He’s a motor-mouthed, egotistical monomaniac. His pathological obsession with becoming the world’s best table tennis player is so all-consuming that he betrays, manipulates and deceives everyone in his orbit, including his mother and his pregnant girlfriend. He steals, he cheats and even semi-inadvertently sets people on fire.
He doesn’t sound like a good person, certainly not someone you’d want to spend time with, right? Yet, this is precisely the person American audiences have flocked to watch on screen, for 2½ hours, since December. He is, of course, Marty Mauser, Timothée Chalamet’s character in Josh Safdie’s Oscar-nominated chaotic dramedy Marty Supreme.
So popular is this character that the film has become A24’s highest-grossing movie in North America, beating the Academy Award-winning Everything Everywhere All At Once, and has earned four Oscar nominations including for best picture and best actor.
The duplicitous sociopath has already won Chalamet a Critics’ Choice Award and a Golden Globe, and on Friday morning (AEDT) it was nominated for Academy Awards in the best director, best actor, best picture and best writing (original screenplay) categories.
It’s not quite that simple, though. Yes, some cinema-goers can’t help but root for Marty, regardless of his many obvious shortcomings. Others, however, have concluded he’s simply too selfish to be likeable, or even worse, is a dangerous role model. Could this division signal a decline in our love for awfulness on-screen?
We’ve long adored anti-heroes, aka characters who just can’t seem to straighten their moral compass. On television, Walter White stole hearts despite his drug lord status following a cancer diagnosis in Breaking Bad. On the big screen, The Bride brutally murdered several people (including a mother in front of her child) in Kill Bill and all we did was clap – hard. In reality, we’d never endorse or excuse these actions, but in their respective fictional worlds, we egg them on.
There will always be something endlessly enthralling about complicated, flawed characters. They’re battling their own demons just as we wrestle with our own (even if their demons are demonstrably larger and more dangerous than those belonging to us mere mortals). It’s not only relatable, but liberating to watch someone act out repressed impulses – be it anger, jealousy, selfishness – from the safety of a couch or theatre. After all, there’s something undeniably human about that kind of unpleasantness.
Take Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver, for instance. He commits atrocious crimes, yet you can’t help but root for him, even if that support is suffused with pity. The beauty of Martin Scorsese’s film is in unpacking the reasoning behind Bickle’s violence – slowly understanding he isn’t just a psychopathic killer, but an alienated Vietnam veteran who’s discombobulated by the urban decay he’s returned to.
We also simply love an underdog, even if their breakout journey is riddled with ethical landmines. In Thelma & Louise, the female duo is held down by a patriarchal thumb, but they fight back – violently – to unshackle themselves.
Safdie’s characters are usually morally precarious underdogs, like Howard Ratner (played by Adam Sandler) in Uncut Gems, who has to fend off loan sharks and gangsters amid a crushing gambling addiction. Chalamet’s Marty lies, deceives and schemes to rise above the lower-middle-class life he was otherwise destined to endure.
Part of the fun in watching these people on-screen is never knowing whether they’ll cross that moral line – the boundary that takes them from likeable terrible people to just terrible. As long as they toe that line, we’ll happily live vicariously through their actions, while affirming our own moral decency off-screen.
That “moral boundary”, however, appears to be shifting, as more people struggle to accept the terrible actions of some flawed characters. Tár (2022), which tells the story of a world-class conductor who uses her power to groom young musicians, was criticised by many online for focusing too heavily on an abuser of power rather than her victims. It seemed to hit too close to home and was therefore impossible for some to enjoy even on a fictional level.
More recently, the musical crime drama Emilia Pérez was criticised as morally tone-deaf for trying to humanise someone who began as a mass-murdering cartel leader, even if they were seeking redemption post-gender affirming surgery. And perhaps most notorious of all, Joker (2019) was seen by many as a dangerous incel manifesto, which only worsened with Joker: Folie à Deux (2024). The commercial failure of the sequel suggests audiences were already sick of this anti-hero, who took none of the blame for his own nasty deeds.
Compared to these examples, Marty seems rather innocent. He’s essentially just trying to transcend the relatively poor, difficult life he was born into. Yet, many still can’t stand him.
Perhaps this is the new norm in an era of “total accountability”, where people demand apologies and consequences on TikTok and Instagram. Or maybe we’re faced with enough questionable decisions in the real-world news cycle, rendering fictional villainy too close to home. It could even perhaps be linked to the recent gradual rise in moral puritanism, in which younger generations desire less sex on-screen and “healthy conflict resolution”. That’s a far cry from movies like Marty Supreme, where the anti-hero sleeps with a married woman and steals her necklace so that he can buy a plane ticket to Tokyo.
Despite these shifts, there evidently remains appetite for awful characters. Amy Madigan’s child-abducting villain in Zach Cregger’s Weapons is objectively despicable, yet she has become an icon among horror fans. Barry Keoghan was a little more divisive in Saltburn, especially when he drinks Jacob Elordi’s bathwater and later pleasures himself at his grave, but his abhorrent and socially unacceptable behaviour went viral on social media for the boldness of its depravity. And audiences really struggled not to love the ever-charming Hugh Grant in Heretic, sadistic kidnapper or not.
Ultimately, the question shouldn’t be whether Marty Mauser is a good person or not. Movies are filled with bad people, and to great effect. Rather, the question is whether we’re willing to accept that his dreadful decisions are driven by deeply human urges we all share – urges that no amount of moral righteousness can silence.
Marty Supreme lands in cinemas on January 22.
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