One Paddle After Another
Or, "Exiting the Vampire’s Tournament A Hauntological Look at Vampire Capitalism and Commodification in Marty Supreme"
NOTE: while I know it’s not technically correct, I am going to use “Safdie Brothers” and “Josh Safdie” more or less interchangeably here. I think Marty Supreme fits easily into “their” milieu and Marty Mauser into their rogue’s gallery of likeable anti-heroes certainly more so on both fronts than Benny’s The Smashing Machine. The simplest reason for this is the continued collaboration between Josh Safdie and Ronald Bronstein who is/was the fifth Beatle or, more accurately, the third Safdie Brother.
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Originally, this post was going to be about how Marty Supreme is really a treatise on the way app-based gambling is sullying the purity of sport, but I kept getting stuck because I didn’t want to look up a bunch of data about how much online gambling is ruining people’s lives. It felt depressing and… I just didn’t feel like doing that work. Then, I was listening to Josh Safdie and Sean Baker’s really great and crunchy interview about the making of Marty Supreme and, about halfway through, Safdie whispers “hauntology” almost like he’s scared he’s going to be outed as a nerd who’s aware of Derrida (and don’t let anyone tell you different: if you know who Derrida is, you are a nerd or at the very least a dork). I almost pulled my car over because, of course. Duh. Why didn’t I think of that? As soon as I got home, I reached for Mark Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life and found my way in.
In his assessment of Kubrick’s, The Shining, Fischer notes that “hauntology has an intrinsically sonic dimension… in terms of sound, hauntology is a question of hearing what is not here” (67). Suffice it to say, Marty Supreme is a haunted movie. We’ll use a slightly simplified version of hauntology as the both the past haunting the present but also the future haunting the present (or, the past, depending on how you look at it). Save for a couple of period-specific songs, the soundtrack is decidedly anachronistic, dominated by the 1980s—New Order, The Korgis, Public Image LTD—along with Daniel Lopatin’s synthy score, the viewer is constantly reminded that the past haunts the present just as the future haunts the past. Likewise, the film is aesthetically heterotemporal as the conception of time is flattened—the picture was shot on film using a number of period-specific anamorphic lenses, tungsten lights and other trappings of 50s-era filmmaking to achieve the film’s look but, save for the period set dressing and costuming, the structure, dialog, score, and soundtrack make the movie feel more like the biopics of the 1980s than, say, Singing in the Rain. This sonic hauntology and aesthetic heterotemporality place the movie into a long conversation with the era of American Excellence, i.e., the bookends of the 1950s post-war boom and the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall. The film’s final song, Tears for Fears’ 1985 new wave hit, “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” famously predicts this event: “Holding hands while the walls come tumbling down.”
Fisher again, this time quoting Jameson:
“For Fredric Jameson, [The Shining’s] Gold Room revels bespeak a nostalgia for ‘the last moment in which a genuine American leisure class led an aggressive and ostentatious public existence, in which an American ruling class projected a class-conscious and unapologetic image of itself and enjoyed its privileges without guilt, openly and armed with its emblems of top-hat and champagne glass, on the social stage in full view of the other classes’. But the significance of this genteel, conspicuous hedonism must be construed psychoanalytically as well as merely historically. The ‘past’ here is not an actual historical period so much as a fantasmatic past, a Time that can only ever be retrospectively – retrospectrally – posited” (68).
Ergo, Marty Supreme’s 1950s is one of these “not an actual historical period… that can only ever be retrospectively – retrospectrally – posited.” This is not a representation of the past as it was but one that has been constructed even beyond the usual construction of “a film,” a simulacrum, if you will. But the reasons for this anachronistic construction serves an important thematic idea: the 1950s through approximately 1989 was the time in which the veneer of American exceptionalism thrived—the American middle-class was flourishing, the Civil Rights and Vietnam War protest movements had, in the eyes of our parents anyway, been overwhelmingly successful, the economy was cha-chinging and now there was nothing more to do than sit back and watch television as we waited for the exportation of soft cultural power to put the final nail in the coffin of the Soviet Union. But, by the 1990s, we would become embroiled in the first of our disastrous Middle East excursions, 1991 brought the USSR’s dissolution, and by 1995 NAFTA had been signed thus beginning the deterioration of American labor and the American work force… and it’s been mostly downhill from there. The current decline of the American Empire and the erosion of this veneer as elucidated by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney—a former central banker and hedge fund manager—at this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos makes the timing of Marty Supreme’s release somehow delicious: “We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigor depending on the identity of the accused or the victim…” Well, I’m glad he’s finally catching on.
Marty Supreme is also a vampire movie. If you’ve been following any of the press around the film, Josh Safdie has admitted that he’d written an alternate ending in which Kevin O’Leary’s Milton Rockwell, not having aged a day since we last see him, finds Marty in the 1980s at a concert with his granddaughter and bites his neck. Odd that Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, also released last year, features a similar scene in which two of the protagonists, also not having aged a day since we last see them, find a character from the film in the 1980s.
And it’s a good thing Safdie didn’t choose to end his film this way. No, Marty Supreme is not a vampire movie in the traditional bloodsucker-in-a-cape-and-castle sense. It’s more about the Vampire of Capitalism1 and how it sucks dry everything we love until it’s nothing but a husk. Marty knows this as a table tennis player and Josh Safdie knows this as a director. The latter has been an anti-careerist champion of purity in filmmaking since he was shooting scrappy shorts with his brother in New York City tenements.
To understand the ethos of the Safdie Brothers, one must travel back in time to South by Southwest 2007 where they first met longtime collaborator, and now major part of the Safdie brain trust, Ronald Bronstein won the Special Jury Award for his fantastic feature film debut Frownland. A difficult film, to be sure (reading some of the IMDB reviews is particularly revealing) but one that not only clearly defines both the literary and visual aesthetics of the Safdie Brothers but also defines their philosophy of filmmaking. Attending the awards ceremony, Josh recalls how “Bronstein gave an amazing speech about anti-careerism,” which, apparently, struck a chord in him.
Perhaps ironically, Marty Supreme as an artifact has been heavily commodified. When I went to the movies to see it a second time on 70mm, I was handed a token. “What’s it for?” I asked the ticket taker. “You’ll see,” he said mysteriously. Well, it wasn’t much of a mystery. There was a gumball machine spitting out Marty Supreme branded ping pong balls. (My cat certainly loves it). There was also a Marty Supreme blimp circling Los Angeles, and Marty Supreme popcorn buckets at the multiplex. Marty Supreme track suits have popped up on my Facebook Marketplace for asking prices of over one thousand dollars! And, of course, the A24 machine is pushing all manner of Marty merch. I’m sure it’s also no coincidence that Marty’s in-film nom de guerre is “Supreme,” which also happens to be one of the most popular streetwear brands on the planet.
The reality is, as much as Josh Safdie comes from that gritty NYC indie film scene, he is now a commodity director. As he says in that interview with the equally once-scrappy, Sean Baker, “I like swimming in big lakes,” i.e., he is more than happy to have big money thrown at his big movies. And, for the record, I think that’s fantastic. I want big movies made by great directors getting lots of money to make their projects.
But of course, this is all happening “above board.” Marty Supreme is also about what it takes to throw yourself into the creative life. It wouldn’t be the first time Josh has used a different vocation to explicate his feelings on what it’s like to be a filmmaker:
“The scene where Howard [in Uncut Gems] shows up in his auction, looks in the catalogue, sees his gem in it, and just kind of sighs to see something he’s worked so hard on listed with a price – that’s our little metaphor for making small independent movies. Weirdly enough, the cost that they estimate for the gem was $200,000, and that’s the exact same budget as Daddy Longlegs. That was subconscious, but it was cool how that turned out. You sweat over something, it unlocks truths in your life, you see so much meaning in it, to you it’s priceless, and then you release it. It goes to a festival. It’s in a program, and you’re one of one hundred titles.
But all this takes some of the air out of you. A person spends all this time creating something, and then it’s out in the world, and it’s just an object. You ask how much of Howard’s struggles resemble our own; the movie can stand in for our process itself, but I don’t want to harp on that too much. I remember that Rocky was originally about a screenwriter, and everyone was like, ‘Dude, nobody wants to see that, let’s make him a boxer!’ All the same, we can see ourselves in these other people. If he’s not a writer, he’s a boxer. If he’s not a boxer, he’s a jeweller. It’s a transference.”
Marty Mauser, like his directorial counterpart, acutely feels the encroachment of commodification. (Obviously I still have Shadow Ticket on the brain, so I couldn’t help but think that this style of commodified personhood mirrors that of Hicks McTaggart’s.) The opening image of a fertilized egg becoming a ping pong ball is not simply a suggestion that Marty has impregnated Rachel nor is it that he’s going to throw as much into being a father as he did into ping-pong, no, it’s much more than that—Marty is the ping-pong ball. Even more than he was “born to play,” in an act of transference, he is becoming objectified.
In Marty’s world, table tennis is changing rapidly with the advent of the “pen-grip,” a certain way of holding the paddle as popularized by Japanese player Koto Edo. Marty sees this and, in his brash exuberance, brushes it off as a fad but when Edo’s pen-grip defeats him in the table tennis championships, he’s forced to contend with the rapidly changing nature of the game. At first, he applies a racial component: unaware that the travel ban has been lifted, he’s angered and confused as to why the Japanese are allowed to compete at all. But this is misplaced aggression. What he’s really upset at—and what he won’t understand until later, when his ass is reddened by the very paddle that defeated him—is the muddying of table tennis’s pure waters by new technology and nascent capitalist interest.
Importantly, this mirror the experiences of Marty Reisman, the figure on which Marty Mauser is heavily based. For Reisman, it wasn’t a pen-grip but instead the shift from the traditional “hardbat paddle” to what was known as the “sponge paddle.” From Howard Jacobson’s excellent profile, (which Safdie and co-writer Ronald Bronstein may or may not have read prior to writing the film):
“For him, the significance of [his loss at the championships in] Bombay was not only that he had been cheated of his title—“There I was at the height of my career and they brought in a piece of equipment that had a skill of its own”—but that ping-pong had lost its aesthetic. No longer was it beautiful. No longer was it sensuous. No longer was it a contest ordered by hearing and touch. So, what was it ordered by? Well, it wasn’t ordered at all—there precisely lay Reisman’s objection. Like an 18th-century aristocrat beholding the beginnings of revolution, he stepped back aghast at the spectacle of unrule.”
As an illustrative aside, Reisman also had sonic issues with the sponge paddle. From Howard Jacobson’s obituary of Reisman:
“Sponge, by his reasoning, changed table tennis for the worse because it silenced it, because the deadened soundlessness of sponge on ball took away not simply the musicality of the game but its conversational quality. Previously, each player responded to the sound as well as to the appearance of his opponent’s strokes, discerning intention as well as performance in them; dispense with the faculty of hearing and you make the game less subtle, less a test of intelligence.”
After his humiliating loss to Edo, Marty is forced into a simulated version of his beloved table tennis, touring as the vaudevillian half-time act for the Harlem Globetrotter’s world tour along with former table tennis world champion and Holocaust survivor, Béla Kletzki, played by Géza Röhrig. The two of them, both Jews but of very different generations, play thesis and antithesis of Jewishness. Marty cracks wise in a media interview about Béla’s experiences during the war, saying he’s going to “do what Hitler couldn’t” and finish Béla off for good in the upcoming tournament. Later, in an attempt to entertain Milton Rockwell, Marty asks Béla to tell the harrowing story of when he allowed his fellow concentration camp prisoners to lick honey from a found beehive off of his chest for nourishment2. Marty is tacitly threatened by Béla existence because he represents the real to Marty’s imaginary but rather than being turned off by this, Béla is endeared by it. This relationship is one of the sweeter emotional notes of the film.
After, Marty is offered a gambit: he needs money to rematch Edo in Tokyo next year and figures he can get it from Rockwell. Milton, who sees the pen-grip as an opportunity to get his business, Rockwell Pens, into Japan, begins sponsoring table tennis matches and sees Marty as a piggyback to further gin up support for the company. A brief but important bit of history: from 1945 to 1952, the United States military, headed by General MacArthur, occupied Japan and set about planning the future of the nation in three phases. The first from ’45 – ‘48 focused on demilitarization, military tribunals and breaking up corporations and conglomerates. All of this caused a massive economic upheaval throwing Japan into an economic crisis. In the midst of this, Chinese communists began to get a foothold in the country (“Everything under heaven is in utter chaos; the situation is excellent”) but seeing Japan go red wasn’t going to happen under MacArthur’s watch so we started the Korean War. Is that an oversimplification? Yes, but not by much. The war helped stabilized Japan’s economy and proved U.S. to be an ally, which led to a formal peace treaty signed in 1951. By 1953, Japan’s economy was open to American business. It was a gold rush and guys like Milton Rockwell wanted to be the first man on the ground with pick and pan.
But Marty’s got pride and he’s not going to let the sport he loves be bastardized to sell pens (despite the fact that he’s already taking part in the simulation). He resolves to get the money his own way. From there, it’s just one paddle after another as he’s batted back and forth between people who socially and economically wield more power than him—while he thinks he may have power because he’s sleeping with Gwyneth Paltrow’s former film star, Kay Stone, its he that’s begging her for the diamond necklace which he can then hock to get his travel money. When he does make it to Japan, he thinks he can win the scrimmage against Edo without repercussion but, in one of the film’s most startling and brilliant scenes, Milton Rockwell, the ur-Capitalist, tells Marty, “I was born in 1601. I’m a vampire. I’ve been around forever. I’ve met many Marty Mausers over the centuries… you’re going to be here forever too. You will never be happy.”
According to Safdie, this line was ad-libbed by O’Leary but, I assume, refined throughout filming. Still, I tried to find a significant 1601 event and, well: On April 22, 1601, the first expedition of the East India Company set sail from England for the Spice Islands with John Davis as pilot-major. Funnily enough, as Milton Rockwell attempts to colonize Japan with American capital in 1953, John Davis was hacked apart by “Japanese pirates” in 1604.
The hauntological echoes of Delbert Grady telling Jack Torrance in the Men’s lavatory of the Golden Room, “You have always been the caretaker, sir” loom heavily here. Both Marty’s powerlessness and the inevitability of his situation is rendered clear: there is no alternative. This coupled with the encroachment of capitalism’s commodification of both him and the sport, he decides to, ahem, exit the vampire’s castle (so to speak).
The Safdie Brothers have a knack for ending their films bittersweetly or, as I refer to it, simultaneously the best and worst moment in the life of a character3. For Good Time’s Nick Nikas, he goes through the tumultuous crucible of his brother, Connie’s, criminal hubris, watches Connie die and ends up in a treatment facility for those with intellectual and behavioral issues. But, free of his brother and finally able to get the assistance he needs, he is likely in a better position than he has ever been in. For Howard Ratner in Uncut Gems, he finally wins the big parlay but in his moment of ecstatic joy, he is shot in the face.
Upon returning to America, Marty views his child for the first time and weeps, but his face remains an unknowable mask. We can assume he is, naturally, weeping for the beauty of seeing his first-born son but he is also weeping for what he has lost—not only a career but of the innocence of the sport for which he has given the quarter of his life. It has been ruined by the vampire capitalist. He has lost it all, but he has gained it all, too. Marty’s inscrutable features suggest that he is haunted by a future which is as ugly as it is beautiful.
Post-script
Today, Saturday the 24th of January, ICE shot and murdered another person on the streets of Minneapolis. While Mao may have written that chaos causes the conditions for the revolutionary struggle, it is still both horrible and disheartening to see it happen live. Although, the solidarity and strength of the people of Minneapolis helps to buoy my darkening mood.
Further, we lost a great mind with the passing of Michael Parenti, aged a respectable 92, one of the truly brilliant figures of leftist thought. Watching the famous “Yellow Speec” and, subsequently, reading his writing, beginning with Blackshirts & Reds, began in earnest my own intellectual development in that sphere. I’m going to leave this post with an excerpt from the preface of that book, one that feels especially prescient now:
“Over a century ago, in his great work Les Miserables Victor Hugo asked, “Will the future arrive?” He was thinking of a future of social justice, free from the “terrible shadows” of oppression imposed by the few upon the great mass of humankind. Of late, some scribes have announced “the end of history.” With the overthrow of communism, the monumental struggle between alternative systems has ended, they say. Capitalism’s victory is total. No great transformations are in the offing. The global free market is here to stay. What you see is what you are going to get, now and always. This time the class struggle is definitely over. So Hugo’s question is answered: the future has indeed arrived, though not the one he had hoped for.
This intellectually anemic end-of-history theory was hailed as a brilliant exegesis and accorded a generous reception by commentators and reviewers of the corporate-controlled media. It served the official worldview perfectly well, saying what the higher circles had been telling us for generations: that the struggle between classes is not an everyday reality but an outdated notion, that an untrammeled capitalism is here to stay now and forever, that the future belongs to those who control the present.
But the question we really should be asking is, do we have a future at all? More than ever, with the planet itself at stake, it becomes necessary to impose a reality check on those who would plunder our limited ecological resources in the pursuit of limitless profits, those who would squander away our birthright and extinguish our liberties in their uncompromising pursuit of self-gain.
History teaches us that all ruling elites try to portray themselves as the natural and durable social order, even ones that are in serious crisis, that threaten to devour their environmental base in order to continually recreate their hierarchical structure of power and privilege. And all ruling elites are scornful and intolerant of alternative viewpoints.
Truth is an uncomfortable venue for those who pretend to serve our society while in fact serving only themselves - at our expense. I hope this effort will chip away at the Big Lie. The truth may not set us free, as the Bible claims, but it is an important first step in that direction.”
-Michael Parenti
Interestingly, the score playing in the background of Marty’s first act of supplication at the feet of the Milton Rockwell’s Vampire Capitalist Avatar is titled “Vampire Castle.” Of course, upon finding this out I couldn’t help but think of Mark Fisher’s essay about leftist infighting, “Exiting the Vampire Castle.”
Not for nothing, when Marty questions Rockwell’s assertion that “my son died liberating you people” though he fought in the Pacific theater, this scene features one of the only moments in American cinema that I can recall where a character admits that the Soviets liberated concentration camps.
There’s got to be a German word for this but all I found was Verschlimmbesserung, which means to attempt to improve something but only succeeding in making it worse. This could be said about the nature of Safdie films, but I don’t think it applies directly.