On Disney Plus there’s The Bear, the series set in a filthy American suburban restaurant, poorly run by even more flea-ish people. Available since last week, both in the United States and Italy, everyone talks about it as a masterpiece, perhaps the best series product of the year. The first news is that they are right. Perhaps also because of this it is complex to analyze the eight episodes of the very dense premiere season with the protagonist Jeremy White, Lip Gallagher of Shameless.
Another comedy then? Not really, not really. There’s a bear in a cage on the bridge across the street, there’s a Japanese plum liqueur – it takes 12 hours to get thick, yes, but also soft, the same consistency as a gummy bear, it serves to decorate a gourmet dish: it’s not those that are behind him for a year to get to do it “well”. There is an intern who is already old but when she grows up she wants to open a restaurant even though the buffet in the garage at home has gone wrong, there is a guy who sleeps in the kitchen because he has no home but nobody knows, meanwhile she wants to do the perfect donut, the kind that if you got close to her ear you’d smell “grandma”, the kind that makes you feel “good” right away.
There’s another one who shot himself in the mouth a few months before and the one who almost got stabbed in the ass, there’s Carmy (Jeremy White) who wakes up in the middle of the night screaming without knowing why then he stopped sleeping “well”, has a debt of 300 thousand dollars and a filthy restaurant that is not worth a penny, the drug dealers go there but only to sell us in front, people who don’t want to eat “well” also go there, just to eat quickly, waiting at the Escherechia coli that then something is going to break and maybe this is a good day. Or maybe it’s the day they shoot out the window and nobody has anything to do with it. The Bear is not a comedy. Well, then what is the Bear about?
Apparently, nothing. The viewer sees the chaotic and potentially lethal (to customers) flow in front of them threesome daily in a diner kitchen amid flying pots, cigarettes by the stove and hot water gushing from the sinks, yes, but after a while. You have to get used to it and once you know it, it’s “ok”. In this context, it Carmy, who at the age of 21 was defined by the specialized press as “the best chef in the world”. His brother had committed suicide a few months earlier and had given him this miserable attic, with an attached asylum. They scream, they don’t respect the minimum hygiene rule or understand the need for it, there’s a hole in the floor, but just dodge and don’t make any noise because here Michelin is just the wrong spelling of some Italian singer. Carmy has many opportunities to serve, but he stays there and tries to change things, make them better. Why?
Fortunately, The Bear is not a resilience series. Jeremy White, with his eyes the color of a perpetually clear sky, doesn’t let any emotion escape the face of the character he brings to life. It is not possible to predict a sunny or stormy day. He doesn’t even know, actually. For years, he focused on references, on the exact amount of Himalayan salt to add to a gourmet dish to make it perfect. To do it “well”. Now that he’s making hot dogs, he has the same methodical attitude, he goes home and watches cooking shows until he falls asleep, only to wake up, cook, and burn down the flea apartment he lives in. Is The Bear about how your passion can wear you down slowly, inexorably if you let it swallow you? Also. But dig deeper than that. As in a session with the analyst, we start from the symptoms, the most obvious, to get to the origins of the extravagant, toxic or harmful behaviors that each character adopts when saying he is “fine”. In fact, each of them is a perfectly functioning human being: breathe, go to work, say good morning, say good night, ignore it.
The tight rhythms that mark time in a kitchen, whether starry or more like a stable, keep the concentration of those who work there very high, preventing them from looking beyond. If he could look over stoves and pantries here, he would see. Not the proverbial elephant in the room, the one we are so used to ignoring despite its size. From Carmy onwards, all characters in The Bear pretend not to see a giant, angry black bear, a very ferocious animal that is not in one room, but in every room. They locked him in a cage some time ago and keep him there, hoping he won’t be able to break free, only to later take him with them everywhere. Because it’s part of themselves. The bear can be the pain of grief, the excruciating feeling of guilt at not being around a person who then, on a bad night, decided to end it all. And you knew very well that it was going to happen. The bear is the relationship with a five-year-old daughter who thinks her real last name is “Bad news” because her mom saved you in the phone book. to let it go, right from the start. The bear is the silent explosion that explodes in each of us when we say we’re okay, but we’re not.
It’s hard to deal with the bear. First, because we choose not to see it, preferring to drag our attention to something different, perhaps even challenging. In fact, better if defiant. In this sense, the choice to adapt a story that, without saying so explicitly, deals with mental health, grief processing, suicide and wild anxieties in a kitchen, even more so if it’s in bad shape, it’s the real stroke of genius, among so many others, of the script. In a kitchen one can only say “Yes, Chef” and make your hands move from dawn to night. There’s no time to get distracted, get lost in thoughts you don’t even want to have. Even during the cigarette break, the protagonists, mostly men, pretend to chat, but never speak. Unless there’s a competition to see who pisses the longest. Xanax in the pocket and malealphism as an implicit subject, the nodes will come to the perch anyway. As? Looking up from the stove and deciding to get help, remaining convinced that you don’t need any support. Slowly the zest will be bleached.
The Bear teaches you to take care of your bear, to name it, to tame it. Because living with it, we have to live with it. You didn’t create it, maybe you didn’t even want it, but now it’s there, you have to deal with it. And it can become something shiny, because, like every story that starts badly, it can have a happy ending.. However, every end has a beginning. And the beginning is to stop being distracted, repeating to yourself that it is enough to do things “well”, to feel “good”. There aren’t enough potatoes in the world to blanch for each of us to blanch for a lifetime, regardless of anything else.
The Bear is an invitation, indeed, a challenge: in front of a bear, don’t pretend to be dead. Ask for help. Yes, chef?
Source: Fan Page IT
Emma Fitzgerald is an accomplished political journalist and author at The Nation View. With a background in political science and international relations, she has a deep understanding of the political landscape and the forces that shape it.
