[Today...
It's the New Year.
I'm thinking about: the new Josh Safdie movie, MARTY SUPREME (went for my third watch in theaters last night). It would make for a good double feature with the Safdie brothers' previous UNCUT GEMS---which might be obvious, but the two films mirror each other in more ways than one. Both about thoroughly American, manic, Jewish hustler characters who rise to the top of a capitalist food chain; one is a "rat" (Howard Ratner) who chooses the money over his family in an attempt at transcendence (but really, he just wants to cum), the other is a "mouse" (Marty Mauser) who believes so thoroughly in himself that he thinks he can have both the transcendence and family without having to sacrifice one for the other, without having to make that fatal choice---and it's that self-belief (bordering on narcissism), coupled with the refusal of the capitalist "vampire," that carries him through to the other side, where there's new life.
We go up Ratner's asshole at the opening of UNCUT GEMS (the psychedelic colonoscopy sequence, which begins as a descent into the black opal gemstone); in MARTY SUPREME, we go "the other way," toward the egg (which then becomes the white table tennis ball). We're at the "bottom" of things even before the colonoscopy in UNCUT GEMS, in the opening at the Ethiopian mine---we're with the workers at the absolute bottom of the capitalist world economy, in the Global South; we see some of the worst depths of pain possible for a human being in that setting (the inevitable consequence of their working conditions), and it's only because of this pain that the black opal makes it out of the mine, eventually into Ratner's hands. On the other side, in MARTY SUPREME, we open with the height of human pleasure and connection. Ratner wears black and is always hiding from the exposure daylight brings, always on the run from the Other (all the people he's conned; most importantly, his wife and his brother)---it's a film cast in "black light"; Mauser, on the other hand, is obsessed with appearance and drama ("drama is very important to me---I can't ever cut the drama") and wants to wear white on the court.
The mirrorings here are nearly Hegelian (i.e., the films are "inverted worlds" to each other); Freud and Lacan come into the picture as well, with Mauser's Oedipal complex (wanting to pay his Mom back with the ultimate gift---first with the stone chiseled off of an "original Egyptian pyramid" ("we built this"), and finally by making her a grandmother). It's also worth mentioning that both characters turn to the power of the ultimate marginalized Other in America---black people---in their quests for transcendence. In so many ways, both films show how you have to go to the bottom to make it to the top (the tagline for MARTY SUPREME spills the beans on this thesis statement---Marty "goes to hell and back, in pursuit of greatness").
But the difference, again, is about the choice (the sacrifice) Ratner makes by abandoning his family in pursuit of the ultimate high, which is the same choice Marty refuses---for Marty, it's not even apparent that he would ever have to choose in the first place (he says to Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow), in response to her saying he's acting like a child (which she says in response to him saying she's acting like his mother), that if he has confidence and believes in himself, "the money will follow"). Marty refuses the twisted capitalist logic of Milton Rockwell (Kevin O'Leary), who can only ever win by losing ("sometimes when you lose, you win---let me explain---"; "if I don't lose this match...")---in the end, Rockwell is simply laughable to him. The ultimate climax of the film, for me, is when Marty's face curls in laughter at Rockwell's "vampire" speech. "You won't ever be happy"---but the thing is, he already is.
MARTY SUPREME would also make a good double feature with Abel Ferrara's KING OF NEW YORK (and also, in a very different way, with Don Bluth's AN AMERICAN TAIL).]