There are a lot of jarring scenes in Marty Supreme, Josh Safdie’s movie about a young Jew in the 1950’s willing to do anything to secure his spot in table tennis history. There’s the one where Marty (Timothée Chalamet) gets spanked with a ping-pong paddle; there’s the one where a gas station explodes. And the one where Marty, naked in a bathtub, falls through the floor of a cheap motel. But the one that everybody online seems to be talking about is a flashback of an Auschwitz story told by Marty’s friend and fellow ping-ponger Béla Kletzki (Géza Röhrig, known best for his role as a Sonderkommando in Son of Saul).

Kletzki tells the unsympathetic ink tycoon Milton Rockwell (Kevin O’Leary) about how the Nazis, impressed by his table tennis skills, spared his life and recruited him to disarm bombs. One day, while grappling with a bomb in the woods, Kletzki stumbled across a honeycomb. He smeared the honey across his body and returned to the camp, where he let his fellow prisoners lick it off his body. The scene is a sensory nightmare, primarily shot in close-ups of wet tongues licking sticky honey off Kletzki’s hairy body. For some, it was also…funny?

Many have reported that the scene has been triggering a lot of laughter in their theaters. My audience in Wilmington, North Carolina, certainly had a good chuckle — with the exception of my mother who instantly started sobbing. I sat in stunned silence, unsure at first what to make of the sharp turn the film had suddenly taken. One post on X that got nearly 6,000 likes admonished Safdie for his “insane Holocaust joke.” Many users replied that the scene was in no way meant to be funny, with one even calling it “the most sincere scene in the whole movie.”

For me, the scene shows the sheer desperation of those in the concentration camps, as well as the self-sacrifice that was essential to survival. And yet many have interpreted it as merely shock humor.

Laughter could be understood as an inevitable reaction to discomfort and shock at a scene that feels so out of place in what has, up to that point, been a pretty comedic film. The story is sandwiched between Marty’s humorous attempts to embarrass Rockwell and seduce his wife. Viewers may have mistaken the scene as a joke since the film’s opening credits sequence of sperm swimming through fallopian tubes gives the impression you will be watching a comedy interspersed with some tense ping-pong playing.

The reaction could also be part of what some in the movie theater industry are calling the “laugh epidemic.” InThe New York Times, Marie Solis explored the inappropriate laughter in movie theaters that seems to be increasingly common. The rise of meme culture and the dissolution of clear genres (Marty Supreme could be categorized as somewhere between drama and comedy), she writes, have primed audiences to laugh at moments that may not have been meant to be funny.

The audience’s inability to process the honey scene as sincere may also be a sign of a society that has become more disconnected from the traumas of the past. It would not be the first time that people, unable to comprehend the horrors of the Holocaust, have instead derided the tales of abuse as pure fiction. But Kletzki’s story is based on the real experiences of Alojzy Ehrlich, a ping-pong player imprisoned at Auschwitz. The scene is not supposed to be humorous trauma porn — Safdie has called it a “beautiful story” about the “camaraderie” found within the camps. It also serves as an important reminder of all that Marty is fighting for.

The events of the film take place only seven years after the Holocaust, and the macabre honey imagery encapsulates the dehumanization the Jews experienced. Marty is motivated not just by a desire to prove himself as an athlete and rise above what his uncle and mother expect of him, but above what the world expects of him as a Jew. His drive to reclaim Jewish pride is further underscored when he brings back a piece of an Egyptian pyramid to his mother, telling her “We built this.”

Without understanding this background, the honey scene will come off as out of place and ridiculous. And the lengths Marty is willing to go to to make something of himself cannot be fully appreciated. The film’s description on the review-app Letterboxd says Marty Supreme is about one man “going to hell and back in pursuit of greatness.” But behind Marty is the story of a whole people who have gone through hell; they too are trying to find their way back.

The post We need to talk about that honey scene in ‘Marty Supreme’ appeared first on The Forward.

Activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah, freed from prison in Egypt and now in Britain, apologized on Monday for his “shocking and hurtful” social media posts made more than a decade ago, which counter-terrorism police said they are assessing.

Abd el-Fattah, 44, became Egypt’s most prominent political prisoner after spending years in and out of detention and a rare symbol of opposition during a crackdown under President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.

He arrived in Britain last Friday after obtaining British citizenship in 2021 through his mother, with Prime Minister Keir Starmer saying he was “delighted” by the news.

In the following days, British newspapers ran stories about antisemitic posts he made on the former Twitter platform between 2008 and 2014, seen by Reuters, which endorsed violence against “Zionists” and police.

In another he called British people “dogs and monkeys.”

Counter Terrorism Policing said the posts were being assessed following referrals from the public.

In a statement, Abd el-Fattah said many of his tweets had been misunderstood but that others were unacceptable.

“Looking at the tweets now – the ones that were not completely twisted out of their meaning – I do understand how shocking and hurtful they are, and for that I unequivocally apologize,” he said.

He added they were mostly “expressions of a young man’s anger and frustrations” at wars in Iraq, Lebanon, and Gaza, and “the rise of police brutality against Egyptian youth.”

Nigel Farage, leader of the right-wing Reform UK party which tops opinion polls, called for Abd el-Fattah’s deportation. Kemi Badenoch, the leader of the opposition Conservative Party, said the country should consider it.

A spokesperson for Starmer said he was not aware of the posts when he campaigned for Abd el-Fattah’s release and called the comments “abhorrent”.”

But the spokesperson added the government has a record of helping its citizens overseas.

Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper later said she was also unaware of the posts and that her office would urgently review its processes after what she called “an unacceptable failure” of due diligence.

In a letter to lawmakers that was posted on X, Cooper said long-standing procedures and due diligence had been “completely inadequate” and promised changes to ensure accurate information and proper checks.

The Board of Deputies of British Jews said his posts were of “profound concern.”

Abd el-Fattah was most recently serving a five-year sentence in Egypt imposed in December 2021, after he shared a social media post about a prisoner’s death.

Three Turkish police officers and six Islamic State terrorists were killed in a gunfight in northwest Turkey on Monday, the Interior Minister said, a week after more than 100 suspected IS members were detained for planning Christmas and New Year attacks.

Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya said eight police and another security force member were wounded in a raid on a property in the town of Yalova, on the Sea of Marmara coast south of Istanbul. More than 100 addresses were raided nationwide early on Monday.

Turkey has stepped up operations against suspected IS terrorists this year, as the group returns to prominence globally.

The US carried out a strike against the militants in northwest Nigeria last week, while two gunmen who attacked a Hanukkah event at Sydney’s Bondi Beach this month appeared to be inspired by IS, Australian police have said.

On December 19, the US military launched large-scale strikes against dozens of IS targets in Syria in retaliation for an attack on American personnel.

RAID LASTED HOURS

Police raided the house in Yalova on the suspicion that terrorists were hiding there overnight. Sporadic gunfire was heard during the operation, which lasted nearly eight hours, according to a Reuters photographer at the scene.

Last week, Turkish police detained 115 suspected IS members they said were planning to carry out attacks on Christmas and New Year celebrations in the country.

Yerlikaya told reporters that the militants killed in Monday’s attack were all Turkish citizens, adding that five women and six children were brought out of the property alive.

In the last month, police arrested a total of 138 IS suspects and carried out simultaneous operations on Monday morning at 108 different addresses in 15 provinces, he added.

In a post on X, President Tayyip Erdogan offered his condolences to the families of the police officers killed, and said Turkey’s fight with “the bloody-handed villains who threaten the peace of our people and security of our state” will continue “both within our borders and beyond them.”

WAVE OF IS ATTACKS IN 2015-2017

Police had sealed off the road approaching the house in the early hours and smoke was visible rising from a nearby fire, while a police helicopter flew overhead.

The Istanbul chief prosecutor’s office said last week that IS terrorists were planning attacks against non-Muslims in particular.

Almost a decade ago, the jihadist group was blamed for a series of attacks on civilian targets in Turkey, including gun attacks on an Istanbul nightclub and the city’s main airport, killing dozens of people.

Turkey was a key transit point for foreign fighters, including those of IS, entering and leaving Syria during the war there.

Police have carried out regular operations against the group in subsequent years and there have been few attacks since the wave of violence between 2015-2017.