Marty and the Antagonistic Old

I’ve seen the film version of Marty before so it was interesting to read the teleplay. It will also be interesting to watch a scene from the television movie, especially since Rod Steiger plays Marty—I’ve never seen anything with Rod Steiger in which he plays a character as likable as Marty.

One thing that the teleplay, the t.v. movie (at least I’m guessing), and the film share is their somewhat negative portrayal of the older generation. This older generation, primarily comprised in the narrative of Marty’s mother and aunt, is in many ways portrayed as an antagonist to Marty’s generation. Interestingly enough, it is approximately the same generation as Geremio and Annuziata in Christ in Concrete. They are a generation that has experienced the various economic hardships the working class faced during the early decades of the twentieth century culminating in the Great Depression. But the Great Depression is something Marty’s generation faced as well. If he’s thirty-six in the play, and it is set in 1953, he would have been about twenty during the mid 1930s. So why has his generation been able to cope with and benefit from the post-war boom—and the economic, political, and cultural changes that it brought—while his parent’s generation has refused many of them? Old age? The fear of change? Economic uncertainty among an older generation that’s unable to work and must depend on their children or possibly Social Security, which was passed during the Depression? In his essay printed after the teleplay, Chayefsky seems to single Marty’s generation as its own antagonist. But he doesn’t mention the antagonistic part that the older generation plays. Maybe this is something we can talk more about during class.