The Bear is all sizzle, no steak

At one point in the 1975 neo-noir Night Moves, Gene Hackman’s character quips, “I saw a Rohmer film once. It was kind of like watching paint dry.” Nothing could better express my feelings about The Bear.

Sometimes I forget to lay out a clear thesis so let’s get this out of the way: I don’t know if I’ve ever hated a television show like I hate The Bear. I found the first season quite flawed but often enjoyable in its meanness and vulgarity. It was a dirty little show about a dirty little sandwich joint with mold in the walls. Season two, by contrast, caught a bad case of artistic ambition. Showrunner Christopher Storer dared to ask, “What if you made the whole show out of montages of the Chicago skyline?” Episode runtimes stretched past the 40-minute mark as characters went on journeys of self-discovery that were short on epiphany. They gave Carmy a manic pixie dream girlfriend that would make Cameron Crowe blush. Every minute I spent watching the back half of season two made me feel like I had ants crawling under my skin. 

The third season of The Bear was released recently. This would be a stronger article if I watched the new episodes and integrated them into my critique, but I won’t be doing that. Every moment of this show I subject myself to feels like torture, the utterly empty dialogue makes me want to tear my hair out, and the unearned aura of profundity that infuses every scene makes me want to scream. This may sound like hyperbole but I promise it’s true. Before Liz and I quit the show halfway through the second season, we were working through it at a rate of about one episode a month because each one annoyed us so much that we needed that long to recover. Even after I decided to finish the season in order to write about it I truly struggled to sit down and turn it on. I cannot imagine a world where watching more of it could change my mind. 

If you’re reading this, I assume you are familiar with the show but in case you’re not here’s the premise: Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White), a rising star chef, returns home to Chicago to take over his older brother Michael’s struggling sandwich shop after Michael commits suicide. There he deals with unruly staff, money woes, and a restaurant that threatens to collapse or burst into flame at any moment. He hires Sydney (Ayo Edebiri), an ambitious young chef, as his sous to whip his cooks into shape and tries to find common ground with “cousin” Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), a rage-aholic who runs the front of house, so to speak, of The Beef. In the first season finale, Carmy discovers that Michael stashed hundreds of thousands of dollars inside sealed cans of San Marzano tomatoes (???), leading to season two, in which the restaurant is closed as they gut renovate and transform their neighbor institution sandwich shop into a fine-dining establishment.  

On a basic level, I think the first season was so much more successful because its episodes had clear stories centered around the restaurant. Here’s the episode where Carmy and Richie work a birthday party for their mobster “uncle,” here’s the episode where they’re swamped by delivery orders, and so on. The show’s creative limitations started to show moment it stepped outside workplace sitcom mode. There’s a point near the end of season one when Sydney has quit her job after Carmy (very mildly) yelled at her during a bad service. She has dinner with Marcus, the Beef’s pastry chef, during which they have a long, meandering conversation about—wouldn’t you know it—their feelings about Carmy and the restaurant. This show needs some sort of Bechdel Test equivalent for whether anyone ever manages to have a conversation that’s not about Carmy. Anyway, Marcus asks Sydney why she wanted to work in Carmy’s grimy sandwich joint in the first place; she responds with an incredibly long, incredibly boring monologue in which she describes visiting New York and eating at all these great restaurants but there was one in particular that really changed her life. Whose restaurant was it? The way the scene dangles the question in the viewer’s face makes it clear the writers think we’re a bunch of morons. Guess what—it was Carmy’s restaurant. Wow, what a surprise. 

In the second season, they send Marcus to Amsterdam to level up his pastry game (???) where he gets to know some chef played by Will Poulter. Marcus asks him something about his culinary journey—Marcus exists to elicit exposition from other characters—and Poulter delivers another long speech about how he was always the best in the kitchen until one day this other young chef showed up who could actually keep up and ignited this great rivalry and they both inspired each other and pushed each other to be better. The scene hits the exact same beats where it withholds this other chef’s name, imagining the audience craning forward, just dying to know who this amazing hotshot could have been. Hey would you believe it was Carmy? It’s the exact same scene! It’s so insulting that they think they can get away with repeating themselves this way and I won’t notice. But even more it’s embarrassing for the writers that they have so few ideas. 

Early in Natalia Ginzburg’s essay “Silence” she writes the following:

Silence must be numbered among the strangest and gravest vices of our time. Those of us who have tried to write novels in our time know the discomfort and unhappiness that appears as soon as we reach the point when we have to make our characters talk to one another. For page after page our characters exchange comments that are insignificant but pregnant with a desolate unhappiness: ‘Are you cold?’ ‘No, I’m not cold.’ Would you like some tea?’ ‘No thanks.’ ‘Are you tired?’ ‘I don’t know. Yes, perhaps I’m a bit tired.’ This is how our characters talk. They talk like this to kill time. They talk like this because they don’t know how to talk any more… The meagre barren words of our time are painfully wrung from silence and appear like the signals of castaways, beacons lit on the most distant hills, weak, desperate summonses that are swallowed up in space.

She’s describing The Bear!!! So much of the dialogue has that exact exhausted quality, that it took a titanic effort on the part of the writers to dredge up the most anodyne small talk. There’s such a disconnect between the filmmaking of the show (more in a moment), which treats the characters’ every utterance as deeply moving and profound, and the substance of their speech, which floats along on surface banalities and therapy speak. Also, catchphrases! Every time Carmy and Sydney conceptualize a dish together there’s a moment where they get stuck and then one of them suggests an ingredient or technique and looks at the other meaningfully, and the other one looks back meaningfully and says, “That’s something.” And the other says, “That’s something.” I get that it’s meant to suggest a growing understanding, that that’s all they need to say, that they’re speaking their private chef language, but it just isn’t good. Listen, I think the greatest novel of the last fifty years is JR by William Gaddis, a book that relies heavily on its characters’ habits of speech because it’s almost entirely dialogue—when a voice cuts off another with a familiar “No, but holy—” you know that’s JR because that’s what JR says—but this is not that. This is writers who are so dedicated to some abstract principle of realism that they only write lorem ipsum filler and can’t be bothered to come up with a second way for someone to say “I like that idea.” 

While we’re talking about dialogue, let’s look at some of it in action. Maybe the way The Bear annoys me the most is in how showy and overbearing its direction is while also being really bad on a technical level. Here’s a scene from the season two episode “Pop”: 

Argrrggghhh!!!! I hate it!! Say something interesting!!!

The Bear has a real fixation on extreme close-ups but has no idea what they mean in cinematic language or how they affect an audience. Just to spell it out, putting the camera as close to an actor’s face as they do in this scene is intense, uncomfortable, and intimate. Most films save a move like this for a moment of extreme emotion and limit it as much as possible. Let me say it again: being this close to the actors is unpleasant. If a long shot can feel voyeuristic, pushing up like this feels violating. To force the viewer to endure a point-of-view where they expect to feel Claire’s breath on their face for more than three and a half minutes is borderline sadistic, or completely oblivious to how the scene will be processed. 

At least here my discomfort is mitigated by how distracted I get by how the shots don’t match. The camera is significantly closer to Claire’s face than Carmy’s. I feel whiplash every time the shot flips from one actor to the other. If you maintain a strict shot/reverse shot cadence for this long—why would you, I feel like I’m watching the Star Wars prequels—audiences are going to notice the inconsistency. I find it so bothersome here that I find it genuinely difficult to focus on what Carmy and Claire are saying to one another. I said as much to Liz when we watched this together and she responded, “It’s okay, you didn’t miss much.” The episode culminates with them kissing at the party while actual fireworks go off outside the window. That earned a groan of disgust from Liz at the obviousness of the symbolism; it was the last episode she watched. 

“But Danny,” you’re grumbling, “The whole point is that this is how it feels to fall in love. It’s not about what you’re saying but who you’re saying it to. The overbearing close-ups are telling us this actually is a moment of extreme emotion because that’s how love is in real life.” Sorry, no. If that’s what’s happening here it’s so subtextual it’s in the damn basement. I really can’t stand Claire because all she ever does is bust Carmy’s balls and tell him he needs to be better in some way. I guess Carmy likes that because he has trauma, but all I see in their scenes is a miserable guy trying to use humor to mitigate the fact that he’s being endlessly torn down and told he doesn’t measure up. 

To say something nice about the show, I think Jeremy Allen White gives an incredible performance as Carmy. Unfortunately it’s a lot of wasted effort trying to breathe life into a character I find fundamentally incoherent. 

From the jump, Carmy has problems. He’s extremely stressed and seems to have a hard time focusing and reacting in the moment. He has a tendency to shut down and disappear into his own head. In the first few episodes it’s heavily signaled that this spaciness is a holdover from his previous job as head chef at the number-one restaurant in the world (I forget if it’s actually specified as Noma or if we’re just supposed to understand it’s Noma) where he labored under a sadistic executive chef who belittled him and ran a cartoonish silent lab kitchen of perfect regimentation. As the season progresses the show tries a little sleight of hand—actually, Carmy’s damage comes from his older brother Mikey, who never included him and was a total mess of a drug addict. Only in death has Mikey finally let Carmy in, by willing him the burden of The Beef. 

So Carmy goes to Al-Anon meetings and White gets to make a loooong speech directly to camera that’s remarkably similar to the looooong speech BoJack gives at his mother’s funeral but it ends up a dead end. Okay, Carmy has trauma about his brother, now what? Since the writers don’t know how to develop a theme in a meaningful way, it’s time for another substitution. In season two we learn that Carmy, Mikey, and their sister Natalie are all fucked up because of their mom, who to my memory is not mentioned once in season one. This is the illusion of thematic movement. It feels like we’re going deeper with our characters but nothing is actually revealed. 

I’m not saying anything new here. Parul Sehgal wrote the case against the trauma plot years ago and it’s striking the degree to which her criticisms map onto The Bear. The trauma plot, in her estimation, inherently precludes the type of depth The Bear aspires to and thinks it achieves. When the question Why is this character this way can be definitively answered by an event in their past, there’s nowhere to go. Every question and every answer becomes perfectly tautological, with no space for ambiguity in between. 

Also—and this sounds stupid but I’m not kidding—how old is Carmy? Seriously, tell me. We’re told he’s been in restaurants for about ten years, plus culinary school. Pretty basic math puts him at 30 years old, minimum. Yet everything about the way he’s written reads early 20s. Same with Claire—she’s an ER doctor but she has infinite free time and takes Carmy to house parties. When he takes her to see the gutted restaurant—boards with nails sticking out, exposed wiring, etc—they end up having sex on the nasty ass floor! This is not 30s professional behavior! A doctor is not lying down there!

As for the other characters: Sydney is boring and has a dead mom (trauma!). She spends the whole second season reading Coach K’s memoir and sharing life lessons from it—why is there so much Coach K talk?? Marcus, as discussed, is pointless. Brassy line cook Tina, a delight in season one who pranks and sabotages Sydney, is so touched that Sydney sees something in her that her personality changes entirely; in season two she has become a shrinking violet who wants everyone at culinary school to like her. Everyone turns into such a pile of mush, everyone feels the same. The best character is probably Cousin Richie, who both continues to be a vulgar jerk (complimentary) and receives some real depth. However he also functions as a primary vector for the show’s general philosophy, which I find offensive and which it’s now time to talk about. 

Richie’s journey of self-discovery involves him taking a weeklong stage at one of Chicago’s top restaurants so he can learn what Michelin Star-quality service looks like. They set him to work polishing forks (the episode is titled “Forks”). Feeling disrespected, he acts sulky and defiant and eventually gets pulled outside by his supervisor Garrett who tells him yeah seriously, I’m fucking amped to come here and serve these people and I need you to be fucking amped too just to polish the forks. Richie scoffs but as the week goes on he is impressed by the way the restaurant’s team goes above and beyond to surprise and delight their guests. He becomes an enthusiastic participant and bonds with his coworkers, caught up in the feeling of being part of something.

As the week nears its end, he has another conversation with Garrett, asking him why he works in restaurants if he doesn’t like to cook. “A couple years ago, I had a drinking problem,” Garrett replies. “And I got sober…and through that experience I learned about acts of service. And I just like being able to serve other people now. I used to work for this guy who used to say that taking care of people at the highest level was like working at a hospital.” Richie cuts him off, scoffing “Okay, that’s a little much.” Garrett: “I’m just saying, I think that’s why restaurants and hospitals use the same word: hospitality.”

Man, woof. No disrespect to restaurant workers but I find the comparison between working in a fine dining venue where entrees are $100 a pop and nurses providing life-saving care to be in pretty bad taste. And miss me with the appeal to etymology—only Heidegger is allowed to pull that move!

But mostly I find Garrett’s philosophy of self-abnegation pernicious and dispiriting. His solution to his personal struggles is to deny his personhood as much as possible. There’s nothing wrong with avoiding temptation of course, but Garrett has taken it farther, into an all-encompassing avoidance of life. He has refashioned himself into a pure servant, living exclusively for others. In trying to conquer a particular, destructive desire, he has extinguished desire in himself generally. Where there once was a person he has substituted an enthusiastic cog in a notoriously exploitative and toxic industry. 

I was discussing this criticism with a friend who objected that if he feels fulfilled who am I to naysay. No doubt he has a point. But I’m reminded of what Becca Rothfeld wrote about mindfulness in her book All Things Are Too Small. The core exhortation of mindfulness practices, in her telling, is “judge not.” Absorb life uncritically, make no distinction between people who treat you well or poorly, accept genocide as simply one more thing happening in the world. Whereas mindfulness promises ascension to a level of pure consciousness where there are no barriers between the subject and the world (a doomed endeavor, read your Kant!), Rothfeld sees quite the opposite; in shutting down our most human faculties—judgment and reason—mindfulness encourages absolute passivity, denying the practitioner their agency and erecting thick walls between them and reality. Many people claim to have been helped by mindfulness, so one could object that it’s wrong to condemn it, but when that help is of a narcotizing, pacifying kind, one wonders whether the true aim is to help the individual or to neutralize discontent and channel their pathology back into the maintenance of the status quo. 

In The Wire, as Detective McNulty grows increasingly obsessed with catching Stringer Bell, to the extreme detriment of his personal life, character after character tells him the same thing: “The job will not save you.” Good police work is not appreciated by the Baltimore PD, but more importantly, chasing bad guys can never make you whole. You get your man, but guess what? That hole in your heart is still there—maybe catching Marlow Stanfield will fix it. The Bear disagrees. The overwhelming message of the show is “No the job can save you, and actually there’s nothing else.” 

Carmy’s storyline reinforces what’s stated so explicitly in Richie’s. After being a lonely wreck with no life outside the restaurant in season one, he lands Manic Pixie Claire Bear in season two. Immediately every other character is on his ass, constantly berating him for taking too much time away from the restaurant and letting details of the renovation get past him. The show really dwells on this dynamic—there’s a scene where Uncle Jimmy delivers some extremely muddled baseball analogy about how Carmy needs to get his head on straight and another scene where Carmy is finally about to call the guy about the broken freezer door handle but then Claire calls and afterward he’s forgotten what he was doing. Can someone please get this guy some ADHD medication he’s clearly struggling!

Everyone is of the same mind: Carmy’s life is distracting him from what’s important, which is work. He ends up agreeing with them. In the season two finale, the new restaurant hosts its dress rehearsal Friends & Family night during which Carmy ends up trapped in the walk-in because he never called the guy to get it fixed. He has a panic attack and ends up venting through the door, saying, 

I failed you guys. Maybe I’m just not built for this, right, maybe that’s okay, maybe that just is. I wasn’t here, right? What the fuck was I thinking, like I was going to be in a relationship? I’m a fucking psycho! That’s why I’m good at what I do, that’s how I operate. That’s why I’m the best: because I didn’t have any of this fucking bullshit. I could focus and I could concentrate and I had a routine… I don’t need to provide amusement or enjoyment. I don’t need to receive any amusement or enjoyment. I’m completely fine with it. There’s no amount of good that’s worth how terrible this feels. It’s just a complete waste of fucking time. 

I’m not an idiot, I know that in this moment Carmy is coming to the wrong conclusion and the filmmaking is telling us clearly that he’s coming to the wrong conclusion. But the show wants to have it both ways. It’s holding him up and saying look at this guy, he’s so damaged and full of self-loathing that he doesn’t think he deserves happiness or a normal life. But that’s exactly what the show has been arguing all season! The show thinks Garrett is a cool dude for being nothing but a restaurant robot! Everything that went wrong did so because Carmy has been prioritizing himself, which the show clearly thinks is unacceptable. The job will not save you and I find it repugnant how hard The Bear argues that it can. 

Back at Richie’s stage he has a conversation with the chef/owner. She talks about how her father so appreciated the little moments in life and kept these little notebooks where he would sketch down scenes from his travels and how his motto was “Every second counts.” She’s peeling mushrooms; Richie wonders if that’s the best use of her time. She says she thinks it’s time well spent to put such care into her mise en place. “Time well spent? That’s what it’s about?,” Richie asks her. “I think so,” she says. What does The Bear think is time well spent? Working a double shift on your feet in a windowless room.