Marty Supreme is the real fucking deal. This is America not at the “zenith of its influence” but rather at the accidental convergence of a set of overdetermined and hyperspecific historical conditions that we today confuse for a primal scene, one which gives every crisis of the present its meaning by dint of being different from Now. Ironic that those conditions are what made the myth possible in the first place. Now myth, of course, is another word for ideology, and this one is at the beating heart of this stupid country, one that believes money is a god we can call down from the heavens not just through hard work but through sheer blood-drenched will made manifest.

What's happening right now in the country that still wants to believe that myth is that it no longer does. But not because we told bad stories, or held mistaken beliefs. It's not even that our parents got addicted to Fox News and the housing market turned into an asset bubble that's hijacking the rest of the economy. It's all about time, and where you are in its forward march. The realization everyone has come to is not that the myth is a lie but that it actually was very true, but only for a certain set of people, and at a specific moment in time, none of whom played by the rules we all thought would reward us for following to the letter. America has peered into the mawing, Trump-shaped hole in its stomach and seen straight through to the other side. America is a scam all the way down, but sometimes you're born into the right moment to put a stolen $700 on the right number. And for Marty (and the Myth as such) it was all converging, America's industrialized postwar domestic economy was spitting out profit at high rates of return, but it was happening at a moment when the rest of the world market had taken a step back to catch its breath. America's rise to supremacy was really nothing other than a chance to invest that profit (M', which at this moment was the rest of the world's surplus they were now in possession of) back into the circuit, in the domestic economy, in order to produce commodities for the generation who just saved the world in the form of the suburbs and pensions pegged to the stock market. That's the only time the rest of us got the surplus, and it came on the heels of the rest of the world almost ending. You couldn't even do it again if you tried, it only worked then because the rest of the world was in ruins, decolonizing and in need of reindustrialization after smashing itself into a million pieces for the Yanks to pick up to call their own. Marty is a character who seems to understand this, and he knows his time is short. He wants to get to M' a little faster, and I'll be damned if that isn't a desire held by every American fully aware this place has no real investment in people like the ones you see in this movie, and those sitting in front of the screen, children of Holocaust survivors, a Black taxicab driver, women who found themselves trapped in consequences of others' actions in a pre-Roe world, you name it. We like to lie to ourselves that we're different, but give me a break, we have to negotiate our ability to just exist with our health insurance providers over minuscule percentage points designed to give the wealthy more money to gamble with. At least he was being honest about it.

The Safdies' stunt casting really benefits here, and I think Josh is the one who clearly has the juice. Sharktank's Kevin O'Leary plays the capitalist (the only person Marty can't swindle), and supposedly improvised the line where he claims to be a "Vampire" "from 1601," which was coincidentally the year of the English East India Company's first voyage to colonize the subcontinent for the British to call their own. I find it no accident it took the actual capitalist to figure out he wasn't just playing a villain but Capital itself. Josh's cinematic literacy helps frame so much of this film's productive pastichelike tablesetting, but it would help to put this into conversation with his other films, too. 

Take Uncut Gems, for instance, which opens inside the intestines of an addict who spends the rest of the movie chasing the highs that come from watching an app in his phone turn green because men on television achieved something. Marty Supreme opens on sperm racing to fertilize an egg, swimming upstream against the current to fight for its place. This is not a spectator sport it's fucking to create new life and BECOME somebody in the process, dammit, somebody who can make the economy bend to his will rather than trick his phone to make a noise. Gems' Howie was just a character study, a movie about a Kind of Guy which in retrospect may have simply been a dry run for Marty, who here becomes an allegory for postwar American supremacy and the idea it had about itself which we are only now starting to unlearn. Marty's America is a happening place, scaffolded by a productive manufacturing economy with sales to be made and destinies to will into being. 

But it turns out prosperity was to be had back then not by adopting a new lifestyle brand like the MAGA fantasies of 2.5 kids and a car in every garage. That's loser shit, what nobodies do. It's an irony Trump became their avatar, someone who wouldn't be caught dead in the suburbs cucked by soccer practice and a car to wash on the weekends. Marty knows this; that the real route to success comes through finding someone to scam out of money you can then go put somewhere else more productive, more interesting. The kind of places that have movie stars and real capitalists (doesn't matter if they are on the upswing or not, they are Somebodys). Marty's America is an America that wants to Be Somebody, and so he does, by running scams with his fellow "business" partner and taking out loans so he can buy into the global championship that will grant him the success he so desires (and compound many returns).

The allegory here becomes quite literal: we watch as Marty runs scams at the bowling alley by staging ping pong performances that can't lose (the gamblers are betting on the same side of the scam). Like anyone who made it in the 50s, he's searching for shortcuts to close the circuit of capital to get from M to M' faster than the rest of the suckers, wasting time slowly converting their money into commodities to sell for slivers of profit. Why do that when you can double it? How? Marty will figure it out; and he does. He knows the real way to get rich in America is to find some wealthy fools you can entertain into handing over their money so you can take it out of the consumer economy--in Marty's case literally the US--and dump it into some other market to restart the scam anew. That's Silicon Valley's entire business model! Every day the available time between M and M' compresses, and while there was more of it in 1952 Marty knew where the wind was blowing. He was a time traveler, like the film's asynchronous score, hopping from one moment to the next, BAM, and just like that he's now the lucky owner of a new market nobody else had even heard of yet because it was on page 12 of the pre-failing New York Times. The film is so smart about this: capital's forward motion, its incessant drive to find new markets is allegorized in the two international tournaments that bookend the film's plot. This is the film showing you the world market opening up, right as the postwar world system began generating profit again. Victory for Mart is thus about supremacy over those global flows of capital--Marty Supreme, the kind of thing Empires are built on.

That kind of Business is the stuff not of 12 hour shifts but of smooth talking and showmanship, America's real beating heart, the Geist that gave way to the election of a reality television producer and star as President eight years after the economy finally snapped for good in 2008. So of course, time becomes of the utmost formal importance to the film. The asynchronicity of the score's electric pads over shots of incandescent bulbs and high-waisted pants are just one example of the film's use of historical asynchronicity, something I have finally decided will be a chapter in my book (make sure you catch the end of the credits, which list the songs from each decade as if they were performers themselves, grouped under "The 80s" and "The 50s," respectively). This device--of the 80s "watching" the 50s, and us in the 2020s looking at both--is reminiscent of The Secret Agent's own self-conscious framing device of the historian archivist listening to the tapes the camera brings to life, and I can't help but think we have FINALLY started to settle on a truly new set of aesthetic devices specific to our age, one where History has returned as an absent cause, evoking a desire for historicity we are increasingly realizing smartphone apps and just-in-time gambling economies won't give us. I filled up half a notebook watching this today, which immediately skyrocketed to #1 on my list, and I am setting it down into print now that I need to put those handwritten scribbles into prose form one way or the other, which I'll start right after I watch this again. MARTY SUPREME.