The Bear: Carmy Is a Virgin

On narrative and frustration and the pursuit of happiness

The Bear is a good show. I like watching Jeremy Allen White as tortured chef Carmy, a fancy restaurant chef returning to his hometown of Chicago to take over his family’s sandwich business, The Beef. I’ve loved watching Ayo Edebiri as Sydney, a highly trained chef in love with food and taking a bet on the idea that just being around Carmy will push her to another level. The workers making their own family at the restuarant are fleshed out - Marcus, a sweet teddy bear of a guy dealing with a sick mom and discovering his love of creating desserts - Tina, an old timer from The Beef trying to keep her job and discovering a passion as well - and Richie, the number two guy who was Carmy’s brother’s best friend and is, generally, the obstacle in the way of everything. Whatever everything could be. There is a beauty to a restaurant working at its best. There is a beauty to a well made meal. It’s all a sensual, physical pleasure that is one of the great things in life. Eating can be merely fuel, or eating can be revelatory, a moment in time. We do, actually, remember meals and how they make us feel.

The Bear, nominated for 23 Emmys in comedy this year, can be funny, with the delivery of a line (Ayo) or a slightly absurd situation, but its humor, emerging more from character, often is at odds with the intense manner in which it is filmed, and at its worst in this current season, just relies on guys swearing at each other and the pile-up of local dude accents. The filmmaking, indebted to folks like Michael Mann and Ridley Scott and action guys who know how to cut a scene for maximum stress, gives the show its tone: quick-paced, beautiful around the edges, nervewracking, just like firing on all cylinders in a restaurant. But look, as a woman, I would never, ever want The Bear doing a crazy close-up on my face, pores and all. Their choices and the coloring make people nearly impressionistic, the blue of Jeremy Allen White’s eyes sticking in your head.

I think the latest season of The Bear, out now on FX/Hulu, was somewhat fated to get middling reviews. The first season had a clear through line for the plot: Carmy, a fine dining chef, returns home to Chicago to salvage The Beef, his family sandwich restaurant. The second season was about turning The Beef, a casual place, into The Bear, a fine dining place. Carmy is dealing with grief. He goes to Al-Anon meetings as the son and brother of an alcoholic. The second season had the space to stretch out, to have episodes devoted to characters like Marcus and Richie experiencing fine dining workplaces and understanding just what goes into a perfectly plated meal, like a fork that is shined with absolutely no smudges.

It had an episode dedicated to the dysfunction of the Berzatto family, where Carmy’s Christmas meal was more of a ride of terror, as people who rely on drugs and drink to get through their day rely on drugs and drink to get through their meal. It was a recognizable situation if you are, I don’t know, not WASP? You cook your food yourself and you clean your house yourself? It had the relatives from New York who get shit because la dee dah they live in New York, the drunk terror of an Uncle type, the loud braying tempo of conversation. I related to some of it and I did not relate to other bits. It was dramatic and what little humor existed in it was from the gallows, realistic and unpleasant. There was also a row of familiar actors in roles like drunk uncle and drunk mom. It was all backstory for why Carmy was the way he was, why he wanted to pursue excellence and something beautiful but threw himself into another industry that relies on approval without realizing that approval never quite fills the gaping wound in the way that you want it to; instead, it is always on some Gift of the Magi O. Henry shit.

(The Bear X Miranda July collab live on A24 jk jk jk)

I have not even mentioned Carmy’s girlfriend in season two, a distraction from his purpose named Claire who works in a pediatric ER but has enough time to while away some time with Carmy, barely talking about her work and living her life in extreme close-up, mostly. She was a character that didn’t feel full, especially in comparison to the other women in the show, and she seemed very much put in as a reason to distract Carmy from The Bear’s opening. Their love story wasn’t satisfying, partially because the love established in The Bear so far is mostly based around cooking. A meal. Creativity. Not just messing around and chatting with someone who is as attractive as you.

But it’s weird because spiritually, Carmy is a virgin. (Which is hilarious, considering how many thirsty tweets The Bear inspired.) What relationships has he had? He has to be single. Monk-like. He is focused on one thing and one thing only, and if he brought in anyone else into his life, they would be bound to suffer, and to suffer too much. Which is why Claire’s equally hectic job in the ER is confusing. I think it’s supposed to say that they are soulmates but mostly it just makes her on her downtime seem confusing.

I think a real tell with season three feeling all over the place was just the issue of time. Time is fudged a lot on tv shows that fall into the prestige category. Season two was about a month long. Season three had one episode that spanned a month, but overall, everything felt very sudden, as if all this was occurring in the span of a couple of weeks. And there was no way to put your finger on time elapsing when the show relied on too many flashback montages. Plot-wise, season three didn’t have something specific to work towards. Carmy ended season two in humiliation, fighting everyone, and he begins season three trying to solve his human, real world problems by throwing himself into his work. He repeats all the lessons he learned from his decade in fine dining, for better and for worse. He imposes ridiculous new rules - a new menu every night? Sir! But there’s this theme that comes through, with Carmy, with Marcus, with the characters that are sitting and mourning something and are trying to impose purpose and narrative on their lives. Marcus throwing himself into desserts, into magic, in the wake of his mom’s death. Assuming that her death was purposeful because he had the restaurant to focus on. Marcus is heading for a big hurt.

When my mom died? It felt like a cosmic joke. God laughing in my face. And I thought that well if that happened, then of course my career would pull up afterwards, in a beautiful straight line. It’s been cruel - and depressing - to not have that be the case. To have talent but to not feel like I can make that into a career that pays the bills, a career that takes care of my kid. And some of it is trying to fight my way through depression and fear. You can’t ever fail if you don’t write, can you? And it seems today the only way to be successful, at least to the casual eye, is to basically, in short, have graphomania at the least. You write and you write and you become a name. So I have protected myself from ever failing by not trying, by writing down every disappointment as a way to be embittered. 

I don’t know if it’s the best way to live. And with Carmy, well, by the end of the season we’re realizing it’s a trauma plot, that he has, not just a dysfunctional family, but a specific bad dad boss from his memory, Joel McHale. The abuse from that boss meant that Carmy was cursed to pass it on in some way. So much of The Bear is just people - Carmy, especially - trying to function in the wake of what’s essentially PTSD, and it’s a bastard. It traps you in circles and spirals while life goes on in a straight line. It feels like jamming a square peg into a round hole. I get it, I understand it, and I think that the acting and writing on The Bear got these experiences across, even if it didn’t make for great television in the same way as previous sessions. It certainly wasn’t satisfying. Honestly, it’s a bit more of a novelistic topic in my opinion: the perennial human ability to try to narrativize stuff, when there is no narrative. (Regrettably applicable to our current politics.)

With the beauty of its filmmaking and the focus on the process of food, The Bear can lapse, so easily into Chef’s Table-style chef worship, and it did that plenty of times, especially with all of the Great Chef Cameos this season. It can’t not feel a bit masturbatory, and it didn’t balance out the fact that we see unhappy people who are generally and spiritually virgins, who have little in their life beyond their food. That’s the path that Carmy is on, and at some point, something has to give and break. And perhaps that’s the rest of the show: Carmy torn between work, talent, and learning how to live a life, even through his faulty wiring, where he can learn how to give and receive happiness, the small miracle of quotidian life.