Marty Supreme: Music as Births at Play

Welcome everyone to a new episode of Notas en Frame. As I had already mentioned, we are going to have a series of episodes about film soundtracks that absolutely needed to be discussed.

To catch up, this time we’re talking about Marty Supreme, with Daniel Lopatin in charge of the music. I find this to be a very interesting score and, honestly, one with very little conversation around it. Almost everything that has been said about this film has revolved around Timothée’s performance… and yes, that’s fine, but let’s remember that here the focus is the music, so let’s go there.

In this work, we don’t have a large orchestra but rather extracts of one: alongside synthesizers and very powerful choirs, we hear percussion, violin, bass, guitar, and a very rich selection of winds: saxophones (alto and tenor), flutes, and piccolos.

These initial decisions seem interesting to me because from the very first moment we hear different music. A strategic decision for a half-biographical film.

Let’s go step by step. Lopatin is better known in the industry for his work in experimental and electronic music and, according to his own words, he focuses more on the textures of sound. Known under the alias Oneohtrix Point Never or OPN, Lopatin has a history of collaborations with Trent Reznor and The Weeknd… so you can more or less imagine where this is going. We’re talking about a manipulation of sound from an epistemic shift. The goal is not structure, but play, the challenge to the senses… and from there, that already seems to me like a different inscription.

Precisely, the film Marty Supreme seems to focus on a “game,” on a “sport,” but—following the composer’s lens—it is rather about “births”… births from different vectors.

Let’s see: an athlete is born, a sport is born, an identity is born, a perspective is born and… there is also (and this is the closure) literally a birth.

So it is a film that revolves around birth, even from a musical angle. It is a new way of sensorially relating to the environment of what we know but, at the same time, I believe that within this flow there are interesting symbolisms.

Honestly, it had been a long time since I liked a soundtrack as much as this one, but if I had to choose my favorite pieces, they would be The Call, Endo’s Game, Holocaust Honey, The Scape, and The Real Game.

The electronic and hybrid textures that Lopatin uses allow us to remain in a state of alert, because it is evident that to our ears something, sensorially, does not feel familiar. It is interesting to see how, in a film of this type and with the center it has, this resource is used. Moreover, in a very superficial reading, the use of electronic resources such as patterns, arpeggiators, or delays maintains the sensation of “bounce,” like the trajectory of a ping pong ball. But this film goes beyond a simple “bounce,” and I think it is quite the opposite.

There are two pieces I would like to take as examples.

The first is Holocaust Honey. Evidently, it has some relation to time due to the historical identity condensed in Marty’s character, but musically, I like how musical elements are introduced that recall that fragment in history referenced by the title. Additionally, the use of voices—which is the first time we hear them throughout the entire soundtrack—seems like a great decision, because let’s remember that the voice provides this “human element.” So we see the historical memory humanized and integrated into the identity of a character who is in constant transformation, and this can be noticed in that mixture between electronic elements (that is, history as process) and elements that subtly recall a harpsichord, which carries immutable history. Thus, here history is presented to us as identity and process. Everything in motion, as the character’s identity is, as the game is.

Now, as a second case, let’s talk about the piece The Scape, my personal favorite. We have a piece that, in my opinion, says so many things… let’s listen to it through the Notas en Frame lens.

3 minutes and 37 seconds of… in my opinion, many things.

This piece appears in a part of the film where the character attempts precisely to “escape” (I know, I know, Lopatin really crossed the line of creativity with that title). Well, the piece begins in an agitated way. Here we can very clearly hear the high wind instruments such as the flute and the piccolo… why is this a good resource, or how can it guide the way we SEE, think, and articulate both ideas and sensations? The trajectory from an agitated melody to a softer one unfolds almost in whispers from those instruments. Now, woodwind instruments depend on the performers’ breath. Air is often also associated with the mind because it is mobile, fleeting, changing. The mind gives meaning to reality; thoughts create it. In this scene that is clear: for the creation of a route and the continuity of the plot, the music draws, orchestrates, and exposes these fleeting thoughts. It is like a script through music—and what better than to use musical resources that are and require this element simply to exist.

Thoughts create spaces, transform trajectories, and within a span of time as fleeting as a reaction, give birth.

The Marty Supreme soundtrack places us in dimensions of movement and creation that go hand in hand with temporal elements integrated within us and with human resources that unconsciously shape what directs our being in the world; as well as the forces of action that, from that mixture, boil within us and guide these new constructions. Forces that may be ambition and risk, as portrayed by the film. Internal forces that give life. Now then, what forces do we allow to inhabit us, and what do we do with them?

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