The Bear: Entropy in a restaurant kitchen

Of all the combat settings in Christopher Nolan’s time-twisty thriller Tenet, the restaurant kitchen may have been the most claustrophobic but the least cogent. The staff seemed a little too quiet, ordered and calm while working. Then, the goons clear them out to take on John David Washington. A bunch of plates shatter. An entire shelf tumbles. A cheese grater comes in handy as a weapon. But for a movie with a lot of talk about entropy, it could have benefited from tapping into the entropy of a working kitchen. Now, imagine if the staff hadn’t been cleared out, and the setting was the pressure cooker of a kitchen in The Bear.

Created by Christopher Storer, the FX on Hulu series is an eight-episode anxiety attack. Jeremy Allen White plays Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White), a temperamental but gifted chef who leaves behind the fine-dining world of New York to run his family’s sandwich shop, The Beef, in Chicago after his brother dies by suicide. If running a restaurant isn’t stressful enough already, Carmy has inherited something of a three-ring circus. The staff are allergic to any change. The hot-headed restaurant manager, “cousin” Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), cannot agree on anything with the ambitious sous chef Sydney Adamu (Ayo Edebiri). Uncle Jimmy Cicero (Oliver Platt) wants to take over the shop as repayment for the mountain of debt owed to him. Add super-tight profit margins, health code violations, family dysfunction, and his own grief and trauma to the equation — it sure takes its toll on Carmy. White’s face slackened by fatigue, hair tousled, and eyes glazed reveal a man walking a knife’s edge.

Watching Carmy and the staff cook together in a cramped and sweaty hot box bristling with boiling pots, open flames, cleavers and knives, you wonder how restaurant kitchens aren’t crime hotspots. Spending 20-odd minutes of an episode with them, you end up with their residual anxieties. When health inspector Nancy Chore (Amy Morton) shows up at the restaurant looking for violations, from the least to the most miniscule, chaos abounds. While Carmy attempts to sway her, Richie and Sydney get into an argument. Everyone is speaking over one another, ratcheting up the tension. The camera matches the characters’ energy with the hand-held keeping pace with all the drama. The Bear adopts the audio-visual language of destabilization we have come to associate with the Safdie brothers, starting with Heaven Knows What, improved upon by Good Time, and mastered by Uncut Gems. From the camerawork to the score to the editing, each element brings a distressing intensity of its own, as if the whole production has been designed to induce an anxiety attack. The atmosphere is infused with a sense of claustrophobia,  making the characters’ shortcomings appear larger than life. Yet, you are sucked in throughout by these comedies of discomfort.

Tension reaches a boiling point in the seventh episode of The Bear. Sufjan Stevens’s anthem “Chicago” opens the episode in all its youthful strings-and-vibraphone glory, like the calm before the storm. The near-20 minute one-take that follows is a spectacle of dissonance and modulated frenzy. We watch an absolute disaster unfold in real time. Sydney has left the online pre-order option open by accident. The receipt printer keeps ticking. The orders start to pile up. The problems as well. There is a meat shortage. The line cook Tina (Liza Colón-Zayas) has brought along her son who has been suspended from school. Carmen’s repeated reminders — “15 MINUTES TO OPEN,” “10 MINUTES TO OPEN,” “5 MINUTES TO OPEN” — give the feeling of a ticking time bomb. The camera caroms from one character to another relentlessly, keeping the viewer wedged between a rock and a hard place. Every dizzying turn brings something else to stress about. Just as soon as one setback is resolved, another pops up until they start to snowball. We are with these characters perched right on the precipice of sanity, every step of the way, and feel their cortisol levels increasing. Anxiety has seldom felt this tangible. The tight camerawork coupled with the sound design externalises the inner storms brewing till they all bubble up to the surface in shouting matches, ending with one employee quitting, one walking out and one getting stabbed. When the credits roll, you feel like you can finally breathe.

The atmosphere in a restaurant kitchen may feel like a powder keg waiting to go off. But The Bear never forgets that art is order born out of chaos, the flavoursome delights that can still be cooked up by clashing personalities, often nursing overwhelming anxieties. On some level, the show can thus be read as an allegory for the creative process of making films and shows. A set can often turn into a battleground, much like a kitchen. But when the collaborators come together for a greater purpose, they can still make something rich, relishing and restorative.

The Bear is now streaming on Disney+ Hotstar.

Prahlad Srihari is a film and music writer based in Bengaluru.

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