Artwork by Nathalie Thibault
In the finale of Richard Linklater’s School of Rock (2003), Dewey Finn’s band of schoolchildren loses the battle of the bands to the protagonist’s previous outfit, No Vacancy. Among the chaos of the disquieted crowd a chant begins, beckoning School of Rock to play one more song in No Vacancy’s place, losing the competition but winning over the crowd and the schoolchildren’s parents among it. Arguably, School of Rock could have ended no other way; for the band to have won the competition would have devalued the true victory of the characters’ connections to one another, to their parents, and to the music, instead placing it in service of a cash prize. The outcome cannot be an external, material reward, but a less physical, more meaningful prize which transcends the teleology of its narrative borders. It is not only that winning the competition would have been beside the point, but such a victory would also have confined itself to the film’s internal logic, depriving it of the metaphorical victory sustained in its ending. This is almost a rule for competition narratives in general, in which the protagonist must win outside of the structure they intend on conquering. Winning the competition is not the point. If the competition is won, it is to the detriment of the film’s meaning overall: the narrative can only be won if the competition is lost.
Josh Safdie’s table tennis comedy-drama Marty Supreme (2025) could be read as an overt attempt to perfect this formula, and Safdie leaves no stone unturned when it comes to hollowing out any external victory triggered by protagonist Marty Mauser’s (Timothée Chalamet) win in the film’s finale. In the process, Safdie constructs a narrative space in which the moment of victory detaches itself from any meaning outside its own ephemeral euphoria: he makes the victory whole and circular, deferring to nothing other than itself.
This process of victorious centralization unfolds gradually leading to the finale, with each violence Marty does in pursuit of his goal pushing people away from him, leaving a trail of disaster in his wake. In his pursuit of the table tennis world championships in Japan, Marty’s narrative trajectory ensures that there will be almost no home or good will for him to return to, digging out his foundations in pursuit of a seemingly absurd goal. Marty’s path to success is also a process of driving away anyone who might be proud of him for achieving it – his journey toward internal meaning appears at the direct expense of any potential external meaning.
From its outset, Marty is confronted with a world which does not understand table tennis, and his attempts to communicate its value constantly fall on deaf ears. It seems initially to have no cultural capital whatsoever, and it is this factor which distinguishes the film from the likes of Rocky (1976), in whose final act Rocky Balboa also loses the competition but wins the narrative in remaining standing. The boxing film exists with a preconstructed, foundational gravitas in the sport-film genre owing to our perceptions of the sport itself. When making a boxing film, one would expect an audience to understand to some degree the significance of the sport before the narrative begins: it has a kind of exogeneous meaning infecting it from without. Marty Supreme has no such luck. Both the film and its protagonist must construct the significance and value of table tennis from the ground up.
The closest Marty comes in this endeavour is in his illicit affair with actress Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow), earning her fleeting affection with his ping pong prowess. It seems at one point that Kay will be able to fund Marty’s trip to Japan, having been so taken with his skill at the British Open, yet the plan is destined to fail from the outset. Marty’s attraction to Kay oscillates from a shallow, sycophantic gawking at her celebrity to a borderline-Oedipal mess – reaching its grotesque apex when Marty proclaims “you sound like my mom” – yet Kay’s moment of initial infatuation arises from an affinity with Marty’s talent. Kay evidently sees some of herself in Marty, momentarily taken with the exuberant artistry of his trick-shots in the tournament, reminded of her own creative gift before it was bought out by the same capitalistic forces which eventually attempt to appropriate Marty’s skill. A narrative throughline presents itself, in which Marty might be able to rely on Kay as his artistic patron, having proved the value of himself and of the sport to the wealthy actress. Yet, when Kay’s own resurgent career hits the rocks, the situation proves fruitless in both its failed romance and its potential to further either of their interests.
It is not Marty’s charisma or skill which earns him the flight to Japan, nor is it due to any success in communicating the importance of table tennis. No one cares, really, not least because of Marty’s arrogance and recurrent incompetence in anything other than the sport itself. To say he “earned” his trip to Japan at all would feel wrong, and Safdie undoes these narrative throughlines which could be potentially vindicated by the win, isolating it further.
Instead, what enables Marty to get on the flight is a humiliation ritual from pen magnate Milton Rockwell (Kevin O’Leary) – Kay Stone’s husband – in which the protagonist is spanked with a Rockwell Ink paddle in front of the businessman’s friends. It is one of many moments in the film in which we might ask how this could all be worth it, and the answer to this question is that it isn’t. The eventual moment of triumph is not a payoff, nothing is redeemed in its ecstasy; it is an almost absurdly purposeless narrative event and this is, arguably, what makes it beautiful.
Taking place in the postwar shock of the fifties, fractures in national identity and reconstruction have been commodified into a marketable spectacle in the political milieu of Marty Supreme. Having been disqualified from the world championships for his own past bad behaviour, Marty instead plays in in a vacuous, corporate warm-up exhibition piece showcasing world champion Koto Endo’s (Koto Kawaguchi) abilities, put on by Rockwell to sell pens. With Endo representing “the determination of a nation reborn,” Rockwell tailors the event to the lucrative market offered by Japan’s insecure postwar identity, and the exhibition works to embody capital’s pervasive appropriation of every search for meaning to its own end.
In the face of this political reality, Marty’s victory proves wonderfully otiose, dancing in the face of Rockwell’s cynical rationale. Having been instructed to lose against Endo for the show’s sake, Marty’s compulsion, his absurd drive, is too palpable to be ignored, and he rescinds his promise. He must also convince Koto in this entreaty, and does so by encouraging him that “you’re not a mascot”, dismantling the entire infrastructure of the finale and breaking the performative illusion. Marty plays one proper game against Endo and wins, falling to the ground, crying, and telling his opponent, quite sincerely, “good luck at the championships, man. I hope you win.” The championships do not matter, and everything Marty has done to get to this position cannot be seen as transactional. Nothing is forgiven and no sin is washed away, the victory stands on its own and holds no meaning outside of itself.
In this moment, when each external source of victory has been gutted, we realize that Marty has been lying to himself throughout the film, somewhat convinced that the victory for which he strived was for the sake of glory, and that “it’s not long before I’m looking at you from the cover of a Wheaties box.” He has believed that his mission was to habilitate table tennis in the capitalist American imaginary, yet in his aesthetic posturing in service of this goal – his fraudulent hotel expenses, newspaper interviews, and ‘Marty Supreme’ ping pong ball business venture – Marty has misunderstood his own obsession. Marty has been convinced that the victory would be partially exterior, that it was somewhat about constructing a career for himself and garnering some cultural capital for table tennis. Yet in the film’s moment of revelation, its narrative anagnorisis, Marty discovers he has been chasing the moment of victory for its own sake, actively preventing it from being appropriated for some other purpose.
In winning, Marty loses his flight home with Rockwell, going instead with a group of soldiers who happened to attend the tournament (some of the only members of the crowd whom Marty’s victory did not greatly disappoint). Arriving back in the States, any significance of Marty’s victory in the eyes of these soldiers is immediately washed away by their families awaiting them in the hanger. In this scene, Marty seems briefly to walk through someone else’s narrative, eclipsed by the emotional weight of the moment from which he is utterly excluded. Children run past Marty to greet their fathers returning home, he is expelled from a far greater narrative and, forgotten, is out the door.
Marty losing himself the flight home continues an ongoing theme in the film: that, not only is the victory inconsequential to others, but Marty’s victory also is in many ways antithetical to his own material interests. When read like this, despite Marty’s behaviour consistently being narcissistic to the point of sociopathy, it is hard to call his motivations – or even the narrative itself – individualistic. The victory is not valued in how it serves Marty’s trajectory and, if it were, it would seem to harm Marty financially and socially almost as much as he hurts others. To deem him selfish would almost be to give him too much credit: he is not in pursuit of an improvement to his material circumstances. In fact, Marty constantly undermines his own position in aid of his purported, hyper-specific “purpose”, along with everyone else he brings down with him.
The film’s conclusion provides the ultimate belittling of Marty’s victory. We part ways with Marty not in his moment of euphoric triumph, but after he returns home, when he sees his child for the first time (if it really is his, which doesn’t seem to matter in the end). This appears to be the final stage in isolating Marty’s victory, appearing so inconsequential when faced with the unassailable reality of becoming a father. Perhaps we could argue that Marty’s victory is what finally prepares him for this reality, returning to his girlfriend Rachel Mizla (Odessa A’zion) finally freed from the compulsion which had thus far been his narrative lifeblood. But even this reads as too teleological an understanding of his obsession. In the end, Marty does not win for money, nor fame, nor for others, in many ways not even for himself, he wins because of something ineffable which even he cannot articulate nor fully understand, something beyond himself, and the moment of victory pulls him toward it with its immense gravity.
Safdie orchestrates the finale of Marty Supreme so as to hollow out any external meaning the victory might have: it is the cinematic victory proper. The triumph cannot be instrumental or teleological, and as such it even feels wrong to call it pyrrhic. The victory exists almost in a sphere of its own, fraying every narrative thread which would at all outsource its meaning. To distil this meaning, to make it a significantly artistic victory, Safdie endeavours to make it endogenous and whole. It is a victory which answers to no one, not to the corporate structures which attempt to contain it, not even to Marty himself.
By Gabriel Williams
The Camera 