a grand unified theory on the american supreme

A TFS Original Investigation 🔎

When I stumbled out of Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme, my body felt like a jellyfish, all nerve endings and no joints. My ears rang as if I’d just spent hours in front of a Marshall stack. I’m not a Timothée Chalamet stan, but I am an occasional Timothée Chalamet enjoyer and it is true, he does something singular here. He’s all petulant ego and manic ambition, which makes you want to both applaud and shove him into traffic. It’s exhilarating, it’s kinetic.

**Marty Supreme spoiler in the next two paragraphs**

There's a scene midway through where Rachel—Marty's childhood friend, sometime lover, the woman pregnant with what is almost certainly his child—gets shot during a botched attempt to steal money from a dead gangster's pocket, and Marty rushes her to the hospital where she's bleeding from a gunshot wound while simultaneously going into premature labor. Despite her yelling at him to stay with her while she’s in the hallway he walks out of the hospital to catch his flight to Tokyo for a ping pong exhibition match.

The film doesn’t soften this choice with a lingering shot on him looking conflicted, it just gives you a man refusing to let anything get in the way of his paddle, of performing a cold, calculating operation of what matters more and what needs to be sacrificed. When he eventually comes back after the match having hitched a ride home with the American soldiers who watched him play, he tells Rachel he loves her for the first time in the entire movie, then goes to see the baby through the nursery glass and breaks down completely, then sobs in a way that suggests something in him has finally cracked open.

**Spoiler ends here**

I went home and did what I always do when a movie stays with me: I went looking for the discourse. The discourse was, to put it mildly, an absolute disaster. Some saw it as a savage parody of American narcissism in its truest form; others found themselves aching for Marty, swallowed by the dream machine which was rendering him into a perfect object of aspirational fantasy.

My take was somewhere inbetween: the fact that he comes back doesn’t negate the fact that he left, nor does it undo the math he did in that hospital corridor when he decided his shot at being Supreme was worth more than being there while the mother of his child might bleed out from wounds incurred helping him steal money for his athletic career.

As I watched my next-seat-neighbor wash the movie out of his eyes with a Gatorade Zero, Chazelle’s Whiplash and Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood immediately sprung into mind. It was at this moment that I realized, yes, I was thinking about Marty, but I was also seeing Andrew Neiman in Whiplash with his hands shredded and bleeding onto a snare drum. I was also seeing Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood collapsed in an oversized bowling alley yelling that he was finished into the space of his accumulated wealth.

Why did these three men—a mid-century ping-pong player, a contemporary jazz student, a turn-of-the-century oil baron—suddenly feel like kindred spirits?

This proposition might seem ridiculous at first. Their eras are too different. Their genres are too divergent. But the more I tried to compartmentalize them, the more they blurred into one horrifying composite: they perform the same surgical procedure.

So what if, and I'm genuinely asking here, the ping-pong paddle, the drumsticks, and the oil derrick are actually the same scalpel?

a grand unified theory on the american supreme

In physics there's a concept called the Grand Unified Theory—the idea that what appear to be three separate fundamental forces are actually one underlying force manifesting at different energy levels. Raise the energy high enough and the distinctions collapse, revealing a single mechanism operating across different scales.

The most fascinating thing from my research? There’s a 2016. movie called GRAND UNIFIED THEORY. Nerds, we did it!!!!

When I looked at these three films I had the eureka moment that Marty, Andrew, and Daniel are one American sickness running at escalating intensities:

• trivial pursuit (table tennis)

• artistic pursuit (jazz)

• industrial capitalism (oil extraction)

The stakes change. The surgery does not.

But first, allow me to give you the working understanding of this underlying force. I am going to dub it purification which is, in fact, a straightforward operation:

The contemporary American Supreme as articulated in our most venerated auteur cinema is not a process of radical self-fulfilment but rather one of radical self-amputation, one that requires the protagonist to understand heritage, communal duties, and collective identity as biohazard contaminations that must be excised in order to realize what these films consider “Supreme” individuality.

The once-purified being is not granted freedom or transcendence, but what sociologists term Total Social Death—a self so isolated it contains nobody else, so liberated it has nothing left to lose, so magnificent it stands entirely alone.

To prove this is actually a unified theory and not just me having a normal one about ping-pong (I promise I’m fine), I need to show three things:

First: The mechanism must be identical. In order for it to count as the same mechanism, I need to show that the same surgical procedure is being performed on the same specific categories of human connection, in the same order leading to the same endpoint.

Second: The mechanism must be systemically necessary, not just representative of individual pathological choices.

Third: The mechanism is indifferent to stakes — that the same price is charged whether your pursuit is trivial (a ping pong trophy), aesthetic (jazz perfection), or industrial (an oil empire). Gravity charges the same acceleration whether you drop a feather or a boulder.

If we can meet these three conditions—and I'm going to walk you through why I think we can—then our most celebrated narratives on greatness aren’t unique different results but iterative experiments actively purifying American selves into Supreme individuals.

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A) the mechanism must be identical