The Bear (Seasons 1&2); Culture change mirrors and dances with individual change

 The Bear, Jeremy Allen White, HULU, FX Series, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Culture, Culture Change

The Bear is tremendous television.  I highly recommend it.  That said, it can be hard to get started on.  It is filmed in a very rough fashion.  It feels like watching a documentary, or reality TV, but actually, as it moves along, it feels more like a home movie, and, while this leads to a disjointed feel, it eventually draws you in as a viewer.  It is as if you are a member of the family being let in on what goes on inside of and behind the scenes of your favorite local diner.  If you haven’t seen it and you don’t mind spoilers, read on, but I start with the end and work backwards on this one, so spoilers abound because it is hard to think about the content of this film (I can’t help thinking of it as a film, even though it is a series from FX) without interrogating the content.

In the last episode of season two (all that is out at this writing), Carmy Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White), is locked in the walk-in cooler of his newly renovated and now quite upscale restaurant during its “friends and family” soft opening.  His “cousin” Ritchie Jerimovich (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) has had to take over the role of Chef de Cuisine to run the restaurant in Carmy’s absence and salvage what could have been a disaster.  Ritchie observes Claire (Molly Gordon), Carmy’s girlfriend, leaving the area near the walk-in cooler in tears, and he surmises that Carmy has broken her heart through the cooler’s still locked door.  Ritchie goes to the door and shouts a deeply psychoanalytic interpretation at Carmy.  “You are Dee-Dee.  You are Donna,” he shouts, essentially accusing Carmy of becoming his mother.

Wow!  And isn’t he? And hasn’t he?  Good thing we have a psychoanalyst around (reluctant though he may be) to help us deconstruct this interpretation!

To prepare to think about the interpretation, we need to decode the complicated relationship between Carmy and his mother, Donna – played masterfully by Jamie Lee Curtis, who has been introduced only two episodes before and who makes a brief appearance in this final episode, but who, it is now apparent, has been hovering over Carmy’s life as we have seen it throughout the series as much or more than the ghost of Carmy’s older brother Mikey (Jon Bernthal) who bequeathed the restaurant to Carmy in his suicide note four months before the start of the series.

To be clear, The Bear was a gripping series long before Jamie Lee Curtis showed up, but her showstopping performance cements into place the central dynamic elements of the series.  In Donna/Dee Dee/Jamie Lee’s episode, we see her in flashback, when Mikey is still alive, slaving in the kitchen to produce the meal of the seven fishes for Christmas dinner.  As mentioned before, one of the draws of the series is the filming, which is (intentionally, I am certain) slipshod.  I’m guessing there are a lot of hand-held cameras and the editing is a bit rough.  And Jamie Lee Curtis’s episode is even shot on film in low lighting, and the graininess helps us feel, in a very close and uncomfortable way, like we are there,  not just watching, but feeling the evening unfold.  You know, at a certain point, that there is no way for it to end except badly, but it just keeps getting worse.

Christmas is a complicated holiday.  There is an incredible amount of preparation that goes into creating the “perfect” experience.  The shopping, cooking, decorating and travel create a pressure cooker that, if all goes well, produces a space that is insulated, somehow, from the rest of one’s life – the very toil and trouble that has created this moment.  But the pressure to create that moment can also cause cracks in it, and once those cracks start, the strain of serving the needs of others whom we love enough to want them to experience the magic of Christmas, can explode, as it does here.

A fine dining experience, when it goes well, is a little like the magic of Christmas.  It is an experience that is walled off from the rest of our lives – and it creates an internal experience – a feeling – that is truly sublime.  The first time I ate in a Michelin rated restaurant was in college.  I ate there with a friend.  We couldn’t come close to affording dinner, but we scraped together enough to eat breakfast.  In the moment after a stack of dishes fell and broke, I realized how good I had been feeling as a result of the meal and the company.  The second time that I ate in a Michelin rated restaurant, after I could afford it, it was magic.  The next day, I went to a local eatery with coworkers and the waitress said that she would be serving us today and I thought, “I know you think that, but I now know what true service is, and I don’t think what you have to offer will measure up.”  The fine dining experience, when done well, is as close to seamless as a human experience can be and it is something to be treasured.

This series actually creates a magical experience of its own.  The Berzatto family is one that takes in strays.  Ritchie is such a stray.  He is a cousin by choice, not by birth.  And the restaurant employees are also like family.  In fact, the restaurant is a second, broader family by choice.  I think that we as viewers are invited in, not as viewers, but as family members.  We identity with the crazy and lovely aspects of the family and the business.  The reluctant wife, as an ice breaker, often asks groups that include mucky mucks to talk about their first jobs.  Many of them worked in the restaurant industry or other service jobs that require hard work but not much skill.  Bonding quickly takes place over the hazards and complexities of those early jobs and the mucky mucks and the average Joe’s find that they have a lot in common as they remember what it was like to work in a pressure cooker atmosphere aimed at pleasing the gustatory customer.  I think that we recognize the space that is created here as one that is familiar, but also, thankfully, not our own, and we can vicariously experience it without having to clean up the messes that are created.

But it may also be that I am more susceptible than others to identifying with this family.  I was born in Chicago, but, because of my father’s peripatetic career, I have lived much of my life in exile.  My mother grew up in Chicago and, later, the suburbs.  Two of my cousins on my father’s side ended up opening a bar and restaurant in Chicago.  It was a family business that was a pressure cooker of its own sort – and I was able to vicariously participate from afar (which was much easier than being directly involved) as it got started, flourished, and then crashed and burned.  Though the arc of this story is different, the interaction of family and work dynamics seems very, very familiar, including the tensions between members of the family that have different skill sets, different personal characteristics, and different senses of feeling loved by different members of the family.

Carmy grew up in a sprawling Italian family.  The restaurant that his brother ran (and almost ran into the ground), Chicago Beef, was a sandwich shop that served an urban neighborhood, while the family lived in the suburbs.  When Carmy became old enough, he left Chicago, fleeing from the craziness of his family and searching for a better life.  He found one, sort of, working his way up the ladder of the restaurant business, becoming the Chef de Cuisine at one of the great restaurants in the world.  And there, despite his skills, he was lorded over by a sadistic chef who berated him, encouraging him to work harder and faster.  And, we are left to surmise, he harbored a dream: He wanted to return home and partner with his brother, hoping that his brother could sober up from all the pills and whatnot he was on, so they could transform the sandwich shop into a new restaurant – one that would create a more nuanced experience than the Chicago beef sandwiches that were the mainstay of the business as it was currently run.

When Carmy returns to Chicago, his inheritance is complicated.  The business is failing, and he jumps in with both hands to make sure that it does not go under, but this is complicated by the inertia of the restaurant as it has been, including the people that go with it; Cousin Ritchie, Tina Marrero (Liza Colón-Zayas) the sassy linecook, as well as Carmy’s sister, Natalie "Sugar" Berzatto (Abby Elliott) who also has an interest in the business, and his Uncle, Jimmy "Cicero" Kalinowski (Oliver Platt), who is financially involved.  Carmy is trying to both preserve and change something that all cherish, that all are invested in, and that none but he see the evolutionary potential.  

Carmy’s first gambit, then, is to hire someone from the outside to help him act as a change agent.  Sydney Adamu (Ayo Edebiri) fits the bill because she has burned every other bridge and, unbeknownst to Carmy, has eaten his food at the high end place he worked for out of town and she is a true believer in him and what he can do with food.  She is also black and she is odd – she is not comfortable in her skin.  It is almost embarrassing to see her on the screen with all the other actors that fit so comfortably into their roles.  It is as if she is the only actor – the only one trying to act a part rather than be someone.  This is, in my estimation, not a sign of her failing to be a good actor, but a sign of her ability to act.  Her self-consciousness is just what the role calls for.  Sydney is, unlike the rest of the characters, uncertain of herself and how she fits in – not just at the restaurant, but in life.  She is, as it were, playing at being human, so she is the one who is most open to the possibility of change.  Carmy has a vision of what the restaurant will be, no matter how muddy, while she is just awkwardly trying to figure out how to have any vision, of a menu item, of a wardrobe choice, of a topic of conversation, that will work.  Her anxiety about not fitting in, about not being centered in herself, leads her to try out and try on all kinds of different new things as she almost spastically tries to become herself.

So the first season can be summarized as a war for the soul of the restaurant.  Carmy and Sydney are trying to bring the old guard up to speed and the old guard are resisting it.  The old and the new (with the exception of Sydney) want the restaurant as the restaurant it has been to work, they want to preserve the legacy of Mikey, the guy who was fun to be with and who could, by dint of his charisma, make everything fun and crazy, but they want to be able to do what he was not able to: keep the bottom from rotting out.  Carmy is trying to instigate culture change – creating a culture where what matters is not the glitter of having a barely functional working space, but the content of producing something of value.  He and Sydney share a vision of the restaurant producing an experience within the people who consume what is offered that is sublime.  In order to affect this, the staff needs to shift in the way that they work together on creating that experience.

The functional changes that Carmy and Sydney institute are, on the surface, simply matters of protocol.  The employees now call each other “chef” and they call out to each other as they move around the kitchen so that they don’t run into each other.  They wash their dishes and keep their spaces clean.  These are the practices of higher end restaurants like the ones where Carmy has been working, but they are foreign to the functioning of a Chicago Beef place that is turning out sandwiches for the lunch crowd.  The culture – the people who have been working in the sandwich shop – resist the changes.  They are used to doing things the way they are used to doing them.  But they are also intrigued by the possibility of thinking about themselves in new ways.  They begin to recognize that what Carmy is offering is something that would not just elevate the experience of the customers, but it would elevate their experience of themselves.  This creates a sense of intrigue, but they don’t know what they are shooting for, or how to get there, and there is considerable anxiety about whether they have what it takes to make the transition. 

The first season ends with a tremendous performance from Jeremy Allen White as he recounts his experience of losing his brother and the impact that has had on him.  It also ends with the surprise discovery of financial resources assumed to have been lost to drug dealing that are in fact stored away on premises and that can be used to fuel Carmy’s vision of what the place could be in the second season.

So the second season unfolds as a series of short stories that allow us to understand the characters that make up the restaurant family.  We learn their back stories and we see how they individually come to make the changes that will allow them to become a functional family – one that will work to remake the restaurant.  All of this is set against a series of catastrophes that threaten to derail the rebuilding of the restaurant, the central of which is Carmy’s failure of heart.  He is distracted from what should be his central and driving concern by his relationship with Claire (Molly Gordon).  This keeps him from attending to the necessary details of getting the door fixed on the walk-in fridge that leads to the ultimate moment of being unable to preside over the soft opening of his restaurant.  Sydney and Sugar are left to be the driving forces as Carmy orchestrates, but with a distracted air.

I said a moment ago that we get the back stories of the characters, but we also get to see them more fully become themselves as they engage in a series of exercises that Carmy comes up with that allow them to explore, outside the confines of the restaurant, who it is that they can become.  Tina Marrero goes to the Culinary Institute of Chicago, the pastry chef studies with a chef in Denmark (where Carmy had a stop on his journey to learn the trade), and, after the episode with Donna/Dee Dee Jamie Lee Curtis, cousin Ritchie spends a week in the kind of restaurant that he defensively disdains – one that he could never afford to eat in, but one that he would secretly kill to be able to claim as a place that he works.  And we see him transform, in the final episode, into the kind of person that he could only have dreamt of being – the person who can confidently fill in the role of chef de cuisine when Carmy gets locked in the walk-in.

So in the Christmas episode, one facet of the manifold complicated interactions that are taking place is the interaction between Carmy and his mother.  She is demanding that others help her and that they leave the kitchen and she is complaining that they never help her all the while managing not just the seven fishes dish (the meaning of which no one seems to quite understand) but a plethora of other complicated dishes all needing time in the oven simultaneously.  Through the chaos of her cooking and her moods, Carmy is tuned in to his mother and her needs.  He knows what it takes to keep her precariously on track, to emotionally resonate with her and to hold her together so that the next step can be taken.  And he knows how to anticipate which dishes need to be attended to while flying under the radar that would lead his mother to think he thought she couldn’t manage what she is doing.  But this is dangerous business, this business of keeping one’s mother on track.  It requires a lot of work, it is highly anxiety producing, and it ends up being something that one might resent as much as Donna clearly resents preparing the elaborate meal that the entire family looks forward to eating.

So this series is presenting something like a paradox.  Carmy is the generative mastermind that is helping his staff, many of whom are his friends as well as employees, make the kind of personal transformations that will allow for a cultural shift that well create a new functional work space.  At the same time, Carmy himself is undergoing a kind of retrograde personal shift.  His single-minded focus, learned while managing his mother’s mercurial moods (and cooking) drove him to get out from under her oppressive oversight, and became his support system as he competed in the realm of high-end cooking.  But now that he has the ability to harness this for his own good, he is wavering.  Not completely in a bad way.  He is entertaining the possibility of allowing someone else into his world – he is not just partnering with Sydney in the business, but falling in love.  And maybe, just maybe, this is helping him realize that he has needs; significant unresolved needs that deserve to be attended to.  Needs for nurturance and support and connection with someone who really understands him, even if that understanding also comes at the cost of interfering with his unwavering attention to serving others.

When Ritchie accuses Carmy of having become Donna, he senses that Carmy has driven away someone who could love and care for him, and that Carmy is pretending that he doesn’t need this, while his behavior cries out that he does.  The complicating factor, of course, is that tending to the relationship with Claire has interfered with his ability to attend to the restaurant, and therefore to his customers, exemplified by his having failed to replace the door handle to the walk-in cooler, including by forgetting to make the call for the repair because he took a call from Claire.

Daniel Stern, in his book on infants relating to others, clarifies what Carmy demonstrates so clearly in this series.  We are built to relate to others.  As infants, we thrive when others closely attend to us and communicate to us that they get what our needs, but perhaps more importantly, our desires are.  When we have internalized a sense of ourselves and are able to articulate our needs to others while also meeting their needs, we achieve a state of equilibrium.  But this state is rare and difficult to achieve.  Carmy has long been laboring in the desert.  He has been trying to build himself on his own foundation, rather than a foundation that is connected to others.  He hasn’t connected to others, apparently, because it is too painful to do that.  His older brother made fun of him.  His mother demanded too much from him, so he headed out on his own, and he got a considerable distance, but it didn’t create a foundation within himself that is like the one he has been preparing for others.

Many people come into my profession from similar backgrounds.  We work to provide a foundation for others in part because we are seeking such a foundation for ourselves.  Perhaps this is a contributing factor to the high rate of suicide in those professions.  I don’t think that Carmy has such a dark future ahead of him, though it might have something to with the suicide of his brother.  I think that the community that Carmy is building will help sustain him and support his seeking out the kind of support that he needs, that is, after all, the arc of the other characters, but I think both he and Sydney are in need of support, and it can be particularly hard to acquire genuine support as leaders in an organization where you are expected to support others and the others don’t always see the need for the leader to be supported.

What I intended to point out here, though, is that culture change does not occur in the culture – culture is amorphous and dependent on the functioning of the individual members, and ultimately for a culture to change, the individuals have to change.  As I write this, I am in Florida, where I visited an art museum that included the works of Seminole Indians.  In a video by one of the artists, he noted that the elders taught him the basic skills that he needed, then sent him out to explore his craft (in his case it was building dug out canoes).  As he worked, he came up with questions, which he took back to the elders, who would suggest that they had solved the problem he was presenting in a particular way, and he could use that, or he could find a novel way to solve the problem.  It occurred to me in that moment that culture and cultures are not static, and that they are, as depicted in The Bear, fluid entities powered by the interactions between people with complex individual histories that are shaped by the flow of the previous culture through those they have interacted with.

 The Bear asks us to think about who it is that we are as individuals and in relation to others.  It clarifies that neither the individual nor the culture has unlimited degrees of freedom to change.  We are embedded in the culture that has supported and sustained us, but we can also contribute to changing that culture - often by changing ourselves and the ways that we interact with others.  We can, through effort and hard work, move closer to being the person that we would imagine ourselves to be.

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