"Marty Supreme", A Jungian Review by Joel Crichton

In what world is Marty Supreme a hero film? I ask this question because that seems to be the tone of its general reception, colored especially by the press tour that its star Timothée Chalamet gave. For example, on Dec. 25, he pitched the film on The Tonight Show like this:

This is a movie about sacrifice in pursuit of a dream . . . and we live in a bleak time, especially for young people. So this film is an attempt at an antidote to that, and to continue to believe in yourself, to continue to dream big and to follow your dreams and to not take no for an answer. That’s the spirt of Marty Supreme.

At the risk of sounding provocative, I feel like a lot of people are getting this movie wrong, and that it starts with Timothée Chalamet. No offense meant to him, but I don’t think he entirely understands the film he’s in. He understands his character, Marty, and he understands Marty from Marty’s perspective, which is a beautiful thing—an actor has to fall in love with their character. But Chalamet’s Marty Supreme press tour channeled Marty himself, and that ends up fudging a crucial fact about this film, which is that it sees Marty Mauser from a slightly different perspective than Marty himself does.

Jordan Bassett, reviewing in NME, writes that “it is a film about living fully and without fear, a cynicism-free zone where, for all their fast-talking, people love each other so much it makes your heart feel like it’s about to burst.”[1]  It’s hard to believe that he and I even saw the same film. So much love? Sorry, is this the Marty Supreme where the hero drops a bathtub on a guy and then gets salty and litigious over $2.50? The same Marty Supreme who agrees to take an injured dog to the vet, but instead feeds him bourbon and ice cream—and then loses him in a cloud of smoke? Are we talking about Marty Mauser, the guy who blows up a gas station, who helps himself to a piece of “an original Egyptian pyramid,” and who, faced with the pregnancy of his lover (Rachel, played by Odessa A’zion), badgers her into tears with his presumed-unassailable defense, “I pull out . . . it’s a simple question, answer it, yes or no, does he pull out when he has sex with you? Answer it!”

Criticizing Marty’s personality from a psychiatric point of view is not very interesting, so I’ll just remark that filmmakers sure are getting skilled at writing narcissism these days, and Marty himself is a supreme pageant of its patterns. He is never wrong, and nothing is ever his fault.

That said, the more interesting question remains: In what world is such a young man a hero?

There’s a subtle, almost subliminal post-apocalyptic attitude in Marty Supreme. Most obviously, we can observe post-WWII in the setting: the Japanese athletes have only just gotten around a postwar travel ban; Milton Rockwell’s  (Kevin O’Leary) son was killed in the South Pacific; Bela Kletzky (Géza Röhrig) is a survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Yet its temporal 1952 setting is put through the prism of its predominantly 1980s soundtrack—Peter Gabriel, Tears for Fears, and the grippingly crystalline synth score by Daniel Lopatin. What we get is a kind of unholy mixture, one part 1950s postwar euphoria, an era in which anything seems possible, and one part 1980s excess-nihilism of the Cold War. Perhaps this elusive quality is best expressed in Alphaville’s “Forever Young”:

Let's dance in style, let's dance for a while
Heaven can wait, we're only watching the skies
Hoping for the best, but expecting the worst
Are you gonna drop the bomb or not?

That song asserts itself as the film’s theme song early on, evoking the archetype commonly called puer aeternus, or eternal child; the puer’s chilling all-or-nothing of the song’s lyric, “Let us die young, or let us live forever,” resonates through the opening credits.

And the credit sequence! More than anything else, the film establishes in these first minutes that it does not give a f—; it’s going to do what it wants. Besides immediately pushing us to the edge of aesthetic reason with its musical palette, it will then cut directly from a beautifully tawdry backroom sex scene to the desperate race of thousands of sperm to an egg. The credits itself may also surprise us with their list of non-actors in acting roles, from the essayist Pico Iyer to real-life table tennis champion Koto Kawaguchi. Again not giving a f—, this movie tells us it will hire who it wants to hire, accusations of “stunt casting” be damned.

Back to the sperm. In their hectic charge, each individual spermatozoon pursues an existential struggle to successfully become something, and here Marty Supreme first touches the archetypal, finding the common ground between its own time(s) and our own. The contemporary bleakness that Chalamet was talking about is the bleakness of being a sperm among sperm. We might reflect that we were all once sperm, and perhaps in some sense we still are.

Moreover, this 1952/1985 period piece is unmistakeably 2025 in its grasp of the quality of a time that seems both like the end of the world and the beginning of untold, limitless opportunity. It understands the sperm’s kamikaze-like urgency that so many feel to become something in a world where it seems a) everything has already been done, b) anything left will soon be outsourced to machines, and c) it might all be over any day now. Even the meta-quality of this being a Ping-Pong movie stands as a tacit acknowledgment that every other sport has already been done to death and doing something original seems to be an ever-narrowing target.

It is in this world that Marty is a hero. His amorality precludes him from being a hero in any other. But here and now, no objective standards for value or behaviour seem to exist anymore, and one’s personal myth may be the only tangible, the only thing that one can be loyal to.

Any regular notion of heroism—the kind that involves any measure of altruism, sacrifice, or service—that the film glances at belongs to Béla Kletzky, who supplied his Auschwitz bunkmates with honey slathered all over his own torso, a crazy and Christological image evoking the last supper (Matthew 26:26: “take and eat; this is my body”), and implicitly putting Marty’s savior persona to shame; and perhaps it belongs also to Koto Endo, the Japanese introverted sensate foil to Marty’s all-American extraverted intuition. Endo insists that he returns home “not a hero, but a humble craftsman.” However, though the film observes these restrained heroics, it passes by them a little dully, possibly perplexed by their lack of loudness.

They contrast Marty, who is entirely lacking in concern for the pain he causes to anyone who comes anywhere near him and respects no rules whatsoever (except the rules of table tennis). To him, lack of concern is morality, because he’s got a purpose—they do not. He is possessed by the spirit of “forever young,” and we are continually reminded of his youngness, from his acne-scarred cheeks to his baby-boy bum.

If you really think about it, I guess we all have crazy myths about ourselves. Some are defensive and self-limiting: “I’m doomed to never find true love,” or “I’m too old to start something new.” Some are expansive, perhaps not attuned enough for the limitations of real life: “I could write the Great American Novel if I wanted to.” “I coulda been a contender.”

From this point of view, it is but an easy leap to accept Marty’s personal mythology:

They all love me. I am uniquely positioned to be the face of the entire sport in the United States.

Or, as he casts himself to some politely interested reporters:

My mother died in childbirth, my father was a compulsive loser who abandoned me when I was 2 years old. I got stuck in the New York City orphanage system…

We’ve met his mother (an unusually grounded Fran Drescher), so we, at least, see that this is marketing he’s doing. But in terms of personal myths, even Rockwell’s completely surreal, “I was born in 1601. I’m a vampire,” is relatable from the point of view that these myths are what we live according to, whether we’re conscious of them or not. And the film, generally speaking, stands on the side of taking these myths seriously. Rockwell might be speaking metaphorically, or he might believe he is a 350-year-old vampire, but he does seem to be telling the truth, because he is a kind of undead who has sold his soul for something he has no passion for, his deceased son a symbol of his lack of futurity. He has long ago lost his connection with the puer.

What we as an audience find ourselves respecting, despite our offended moralities, is Marty’s continual pushing forward, though he is nothing if not haphazard about it. His criticism of the young actor (Fred Hechinger) reveals his ethos: “If he’s so committed, why’d he stop the scene? Why didn’t he punch his hand through the screen, unlock it from the other side?”

Marty punches his hand through the screen over and over, and he does, in his way, get to the other side. In a psychological way, he embodies the necessary narcissism of the creative drive that we rarely allow ourselves to access. Most of us, after all, compromise—out of craven fear, disabling doubt, or lack of imagination, we allow ourselves to become unconscious and collective.

Okay, we might protest that there are virtuous motives, too—unlike Marty, some of us have these pesky things called scruples, or, God forbid, empathy. We don’t want to hurt everybody around us or constantly live on the edge of catastrophe; we tend to find some kind of acceptable balance between our responsibilities to our world and our responsibilities to our own souls.

Marty’s view of himself, if we can take it as seriously as he does, transcends that binary:

I have a purpose. You don’t. And if you think that’s some sorta blessing, it’s not. It puts me at a huge life disadvantage. It means I have an obligation to see a very specific thing through, and with that obligation comes sacrifice.

Fulfilment of his personal myth is his collective responsibility. We might see that view as convenient—but is he wrong?

For Marty, any serious person would be punching through the screens just like him. He argues that “it’s every man for himself where I come from,” punch-or-be-punched-through. If you get punched through, Marty might propose, then that’s your own damn fault.

Marty’s own method acting becomes transparent, however, at least to Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow), when he tries to persuade her that “I’m never accepting anyone’s help, I gotta do it completely on my own, purely on the basis of my own talent.” The previously all-too-malleable actress now points at his hypocrisy, the Witch archetype emerging to attack his intolerable puer inflation:

KAY

Do you make money at this little table tennis thing?

MARTY

Not yet.

KAY

Do you have a job?

MARTY

No. I mean, table tennis is my job.

KAY

How do you live?

MARTY

I live with the confidence that if I believe in myself the money’ll follow. Ultimately, my struggle isn’t even about money.

KAY

How do you pay rent?

MARTY

I don’t.

KAY

You’re avoiding the question.

MARTY

No, I’m not avoiding anything.

KAY

How do you plan on eating food today?

MARTY

Honestly? I was gonna order room service the second you leave.

KAY

Nice.

He does everything on his own… with the exception of the assistance he receives from Rachel, Wally, his mother, Murray, Dion, Kay herself, etc., etc.

Wally (Tyler the Creator), his hustler-accomplice trying to be a responsible father, pricks his balloon, similarly, earlier:

MARTY

Every time I take a piss, I pull back, I hold my urine in, and I count to ten Mississippi. That’s how you build up the muscle.

WALLY

God, that’s how you get a fuckin’ bladder infection… You need to grab some goddamn diapers. And get a fuckin’ grip.

MARTY

[with palpable petulance] I’m not a father.

Marty Mauser might be the hero of his own story, but Marty Supreme is essentially post-heroic; the final stroke of its post-heroic argument is that the relatively happy ending primarily comes about from the hero’s being transported past his heroic monomania, coasting to a landing, where he can, for the first time, accept the consequences of his actions.

The unique understanding that this film brings is the degree to which the eternally young may need to grow up on their own terms. In a post-apocalyptic time, how can the young trust that the older generation has any clue what it’s doing? And so the father archetype cannot reach him, and we see the influences of Rockwell, Mr. Sethi, Murray, etc., bounce off ineffectually. Nor can the mother archetype bind him—his mother’s castratory sabotage attempts and, yes, Rachel’s (however justified) ploy to stop his escape are seen through.

It is often the case that the puer comes down to Earth of his own volition, or not at all. It seems to be necessary for Marty to drive his situation to a superlatively desperate turn, where every single bridge is burned, so that he can truly stand alone -- “As if a man were author of himself,” to quote Shakespeare’s Coriolanus --  and take ownership of his own life. In doing so, he seems to exorcise his demon.  He arrives back to New York not in the spirit of compromise or diminishment, but in the spirit of affirming his reality: “I’m the father”— “I’m not going anywhere.”

As he sees his little infant, he begins to weep, like Pinocchio finally becoming a real boy. If we remember the movie’s initiatory song, “Forever Young,” next to its departing, “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” we see they chart the overall journey in miniature: “Welcome to your life. There’s no turning back.” The extended overlap between this sublime song and the cries of innumerable infants implies to us that life is now diapers, responsibility, and relationship. And that’s going to be okay.