The Brilliant Psychological Rawness of The Bear

The Bear is an innovative TV series from the FX Network and Hulu, that premiered last summer to some critical fanfare, which has only grown after its second season shown in June this year. The show focuses on Carmy Berzatto, a driven and award-winning young chef who urgently has to take over the reins for his late older brother Mikey’s traditional Italian Beef sandwich shop in Chicago after the brother dies by suicide. The first season focuses on the inherent chaos of the restaurant business, and the culture clash between the disciplined and ambitious Carmy and the staff of the casual, messy sandwich shop, while all of them are simultaneously grieving the loss of Mikey.

While the first season was striking in its authentic, agitated portrayal of a struggling kitchen, the second season takes an even more resonant approach, delving behind the stories of most of the main characters in a both calmer and rawer way. This season is bold in terms of these wide-ranging tonal shifts that somehow come together to form a deeper portrait of damaged human souls trying to win against the odds. After an unexpected posthumous gift from Mikey, the madcap gang from the first season forge ahead to reboot the sandwich shop as a creative novel fine-dining concept called The Bear.

Honest Emotions
The show beautifully mixes documentarian moments of the inherently fascinating world of restaurant creation with honest emotional moments of the characters’ ambition, doubt, frustration, and hope during the process. There is the junior but smart and talented right-hand woman chef Sydney, using Duke’s Coach K as a motivational symbol to talk herself through her severe anxiety. There is the wild card Richie, Mikey’s best friend, who is seemingly a loud reckless, heartbroken live wire, but after going through a week-long “boot camp” at a fancy Alinea-style restaurant, touchingly begins to believe in himself again. There is Marcus, the hidden diamond, movingly beginning to shine once also given an elite training opportunity in Copenhagen at a Noma-style restaurant where Carmy once trained. And there is Carmy, who we will get to.

The series reaches a new echelon with its midway episode called Fishes (after the Feast of the Seven Fishes). It is (with acerbic humor) modeled after a Christmas family flashback episode, but rapidly reveals itself as the family flashback from hell. While many cultures deservingly pride themselves on how they marry their food traditions with family love and affection, including Italians—this episode pulls that comforting trope inside out and rips it to shreds. As the episode brutally acknowledges and we all likely know but hate to admit, family holiday meals are also often an outlet for pent-up rage and dysfunction, where unresolved hurt literally simmers on the stove and explodes at the dinner table. And the vaunted family matriarch, Carmy’s mother Donna, becomes the centerpiece of this chaos, exhausted by a lifetime of juggling impossible tasks (symbolized by the volcanic numerous dishes bubbling over in her kitchen) and drowning in alcohol-fueled agony. We get a painfully direct psychodynamic link between Carmy and his brother’s abusive relationship with cooking and their family upbringing.

Conquering the Trauma
And true to form, Carmy is trapped in a kind of repetition neurosis with his obsessional chef career, pushing himself constantly to screaming levels of stress and perfection but unable to quit the lifestyle he sees as familiar and perversely comfortable. He is trying in some ways to undo and conquer his family trauma but is also subconsciously immersed in it, braising in it, burning in it. He has a brief moment of respite with a shockingly wholesome relationship with a school friend turned resident physician. But he quickly (if unintentionally) sabotages it during a tragicomic moment out of a Shakespeare play, where he accidentally locks himself in the walk-in freezer during The Bear’s opening night. He rants to himself in a self-hating soliloquy, saying his relationship is doomed to failure, which is sadly overheard by his girlfriend who came to find him out of concern, and she runs off in tears.

The ending is left mixed, with moments of genuine victory for most of the staff, and unresolved worry for Carmy. The show orchestrates the inherent beauty and human victory found in and despite the chaotic pain of the restaurant business, and also the realistic cost of that pain, and the reasonable question of whether any of its inherent absurdity is actually worth that pain (despite its appealing highs). The Bear is an amazing psychological work of art that illustrates within a specific niche the universal truths of the human condition. It will be fascinating to see what answers to this question lie in the seasons ahead.