Marty Supreme
Japanese table tennis player Koto Endo brings some idea of glory and superiority to the collective of Japan; Marty Mauser, by design, brings shame and egoism to America.
These representatives for country are facilitated and funded for conquering. Conquering is a universal presence that necessitates survival on an instinctive level and necessitates ego on a performance level, on stage, beyond need to survive.
Maybe this stage exists even in the most dire situations, in Auschwitz during a honey ritual, intertwined with survival. What is Marty's journey if not the stage intertwined with survival?
On a fundamental level, Marty Supreme is a story of conquering and the dynamic beauty it can take on. Conquering in intelligence, in sex, in wealth, in charm, in sport. And by that dynamic existence the contextually defined meaning it takes on, by what's important and valuable to the individual, and what they seek to actually get.
Marty Mauser is some empty void of a man, he's a machine in pursuit of one goal at all costs. A goal that's arbitrary and a goal he's incapable of comprehending the full scope of. The image of victory he one day imagined and never stopped chasing.
And then, after the brutal grueling chase for that image, all the sacrifice; seeing his child, some simple accident achieved so easily, he actualises his inherent purpose and meaning as a man. It swamps in it's beauty any and everything, something new and all consuming to devote his passion towards.
His child prepared to push him to a new limit, a new challenge to rise to. An illustrious actualisation of desire. An image he is graced with loving; desire, the driving force of life, it's birth and the death of table tennis enacted by the totalising force of the people running the game on basis their ego was bruised in a conquering of charm. Made in America charm outcasted by the stronger force a conquering in establishment power takes on.