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Some Thoughts on Marty Supreme
A whacking time of it.
I didn’t know much about this movie before going in, only that it starred Timothy Chalamet, it was about table tennis, and it was touted as an Oscar contender before it was even released. I wanted to see it. This is part of a larger intention on the part of me and my husband to see more movies and less series. Recently that’s been Eddington and One Battle After Another on streaming, with plans to use those fabulous Regal gift cards for Marty Supreme and Hamnet.
Okay. I have a soft spot for the kind of movie where nothing goes right for our hero, whether or not his disasters are of his own making. That starts way back at It’s a Wonderful Life and stretches through What’s Eating Gilbert Grape and Dan in Real Life and Inside Llewyn Davis and The Joker on up to, well, Eddington, One Battle After Another, and now Marty Supreme. There is something intensely compelling in watching human action in the face of one battle after another (see what I did there). It’s the basis of action movies, which I don’t usually watch, and these movies, where the catastrophes are small and personal.
And this isn’t about the so-called likeability of the character at all. Llewyn Davis was a self-centered prick who was somehow unable to make one good decision. Still, I was fiercely urging him on. My heart was bleeding for Phoenix’s Joker and he was a psychopath. In Eddington, another of Phoenix’s characters bumbled from one catastrophe to another, continuously making his situation less and less survivable. Everyone in that movie was either insane or corrupt except for one character, who in the final shot of the movie is radicalized and ready to wreak havoc for what has been done to him. Still, I didn’t regret watching it, and I understood the characters.
I’m not saying that any of these movies are a walk in the park, a feel-good afternoon with popcorn. I’m saying that if I can find the terrifying actions of Colonel Lockjaw compelling, understandable, and impossible not to watch, I have a high tolerance for monomaniacal assholes on the big screen.
I couldn’t stand to watch Marty Mauser.
He made no sense to me. He left behind a trail of mayhem in the name of WHAT. He actually destroyed cars, homes, reputations, businesses, and LIVES. He underwent utter humiliation and wreaked physical havoc on everyone he met in order to get where he believed he belonged. He was not a man whose triumph I could possibly celebrate.
The movie, as a piece of work, has a complex, twisting script that is word-for-word brilliant. Every single thing about the production is perfectly done. There are moments, especially those around the women in Marty’s life, that are so compelling. I mean, watching Fran Descher actually act, with not much more to work with besides the conflicted intensity of a mother’s gaze? The graceful faded swan that is Gwyneth Paltrow? The fecund beauty and spirited-if-misplaced loyalty of Odessa A’zion?
Those are the women, but every single actor is a marvel, in fact. Koto Kawaguchi invests his character with a focused grace that is the absolute opposite of Marty. This performance was the standout of the movie for me, the perfect counterpoint to all of Marty’s bombast and frenetic energy. I could go on about Tyler the Creator and Kevin O’Leary, but they are just at the top of a list of actors who invest every part with humanity, no matter how small. I mean, even the rubes at the bowling alley are magnificent. There’s also a dog that gives his all, a dog that arrives covered in shit and is last seen barking and snarling as if he will rip apart anyone near him.
And yet, folks.
And yet. Chalamet knifes his way through his role with pointed intensity, hitting every note, never stopping for an instant, fully committed to his destiny as the table tennis king. Was it actually his job to enlist me in this quest? If so, he failed. For me, he was like that dog, a loud, terrifying catastrophe waiting to sink his teeth into anyone to get out, out, out and on his way to wherever he thinks he needs to be. He did what he needed to do perfectly, but I didn’t want him anywhere near me.
That’s my review. I’d love to hear what you think of the movie.
David Arndt on Critique
From his book Philosophy of Writing:
Even the most obtuse and unjust criticism can be inadvertently illuminating and helpful, if it shows how our writing is open to being misread. The hardest task of writing is to look for grains of truth in criticism that seems stupid and unfair. Listen to feedback carefully: pick out the grains of truth, correct the distortions, and ignore the blind spots.
That is perhaps the most graceful and useful advice I’ve ever read on how to handle criticism of a work in progress.
That is all.
Migration Patterns by Dana Wall
I have become a country
people leave at night,
suitcases packed with borrowed breath,
passports stamped with might-have-beens.
The sky keeps folding into smaller squares
until it fits inside a locket—
the one my mother wore when fever
turned her garden into salt.
I am learning the architecture of absence:
how doorways remember what passed through,
how silence builds its nest in abandoned bells,
how your name has become a room I no longer enter.
Each winter, the geese reverse their arrows,
rewriting the sky’s ancient manuscript.
Even their certainty is a kind of faith:
north exists, and so we must.
The archaeologists of tomorrow will find
my ribs curled around nothing,
excavate the empty museum where I kept
all the artifacts of almost.
Memory is a climate we cannot predict—
droughts where once were floods,
hurricanes in deserts, ice where fire bloomed.
I’ve become my own strange weather.
Yesterday, a child asked why the moon
follows her home each night.
I wanted to explain how loneliness
becomes devotion if you give it enough time.
The calendar on my wall is quietly
eating its own months. December
feeding on April, September
swallowing May. Soon there will be
only one day left, unnamed and endless.
I have grown wings on the insides of my hands.
They beat against my palms when I make fists,
a private migration no one sees
as I cross borders visible only to me.
From SWIMM (source) one of the places that sends me a daily poem.
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Dog Day
But first, Dogs.
Yesterday I went to pick up my friend Sarah for a lunch date. She was ready to go when I arrived, but there were dogs there. Dottie, named for black spots on her white paws as a puppy, and Frank, named for his eerie blue eyes. “Let’s go get some fish and chips,” Sarah called out happily, but I was perched on a footstool, reaching for the short glossy fur of dogs. Prancing dogs, one with a rope and a ball clenched tightly in her jaws to let me know how happy she was to have me there. She is sleek and black and elegant, with catlike grace, and if she were mine I would call her Isis, after the Egyptian queen of the underworld. The other dog I’d call Jack, because to me that seems to be his name, with his cattle dog brindle coloring and uncanny white snout, wide as a Bull Terrier’s, and those strange blue eyes, always watching me to make sure of what, I don’t know. A hundred pounds of young, muscular dogs, romping and wrestling in play and nipping each other in competitive jealousy to be the one that sat at my feet, to gaze into my eyes with that singular canine devotion, to be carefully petted and caressed and talked to as if this particular set of eyes was the only set in the world. How can they both be the very best dogs, I wonder, though that is what I told each one in turn. And after a long interval of attention, each took a minute to lean a rump against my legs, extending an invitation that I declined, as I don’t require the information available at the back end of a dog.
And then I washed my hands, and then we went to lunch.
The Really Long Book, and the Fairly Long Book
What got me started today
I enjoyed this GAWKER essay by Tom Whyman about Really Long Books:
Learning to Love Really Long Books
Especially this part:
A book is Really Long because there is something essentially stupid about it, something broken: its length is the product of the writer having no ultimate clue how to say what they want to be saying. Its length is often glorious – but it is also an admission of failure.
I don’t even know if that’s true, but I like the idea so much that I don’t care if it’s true.
My Book Stack
The Really Long Book is on my mind lately, because I have a stack of Really/Fairly Long Books to read. Seven of them, to be exact. Well, no, six, because I’ve already made my way through Neal Stephenson’s Snowcrash, which isn’t actually that long–480 pages. But it FELT long. It felt insanely long, and here’s why.
This book is so overwhelmingly clever that every third or fourth sentence, I had to stand back and marvel at how hilariously clever it was. Just one satiric thrust after another, right into the belly of society. It has its flaws, but I doubt at the time of its writing these were seen as flaws. They were more likely seen as allowable stereotypes that we now see (at worst) as offensive, or (at best) as lazy characterizations. But they are cleverly done, there is no denying it. And all these cleverly satirical people do very clever things in a world that is oh-so-cleverly constructed. And every time I had to stand back and think, Ho-ho-ho, Mr. Stephenson, what a brilliantly clever man you are, it yanked me out of the story. That could happen multiple times per paragraph. This made the <500 pages more like >2000 pages, as far as reading time.
I also have Seveneves and Cryptomicon to read there on the stack. I’m assured by my friend James that these are mature works of a master of his craft. I’m hoping he’s right. I think he might be, simply because my favorite parts of Snowcrash were the info-dump conversations between Hiro the Protagonist and the Librarian, in which I learned about Sumerian language, ancient myth, the Babel Event, and so on. I ate that stuff up, as opposed to the various battles and vehicle chases and harpoonings and so on, which bored me.
So, three of the seven Fairly (as opposed to Really) Long Books are by Stephenson.
The Daunting Book
The fourth one on my list is an actual Really Long Book; The Fall of Babel, the final book in the Babel series by Josiah Bancroft. This book is 638 pages, minus addendums. And it’s in a TINY type with narrow margins, or maybe it’s not, maybe I am just so daunted by this tome that I’m exaggerating to myself about the formatting. But I have a hunch that if this book were formatted in more standard way, it would be over 1K pages.
I can’t figure out why I haven’t read it. I waited impatiently for this book, I preordered it and tracked when it would arrive, and it finally did, and now it’s just sitting here, daunting me. Maybe it’s that the book sort of spoils itself with that title, doesn’t it? I mean, you write about a multilayered city state in a tower called Babel, and then you give me this title, The Fall of Babel? Gosh I wonder what happens to that Tower of Babel I’ve been reading about for three previous (enormous, brilliant, absorbing, fascinating) novels. I am completely absorbed and absolutely stressed out by reading these books. It has to do with the anxiety level created by the premise, and by the skill of the writing. Maybe I’m not ready to immerse myself in 600+ pages worth of high-stakes anxiety right now, even though it will be worth it. I don’t know.
Let’s move on to some others.
Another Fairly Long Book is Purity by Jonathan Franzen, which I’ll get to and no doubt enjoy. Franzen writes lavishly about characters he seems to despise but secretly loves. I find it personally satisfying. There, my heart says, this is exactly how one should see the world, clearly and without mercy, in many pages that crackle with whip-smart humor that verges on cruelty! Yes! His books are long, but the time they take is time well spent. Still, I can’t make myself crack the cover because I have all these other big books to read.
Also in the stack is an actual Really Long Book; Maia by Richard Adams. Remember him? Watership Downs and The Plague Dogs? Well, Maia is 1223 pages in mass-market-paperback! Holy crap, what did it look like in hardback? Could you even lift it? Did you have to put it on one of those wooden OED stands? At some point I’m going to find out, as it comes highly recommended by a friend over cocktails.
Have you noticed something?
At this point, if you’ve scanned the essay and read this blog post, you may have noticed something about all the books mentioned. Yes. It’s true. Every Really Long Book mentioned by Tom Whyman, and all of the Fairly Long Books and Really Long Books mentioned by me, are written by…men.
Is anyone surprised by this? I know I’m not.
Rather than launching into the whys of that, I’d rather point out the only Really Long Book by a woman in my stack, Marguerite Young’s Miss Mackintosh, My Darling. It is thought to be the longest novel ever published (correct me at will, I don’t care if I’m wrong so you won’t offend me). I ordered a used copy (a boxed set of two volumes) about a year ago. I got about 40 pages in before realizing I’d have to get back to it once I’m retired. There are too many books to read in this world, and I’m going to have to do this one in deep dive.
There are many, many Fairly Long Books written by women, like Joyce Carol Oates’ Bellefleur, and her A Bloodsmoor Romance (both of which I love). And, you know, Middlemarch, and The Man Who Loved Children, and…so on. So, just because no long books by women are on my current to-read pile (which is part of a larger to-read pile that fills an entire bookcase in my TV room), still, they exist. Women write long books, too.
What’s your favorite Really Long Book?
I am open to observations, corrections, ruminations, and ideas. Who knows, maybe I can add more titles of daunting length to the stacks of books I haven’t read yet, but will someday, absolutely, for sure, at that mythical point in the future when I have unlimited reading time. Perhaps in the afterlife.