The thing that is “Supreme” in Marty Supreme is confidence. Marty Supreme Confidence.
Confidence is alluring in part because it is inherently dramatic. Two guys squaring off in a table tennis tournament is a contest. Two guys squaring off while one of them says “I’m the best of all time. You’re going down. I can’t lose.” is a drama.
It’s dramatic because there is suspense implicit in the confidence. It is Hitchcock’s ticking bomb under the ping pong table. With confidence the stakes are no longer just who can paddle a tiny white ball with the most speed and accuracy, they are the nature of the universe itself. Can we mere mortals through the power of belief alone, bring about a future that has not yet happened, into existence? Can the titular Mr. Supreme (played by Timothy Chalamet) through his conviction in his own greatness bring about the destiny he already know is his birthright?
“Believe in yourself.” “Fake it till you make it.” The Law of Attraction. Manifest your desires. “Confidence is king.”
Our society is replete with the superstition of confidence. Those who seem to wield it effortlessly proclaim it’s power is right there for the taking. We are correct to have our doubts. To believe you can simply speak or think a reality into existence is to believe in magic. And yet—despite the prevailing skepticism—we find it hard to untangle ourselves from these ideas. The confident among us do often seem to have an almost uncanny knack for success. Maybe there is something to this power.
Some of the power of confidence lies in the suspense. The performance of confidence draws us into the drama. Those who root for the confidant man might do so out of curiosity as much as anything else. The success of the confident presenting a felt proof in his manifesting power, and if that power is found to be real, then we are given hope that it may also work for us, that all we need to pry ourselves from the floorboards of mediocrity and into the lofty rafters of greatness is the belief that the rafters are where we belong. But even the skeptics and the haters are enthralled by the drama: for if the confident one crashes in what we call a blaze of glory all the sweeter their defeat. Watching a loss is one thing, but to watch your opponent lose when they knew they would win is to watch their world fall apart. Their reality destroyed and your own affirmed.
Suspense alone is not power. The power lies in the way the drama of suspense attracts and holds attention. Attention (as we’ve been so frequently reminded in this attention economy) is a limited commodity which, once gathered can be transmuted into power. Power which can then be wielded by the confident to help achieve their goals.
This is, partly, the basis of confidence’s sleight of hand: If you believe fully enough in your own success, others will pay attention and with that attention you may actually be better equipped to facilitate that success. The other, more tangible dimension to the power of confidence lies in the nature of choice and self-fulfilling prophecy.
A large part of what you achieve in life is defined by what you choose to attempt. (You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.) But like most people, your choice of what to attempt is largely defined by what you believe is possible to accomplish. If you know it is impossible to make the 50ft leap across the spike-filled pit, you will never try, and rightly so. You cannot suddenly make the impossible possible simply by believing you can do something that you cannot.
However. Many of us unwittingly believe that which is possible is not. These beliefs limit what we attempt and what we do not attempt to accomplish is certain to remain unaccomplished.
So the confidant man unlocks a kind of power by expanding his vision of what is possible beyond the common bounds. He is more willing to attempt the seemingly impossible, and in doing so is more likely to accomplish the seemingly impossible. When this effect is realized, it further reinforces the confidence, and the belief in confidence itself as power, and the confidant man might begin to believe that the power of his confidence is limitless and that he himself is limitless.
From the outside, when overconfidence pays off, it can seem as if the laws of material reality have been defied. It is by appearing to facilitate acts that appeared impossible that confidence takes on its almost mystical quality. To fully harness this power the confidence man must not only convince other’ his destiny is pre-ordained but also himself. He must become lost in the performance, him must himself fully believe so that all doubt is overcome, forcing him like a funnel towards the choices that could result in his success, indeed making the success more likely, though not, as he must believe, inevitable.
This double gambit, which first attracts attention, then seems to make the impossible possible is quite effective as a means of seduction. This is the power that the con man leverages against a mark. Either hiding his own ability while stoking your confidence until you make a miscalculation that benefits him, or by earning your confidence in him through the performance of his own, which he may then exploit.
It is why campaigning politicians always refer to themselves as “the next president of the United States” rather than the more accurate “prospective next president of the United States.” Because they know that by projecting the view that their victory is an inevitable, they might influence the voter’s perception of what is possible. That because most people are more likely to bet on a person they believe has a shot at winning and because beliefs are not rooted in cold hard science and reason (as many of us would prefer) but are instead malleable and susceptible to influence—if you can influence beliefs you can influence outcomes. That is where the power of confidence lies, made greater by the force of the conviction behind it.
But the whole thing is fragile, for no matter how strong the conviction of the confident, the self help guru, the salesman or politician, they are still bound by the same physical laws of the universe, they are still susceptible to the same forces of happenstance. Even though confidence helps a candidate win, for every candidate that wins many more will lose.
Yet there is just enough real power in confidence that sometimes the confidence itself is all you really need to convince someone to believe in you enough to provide the next wrung on your ladder to heaven. Marty Supreme knows if he can just get that next wrung, he’ll climb right to the top. Never mind he doesn’t yet know where all the other wrungs will come from—he believes his confidence will materialize those as well.
In the face of enough confidence many think maybe they know something I don’t. And it’s easy to almost hope that they do. Because wouldn’t it be nice if we could know the future? Wouldn’t that be a comfort to our anxieties? Perhaps if I am in close enough proximity to the confidence it will rub off and I too will gain prescience of my own destiny, discovering the comforting certainty that I will win.
It is with glee that Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow), a fading actress trying to restart her career on broadway, runs to hear the New York Times review of her play. “You’re acting circles around that guy.” Marty had told her confidently in rehearsals. The confidence is infectious.
When the gambit pays off, for a moment the confidence appears to be manifesting the outcome, our confidence man grabbing wrung after wrung in the ladder to his success out of what appears to be thin air. Each successive success makes the sleight of hand all the more compelling. Maybe confidence is all you need. Hustle. Optimize. Manifest. Ignore the haters. Ignore the critics. Ignore the damage your single-minded focus has done to yourself and everyone around you.
We should not forget the bomb of reality ticking underneath the table tennis. And if you’ve seen these stories before, or been on this plant long enough (and payed attention to what’s happening around you) you probably see where this is going. Things are not so simple, and however compelling, the high-wire act often comes to a spectacular end. That in-and-of-itself is sometimes the show.
This year at the Golden Globes Chalamet broke with Hollwood’s tradition of affected humility to declare out-loud his desire to be ranked in the pantheon of acting greats. It not to see a through line between the Marty’s confidence, Chalamet’s own display of confidence, and the brashness of the meta-character behind film’s brilliant marketing campaign. A campaign which gave us a “leaked” meeting where Chalamet overconfidently pitched absurd concepts and where the punchline was “yeah sure, that’ll never happen.” —Only for many of the ideas to materialized as viral marketing stunts leading up to the film’s release. A marketing campaign perfectly timed to double as an Oscar campaign, a film released on Christmas day well positioned to generate Oscar buzz, all lead by a confident guy who clearly has his sights set on his first academy award.
I myself am fairly confident that Chalamet will one day earn the statue he desires, and he may even rank among the greats. But I doubt this performance is the one to cement that position.
Director Josh Safdie does a wonderful job of guiding us frantically through Marty Supreme’s calamitous wake. And while the film’s examination of confidence is less overtly spiritual than Uncut Gem’s, Daniel Loplin’s soaring, etherial choral/synth score still evokes a mystical dimension. The wonderful casting mixes non-actors with familiar faces to lend us a world with depth and texture, and Darius Khondji’s cinematography is well tuned to the controlled chaos. Throughout all of this, Chalamet is strong as a leading man, effortlessly embodying youthful cocksure intensity needed for the role: but he wants to be ranked against the likes of Day-Lewis, Pacino or Viola Davis, and I say in all love, that he just is not yet there. I don’t see nuanced physicality, sensitivity, or presence—I see mostly a young man frantically trying to win. It is what the role calls for but what is underneath this Supreme Confidence? What formed Marty Supreme? Who is he besides his drive?