A Tale as Old as Time: Hollywood and the Ambitious White Boy: ‘Barry Lyndon’ & ‘Marty Supreme’

Redmond Barry Lyndon in ‘Barry Lyndon’ (1975)

Marty Mauser in ‘Marty Supreme’ (2025)

‘Barry Lyndon.’ An ambitious Irish rogue who travels all across the continent in wars and gambling schemes in order to eventually find himself amongst the elite after seducing and marrying rich widow Lady Lyndon, but his unchecked ambition leads to family tragedies, financial ruin, and culminates in a near-fatal duel with his stepson. ‘Marty Supreme.’ An ambitious American table tennis ‘prodigy’ rises from the New York grit with hopes of championship glory, where he gets to mix and mingle with the elite of the world, always finding cunning schemes to get the money he needs to get to the next championship, but his unchecked ambition hurts all those around him and eventually leads to his downfall. What do these films have in common? Ambitious? Check. From the lower classes of society? Check. Go to hell and back to achieve their dreams? Check. Does their unchecked ambition lead to their downfall? Absolutely check. Exactly fifty years separate these films, and yet, the importance of the main character being a douchey, overly ambitious white guy still remains, proving that the biopic of an overly ambitious white man is usually the same film with different wardrobes and production design.

We can almost certainly credit ‘Citizen Kane’ for popularizing the idea that the main character could be this insufferable white guy character. What ‘Citizen Kane’ differs from these films is that there is no ambition to rise the social ranks, but in a way, Charles Kane wants to fall down the ranks. All he ever wanted was his childhood and that moment of happiness back. Both ‘Barry Lyndon’ and ‘Marty Supreme’ seem not to recognize the reasons why the characters are the way they are. Maybe ‘Barry Lyndon’ addresses it in the beginning in passing, mostly coming from the omnipresent narrator voice who shepherds us through Barry’s story, but other than that, it isn’t addressed. ‘Barry Lyndon’ also features little to no interiority, and the audience feels detached from the character. Interiority is what they come to expect from a character-driven story. ‘Barry Lyndon’s voice‑over confesses that the very ‘qualities and energies’ that lift Barry up are also what make him unravel. Instead of being told directly by a narrator, this is fully implied throughout ‘Marty Supreme.’ I applaud Josh Safdie for doing what Kubrick couldn’t in ‘Barry Lyndon,’ not being too upfront with his themes. But that doesn’t mean that ‘Marty Supreme’ is this perfect exploration of character. It doesn’t even address a childhood at all. We just have to accept that this guy is an absolute dirtbag for the love of the game, which is so incredibly asinine. We need to understand what made him this way. Marty harbors an enormous aspiration. Why? Especially when it’s so important to the story. His enormous aspiration gives us two identifiable character traits: the relatively admirable trait of self‑confidence and the less favorable trait that verges on selfishness. By not allowing us the opportunity to view the formative years of the protagonists, both ‘Barry Lyndon’ and ‘Marty Supreme’ end up suggesting that high‑status male ambition is still so normal that we’re expected to tolerate the protagonists’ callousness towards others with no further explanation.

The famous “Rosebud” from ‘Citizen Kane’ (1941)

Unlike ‘Barry Lyndon’ or ‘Marty Supreme,’ Charles Foster Kane in ‘Citizen Kane’ is actually framed by the real inciting event, his lost childhood, where his sled, the famous “Rosebud,” becomes a synecdoche for the trauma that secretly motivates every move he makes, whether it be as a person, a politician, or a newspaper owner. If ‘Citizen Kane’ is about a man who wants to fall back into his childhood, ‘Barry Lyndon’ and ‘Marty Supreme’ are about men who never grew up enough to notice they’re hurting anyone. The audience is meant to feel like the first meeting with a psychiatrist, as the psychiatrist. You have two hours with this character, but they refuse to talk about their childhood, even though it is the most formative period that shapes how a person acts. You just have to sit there as they talk about their actions, but never the reason why. In the end, ‘Barry Lyndon’ and ‘Marty Supreme’ ask us to forgive the damage left in their wake, not because they’ve earned our sympathy, but because the story of an ambitious white man is still treated as the gold standard in Hollywood, unrepentant and urgently overdue for a rewrite.