The most American substitution happened at the beginning: John Locke’s bland assertion that the sensible liberal society would acknowledge a natural right to “property” as well as life and liberty gave way to the romanticism of Thomas Jefferson’s claim that God favored the “pursuit of happiness.” The Lockean focus on titles and deeds and other pecuniary matters did not vanish from the American character, but it was subsumed into a vision of self-fulfillment and self-creation; a contest between liberated individuals in which money was just one way of keeping score.
Marty Supreme, in which Timothée Chalamet makes his latest attempt to transcend our age of cinematic decadence by sheer force of will, is a movie that illuminates the Locke–Jefferson dialectic. The engine of the plot is the need for certain sums of money: The MacGuffin that the main character is chasing is always denominated in dollars. But Chalamet’s Marty Mauser, a would-be world champion of table tennis from New York City’s Lower East Side in the 1950s, isn’t a servant of mammon who imagines that it’s glorious to be rich. He’s pursuing happiness in the Emerson-meets-Gatsby style: He’s after the green light and the orgiastic future, the fulfillment of the self’s imperial ambitions. And because we’re Americans, we don’t want his story to end in Gatsbyesque tragedy; no matter his sins, we want him to win.
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