Marty Supreme
Riding high with your very own runt messiah
WARNING: SPOILERS.
HONESTLY DON’T EVEN BOTHER READING THIS HUMAN SLOP.
Marty Supreme is the epic fantasy of a teenage Jewish boy, Portnoy’s id finishing in chopped liver over and over and over again. Our hero Marty is a pimply pinball racketing around post-war America, the grime on striver New York Jewry hurtling into the city’s establishment WASPs, smashing everything in his path, endlessly losing with the hysteria of an addict who’s convinced that if he breaks down enough doors there’ll be a score eventually.
Everything in the film is gritty, textured, pulsating with a ravenous adolescent sexuality. Watching this movie is scraping your teeth against bristling pockmarked skin, monobrows, protruding schnozzes and paunches, rotund or elongated or crumple-faced or googley-eyed grotesqueries, a Star Wars cast out of a Brooklyn bar mitzvah. Our wiry ferret hero believes himself to be chosen, him personally, and like every idiot false messiah he has just enough charisma and force of will to suck just enough believers into his vortex. Every humiliation follows this life where the next buck and meal and flight and kiss is a hustle away. Shame is the water these people swim in and shamelessness their superpower. They are spanked, beaten, shot at, fall naked through the rot of their motel floor.
There is no more outrageously visceral sequence in film than the recollection of an Auschwitz inmate dousing himself in wild honey and inviting his fellow inmates to lick it off him, suckling at his hairy emaciated chest and arms for sustenance, before cutting to a present-day beautiful washed up movie star Gwyneth Paltrow arriving to our young protagonist’s hotel suite to ravage him. Later after stealing from her and insulting her, she gifts Marty expensive jewellery to fund his escapades before he eats her out on park grass. It’s over. Every pimply yiddishe boy will demand his own giant blonde shiksa sugar mama. How can you possibly live without one.
What propels our feral runt messiah through this universe? A chip on his shoulder the size of a pyramid. He returns from Egypt one day with a gift for his poor mother: a rock chipped off the pyramids. We built that, he says. He is a Hitler’s defeat manifest, he tells journalists. In beating an Auschwitz survivor rival in a table tennis match, he will finish what Auschwitz failed to! Ok, that one went too far, he concedes. He runs his mouth like a Bangkok ping pong ball, sometimes it lands, sometimes it doesn’t.
This is a quest. Goy kids have The Never Ending Story, broken Jewish kids have this land of troll uncles and nasal-screeching mothers where one side-quest has you eating out Gwyneth Paltrow then getting spanked by her husband to unlock a flight to Japan to defeat a deaf table tennis champion at the risk of kissing a hog. Keep your 8-month pregnant married side-piece at bay while goyishe cops chase you past Chinese cooks in a New York alleyway.
Every kindness is squeezed to its limits, pressed until it pops like pus into putrid resentment. Every man and woman for themselves. Marty’s mother fakes hospitalisation to twist him, his sweetheart fakes a black eye, he’s playing his mother and sweetheart and the doorman and every other schmuck he careens into. You can’t win ‘em all but you gotta win just enough — a gambler’s manic ferocity and anxiety applied to every human interaction. Our hero knocks up his sweetheart in the basement of a shoe store. This is their world, how these people are conceived, sweaty mid-work sex squeezed into a feet-smelling underground crevice. And from birth every American goyishe boogeyman will be after you, from the farmer with a shotgun to country bumpkins in a pick up, heck, every yiddishe boogeyman will be after you too, hardly less terrifying.
Marty Supreme makes this pedestrian grotesquerie feel mythic. Infused with obsession and vomit-inducing levels of ambition, any boy’s fantasy and plight is made vital. That’s life isn’t it? You got one shot… one opportunity… there’s vomit on his sweater already, mom’s spaghetti. Marty is not redeemed; redemption would kill him. He is funny because he is awful, heroic only in the ancient, unflattering sense: a person with one monstrous gift and no corresponding wisdom. In this world ambition is compulsion, a rash that spreads across the soul. Jewishness is not identity-card piety but appetite, memory, resentment, comedy, terror, performance, inheritance, and noise. Shame. But in his hands shame is a rocket ship. Marty Supreme is a pustule, a prophet, a pervert, a champion. Above all he is alive.