Still, Marty’s deceptive tactics, exaggerated
as they may be, aren’t unusual in his working-class quarters. His own mother
(Fran Drescher) has made a habit of feigning sickness, or enlisting the help of
her relatives in the police department, to wrangle Marty back home; and Rachel,
who emerges as the Bonnie to Marty’s Clyde, proves slippery herself when her
black eye—supposedly a blow from her jealous husband—is revealed to be painted
on. Desperation, as Safdie’s previous films have shown us, begets deranged,
dangerous, and ruthless forms of invention, and the risks are vast—like getting
caught in the crosshairs of a gunfight over a gangster’s missing dog. The
looming presence of Rockwell and Kay, whose wealth is held over Marty’s head
like a dog bone, underscores the casual cruelty of this class discrepancy. Is
Kay really all that generous when she decides to give Marty one of her dozens
of diamond necklaces? When the cops catch them canoodling in Central Park after
hours, they take Marty’s prize—in other words, his Tokyo plane ticket—as
punishment. Kay could easily get him another, but as he waits outside her
building for this life-changing gift, she’s sidetracked by devastating pans of
her Broadway debut; her goodwill towards Marty gone in a puff of smoke.
If survival in Marty Supreme involves
tearing down others, it also means signing off on your own abuse and
humiliation; in other words, being the clown they took you for in the first
place. Table-tennis’s frequent comparisons to vaudeville and other forms of
mass spectacle throughout the movie also tethers the game to early forms of
American entertainment, most conspicuously the Hollywood studio system, which
was heavily shaped by Jewish creatives and entrepreneurs and which was, at its
inception, derided as cheap and sensational.
In this sense, Marty Supreme is of a
piece with other narratives about Jewish identity during and after the war,
stories that bristle at the shit Jewish survivors must eat not just stay alive
but to live the way they want to, however small or, in Marty’s case,
outrageously big, that may be. In last year’s The Brutalist, for
instance, a gifted Hungarian architect is figuratively and literally
raped by his gentile benefactor. Marty, though spared such extreme levels of
sadism, still suffers a great indignity in exchange for his ticket to Japan,
agreeing to pull down his pants and receive multiple spankings from Rockwell in
front of an amused audience of his fat-cat friends.
