Some Thoughts on "Marty Supreme"

 

1. Marty Mauser. The family name evokes Art Spiegelman’s breakthrough comic book treatment of the Holocaust, with its Nazi cats and Maus Jews. As a Survivor, Marty (Timothee Chalamet)  proves as indomitable in competitive humanity as in table tennis.
2. The first ping-pong ball tells it all. Under the hero’s name: “Made in America.” This hero is the hustler we met in What Makes Sammy Run, our Duddy Kravitz, etc., the aggressive, disturbing, unlikable but successful Jew that the classic noirs were afraid to present. He’s the American outsider who embraces and exploits his marginalization to get ahead. To grab his share. He refuses to be constrained by the social conventions that suppress him. He is driven to offensive self-assertion, to indecorum, to succeed in order to survive: “I’m Hitler’s worst enemy.” 
3. Why table tennis? As Marty introduces himself to the man he would cuckold, be humiliated by, then affront, “I’m an athlete.” But not the big macho athlete we expect —  not from the open court of “real” tennis, the outdoor, the rich, the clubs that banned Jews. This is the small domestic version where a Jew  might still loom large. A kitchen athlete.  
4. Then there’s the ball’s colour dynamic. Tournament players are required to wear black so that the white ball won’t be lost against a white background. Not to be lost in the background, to maintain one’s individuation — that’s also the Jew’s larger determination of selfhood. He's not of the "Sha, sha- shtum" persuasion. Here the hero’s table tennis skill gives him that shot. In developing an alternative colour Marty finds an alternative means to avoid that disappearance.”It’s the Marty Supreme Ball, not the Marty Normal Ball.” 
5. This Jew acknowledges and exploits the antisemitism that ineluctably awaits. “I can say that because I’m Jewish,” he wraps up an antisemitic joke: ”I’m going to do to Kletzky (Beza Rohrig) what Auschwitz couldn’t.”  By stealing the bigot’s trope he inoculates himself against the pain, as did Dick Gregory’s title Nigger. 
6. Then there are The Women. Marty’s true match is the homey, loving, earthy, dark Jewish — indeed Biblical — Rachel (Odessa A’zion). Her he has impregnated then fled. He discovers she has a drive, resourcefulness and energy that match his. Their baby solidifies them and him.
7. In the interim he is tempted away by that trad status symbol, the blonde shicksa goddess. That appeal, challenge, against-all-odds self-affirmation, trap his fantasy and lead him up the blind alley of mutual exploitation. Here Marty realizes his — albeit modified — ambition to defeat the Japanese champ who had defeated him. Banned from the tournament he manages an outside revenge win,. But only through his first suffering the goddess’s husband’s humiliating abuse and then breaking from him.
8. The Nazis had saved the older ping pong champion, Bela Kletzky’s life, then set him to defuse bombs. Not the sinecure a hero might expect as an admiring reward, but for a Jew.… In the film’s most compelling scene, that Jew follows pestering bees to their hive, smokes them out, then covers his body with honey — not for himself, of course, but for his fellow inmates to lick off! The fact that this story is true does not diminish its power as a metaphor. Sweet are the uses of adversity, indeed. 
9. There’s an essay just in what that incident reveals about the prisonerss’ suffering, indeed that of all the Jews, the camaraderie and sustenance the Jews there — and in general  —need to survive. And after all, what are the real sport stars but our source of vicarious satisfaction to help us forget our inadequacy? The honey over our bitter disappointments. Logically, however absurd, the Japanese crave their hero’s ping pong triumph over the American to avenge their WW II loss.
10. The lost dog subplot replays the central thrust. In plot he’s a possible tributary to get Marty back to Japan for what he thinks will be his redemption. The rich hoarder is as compelled to recover his Moses as Marty is his table supremacy. As the Old Testament name evokes foundational Jewry, the final conflagration ironically recalls the burning bush that fired man’s discovery of his God. 
11. So Marty is crooked, compulsive, nakedly ambitious, cruel, dislikable. This Mauser is also a mamzer (bastard). But nothing seriously criminal, just nervy. Chutzpah. His most criminal act is chipping off a piece of a pyramid in Egypt. But history absolves him. He gifts it to his mother: “We built it.” Justice may not always be blind but it is often ironic. That’s poetic.
12. Film feeds on life, as vice versa.  As the long-absent-from-the-stage aging star Kay Stone (as in heart of), Safdie cast long-absent-from-the-screen aging star Gwyneth Paltrow, who wins much respect by playing this unrespectable egotist. Enjoyably resurrected are the once current Fran Drescher and Sandra Bernhard as Mausers. The star’s stage director is played by playwright/director David Mamet. In the most interesting casting, the actress’s sleazy husband, Milton Rockwell, is played by Kevin O’Leary. The Canadian is best known as a hustler on two TV series, Shark Tank and Dragons Den, where he was a panelist cashing in on young talent. IMDB calls him “Canada’s Donald Trump,” but O’Leary can act.
13. As Marty is disappointed when his stolen necklace proves costume jewelry, its owner  Ms Stone heartbreak from the reviews of her return to the stage. Only that grief prevents her from giving Marty a real necklace to sell.. 
14. As the continuing Middle East war — should — remind us, the Jew stands for life against the death cult of radical Islam. Thus Josh Safdie’s tough guy hero ends up weeping at the sight of his baby son. Indeed that sight even charms away the infant’s tears as it may free ours.. 

Some thoughts on Hamnet

1. This feminist approach to Shakespeare’s life tells us nothing about the real Anne Hathaway but freshly reminds us of the playwright’s importance. This Hathaway has no apparent effect on his work — nor even an understanding of it. Her first — and climactic — experience of theatre — she’s unfamiliar with even the basics of casting and roles —  reminds us that he’s the first modern dramatist. Indeed, Harold Bloom says Shakespeare invented human nature by imagining humans as we know them, defined by thought, word and action, of an unprecedented complexity and resonance.
2. This film’s feminism lies in the rich characterization invented for Anne — or Agnes here. Names, indeed words in general, were at the time fluid in spelling and meaning. Anne/Agnes parallels Hamlet/Hamnet. Indeed there were even a dozen ways to spell Shakespeare. (Don’t know how many for Will.) This Agnes is totally invented as a pagan spirit — daughter of a witch, learned in herbs, determined to pop her children in the wilds. She commands a hawk. This character places Shakespeare at the turning point from the primitive to the modern. He is sensitive to both pagan and modern. So while he lives in a humble London garret he moves his family from their primitive cottage to “the largest house in Stratford” (It actually was only the second largest. But enough about unreal estate). When the twins are born the son seems lifeless till Agnes brings him to life — as Will will onstage, to her profound growth from affront to joy. 
3. Anne’s world is coarse, wild, dirty. She has a one-colour wardrobe, dirty nails (like, shrewdly, the whole cast. But alas, her teeth are too good for the period). Where Will will find his expression and insight in words she pours out screams. This marriage makes Shakespeare the pivot from the old coarse world to the modern. His genius lies in apprehending and appreciating the primitive while advancing beyond it. He recognizes and adopts her wild energy.
4. The real Agnes (preggers) married 18-year-old Will when she was 26. The film shrinks that gap romantically. In our world she might have babysat him. (I made 15 cents an hour.) She could have been the most inspiring sitter before Paul Anka’s Diana — but Shakespeare never wrote about her. We’re not even sure he wrote poems to her. Indeed he abandoned his family to create in London. Absented himself from that felicity, a wile, one might say. Only to return to it in grief. 
5. Of course, the entire film can be wound out of the opening shot. The camera pans down what appear to be two dark, thin but real trees — one straight and pure, the other bent, gnarled, kinky. They’re revealed to be branches off the same trunk, which at the bottom reveals even more churning, wild roots. This living organism might be read as a variety of binaries. Art/nature. Drama/life. Male/female. Old/new. Pure/impure. Energetic/calm. Wild/tamed. Active/passive. In some those binaries might be reversed: the straight limb could be either the male or the female. Nature might better be the twisted wild branch, art the straight. Or vice versa. The real tree at the beginning is matched by the backdrop of equally thin but regular painted trees on stage at the end. This art is the flattening of that life. That replays all the binaries from the beginning, but flattened and false. Also, alien to the court setting of the scene.
6. Anent the looseness of spelling and language — this Hamlet yearns to melt his “solid” flesh. Ok. An alternative text spells it “sullied,” making for a richer reading. For the “solid” is already incipient in the “melt.” “Sullied” adds Hamlet’s recoil from his physical being (“or not to be”). 
7. The production we see omits the play’s real ending — the stabilizing invasion by Fortinbras (“strong in arms”). With the focus on Agnes discovering how theatre can address, enrich, even discover her own life, Fortinbras is unimportant. The film prefers to close on the audience joining her emotional union with the actor.  
8. There are two problems with the assumption that the play Hamlet grew out of Shakespeare’s intense loss of his same-name son. The association is tempting not just because of the names but from Shakespeare’s examination of grief, the responsibilities that bind father and son, even beyond the grave, and that old “To be or not to” dilemma. In the revenge theme Shakespeare may rather have drawn from Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy than from his own emotional condition.
9. The second issue may invite fuller consideration. Unlike the film’s direct turn from the life tragedy to Hamlet, between his son’s death (1596) and that play (1600) Shakespeare churned out The Merchant of Venice (1596–1597), Henry IV, Part 1 and 2 (1597–1598), Much Ado About Nothing (1598–1599), Henry V (1598–1599), Julius Caesar (1599–1600), As You Like It (1599–1600) and Twelfth Night (1599–1600). Maybe there’s a PhD. thesis awaiting someone’s development of the son’s loss through that sequence.
10. So are novelist Maggie O’Farrell and director Chloe Zhao to be faulted for imposing this feminist testament on our Will? Not at all. Novelists and directors are entitled to their own poetic licence. But more important: Shakespeare earned that respect. Here is a respectful acknowledgment of his unprecedented representation of rich, complex women in his world, in his plays. Though played by boys his women are realistic glories. His Cleopatra dwarfs both Antony and Caesar. Juliet dims Romeo. Indeed, Coriolanus’s mother may well be the tragic “hero” of his play. Desdemona is Othello’s equal as his “fair warrior” as Macbeth’s Lady is his. Portia’s power and intelligence make her the moral — and suspect — counterpoint to Shylock more than the titular Antonio is. The feminist center in this fantasy of a bio is justified by even this modernity already established in the Shakespeare canon. It’s just another way that Shakespeare is — as Jan Kott put it — our contemporary.