The Color Orange

The success of Marty Supreme, a film about a monomaniacal ping-pong hustler set largely in New York’s Jewish demimonde circa 1952, might seem implausible, but the box office receipts (+/-$80M so far) and critical reception (Timmy won a Globe) are not without a peculiar precedent. In 1976, the socialist academic Irving Howe watched as his World of Our Fathers, a 700-page social history of Yiddish-speaking immigrants, rocketed to number one on The New York Times nonfiction bestseller list. Along with Roots, which dropped the same year, World satisfied suburbanites’ sudden appetite for rearview mirrors amid America’s so-called “ethnic revival.” 

Like Marty Supreme director Josh Safdie, an indie filmmaker famous for sweating out his audience, Howe was an unlikely hitmaker. The Bronx-born son of Yiddish-speaking immigrants, Howe was skeptical of doctrinal thinking and ambivalent about the project of Jewish assimilation² despite writing the book every doctor in Westchester got for Hanukah. His worldview would later be (unintentionally) summarized by The West Wing’s Toby Ziegler: “Jews in the Bronx have a word for Jews from Westport. They call them Episcopalians.” Howe wasn’t interested in the circumsized and circumspect; he wrote about the loudmouth Russian Jews of the LES with the same profound affection Safdie brings to bear when re-animating them.

“To live among them was to live amid disputation, a ceaseless wrangle of ideas, gestures, reproaches, and hopes. Moral judgment was quick, often harsh, and rarely withheld. They were capable of remarkable generosity, but also of relentless criticism, both of themselves and of others.”

Howe acknowledged that his ancestors were, in short, a lot. But, like Safdie, he understood a simple truth: There’s a difference between being too much and being too much for people who can handle very little.

The culture Howe documented, and that Safdie stages so unapologetically, is not intrinsically excessive; it’s excessive relative to the narrow tolerances of WASP respectability. Russian Jewish life in Marty Supreme reads as loud, combative, and chaotic because it is organized around relationships and community rather than rules and institutions. Because moral judgment is personal, not delegated, people fight constantly. The rawness and intensity of those conflicts make suburban audiences cringe while also reminding millions of assimilated ethnics where they came from in America.

“Cultures are slow to die,” wrote Howe. “When they do, they bequeath large deposits of custom and value to their successors; and sometimes they survive long after their more self-conscious members suppose them to have vanished.”

Of course, he was right—and not just about the flash tempers of Jewish American Princesses. Almost every ethnic group in America has its own special slurs for the under- and over-assimilated. For the Irish, it’s “shanty” and “lace-curtain” (think Mark Wahlberg calling Leo a “lace-curtain Irish motherfucker” in The Depahted). For Koreans it’s “FOB” and “banana.” For Indians it’s “FOB” and “ABCD” (American-Born Confused Desi). For Italians it’s “guido” and… “libtard?” The former insult means “too much.” The latter insult means “too little.” They describe different calibrations of that immigrant tendency to, as Howe put it, “live amid disputation, a ceaseless wrangle of ideas, gestures, reproaches, and hopes.”

This is the stuff that generally gets lost when Americans discuss their backgrounds. Americans claim Irish heritage, but very few modify that claim with “shanty” or “lace-curtain” when they do. Because the average American Jew is middle-class and institutionalized, those who claim Jewish heritage are mostly assumed to be the Reform or lace-curtain variety, even though many of us are not. Metadata goes missing from conversations about ethnicity because people are slow to acknowledge that they don’t just come from the old country, but from old places in the new country³. I’m Irish and Jewish, yes – but actually I’m lace-curtain Irish and shanty Jewish (“Greenhorn” is the term of art). It’s a more specific mix, and understanding that mix matters because it’s predictive of my relationship with institutions (uneasy at best).

Daniel Bell helps explain why this dynamic doesn’t disappear once assimilation succeeds. Bell’s central insight was that economic integration and cultural adaptation do not proceed at the same pace. Groups can master institutions – schools, professions, bureaucracies – while retaining older habits of judgment, intensity, and skepticism that no longer fit the environments they now occupy. What once functioned as a survival strategy under strain becomes, after success, a source of discomfort or embarrassment. Bell called this a cultural contradiction: Institutions require procedural restraint and emotional moderation, while the cultures that produce their most effective supporters often prized the sort of argumentation, moral seriousness, and independence Howe admired.

What sociologists later called strain theory helps explain this dynamic from another angle. Developed by Robert Merton, the theory holds that people are socialized into pursuing goals faster than they gain legitimate access to the means of achieving them, incentivizing those shut out of institutional pathways to improvise. In essence, Marty Supreme is about this kind of improvisation – the desire to achieve “legitimate” success (“I’ll be on the cover of a Wheaties box”) by illegitimate means. The movie resonates precisely because that kind of behavior doesn’t stop just because a family moves to Croton-on-Hudson.

A lot of professionals have a bit of Marty Mauser in them. Strain theory suggests it’s basically a recessive disposition – distrustful of procedure, alert to opportunity – activated whenever institutions feel slow, hostile, or insufficient. This is why Marty Supreme can be, at once, a cringe-fest about a morally incontinent loser and a celebration of all-American DIY determination. The majority of Americans who aren’t Anglo-Saxon purebloods tend to have at least a little bit of that dawg in them. 

Howe’s whole schtick was petting that dawg. He refused to sentimentalize the way things were – poverty sucks, for those keeping track – but he also refused to equate economic and moral progress. Josh Safdie is the same sort of refusenik. That doesn’t just explain the yelling and overtalk. It explains the casting.

Safdie, who came up hustling and broke out (along with his brother) with Good Time and Uncut Gems, is distinctly ambivalent about institutional casting. His films are populated by non-actors, semi-actors, athletes, writers, and people playing versions of themselves. The emphasis is less on performance than essence, which is why Marty Supreme features Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary as a villain, the travel writer Pico Iyer as an irked sophisticate, and Gwyneth Paltrow as an aging movie star. Kevin O’Leary is a villain. Pico Iyer is an irked sophisticate. Gwyneth Paltrow (also Jewish, albeit passing) is an aging movie star. And, not for nothing, Chalamet is a half-Jew leveraging his background to pursue fame and fortune.

Unlike many other filmmakers, Safdie isn’t just interested in representation. He’s interested in shanty representation and “dawg” representation. Paradoxically, the lack of Westport Jews in his movie makes it more specifically New York, Russian, Lower East Side, Ashkenazi Jewish and more legible to members of other cultures playing the assimilation game. They may not sympathize with Marty, but they recognize that they possess and suppress some of the traits that make him unbearable.

Marty approaches institutions – Rockwell Ink, the table-tennis establishment – sideways. Most modern Mausers go through the front door. But if they get locked out, they try the side. They might not punch through a screen, but they’ll sure-as-shit rattle it.

In World of Our Fathers, Howe quotes freely from The Bintel Brief, an advice column that ran in the Forward, a mid-century Jewish rag (that somehow still exists), and served as an ersatz confessional for assimilating Jews incapable of making a smooth transition. Readers asked whether “Americanized” immigrants could marry greenhorns, whether Jewish law-enforcement officers had to report unintended violations by new immigrants, and whether atheists could still participate in synagogue life. What stands out is that the folks asking questions are less confused about how to be lace-curtain than they are about how to remain a little bit shanty.

For the children of lawyers whose parents started businesses to get them out of the tenements where their grandparents shouted about the Talmud, being a bit shanty might seem like an odd aspiration. It isn’t. As various doors get shut on professionals by institutions, we may all need to be a little bit more Marty.

For the past few months, Timmy was full Marty in interviews, praising the quality of his own performances and hyping the color orange. Then, on Sunday, he delivered a subdued acceptance speech on the subject of gratefulness. He got some criticism for throwing on the brakes so quick, but the move made sense to every nonagenarian with a dawg-eared copy of World of Our Fathers. Timmy was performing respectability for the Newport Jews up front. He was being too little after being too much. He was calibrating. As are we all..