In the Weeds With Your Emotions

The true power of The Bear has nothing to do with food

“Pain travels through families until someone is willing to feel it”

– Stephi Wagner.

“Trying to get your shit together is like trying to eat once and for all.”

-Unknown

“Can't love me unless you love you too
Treat yourself like nothin' but a fool”

-Sia

What differentiates art from mere content is that art changes you in some way. Whether that change is as small as a sigh of appreciation or as big as a major life epiphany, you aren’t quite the same person after engaging with great art, which is precisely why it’s worth seeking it out in the first place.

I first put words to this concept thanks to Chris Stuckman, one of my favorite Youtube film reviewers. In a roundup of the best films of 2021, he noted that after viewing the Mass, the genius of the film made him run home inspired to write. After watching it on a plane soon after, I understood why and emphatically agree. I was grateful for the excellent movie recommendation and more grateful still that someone had finally named this elusive feeling.

In my recent life there have been exactly three pieces of culture that had this same effect on me. The first was Trick Mirror, Jia Tolentino’s 2019 collection of essays. After devouring these honest, incisive, and illuminating pieces of writing, I went into 2020 convinced that I needed to start a blog and do some writing of my own. Ah the optimism of early 2020. It’s wild to think that had COVID not hit when and how it did, I may have started this blog years earlier. Better late than never, I suppose.

The second transformation came from Midsommar, Ari Aster’s 2019 film. This imaginative, meticulously assembled folk horror movie hit my brain so hard that I literally began writing an essay about it in a Word doc while still watching it, the essence of which I may yet share here one day. The movie burned its way into my brain from the opening scene and it’s one that I still think about often.

Most recently, this searing transcendence happened while watching The Bear, FX’s Emmy-nominated show set in the Chicago restaurant world.

As I noted in my review of The Menu, I’d been putting off watching The Bear for a while. In a world saturated with more prestige TV than I’ll ever have time to watch, I’m famously skeptical of new content and cautious about which gripping shows I allow into my orbit. I was also worried that this restaurant drama might trigger some latent PTSD lodged deep in my amygdala. Everyone kept saying this show was so stressful to watch. Was voluntarily revisiting some of the most intense stress I’ve experienced from my days as a line cook a wise way to spend my precious free time?

The Bear surprised me in pretty much every way a show can surprise you, starting with the fact that the majority of the episodes weren’t the kind of psychosomatic rollercoaster I’d feared; they were poignant and clever character studies. Like an audiovisual tasting menu, every course that The Bear dishes out has a lot of thought and feeling put into every frame.

The craft of this show was so well done that by the end of the first season I began to cut them a lot of slack for the restaurant details I would at first obnoxiously observe them getting wrong. For example, without spoiling it, the finale of season 2 hinges on a sequence where the main character gets locked in a walk in refrigerator. As an anxious person who spent years coming in and out of walk ins I can assure you that this is impossible—all of them have a release button on the inside to prevent exactly this worst case scenario from happening. Yet the plot requires it and the sequence built around it is genuinely gripping despite triggering my bullshit detector.

Ultimately, the things that surprised me the most about The Bear and what I found most powerful about this series were the exact same things, and they had nothing to do with accurate depictions of restaurant minutiae, Italian sandwiches, or food at all. The restaurant world is just the backdrop. At its core, this is a touching story about a damaged family trying to heal. Its emotional power and the reason I benefitted from watching it and wholeheartedly recommend you watch it too don’t stem from its masterful montages or stressful sound design, but rather from its distinctly therapeutic character.

We live in a golden age of art about overcoming multi-generational family trauma. What started with the tear jerking finales of Encanto and Turning Red reached its gilded apex with the triumph of Everything Everywhere All At Once at the Academy Awards. It is in this touching and cathartic company that The Bear finds itself.

At the start of The Bear, fine dining chef Carmen, aka Carmy must return home to Chicago to tend to his family’s restaurant after his brother Mikey takes his own life after a prolonged battle with substance abuse. There, he has to deal with physical setbacks in the form of a chaotic restaurant with jaded employees and mounting debts to pay, but also the emotional setbacks of a family broken by loss. What’s genius about the construction of the show is how the premise interweaves the challenges of restaurant life with the challenges of grief, resentment, and dysfunctional communication patterns. Some of the most satisfying moments to watch are Carmy and the team learning to trust, listen, and be kind so they can work together in a functional restaurant. Conversely, the most horrific scenes to watch are when people give in to their character flaws, fall back on their worst habits, and end up destroying themselves and each other under pressure. The truly stressful episodes, and be warned there is one of these doozies per season, are devastating to watch not just because of the loud noises and fast pace of restaurant life, but because you’re confronted with the emotional frailty and tragic dysfunction of the family patterns we all internalize from a young age.

In the first season, there’s a one shot sequence depicting their poor little sandwich shop getting totally buried in to go orders that brought back all of my worst memories of being a line cook at Mission Chinese Food, where the Sunday evening takeout rush reliably broke my spirit in a matter of minutes. Watching this punishing orgy of Murphy’s law, where they run out of ingredients, people get burnt and cut was so taxing not only because of my restaurant PTSD, but because we witness Carmy regressing to his worst self. Under the tremendous pressure he begins screaming at everyone and the team falls apart, their dream of a functional restaurant evaporating like pasta water over the relentless chatter of a ticket machine printing to-go orders.

Yet tellingly, one of the best episodes of the whole series is also the most stressful one, and it doesn’t even take place in a restaurant. In a season 2 flashback episode called “Fishes” we return to the Berzatto household for a Christmas dinner that will go down in history as the biggest nuclear meltdown since Chernobyl. It’s a tense, well-acted, perfectly written tour de force of an episode, featuring moving guest appearances by Bob Odenkirk and the inimitable Jamie Lee Curtis. The real achievement of this episode, like that of The Bear as a whole is not just how the artfully cacophonous dialogue of overlapping family arguing and razor sharp editing focused on devastating reaction shots makes us the viewers feel incredibly stressed. It’s how it gives us a raw glimpse into the uniquely personal, yet remarkably universal family trauma of the Berzattos.

This episode is essential to understanding the tragedy of Carmy’s brother, Mikey by way of showing all of the Berzatto children’s strained relationship to their mother, played to perfection by Jamie Lee Curtis. The Berzatto matriarch spends the episode toiling in the kitchen to produce an elaborate Feast of the Seven Fishes while chugging red wine, having volatile conversations with her adult children, and periodically sobbing in between cigarettes. This hour of television feels like watching a car wreck in slow motion, but it’s also the Rosetta Stone for the whole series. After seeing this hellish Christmas, all of the episodes before and after it are immediately cast in a new light.

With this one glimpse of his home life, we finally understand Carmy’s obsession with restaurant excellence for what it is: a coping mechanism for his family trauma. His defense from his chaotic family was to physically distance himself from them and bury himself in the overwhelming labor of being the best chef on the planet. This gives him the stress he’s all too familiar with from his upbringing, but in a more controlled and disciplined setting so he can finally overcome it through his talent and hard work, or so he thinks.

One of Carmy’s tragic flaws is that he’s incapable of being truly happy in spite of his tremendous career accomplishments because he has only ever run away from his traumas instead of confronting them head on. In the homecoming central to the show’s set up, Carmy must address the festering schisms inside of him and the Berzatto family unit as a whole. Until he can befriend the bear inside of him, his fear of it will run his life. As Resmaa Menakem puts it:

“As every therapist will tell you, healing involves discomfort, but so does refusing to heal. And over time, refusing to heal is always more painful.”

This healing starts by taking a long hard look in the mirror. Like his mother, it’s clear he’s emotionally unavailable to those around him, struggling to open up and unable to feel lasting joy or happiness because he doesn’t truly believe he deserves it. He gives all of himself to a life of service, pouring out the entitreity of his container every day at work just like his mom did at Christmas, only to end up with nothing left for himself. Others repeatedly offer to help him, and like his mother, he mostly ignores or rejects their offers. It’s a distressing yet totally understandable cycle. So he’s doomed himself to a life of Sisyphean struggle, where his very efforts to overcome the family dynamics he so loathes end up rebuilding them wherever he goes.

This aspect of Carmy’s struggle hit home for me personally. During my line cook days, I’d voluntarily spend hours planning and cooking exhaustingly elaborate meals on my Wednesdays off, relaxing only after dinner was finally served and multiple bottles of wine had been drained. Even after I left restaurant kitchens behind, I kept this dynamic alive for years after. I couldn’t escape the cycle of planning, stressing out over, and executing ambitious dinners because I made it the main way I got together with friends and sought to demonstrate my worth as a person for close to a decade. While the highs were quite high, over time I began to wonder why my free time felt so constrained, why trying to relax felt so stressful, and why my main form of leisure was taking on more work. Where had I gone wrong? Wasn’t giving to others and making them happy my ultimate goal in life?

The reality was more complicated. Ambitious and creative menu ideas had become unmanageable mountains of logistics I forced yourself to climb. Eagerness to show off my skills had become a dependency on external validation. Passion for the happiness of others had spiraled into an inability to be happy myself unless everyone else was happy. For years anytime anyone offered to help out in the kitchen, I’d repeatedly decline. Like Carmy’s mom, I assumed my role, worth, and purpose as a person lay in slogging through this alone.

What I’m getting at is that many of us people pleasures end up like Carmy and his mom even if you “know better.” If you have decided that happiness is a zero sum game or that your worth must be continuously proven via the approval of others then you’ve already accepted a life of giving to others only by depriving yourself. If you’re not careful, you’ll spend the entirety of the dinner party physically isolated from your guests, stressed in the kitchen, having ensured your guests had lots of fun by guaranteeing that you had none.

In my experience, the crux of trauma is that often your initial attempts to manage the symptoms like depression and anxiety fall short and even exacerbate the problem because you’re focused on the wrong things. You try in vain to achieve or control your way out of your unhappiness, arranging external circumstances endlessly when the real misery is within. Then, you pour water into a colander and end up frustrated when you have nothing to drink.

By watching Carmy’s journey, we begin to understand that no amount of restaurant accolades will make him feel whole until he can value himself as worthy of love separate from his achievements. People like Carmy will find a way to feel miserable on vacation or while accepting a Nobel Prize. Only when he learns to love and live with himself will he have a stable emotional life, much less a stable restaurant.

The character of Carmy has a fascinating foil in Richie, the late Berzatto brother’s best friend. When we first meet him, Richie is obnoxious and selfish. He is constantly getting in the way by undermining Carmy’s attempts to improve the restaurant. As you get to know him, you learn that Richie too is a broken man, devastated by his divorce from the mother of his child, and frustrated with his inability to make something of himself as an adult. He’s afraid of change, at the restaurant and in his own life, not because he wants to be annoying, but because he’s grieving the loss of his best friend and is terrified that if things change he will no longer belong.

Richie starts to turn his life around in one of the best episodes of season 2 and the whole series: “Forks.” While interning at a fine dining restaurant, his resentment at having to polish an endless piles of forks yields a marvelous “come to Jesus” moment with the head server. After this tough love, Richie learns how things he once dismissed as silly are actually the secret ingredients he’s been missing to feel whole. It all starts with respect. By respecting himself enough to dress well and respecting the guests enough to truly care about the little details of their happiness, he’s able to achieve a level of joy and purpose that’s eluded him the entire series. This glorious self-betterment montage is capped off by one of the most unexpected yet pitch perfect Taylor Swift musical cues I’ve ever heard in media. It’s a thing of beauty.

This leads us to an empathetic break through. In episodes like “Fishes” and “Forks,” The Bear does a marvelous job of visualizing how the most annoying and dysfunctional aspects of people like Carmy and Richie are usually just their ineffective coping mechanisms for dealing with their unresolved trauma. Carmy’s temper and perfectionism, Richie’s obnoxious stubbornness, and Carmy’s mom’s drinking, and Carmy’s late brother’s drug use were all different flawed ways of dealing with their intense pain. We see how most coping mechanisms, whether resentment and complaining or addictions to work, drinking or drugs are destined to be insufficient because they can never address the root of the problem. At best, all they can do is redirect or distract from your unhappiness. Indeed, in the long run, over-relying on coping mechanisms is a form of mental health fool’s gold that impedes true healing. You think they will be a chemotherapy for your suffering but they turn out to be simply poison.

The food industry is a perfect setting for a drama about trauma for exactly this reason. People like Carmy are drawn to the restaurant world since its rigidity, routines, and focus on others lets them lose themselves in the work. The tragic irony haunting this industry is the toxic codependency and bad coping mechanisms it encourages. While hospitality is built around taking care of other people, many chefs neglect to take care of themselves. While their blood, sweat, and tears ensure that hundreds of people have the best meal of their lives every year, they often eat poorly, drink too much, barely sleep, and live with a level of stress that takes years off of their life.

Many of the chefs I idolized as a younger man like Sean Brock, David Chang, and Danny Bowien have struggled with and faced very public reckonings with this contradiction. Brock went public about his drinking problem on his episode of Chef’s Table. Chang opened up about his bipolar disorder and agonized over his abusive treatment of staff (though by some accounts, not enough) in his heartbreaking mea culpa of a memoir, Eat a Peach. Bowien, the celebrity chef behind the restaurant I most recently worked at had a meteoric rise to fame followed by a truly meteoric crash that revealed a toxic workplace. They’ve all since voiced their shame and sadness at how restaurant life drove them to neglect their physical and mental health and be a worse version of themselves to their staff and the people closest to them.

The invitation of The Bear is try to examine and hopefully resolve this toxic dynamic. Season 2’s question of if Carmy can build a fine dining restaurant that makes people happy without making him miserable isn’t a low-stakes question for him or his family. For the Berzattos, it’s quite literally a matter of life and death. Rebuilding their family restaurant must start with rebuilding their family.

This is why the climactic walk in fridge incident is perfect dramatically even though it’s questionable from a restaurant standpoint. Carmy ends up locked in the fridge on the biggest night of his life because throughout the season we see him repeatedly put off calling the fridge repair guy to fix a known issue with the door. He is the source of his own crisis when he could have easily been the solution to it. Like many of us, he ends up trapped not truly by circumstances but by his own unwillingness to help himself. He ends the episode and the series isolated from his family, his girlfriend, and his staff on their biggest night, unable to see or help their successes and struggles because of his own disregard for himself. He can’t see how much Richie has risen to the occasion because he’s trapped, literally and metaphorically by his own fatalism and sense of masochistic victimhood, the perfect visual metaphor for the themes of the entire series.

This image perfectly captures what I’ve found to be one of the biggest epiphanies of years of therapy, a twofold realization as sobering initially as it is empowering eventually.

First, you must realize that help isn’t coming.

No one is going to rescue you from whatever you’re struggling with. I first heard this hard truth not in therapy but when Cate Blanchett’s Galadriel told Elijah Wood’s Frodo:

“This task was appointed to you. And if you do not find a way, no one will.”

After sitting with this humbling reality and working through it, you then realize that help is coming, but if and only if it can come from within.

While no one else is going to ride in and save you like Gandalf at Helm’s Deep, you can ride in and do exactly that. You can be the parent you were lacking, the friend you wished you had, the emotional lifeguard or motivational speaker dishing out the pithy Ted Lasso-ism you need to keep going on your own journey.

Richie’s surprisingly hopeful arc shows us that it’s never too late to find meaning in your life. Carmy’s more frustrating arc shows us the very real ways in which we all at times sabotage our own healing through our bad habits and fallibility. They make it clear that fixing yourself is neither linear nor a one and done process. Through these flawed men we see that, like a fine dining dinner, while the end result of overcoming your own bullshit can be beautiful, the process is as exhausting and humbling as it is collaborative and empowering. Both of these characters show us what healing actually looks like, which is all too rare to see men doing in real life, much less on Hulu.

Taken together, Carmy and Richie’s stories and the saga of the Berzatto family changed me by helping me understand that love and validation are essential but vexing food sources for our emotional nourishment. While we can and do receive them from others, we are the only ones who can make them real. Like a vitamin that’s not bioavailable without the right enzyme, love or validation without internal acceptance and worth goes straight though us. It is only when you believe yourself to be intrinsically valuable and worthy that any kind of love, from yourself or others can stick around and become real.

The Bear’s most lasting impact on me were the many thoughtful and tender scenes musing on this duality. One of the most beautiful things we can do in life is to show others kindness, whether through a heartfelt compliment or a handmade omelette. At the same time, these gestures will be hollow and ineffective if we aren’t also extending that same grace and compassion to ourselves. Life is a feast that is most enjoyable shared, but true nourishment is something that only you can give yourself.

So, am I eagerly awaiting season 3 of The Bear?

Yes, Chef.

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