Why Trying is Sexy

On Marty Supreme, Addison Rae & that dog in me

I went to see Marty Supreme alone over the holidays. Curled up in my seat, my phone on airplane mode in my purse, I let Josh Safdie’s tour-de-force take me for a ride.

As the movie progressed, I found myself . . . aroused. My attraction had nothing to do with Marty as a person—he’s a narcissistic asshole who you wouldn’t want to be stuck in an elevator with. But the sheer force of his unwavering devotion to his dreams turned me on.

Marty’s unexpected sexual magnetism is evident in his relationship to Gwyneth Paltrow’s character, Kay Stone. Stone is an aging movie star who sleeps with Marty, not because she’s overcome by her attraction to him, but because he vibrates with an infectious passion that she lacks. There’s a sexual tension between Marty and his dreams that those who get close enough to him are sucked into, like a force field.

It’s exhilarating to see someone relentlessly pursue their dreams, because to want something that much is animalistic—and when that energy is directed with intention, that hunger becomes erotic.

Marty is a shark. To settle for anything less than being the greatest (ping pong player in the world) would be to stop swimming, to die. Something that he explicitly tells his childhood-friend-turned-lover Rachel when she, eight months pregnant with his baby, demands some sense of responsibility from him, which he vehemently rejects and throws back in her face.

“You’re lucky,” he says, and he means it. “You don’t have a dream. I have something that I have to do, a singular dream that I have to see through. I can’t settle down right now!”

Of course (spoiler), the movie culminates in Marty doing just that. He returns home from Japan, his dream of playing in the world table tennis championship dashed, to be by Rachel’s side in the maternity room—and when he sees his newborn son for the first time, he breaks down in sobs.

Safdie characterized this as Marty’s boy-to-man moment. This shift in Marty’s priorities makes me think about Plato’s Symposium.

The Symposium charts a “ladder of love” that we all work our way up. With each level that we ascend, from making art to having kids, the impact of our legacy increases. To Plato, procreation is the most attainable way that we as humans can leave a legacy and essentially “live on” after we die.

I couldn’t help but wonder: was it possible for Marty to put his dreams of athletic achievement to bed? To be content with fatherhood? He seems closest to God when he sees his son for the first time, but I left the theatre feeling skeptical, and a bit depressed.

In this sense, Marty Supreme reminded me of the last movie I watched that made me feel as equally electrified, and ultimately as crushingly disappointed: Anora.

The first hour of Anora is akin to a modern Cinderella story: Mikey Madison’s titular heroine is lifted from life as a stripper into a swaggy millionaire existence, after a quick elopement to an ultra-wealthy Russian nepo baby. The latter half of the movie deals with the fallout of their relationship, charting Anora’s desperate attempt to cling onto her Cinderella story as the carriage turns back into a pumpkin.

Both Marty and Anora experience the heavenly ecstasy of coming tantalizingly close to achieving their dreams before they come crashing back down to earth like Icarus. And when everything falls apart, they go down kicking and screaming (they do not go gentle into that good night).

IRL, both Madison and Chalamet have talked about how badly they want to be one of the greats. Madison learned how to speak Russian and pole dance to play Anora, and Chalamet secretly practised ping pong for years to hold his own as Marty.

“The truth is, I’m in pursuit of greatness,” he said, during an acceptance speech last year.

In this way, pursuing your dreams is inherently vulnerable. Publicly trying is like being naked in front of a crowded room (at one point in the movie, Marty literally drops his pants at a party so a millionaire can smack his ass with a ping pong paddle, because the price of his humiliation is a ticket to Japan).

Whether you’re getting naked in front of someone else or putting yourself out there in pursuit of your dreams, this kind of confidence is inspiring and magnetic. It’s why I love Addison Rae.

Rae, who grew up in Louisiana, blew up filming short dance routines on TikTok in high school. When she started posting (up to eight videos a day), her peers rolled their eyes with a who does she think she is lilt. After she moved to LA and rebranded as a bubbly, rainbow-coloured baby Britney, she received further backlash for her hyper-curated new image.

“Everyone’s always like oh she’s trying too hard this, she’s trying too hard that—how about you try at all?” she cheerily quipped on a YouTube podcast. “We can tell you’re not!”

Rae’s career is a success story for the social media age, a shining star example of where self confidence and persistence can take you (she just completed her first world tour for her debut album). Her trajectory also illuminates a compelling intersection, between the erotic hunger of pursuing your dreams, and the perceived cringe-ness of trying.

Amongst Gen Z, “trying too hard” is seen as lame (or “cheugy”). It’s cool not to care, to be aloof. Haphazard, seemingly random photo dumps dominate Instagram, the messy, party girl, day-old mascara look is in, we’re all ghosting each other and having no-strings attached sex. We’re all trying sooo hard to be effortlessly cool!

Personally, I’ve never been effortlessly cool. I’ve tried and failed and fucked up and embarassed myself in pursuit of love, greatness and self-actualization so many times. I’ve always wanted more, as Addison Rae sings on “Fame is a Gun.”

The social faux-pas of caring too much is defined in the novel Martyr!:

“He felt a flash of familiar shame—his whole life had been a steady procession of him passionately loving what other people merely liked, and struggling, mostly failing, to translate to anyone else how and why everything mattered so much. He realized he was perhaps doing . . . The Thing, the overlooking thing, obsessing over something in a way that others felt to be smothering.”

Remember how Gwyneth Paltrow cried when she won her first Oscar at 26 and we all hated her for it? She was too good, she cared too much. She was a nepo baby and a gifted actress? We didn’t know what to do with that, so we made her a meme.

Yet, when Josh Safdie explained why he wanted Gwyneth to sign on to star in Marty Supreme, he said:

“Gwyneth, she’s got that dog in her, as the kids say.”

In this sense, the path to success is shaped like a horseshoe, in which what’s perceived as “too much” at the time can be seen as cool down the line. Obviously, this can’t be a motivation for going after your dreams (otherwise it’s not about your dreams, but something else, like popularity etc), but it’s an interesting potential byproduct that proves that, even when it doesn’t seem like it, trying IS sexy!

Another prime example of this sort of obsessive-and-off-putting to celebrated-cool-girl pendulum swing? Joan Didion.

Joan, like Marty Mauser, was a shark in the water. Known as “the ice queen,” she was silent and serious (as a teenager, she studied Hemingway’s sentence structure in order to teach herself how to write). She could turn the charm on, but it wasn’t her natural disposition.

“Joan was no picnic,” an ex-flame of Eve Babitz’ told biographer Lili Anolik for her book Hollywood’s Eve. Ironically, Didion’s legacy has eclipsed her personality—today, we all know her as the quintessential hero of the literary It Girl. She’s been Pinterest-ified, which I’m sure would amuse anyone who had to sit next to her at a dinner party.

Didion is often compared to Eve, who, while also being a naturally gifted writer, never applied herself as methodically as Joan did. Eve’s writing came in fits and spurts (when it was good, it was great), and she had largely faded from the limelight, her books mostly out-of-print, before Lili Anolik came knocking at her door.

“I knew that Eve was my meal ticket,” Anolik said, describing how she obsessively tracked Eve down because she had a gut feeling that writing her biography would be her big break (and it was—today, Anolik is a staff writer at The Atlantic, and she scored a second book deal to write Didion & Babitz).

When Anolik confessed in Hollywood’s Eve that she’s “never taken a drug in her life,” I thought about how she was so uncool compared to her source material. Eve was sex and drugs and rock n roll: she posed naked with Duchamp playing chess for art, she fucked Jim Morrison and Harrison Ford, she did every drug under the sun. But she didn’t have The Thing—so someone who did had to come in and pick up the pieces, in order for her life’s work to be recognized.

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Last October, I saw Addison Rae perform live in Toronto. Wearing nothing but a bedazzled crystal bikini, she sat mermaid style in front of her backup dancers, clutching a microphone to her chest, her cheeks flushed.

“Thank you for being here tonight,” she said, emphatically. “You are the reason that I get to live my dream!”

I left the concert vibrating, my skin tingling. On the walk home, I listened to “Fame is a Gun” on loop:

There’s no mystery, I’m gonna make it, gonna go down in history, Rae sings.

When I hear this line today, something stirs in my chest. I feel alive and electrified, like I’m about to have sex, but there’s no lover in sight. It’s the sexual tension between me and my dreams. It’s that dog in me.