Marty Supremely Annoying

Illustration by Vlada Popyk

‍ ‍Marty Supreme is a sweat soaked, adrenaline filled odyssey about a table tennis player in the 1950s as he bounces from one set back to the next, obsessed over his own glory at the expense of everyone around him.

When the film finally closed out, I was left with one thought: they would never allow a woman to be this goddamn annoying. 

That’s the driving force of this film – Marty is utterly unlikeable. He takes, and takes, and takes. He sleeps with a married woman, he books himself at the ritziest hotel in London even though he can’t afford it because he’s so certain he’ll win prize money at the table tennis tournament, and he demands favors from the people around him with little regard to the consequences. He’s horrifically abrasive, including making holocaust jokes about a fellow Jewish player. He disregards promises and floats through life balanced on an ego inflated to high heaven. He believes he is owed everything and owes everyone else nothing. 

Unlike the barrage of tiktoks of people in their “Marty Supreme era,” and other fans who saw the movie as an “inspiring” chase to success, I spent the entire runtime hoping the main character would lose.

Now here’s the thing, I like an unlikable character. Films don’t need a moral lesson in goodness to be worthwhile. Sometimes people are shitty, and that’s what the story is about. What I don’t like about Marty Supreme is that it offers nothing new to this genre of movies about ego driven white men who will sacrifice everything to achieve greatness. 

It’s a film that, while technically sound, has a storyline that ends ringing hollow and, frankly, boring. 

Marty Mauser is unlikeable, driven, plays table tennis, and eventually wins. Each beat of the movie is predictable. In the end, when you finally think he is paying the price for his mistakes and forced to play a rigged exhibition match, he announces to the crowd the match is fake, gets to play his rival for real, and wins. Then he gets a comfy ride back home on a US military plane, rushes to the bedside of his pregnant on and off again girlfriend, Rachel, who got shot in one of his money making schemes, and has the opportunity to slide himself into a ready made family if he so chooses. 

It never feels like Marty is in true danger. There is always the impression that he’ll work his way out of the corner he is backed into, and in the end, that’s exactly what happens. The emotional beats of the story fall short without any real tension. Marty makes one stupid, egotistical decision after another, realizes he’s in a bad situation, then gets up and gets himself out of it. Over and over again. 

In the periphery of Marty’s life, the women exist to be people Marty sleeps with, while helping him out of the problems he creates. Marty’s sworn table tennis rival Endo acts as silent backboard to a less-than-fleshed out metaphor of the American military in Japan post World War 2. It’s a white man’s world in this film, and the white man gets to win. 

There are a hundred iterations of this exact storyline. Marty is Maverick in Top Gun and Sonny Hayes in F1. He’s a less complicated version of Jordan Belfort in Wolf of Wall Street or Patrick Bateman in American Psycho. Marty Supreme is another sex-filled fantasy where men get to be horrible, unlikable, pursue their wants and needs with no regard to the consequences, and still get to win.

Women, on the other hand, never get to be this character and get to win. In fact, this Oscars cycle has Sentimental Value nominated for Best Picture, a movie about a woman who doesn’t want to become famous. 

When women are annoying, or evil, or egotistical, in critically acclaimed movies by the academy, their downfall is devastating. Looking at the recent Oscar nominations, there is a dearth of unlikable or egotistical women, but in the few movies that focus on these types of women, they are never given the same grace and success as Marty. In Bugonia, Emma Stone, playing a cold, potentially alien CEO, gets tortured for the entire runtime of the film. In The Substance, Demi Moore’s character has her vanity cruelly twisted as she splits into two versions of herself and then ends as a grotesque monster that explodes on stage. Looking further back in time, we have movies like Black Swan where our main character’s ambition is coded as a horrific thriller that ends with her stabbing herself to death, or Million Dollar Baby where a woman’s competitiveness in her sport ends with her breaking her neck on a stool and winding up paralyzed and suicidal. 

Ambition in men is lauded and rewarded. They are allowed to rampage through life intent on one single goal, like a table tennis victory, and in the end, they don’t have to grow or change in order to achieve that victory. When women are ambitious in film they have to suffer. Their desire is seen as monstrous and ugly, turning films about a woman’s ego into horror, like Black Swan, Pearl, Maxxxine, X, or The Substance.

There are no sports movies that focus on a woman’s ambition. The closest a film gets to that is Challengers, but even here, Zendaya’s Tashi Duncan has her tennis hopes crushed by a torn ACL, and it’s the man in her life that gets to play professionally as she coaches. In every other famous sports movie about women – Bend it Like Beckham, Whip It, Stick It, A League of Their Own, Bring it On – the main message for women is to learn how to work as a team, not to win glory for themselves. 

One of the problems with this disparity is that the academy has a consistent record of rewarding films about ambitious men over films about any women. In this year’s nominations for best picture, women speak just about a quarter of the words across the ten nominated movies. Only in two movies do they speak more than half the words, with women speaking 57% of the words in Sentimental Value and 51% of the words in Hamnet. And the statistics of being rewarded by the academy are even worse for women of color. Since the first Oscars in 1929, there have been 13,445 nominees across all award categories. Only 17% of the nominees were women; 6% were people of color, and 2% were women of color.

Movies about women are not valued in the academy the way movies about men are. And movies about unlikeable women that get to triumph without punishment are not nominated at all. 

And while we see this play out on screen, this trend trickles over into real life, impacting the people playing these characters. 

It shows in Timothee Chalamet having no issues saying things like, “I'm really in pursuit of greatness. I know people don't usually talk like that but I want to be one of the greats. I'm inspired by the greats,” and knowing he’ll still have the support of people behind him versus Emily Blunt very candidly saying, “Women are still pressured to be warm and likable. Men are not…Men are not held to that same standard. No one cared if Leonardo DiCaprio was likable in The Wolf of Wall Street.”

At the finish line of the Oscars, Marty Supreme ended up losing to One Battle After Another in Best Picture, and Timothee Chalamet lost to Michael B. Jordan for best actor. But Chalamet’s and Marty Supreme’s long list of nominations prove that time and time again, men get the stage no matter what sins they commit. 

‍ ‍Marty Supreme is a reminder that still the same storyline of the ambitious white man is rewarded by the academy while others are swept to the side.