‘The Bear’ Season 2, and the Performative Professional Chaos Complex

Turns out frantic anxiety is the organising principle of good work. Who knew?

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This post (1607 words, or 5m 50s) talks about The Bear S2 and features a few, relatively gentle spoilers.

“Why are so many men obsessed with turning themselves into professional martyrs?” After chaining the first two seasons of The Bear, it’s a thought that’s been steeping in my mind. A phenomena known all too well across genders (bearing in mind, gender is a construct; it being what you do, not who you are, etc), I couldn’t help but notice it acutely in myself and manifold male colleagues: A predilection for thrashing around, bounding from place to place, eyes bloodshot, every question met with a scrambled ‘I don’t know, I’m too busy’, drinking themselves into oblivion at post-work pints and dredging themselves up the next morning with a volcanic pot of jet-black coffee. All extremely healthy behaviour that makes one thing crystal clear: I Am Doing Work And The Work, My Friend, Is Extremely Fucking Stressful.

It feels like they are (and by ‘they are’, I mean, sadly, ‘we are’) what American critic Alfred Kazin once called ‘The Hero-Victim’. As in Whitman: I am the man, I suffer’d, I was there. They/we are mindless young militants without a battlefield. Our conflict is work. Men with an obsession to imbue the familiar with pathos, the professional with the ragged tensions of war. It’s just a job, lads! It’s just a presentation/meeting/email. That’s not a crosshair, it’s just a cursor. Just a spreadsheet that needs filling and filing. There is no doomed mission hurtling headlong into the abyss, where only twisted metal and broken bone await; it is a mostly Cloud-based project due for the looming but ultimately nebulous deadline of ‘EOD’. Why do men still crave war to derive meaning? Even if ‘war’ is just getting a nice beef sandwich into the hands of customers on their lunch break.

There is, according to William Broyles Jr. in his classic Esquire essay Why Men Love War, such a modern invention as the “vicarious war, the thrill of participation without risk, the lust of the audience for blood.” It is a lust for dramatic meaning. “Like all lust,” he writes, “for as long as it lasts it dominates everything else; a nation’s other problems are seared away, a phenomenon exploited by kings, dictators, and presidents since civilization began.”

It’s exploited by bosses, too. There remains, in our lovely, flattened, homogenised western culture, a raging boner for performative busyness. Busyness as a status symbol. Researchers at Columbia University found that “people perceive others who are busy to be important and impressive”. Other studies found that people consider those who exert high effort to be “morally admirable,” regardless of their output. For workers, it is “the trap of busyness”: a catch which causes us to plunge, mindless and panting, into work with “a manic energy that forbids reflection, deeply honest conversations, and breaks from the routine.”

The psychoanalytic concept of ‘displacement’ is regularly left out of workplace analysis. It is, essentially, taking what is actually bothering you, and placing it somewhere else. “Instead of dealing with the stressful situation at hand,” reads one definition, “you feel safer to focus on a topic, person or situation where there isn’t as much at stake or where you have better control.” 

Season One of The Bear is a whirlwind of quasi-professional chaos: all sweat and stainless steel, flying utensils and pitched battles, danger around every corner (“Corner!”) and behind every door (“Behind!”); cooks scream as ovens blare as chefs have panic attacks as ticket-machines belch out lists of elliptical demands on scraps of white paper. It is an environment enamoured with the anti-structure of war. Its inhabitants love it, clearly, even as they curse it. Mayhem reigns, motherfuckers! Even as they chug Pepto-Bismol and angrily eat cigs, reach for their gun and dream of flame engulfing their station, their mind and bodies, the precarious manhood and motivations of characters—particularly, tellingly, Carmine Berzatto (the first syllable of whose surname gives the show its name) and ‘cousin’/friend Richie Jerimovich (who is a certified fucking idiot)—are clear: Frantic anxiety is the organising principle of good work.

Season Two is (a little) quieter, but still the obsession with martyrdom sits on the stovetop, driving the narrative towards boiling point, as we explore the capital-T trauma that brought these chefs into the same cauldron of performative pandemonium. While the extended cast is pretty diverse in gender and race, each dealing with their own traumas or having to shoulder the excess of those around them, it is The Bear’s white male characters who routinely fuck everything up with their strained sinews, chest tension, and tortured souls, as every other character is left to ruminate on their place in this world.

It’s telling that Carmine’s love interest in S2 works at a hospital. Claire is calm and seemingly well-adjusted, but she is—as actor Molly Gordon describes her character in an interview—“a human woman; not just this sweet, sweet girl”. For all of the boys play-acting in the restaurant, when faced with the pungent reality of life and death, they are shy. In an early-ish scene, a visibly unsettled Carmine asks what it’s like for Claire to work in the hospital, taken aback by a job so “gnarly and gross”. It’s a phrase Claire charitably hands back to him, showing clear parallels between the hospital and kitchen but also the marked difference in how they treat themselves, their work, and others. (In the end, it’s all hospitality, right?)

Matty Matheson—a real-life chef who plays DIY guy Fak on the show—describes kitchen life with the timely analogy of being stuck in a submarine. “When you’re spending that much time that close together in a narrow hallway that’s really loud and hot,” says The Bear creator Chris Storer, “it’s going to get weird. It’s not okay, but it’s no wonder why these tensions start to get hot really quickly.” 

This being a beloved prestige television show in the year of our lord 2023, every character in The Bear is laden with psychic baggage. The death of Mikey, Carmine’s bullish, often-bullying, brother, who took his own life, begins the series and sets its tone. Throughout, Carmine’s central truth rears its ugly head: “I cannot be happy.” In Season 2, newly-divorced Richie is plagued by existential crises: “I don’t have a purpose.” Even beloved Sydney cannot escape, battling trust issues and imposter syndrome, corrupted as she is by the theatre of war. The solution to all problems is, of course, work. 

“The business of feeding people eats people,” writes NYT critic James Poniewozik. “The Bear has no illusions about that, but it is also unashamed to see a value in it.” 

Perhaps hoping to find your life’s meaning in the din of the submarine is doom itself. The kitchen is a place where you drive yourself into the ground for fleeting glory; where you’re only as good as your last quenelle of butter; where hours of hard graft produce results that are gone in minutes, sometimes seconds. It is brutal, ephemeral. It is the art of carving intricate ice sculptures in the sunshine. Time does not stop. Heat will not abate. Death, as it does, marches on. 

Or maybe there is beauty in the ego-warping impermanence. Joy in the Sisyphean bleakness of it all. There’s gotta be something. For all the highfalutin menu stuff in S2 (I’ve never tried cherry vinegar, but I guess I’m down), one of the season’s most tender moments comes towards the season finale, and features Sydney quietly making an omelette with chives and crinkle-cut sour-cream-and-onion crisps. Another involves a deep-pan pizza cut into cute, doughnut-sized circles.

These moments take a breath to remember the human at the helm of the kitchen machine. There is a tension in accepting your role in the production line and accepting that you can be more than just a cog in the engine. There is a degree to which pressure and stress can be vital to mastery at work. But, whether it’s Marcus’ dessert reconnaissance in Copenhagen or Richie deciding that, having spent a week shining forks on a fancy secondment, he wears suits now: It is in the discovery of yourself that you find your place on the team. 

If self-actualisation takes vulnerability, it’s safe to say many men suffer through an inability to access that muscle just yet. Molly’s aptitude speaks to a societal pressure on women to be a source of strength as male counterparts flail around (a classic) in and outside of the workplace, but her balance comes from the character’s understanding that a position of high stress requires high empathy, too. But for everyone, vulnerability is a destination with a different ETA. Maybe that’s why these stunted men cannot let each other go just yet. The broken, hyper-masc obsession with professional martyrdom requires the pushing of boundaries to see who will be there to catch them when they fall, without anything so burdensome as clear communication with those around them. Why every disappointment feels like outright betrayal. They cannot help but recreate the spectacle of conflict in the hope that the heat of battle forges them together forever.

“The enduring emotion of war,” wrote Broyles Jr., “when everything else has faded, is comradeship. A comrade in war is a man you can trust with anything, because you trust him with your life. It is, as Philip Caputo writes in A Rumor of War, unlike marriage, a bond I that cannot be broken by a word, by boredom or divorce, or by anything other than death.”

Or in the words of the late Mikey Berzatto: “I love you dude. Let it rip.”