jewishness lies. I think there's a version of that you could do with other minorities, and I think the way in which it makes a case for the particular Jewishness of it—or that I would want to make a case for how it's effective—has to do with the way that I think the film is interested in engaging with Jewish self-mythologies. The two things that come to mind are, one, what it's thinking about with respect to the Holocaust—which we should talk about because it's weird—and also this moment where he is in Egypt, and chisels a little piece off the pyramids, and then, when he comes home, gives it to his mom and says: We built this. Which is the maybe most explicit engagement with Jewish mythologies. But I'll leave it there for someone else to pick up what they're thinking.
MA:Yeah. As I've been telling everybody—and I think I even told a couple of you guys—that for me, the film is about a Jew who's a scumbag, and he's not enough of a Jew and not enough of a scumbag for it to work. Richard Brody in the New Yorker said that this was Uncut Gems with a happy ending—an unearned happy ending that we can get to at some other point. But there's so many things wrong with this film that I frankly don't even know where to start. And Nathan, about a Jew driven by the urge and the need for success—another inspiration for this character and how a Jewish scumbag should be portrayed is What Makes Sammy Run? Because Sammy Glick is the model. In fact, he lives in the same neighborhood. He's from the Lower East Side, and everything that Sammy Glick does, just as in Uncut Gems, is saturated with Jewishness. And not like in “I'm wearing tefillin, and I'm davening” or anything, but it's a form of New York Jewishness that's completely absent from this film. What needs to be there for this to have really any Jewish content is some Jewish something that we feel within the Chalamet character. All the secondary characters have impeccable New York accents. This is the Lower East Side in 1952. I didn't come from the Lower East Side; I come from Brownsville—I know what these people sounded like. All the secondary characters sound right, but Chalamet, if he didn't make these couple of remarks specifically says he's a Jew, there's really nothing about him. So he ends up just being somebody who's a scumbag who's not even willing to take that to the ultimate degree. Although I will say, Nathan, his quest for success is what drives him, but not in a scumbaggy enough way for my taste.
AA:Yeah. I would say my whole critique of this movie comes down to that, Mitch. I'm with you. Like, where's the fucking accent, Chalamet? Like, you cannot play this role straight. I mean, I enjoyed his performance, but it made me wonder—and I know you guys think that there might be some intentional anachronistic elements, and I'm down to talk about that—but if I had to really guess what was going on, Chalamet seemed cheesy doing the accent. He couldn't pull it off, and so it fell out. That's really the only way I can see what happened here. I mean, Fran Drescher is so nasal. She's even more nasal than nasal Fran Drescher; it's amazing. It's like art, what she's doing with her voice. And Odessa Azion is pretty good. Everybody is perfect, and he just doesn't even try.
DK:Well, okay, so I'm pro this movie, first of all, for the most part, although I think it goes on a little too long and is a bit of a shaggy dog story. But generally, I liked it, and I want to give a hat tip to Eric Baker, Jewish Currents contributor, friend of ours, who—I'm stealing some insights from his review but with my own gloss on them, hopefully. So, on the anachronistic point with the accent: Eric, basically, he sees it as being meaningful that this movie transcends time. It takes place during the ’50s, but a lot of the soundtrack choices are from the ’80s. Listeners can't see this, but Mitch is shaking his head strenuously right now. But it has Timothee Chalamet, the quintessential Zoomer actor, in the starring role, and it has him in a role that has some meta commentary on his own fame and his own persona, and Gwyneth Paltrow in a role that likewise has some meta commentary on her persona, being an over-the-hill actress with a certain reputation. The movie does not feel like a strictly realistic presentation of 1950s America, or Japan, or the world. It is commenting on them, but it is commenting on them from the vantage of the ’80s, which I guess is when the Safdies were kids, and of the 2020s. The key moment that I think a lot of people, including Eric and including myself, that really jumped out at us was actually not in the original script but I think ties the whole thing thematically together, which is when Kevin O’Leary's character in the penultimate sequence—the exhibition ping pong match in Tokyo—his character, Milton, who's a corporate tycoon gentile, has a pen company and he's been Marty's antagonist for this whole movie. He says:
Kevin O’Leary:Let me explain to you. I was born in 1601. I'm a vampire. I've been around for forever. I've met many Marty Mausers over the centuries. Some of them crossed me, some weren't straight, they weren't honest. And those are the ones that are still here. You go out and win that game, you're going to be here forever, too. You'll never be happy. You will never be happy.
DK:So that thing about being a vampire from 1601, I think what he's actually getting at there—and what gives the movie some wider stakes than we've discussed so far, while still keeping it very Jewish, I do think it is essential that Marty be Jewish—what he's saying there, I think, is that he represents capital, in the almost classic Marx imagining of it. You know, capital is this like giant, world-transforming force that's been around since the early modern era. Basically, when capitalism becomes this globe-altering force. And meanwhile, you've got Marty, who works in a shoe store, which is a perfect profession for a mid-century Lower East Side Jew, right? Petit bourgeois. He's being offered a route to managing a little shop, which he has absolutely no interest in doing. That's the conventional path cut out for someone like him in 1952: a tiny little petty bourgeois cog in the machine that is capitalism. But this is post-war America. It's on top of the world. It has beaten Germany and Japan, which is not irrelevant. Japan is basically an occupied country that's being opened up to American markets, and Milton is directly involved in doing that. And Marty has the blinding ambition of a mid-century Jewish guy who sees opportunities to get—in his case, by becoming an international ping pong champion, and really by representing the United States, which is still a pretty gutsy thing for a Jewish guy to want to do in 1952.
DK:And you know, what I think Milton is saying in this speech is: You might have just pulled one over me because you're a hustler, because that's what you do—and what Marty does throughout the movie is scam people, cheat people, take advantage of people, pull one over them, classic Jewish hustler—but ultimately, you'll never beat me. I am the one who's really in power here. I am the machine. You're not going to get what you want. You'll never be happy. Which then, I think, extends an interesting level of pathos we can talk about over the final scene when he sees his baby and what's really going through his head there, which I have complicated thoughts about. But that's how I see it, and while I suppose he could be another type of white ethnic—he could be an Italian or something—I don't think it would play quite the same way. I think that we know, from the vantage of now, that Jews are going to make it in capitalism. They are going to rise to the commanding heights of capital over the 50 or so years following this movie. The question is: Will it make any of us happy?
MA:Well, let me just address the issue of the anachronism. The problem with it is that it's meaningless anachronism. People are using it as an excuse for the errors in the film. The counterexample is Sophia Coppola's film about Marie Antoinette, which—she was trying to make a point, and it was an interesting point whether it's valid or not. You know, historians could argue it, but it worked in this film because it made perfect sense. In this case, you guys have no idea how accurate the shoe store scene was. None. Up to and including the Buster Brown sign hanging at the back of it. It was almost documentary in so many ways, but flawed documentary. When he's running through the Lower East Side, we see pushcarts. The film is 1952; they were banned in 1938. They were gone from the streets of Manhattan anyway, because they did exist in Brooklyn by 1941. So you can't both look for realism and anachronism in the same shot. It just doesn't work. And again, he doesn't come across as a Jew, even though it's been pointed out he's half Jewish in real life. And on the halachic side, he's a Jew.
AA:Since when do you care about the halachic side?
MA:Listen, you see how accommodating I am to Jewish Currents? But any event, yes, there is the scene, “We built this” and everything, but I don't know that we're supposed to take any of that stuff seriously with him. So he doesn't present as a Jew, but even though he doesn't present as a Jew, he's viewed as a Jew. And there's another way to look at it as a Sartrean film, god help me, because the Jew is the Jew in the eyes of the other—in the eyes of the antisemite. Because when he goes to recover the dog, and the guy calls him a kike or whatever he calls him.
AA:Yeah, I think that's such a great point. I think one of the other places where he's seen as a Jew—not just in these antisemitic moments with Rockwell, which we should talk about, when he says to the Auschwitz surviving ping pong player, “My kid was killed liberating you,” and he's like, “Wasn't that the Soviets?” Chalamet says—but the other place he is being seen as a Jew is with the press. He's like, “I'm Hitler's worst nightmare, I'm on top” thing. And they print—later on, when Gwyneth Paltrow's character, he tells her to look at the Daily Mail or whatever, and the title is “The Chosen One” or whatever—he's selling this brand as an up-and-comer, like a rising-from-the-ashes figure. He's selling the story of it; he's marketing himself as a Jew, maybe even more than he is one, and maybe that's something also that's going on in this movie as a whole. Like it's being marketed as like a Jewish movie.
NG:I don't disagree with that. I think it's self-aware about that. And it's a hard thing because I think there are certain things that just basically Mitch and Arielle are—it didn't work for them, and so they're reading it one way, and it worked on an affective level for me and Dave, and so we are reading it a different way.
AA:And just to say, I also liked it. I really enjoyed it while I was watching it. But then the farther I got from the theater, the more it soured.
NG:Yeah. I think that moment with the reporters is really interesting because I agree with you, Arielle, that it does show him gripping onto this narrative, and he does seem to want to put himself forward in that way, in a narcissistic, brand-building way, in a way that I think is also interestingly tied up with his American-ness. He's becoming American by virtue of the story of his Jewishness. He's becoming American in the sense of like, he's in these championships representing America, he wears an American flag alongside his Magen David. And I do think it's notable, by the way that he never thinks to pawn that.
AA:May not be worth anything.
NG:It may not be worth anything, like Gwyneth Paltrow's costume jewelry. But that scene with the reporter is interesting to me too because it's like one of the times he says the word Jewish. The exact thing he said is—he's talking about Kletzki, who's a ping pong opponent who was in Auschwitz, and he says:
TC:I'm gonna do to Kletzki what Auschwitz couldn't. Okay? I'm gonna finish the job.
Reporter:Jesus Christ.
Reporter:That’s a little strong, mate.
TC:It's all right, I'm Jewish, I could say that. In fact, if you think about it, I'm like Hitler's worst nightmare.
Reporter:And why is that?
TC:Look at me. I'm here. I did it. I'm on top. I'm the ultimate product of Hitler's defeat. Yeah, write that down. That was good. Write that down.
NG:That does feel like a weirdly modern exchange. Like: It's okay. I can say it, I’m Jewish. So, I think that supports the point Mitch and Arielle are making. At the same time, I do want to distinguish between unintentional anachronism and intentional anachronism. I don't want to support the point with just a reference to intentionality, but I did listen, on the Big Picture podcast, Sean Fennessey did an interview with Josh Safdie, where he did talk about the way he was interested in getting exacting period detail everywhere throughout the milieu—which, as Mitch is pointing out, seems like there are some errors—in a way that would free some of the central performances to not have to be so clearly literal or something. He didn't talk about how he was thinking about it in respect to Jewishness. I don't know if he was at all. But I think the Kevin O’Leary role is also important, in the way in which it's this weird winking meta thing. Because he's this Shark Tank guy; he's not an actor. He just literally is this rapacious, capitalist figure of modernity who is superimposed upon this film. I do think there is just an energy in some of those central performances—I guess, mainly Timothee Chalamet's, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Kevin O’Leary’s—that feel to me like they do have an energy, that is standing out from the backdrop of the film or something, that makes me feel that it's like more knowing about what it's doing with some of these weird, mythic pastiches.
DK:I never took the movie to be strictly realistic. I mean, there is a fantastical quality to just a lot of the proceedings. The bathtub falling through and the hijinks in New Jersey. But none of this bothered me, both because I was entertained, but also because I thought the movie was trying to make some larger meta, or knowing, or symbolic point. I thought the ’80s cues were a very strong indicator of that. With the Auschwitz sequence and with Bela Kletzki —this Czech Jewish ping pong champion who survived Auschwitz—I think this sequence, as much as anything else, supports that. Yes, it has to be a Jewish movie and also a commentary about where our generation—sorry to Mitch—of American, more assimilated Jews, that includes the Safdies and includes Timothee Chalamet, might fit into this. So to Marty, the fact that Kletzki was in Auschwitz is basically part of his shtick, and a way to brag, and a way to inflate himself as the chosen one and to get one over on Milton the capitalist. But then, we get this amazing follow-up to it, where Kletzki recounts his own story, which also does not feel strictly realistic. It feels like a fable, like so much in the movie does. The Kletzki story is basically that because he was a ping pong champion and the commandant at Auschwitz or whatever recognized him from before the war and admired his talent, he got special treatment. He was working on German munitions in the woods outside Auschwitz during the war, and he discovers this beehive and all this honey, and covers his chest with honey, and then all his fellow Auschwitz inmates lick it off his body. It's this incredible, mystical, beautiful, but also cringe-inducing scene. It's really one of the most memorable things I've seen in a movie recently. The first thoughts that went through my head are like: Oh, God, is this in bad taste? Is it actually in beautiful taste? Is it weirdly sexual? Whatever. All these thoughts cross my mind, but my ultimate takeaway in of the larger movie is: Oh, Kletzki was doing something genuinely altruistic here. The munitions were about surviving, but he goes and he sticks his hand in a beehive, which is an inherently unpleasant and dangerous thing to do.
AA:The script notes that like he's being stung but that he's bearing the stings.
DK:At first, when he's doing it, you think it's so he can get honey. Maybe he's willing to endure some bee stings to get the honey. But no, it's to share the honey on his body with his fellow prisoners. And there's something almost maternal about it. They're like feasting off his bare breast. It's a really memorable and powerful thing, and it is the exact opposite of how Marty comports himself throughout the entire movie. To Marty, the American-born first or second-generation Jew—the hustler, the guy trying to get ahead and trying to conquer American capitalism at its height and make it his own—to him, Auschwitz is this like, fun metaphor about his rise that really has nothing to do with him at all, despite whatever vestigial antisemitism is there in 1950s America. To Kletzki, it's this incredibly stark experience and this backdrop for one of the film's only depictions of pure self-sacrificing altruism, and kindness, and generosity. And I just felt like hangs over all the proceedings—that Marty can barely be there for the mother of his child until the end.
AA:I read that scene also in a way that was a little bit more charitable to Marty, actually. Well, first of all, I think that it would have to be an anachronism. Like, it's very, very hard to imagine that not 10 years out of Auschwitz, Marty would be so cavalier, saying he was gonna finish the job or whatever. It's just like, that's now. That's Timothee Chalamet as a Gen Zer or whatever. But I do think that it's very interesting when Chalamet—I keep calling him that because that's who he is. He's Chalamet. He's not fucking Marty Supreme. He's just being Timothee Chalamet. But when he actually prompts Kletzki to tell this story is when Rockwell's being antisemitic, basically. I saw it as an opportunity to shame Rockwell. It’s a crazy story, but it's also a story that is both base and grotesque and beautiful and, as you said, altruistic all at the same time. It's almost like: What the fuck do you know about anything?
DK:But what the fuck does Chalamet know either? It's Kletzki’s story. For Chalamet, it's just one other little trick he can pull.
AA:But he pulls it to get the upper hand in that conversation, in the sense of changing the narrative of the conversation.
NG:I'm compelled by that reading, too. I do think it's him instrumentally drawing on this reservoir of profound Jewish experience from his friend, who has this modern Jewish myth that's happened to him, whereas Marty has nothing. I think that can be something that is highlighting, in a way, the comparative emptiness of Marty's Jewishness. It's also an expression of his Jewishness, in that he expresses his Jewishness through trying to one-up this guy. So he's using his friend-nemesis’s more certifiably meaningful Jewish experience of near death and Nazi genocide as a means of his own Jewishness, which is an attempt at American assimilation and upper mobility. It still seems like the case that he's, in some sense, authentically offended by the remark about the Americans having liberated Auschwitz, which I think shows that he has an interestingly troubled relationship to what he's up to, in terms of the assimilation, which I think is clearly the frame of his striving. I think, also, of the way that the film opens—after he has sex with Rachel, and then there's that opening credit scene of the sperm fertilizing an egg, and then the egg turns into a ping pong ball which says, “Marty Supreme: Made in America.” It's clear that this is his route to American-ness. But he still does have some feeling of a distance from that American narrative, such that when he has someone saying, “Hey, my son died liberating you guys,” his initial impulse is to be like, “Well, fuck you.”
AA:Well, by the way, really quickly, just to compare the Jewishness of Uncut Gems to the Jewishness of Marty Supreme. That beginning scene with the sperm versus Howard Ratner's colonoscopy—I'm going colonoscopy all the way.
MA:You know, something we haven't talked about at all is—and it's something that's a tendency in all the Safdie stuff—is this affection for the Rich Cohen school of tough Jews. For people born in the ’30s and stuff, tough guy-ness was really their way out of the Jewish ghetto. Tough guys and boxers and stuff were really the image, so Marty tries to embody that. Because he is like a no-goodnik, also, with the way he treats women—all his dealings with Rachel, and going to the pawn shop, and just his general crookedness.
AA:Listen, not forget the dog. I really had a hard time watching that. Like, how could he not take that dog to the vet?
MA:Right. So, I mean, what makes him so weird is: He's a tough Jew ping pong player.
DK:But Mitch, I want to say, I guess I read Marty the whole time—and I've noticed this a lot with online reactions to the movie, both good and bad—I took a very dim view of Marty. I mean, he's obviously very charismatic, and fun, and fun to watch, but I saw him—as I saw Howard Ratner in Uncut Gems—as an antihero throughout, as someone who pretty much always makes the wrong decision and who exists as a loving but critical commentary on some unseemly aspects of the American Jewish story, including the tough guy thin—this aspiration for masculinity and toughness in the mid-century as a way to assert Americanness. All of this was on my mind, and it led to a consistently uncharitable view of Marty, where I basically don't have a lot of sympathy for him. Like, oh, your terrible burden is that you might have to manage a small business instead of being employed in it? But actually, you find a way out of that and manage to chase at least some of your dreams? And most of your problems are of your own making? Like, yeah, he does encounter antisemitism and people just not taking him seriously at various points throughout the movie, but I compared that to what Kletzki was going through—and I compared to knowing what the likely fate of a Jewish guy of his generation in post-war New York is—and I just don't see him as fundamentally the underdog that I think he sees himself and that a lot of the audience is tempted to see him. I see him—I hate to use this term, I know how cringe it is now—but as a relatively privileged person, including—and I think this is all in the text—vis-à-vis his Black accomplice, whose cab gets busted up through his schemes.
DK:I mean, the one time when we see white supremacist violence in this movie when this gang is attacking him and his Black co-conspirator—not to justify them in their racism and antisemitism and violence, but these guys just conned them. They very much created the situation in which this is happening. And then, even within that situation, Marty is pulling one over on his Black accomplice, who is nowhere close to representing America on the world stage. And the main woman in his life, also a Jew—the Odessa A-Zion character—he's getting her knocked up in pre-legal abortion America. He screws her over many times, even though she's a budding con artist herself, in that wonderful black-eye reveal scene. But you know, I see him as someone who is really trying to make it as a white man in capitalist America, and he almost does it. And it's Kevin O’Leary at the end telling him: No, there's still limits, and you'll pull one over, and you'll survive, but you'll never be happy. But even there, we see some of that post-war dream being realized because not only does he get the one quick victory over his Japanese opponent and whatever bragging rights go there, but even as Kevin O’Leary is furious at how he broke the rules of the contract, all the white, all-American GIs in the audience are clapping for Marty. Like he has one little victory here, which is that he does, for this brief fleeting moment, get to represent America against its external enemies and gets to be an American hero in this narrow context. I feel like the movie is suggesting those victories are there, and future victories are there, and you have a kid—there's going to be more of you, and your story in America is not over. But ultimately, you're never going to be happy. You're never going to get what you want.
AA:I do not see that speech as the linchpin of the movie at all, just for what it's worth, and I'm having trouble seeing it as that. I mean, the “never going to be happy”—is that capitalism, or is that Marty? I see more in the speech that he gives to Rachel when they get kicked out of his friend Dion's house, where he's just like: I have a purpose. That puts me at a disadvantage because I have to do something. Like, I have to realize this thing. And the recognition that he's too chaotic to even make this very basic thing happen—none of this would have happened if he didn't go to the Ritz at the beginning, you know? But one other thing that I want to say, and then I want to switch tracks, is the one gangster that we do get, he is a Jewish gangster. The guy with the dog.
NG:Is he Jewish?.
AA:He calls him a mensch.
NG:His name is Ezra Mishkin. I mean, Abel Ferrara is not Jewish.
MA:That goes back to our initial point because, frankly—much of a cinephile as I am, I wasn't aware that was Abel Ferrara—but he wasn't talking Jewish. Abel Ferrara's accent was Italian New Yorker, so I was totally confused. Because I said: Okay, everything else has been right in the secondary characters. Why is he an Italian? And when he says “mensch,” I go: Wait a second, something's off here. And this goes back to what you also said at the beginning, Arielle. What Josh Safdie did here was—I think you're right; he couldn't do the accent because the subtleties of the accent are not all that easy, to make sure you sound like a Jew and not an Italian. Granted, there's only going to be like, 40 of us in the audience who are going to notice that, but even so, Josh went for box office over veracity. Michael Rapoport is who should have played that role.
AA:God forbid.
MA:Nevertheless, Michael Rapaport sounds like, and moves like, and is a prick like Marty was supposed to be. But I think what we also have to talk about, though, is what Dave keeps coming up with, is the redemption. Or is it redemption at the end? You know, when he's crying with a baby and all that. He's moved. I mean, this is his kid, and now he's moved on to another phase in his life. He succeeded in something. He succeeded in having a kid. I mean, that was how I read it, but I thought it was an unearned happy ending, to go back to what Richard Brody had to say about it. And that's why I think that next to Uncut Gems, this film is really a failure.
DK:I have such a different read on it. I do not see it as a redemption, and I do not see it as a happy ending, though I don't see it as entirely punishing or tragic. I mean, obviously, spoiler: Howard Ratner dies at the end of Uncut Gems as a result of the many poor decisions he's made. So that movie is tighter in a lot of ways. It's also incredibly stressful to watch, although it's natural to want to compare them and contrast them— same filmmakers, some of the same themes—I do think they're very different movies with very different tones and objectives. But as far as the baby scene at the end, I mean, first of all, to see this as a great accomplishment—he hasn't even begun to do any fathering yet. The accomplishment is that he inadvertently got someone knocked up while she was cheating on her husband in the backroom with him. I mean, literally, any guy can do that. That's not an accomplishment. The fact that the baby was born safely and is beautiful is likewise not his accomplishment. And the fact that he was off playing ping pong while it was happening is not to his credit at all. He hasn't done anything yet. I mean, if you want to call it unearned, that's only if you understand it as a happy ending, which I don't necessarily. If you see it as: Well, despite everything, you did manage to conceive a child, and it's making you feel something. He hasn't done a single thing yet, at the end of the movie, that would be to his credit.
MA:But there is, Dave. There is, Dave. He didn't cave at the ping pong tournament.
DK:Yeah. He got one little moral victory.
MA:It's a turnaround, though.
DK:It's a little moment of excitement or redemption for him, but ultimately, he's not gonna be a world champion. He has to go back to New York; now, he has to be a dad. I was trying to think: What is probably going through Marty's head in that last scene? So some of it, the optimistic read is: Wow, I've created life, and it's so beautiful, and it's my baby, and I'm in love.
AA:Boring.
DK:I believe that's in the mix, and some things that I think Josh Safdie has said extra-textually about parenthood and that scene suggests that that's certainly part of what's going on. But mixed in with it, I think unmistakably, has to be a recognition of who he's been. Maybe this is like, if there's any redemption, it's in this moment of self-recognition—that he's done nothing altruistic or generous in his life, literally up to this moment. The beauty he's feeling now damns him as a man at how misspent his life has been to date. He did not, despite his little moral victory in winning the improvised non-exhibition match, he did not succeed. He did not make it to the championships. He did not become world famous. He did not win prize money. He just got this one little last successful gig and successful game. He got put in his place by O’Leary in that speech I keep referencing. And all of us, whether we're Jews or just Americans or people who are trying to succeed in capitalist America, I think the movie is rubbing our noses in it at the end—that what will always ultimately matter is family, love, babies, and the procreation of the species, but I don't think they mean that in a “oh, forget money, just be happy you have a kid” kind of way. I think it's more like there's real pain and tragedy in realizing, as you see this innocent life, yet to be warped by the world, yet to be warped by America and capitalism and everything, and you think just how useless your life has been to date.
MA:Do you think he had that much insight?
AA:I just like—my eyes glazed over with the baby. I was just like: Oh, now okay. Baby crying? Like really? Okay.
DK:I'm somewhat projecting as someone who had a kid three years ago. It is a moment where you have to take stock of who you've been to date, and it can be very painful.
AA:I'm totally sure of that. And like, there are plenty of people who have kids—and I'm projecting my own shit as someone who's not going to procreate—but there's plenty of people who procreated who had an external purpose that was not their children. And Marty Supreme is one of those people. Marty Mouser is a person for whom the purpose is not the child, and there's no indication that that's going to change now that the kid is there. There's every indication that it's not going to change. And so, ending with this moment seems quite strange. And also, the fact that it's not undercut seems quite strange because there is literally no way that this guy now believes that everything that he's been working toward is in question. I mean, on a certain level, he may have just hit the height of what he could possibly do. You may have Rockwell going after him now. Definitely, the league is not interested in him for various reasons. So he may not ever be able to go back to this thing that has been his life's work, but he's certainly not gonna retreat from that into parenthood.
DK:Knowing Marty, I don't think that it'll be quite so binary. I think in that moment, he has decided he is going to attempt to be a parent to this kid. I think he's going to be a very imperfect parent, to say the least, and one who's constantly tempted to try to succeed with—whether it's ping pong or some new set of scams. But I think the tragedy is understanding that whatever he does from now on, even if he totally abandons this family, he's going to have to own that too.
MA:Right. But I want to say, though, that it is undercut, Arielle. And this was—I have to say, for me, it was the final straw with this film. Because it was followed by what I thought was going to be a great insight. Because what happens is he's crying, and then all of a sudden, the only thing on the soundtrack is screaming babies. And I said: He's entered hell. And God bless Safdie for showing this. And then, Safdie undercuts his own chance at a final message. Nathan, what's the sappy song that plays over the end?
NG:“Everybody Wants to Rule the World” by Tears for Fears.
MA:Right. “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” which is a little bit on the nose, I think, which drowns out the screaming babies, which then takes us out of the hell that this could have ended up with, which I think would have been a realistic note because Marty is not somebody who's gonna be able to put up with screaming babies. Rachel calls him a narcissistic prick.
NG:Yeah, I also have gone back and forth with the ending. When I was watching it, part of what I was wondering, and then got away from this—and I've seen other people say this too, so I'm glad I'm not the only one who thought it—was like. I was trying to think—is it supposed to be clear that initially—does the baby look too much like Rachel's husband?
AA:I thought that too. I thought that too, that it was supposed to look like Ira because the baby's very blond.
NG:Yeah.
AA:And like, kind of pudgy, you know?
NG:Right. And I don't think that's what was intended. I think maybe that actor just looks sort of babyish, I don't know. But I was like: Is this just gonna end on a joke? That's just like he's been saying, “It's not my baby, it's not my baby,” and it's actually not once he wants it to be? So that interpretation passed through my mind. I do think there is plenty to support the sappy, redemptive thing. I think what Mitch is pointing out about the final needle drop is a good point. I think really important is what he says to Rachel before, because he rushes back and he says, “I'm not going anywhere,” or whatever. And so, I think a lot rests on how much you take him at his word. There is definitely a part of me that would prefer it give us more undercutting of that or some more irony. And I do like, by disposition or something, prefer the ending of Uncut Gems and its totalizing nihilism, or despair, or something. But the way I think I've come to read his sobbing and the fact that he doesn't say anything—I've come to read it not either as him breaking down thinking like, “Oh, what kind of person have I been?” or him breaking down thinking like, “I need to step up,” but just of a total, incoherent short-circuiting. It's the first time we see Marty stop in the film and just be in his body and in the world. For the rest of the film, he's basically just zipping through the world, getting one up on everybody. The way in which he inhabits himself most fully is when he's playing table tennis, and then, that is obviously this rapid motion, frenetic thing. And this is a moment when he just is stopped by the reality of something. And I think, to go back to the way I've been thinking about the role that myths play in this film—with both the myths of Jewishness, the myths of Americanness, the way in which the movie itself has this fable-like or mythic quality—I at least like the reading of it as a confrontation with reality. And that doesn't say anything about what's going to happen after. I do like that it leaves it open after. I can't tell if I'm trying to read too much into what I prefer, but certainly, the reading I prefer is one in which it's just a total breakdown of his whole way of being, and the question is like: Where will it go from there? And we don't know.
DK:I totally saw it that way, Nathan. I guess, rather than looking at it in terms of this read undercutting this read, I like the ambiguity. I like that everyone read their own different things into it, and I think that if there's one true thing I can say about confronting a newborn, it's all of these things at once. It's really beautiful. It's awe-inspiring. It's also hell. It's also screaming and realizing you'll never have the same freedom again. It is what you said: It's a confrontation with reality. It's not necessarily him being like: I suck and I should change my ways. It's more like the way he has continually bullshitted everyone all along is also him bullshitting himself all along, and it's this one moment when you're briefly unable to bullshit yourself. And then you go back to it. Then you adapt and learn how to live with it. But it's this moment when you're just confronted with the implacable facts about life.
MA:This all actually ties into what I said at the beginning about What Makes Sammy Run? And in this case, at the end—Nathan, you and Dave's reading there—it's what makes Sammy briefly stop running.
AA:Yeah, but that's too easy for me.
MA:Oh, yeah, right, right.
AA:You can't just introduce a baby and be like: It's a baby. Now everything—I don't know. It's too heavy a symbol. Like, I don't know. Whatever, fine, I'll go with it. I don't care. At that point, I was just like: All right, let's get to the Chinese food.
NG:For what it's worth, our colleague Mari Cohen wrote a bit about this in a Shabbat rec a while ago. I'll scrounge it up so we can link it. But about a tendency in a lot of contemporary millennial fiction to end with a baby.
AA:Like Girls.
NG:Yeah. Especially as millennials are reaching the age that we are, and many of us are having kids, this kind of meaning-making through the introduction of a baby. There is something that's, to me, just kind of like, eyeroll, and I say that as someone, also, who has recently had kids. But one thing I was trying to think about and don't have an answer for at all is if or whether this thread of the conclusion—but also the whole container of the movie—being the pregnancy—what, if anything, this has to do with his Jewishness. Because of course, one of the most important key, undergirding myths and ideological apparatuses of American Jewishness is this question of continuity, of biological continuity. I don't know if the movie has anything to say about that.
AA:I don't think it does. But I do think that the question leads me into what was going to be my last question, which is: What are the Safdies doing with all this Jewish shit? Basically, I think we have to read Uncut Gems and Marty Supreme together, and I think I think what was interesting about Uncut Gems is that it was trying to make a Jewish film—I think, pretty self-consciously—at a moment where Jewishness, especially before the genocide—I think Jewishness has new meanings post the genocide—but particularly in this period, what was it, 2019. I mean, this is peak Jewish meaninglessness in contemporary life. It's very hard to know what Jewishness might mean narratively in that moment, and yet, they managed to give us a character, as we said, that had these shades of Shylock, shades of Fagan, still strivery but totally believable and also totally within a certain milieu: Ashkenazi guy working in the Diamond District with a family that seems like more wealthy Syrian Jews who don't often intermarry. I mean there's a lot going on that feels extremely specific about what's going on there.
AA:And somehow, I feel like we have this Marty Supreme situation where we have, actually, a nostalgia setting for a moment where Jewishness really did mean this striver thing, and yet, there's almost no specificity within the milieu at all. I wanted to bring in a text that someone on Twitter—who doesn't use their actual name, so I'm sorry to not give you credit—but quoting Vivian Gornick talking about midcentury Jewish literature building world-class literature out of the immigrant experience. I'm quoting here: “That's the only thing that mattered in Jewish American writing. Had Roth and Bellow not been major talents, you wouldn't have Jewish American writing. It wouldn't mean anything. It would just be parochial, local. But we cannot have major talent writing this stuff anymore because there's nothing to write about. What made them major was their gripe, the chip on their shoulders, the rage that they felt at the world for keeping them out. That experience became a great metaphor. There's no hyphenated Jewish experience anymore. I have two nieces who are both Ivy League babies, and they're in the ruling class. There's nothing they can't do, nothing. So there's nothing to talk about. There's really nothing to write about. Yet you have young people who keep on doing it. And all I'm saying is it doesn't count. Take Michael Chabon or Jonathan Safran Foer. They're cashing in on a world that's long gone, and they're writing with open nostalgia. They're making things out of it that belong to their grandfathers. It's a habit to go on assuming that this is legitimate writing, but I truly feel it is not.”
AA:I love the takedown here of contemporary Jewish writing, but I also think that these two films together scramble this. On some level, the nostalgia film fails at imbuing Judaism with any real meaning, even in a moment where it was real, and the contemporary film gives us something really true and uncomfortable. So, I don't know. I wonder what you guys make of it and these two films together in terms of the trajectory of Jewish fiction.
MA:Well, it's funny. While we're having this discussion, I'm thinking that the chronology works: that Adam Sandler is the baby. Because Marty, he's that generation that wants to get out of the Lower East Side. Adam Sandler has got that nice home; he's got the louche mistress and the whole thing. Still living like some kind of Jewish life, still a Jew, but unmoored from things at the same time. So there's actually a continuity.
AA:I know, but why does Howard feel more Jewish than Marty? You know what I'm saying?
DK:So in both cases, I think it's taking a very critical look: It's not nostalgic. It's not romantic, even though it might initially toy with it. It's ultimately, I think, taking an affectionate but dim view and suggesting that the things that they're striving for—that in some ways are a metaphor for the American dream or whatever, or capitalism—are hollow and are self-destroying. More viscerally so in Howard Ratner's case—and maybe more undeniably so in Howard Ratner's case. But that's what I see—is people from the other end who are living in this “we've made it,” capitalist, Jewish paradise of contemporary America, questioning what it was all really worth and dramatizing the self-destructive lure of it for every Jew.
NG:Yeah, I think I largely agree, and I feel like—I guess I would say I do think there's a way in which the Jewishness in Marty Supreme is emptier than Uncut Gems. But it feels to me like it is because the movie is, in fact, interested in that, it is, in fact, thinking about the reduction of Jewishness to certain very superficial signifiers in a contemporary moment and projecting that backward. I think that it, in an interesting way, defies this binary in which there is a moment of authentic Jewishness, and that's lost, by asking: Was it ever authentic? I mean, maybe this is wishful thinking or something, but I think there's a way of reading it in which it's like, the Jewishness that Marty embodies, in which, as I've said, I see as he feels, on the one hand, quite attached to it, and on the other hand, it's put on and manipulated and subsumed into his sense of self as an American, all this stuff. I think the movie is asking about, over the course of the 20th century, the long tale of the emptiness of Jewishness, or what that has meant. I think in that way, it is asking questions about the content of Jewishness. I'm thinking also of Mitch's review of the Taffy Brodesser-Akner book, in which Mitch argued that the novel speaks to the emptiness of contemporary Jewishness but in a way in which it's unknowingly just repeating it and embodying it without anything to say about it. I do feel like Marty Supreme is more knowingly curious about it and either looking at the contemporary moment through the lens of a past moment or trying to chart something that is a longer course of emptiness, which, to me, is a kind of content-ness—reckoning with that emptiness.
MA:What I think is really funny is that Dave and Nathan find exactly what you and I, Arielle, find is a complete failure in the film as the source of its success.
AA:Well, I'm interested to see what Josh does next or what they both do next. I mean, what would it mean for them to inhabit another part of the American experience? Like are they going to have Black leading characters or whatever? They really are focused on the white ethnic of some kind.
DK:I have a dangerous suggestion for them, if they happen to be listening to this. There's a hill no one has scaled yet, I think—in the culture they work in anyway—which would be to really seriously take on American Zionism.
AA:Yeah, why is no one doing that?
DK:I mean, I don't know what the Safdies think about Israel, and I won't presume, but I do think that is—if someone wants to say something new, contemporary, and genuinely challenging about contemporary diasporic and American Jewish life, they're going to have to take that head on.
AA:I agree with that completely. It is interesting that both of these Safdie movies didn't give me the ick in the way that I feel like so much contemporary Jewish content ignores this issue. There's something about their treatment that it's not actually like bringing up that sense of like: Where's the Zionism? Why are they leaving it out? And I'm not really sure what it is that is doing that, to be honest. It may be because these people are such anti-heroes to begin with and because they're such strivers—there's like this way that class plays into things that becomes the more important axis for reading all of this. And also, the ways that Zionism and class are intertwined; particularly now, Zionism is a province of a more upper-class Jewry. In Marty Supreme-time, it would have been flipped, but still, there's something about the way that they're approaching this that it doesn't feel left out, and I think that that's also interesting. I'm not really sure why that is, because I feel that way watching almost everything that comes out, where there's an omission around Israel and Jewish content.
DK:I agree. It doesn't give me the ick, in part because I think we can reasonably assume what these characters think about Zionism. Actually, I think Howard Ratner and everyone around him is almost certainly a Zionist.
AA:And Trumpy.
DK:Yeah, they're probably Trumpy. We can reasonably assume they're those kinds of people, and because the movie is not telling us these are great people you should like, that shouldn't bother us at all. And then, as for Marty in 1952, he might or might not be, but the truth is, he probably just doesn't think about it that much. It's probably pretty back-of-mind to him, which is also realistic. And also, I don't see him as a very sympathetic character. So in both cases, I feel like it doesn't feel like something they're avoiding.
AA:Well, I mean, the one thing that I will say about both of these films is that it's not like an investigation of Jewishness; it's an investigation of American Jewishness. And we talked about this when we talked about Uncut Gems—it's almost more an investigation of what happens when the Jew hits America, and in Howard Ratner's case, what happens when the Jew marinates in America, or whatever. And I think to some extent, it's interesting because Marty doesn't have the money yet, and maybe that baby Howard Ratner or whatever is going to, but that sense isn't going to go away. The striver sense isn't going to go away, and that is fundamentally American and not necessarily fundamentally Jewish. And yet, it seems like they need the conceit of Jewishness in order to create the spark or set the catalyzing force, like what Gornick is describing—this chip, this rage at being kept out or something. Howard is not kept out, and yet, he retains that for some reason. The reason actually has more to do with America than it has to do with Jewishness, and yet, there's such a specific instantiation of it in his character, like the interplay between both of them. So I don't know.
MA:You know, it's nostalgie de la bou: nostalgia for the mud. And that's really what this film is. It's Howard Ratner being nostalgic for the mud from which he came. Because that is the exciting part of the Jewish story—or the way it's told, anyway. The nostalgic rising from the mud to become a success, despite the mud, and you never really shake off the mud.
AA:Well, this has been another episode of On the Nose. Thank you to Jesse Brenneman, our editor. Thanks to our guests for joining us today. If you like this episode, share it, rate it, and subscribe to Jewish Currents, JewishCurrents.org. Thanks a lot, everyone. See you next time.