THE BEAR (Hulu) "A show about the trauma of being excellent at one thing while falling short everywhere else

In one of the more egregious insults offered by art awards, Christopher Storer’s magnificent serialized drama The Bear has won several “Best Comedy” awards. Rarely has categorizing a collective unit of small-screen cinema as a comedy been such an insult to the quality and importance of the work.

The Bear is a comedy about food workers, much like The Sopranos was about sanitation workers. Both of these dramas are profound meditations on family trauma. From a long-term perspective, each show prompts a viewer’s analysis of the effects of sustained trauma on sensitive people forced to act hard in a cold world. The Bear forces a choice on the primary character, Carmen Berzatto: How much of this suffering will you pass on to others?

Personal strength measures how much trauma we can each drink down and still manage to smile at the ones we love and mean it. Kindness is a superpower in the face of adversity, and gentleness is the fruit of its presence. Gentleness is the perception others have of our impact on their lives. Kindness is not an individual’s intention but rather an experience others have by our effect on their lives. The best intentions do not imply good results. 

Being a genius, skilled in one facet of life (like cooking) but defective in all others (like supporting a loving partner) amounts to a failure in a life lived with the best intentions. Our behavior matters in the end, not our intentions, which is a hard lesson for the angry and aggrieved person to learn. People who are not gentle with themselves can never be truly gentle with others. This is another lesson that only self-reflection, applied to the kinetic motion of the living moment, can bring. 

Our outer lives of relationships, meaning, and connection to the natural world and the people who inhabit it with us are an extension of our inner lives. If we live in turmoil inside, we create chaos on the outside; this is common sense. If we cannot fix the film projector beating in our rib cage, the image projected onto the screen of our lives will be distorted, fragmented, sometimes demented, and often broken.

In Tomorrow, Episode 1 of Season Chapter 3 of The Bear, Carmy finally has the restaurant he was meant to run, created on the ashes of his deceased brother’s failure. But in building his pyramid, Carmy has driven nearly everyone who cares about him out of his life, just like his mother did, just like his dead brother. Since high school, Carmy has loved Claire, but he’s consistently fallen short of that commitment. Harsh words spoken in a time of crisis that left real scars on his flesh drove Claire away and broke the covenant of sorrow with his closest cousin. 

At the moment of triumph, a locked freezer door caused him to let everyone down when they needed him most. At least Carmy feels that way. He fell apart, and in this moment of desperate failure, he lashed out and nearly burned every relationship in his life to ashes. Sorting ashes on top of ashes is a subtextual theme of The Bear. And Carmy has struggled to keep these feelings and thoughts submerged in the quiet dark of that theater of his heart, lest he do what he ended up doing anyway.

Carmy has created the greatest restaurant he can build. He has assembled a team of misfits and goofs but empowered them to do great acts within the small but essential framework of the back-of-the-house food artists and front-of-the-house service experts that make The Bear a story about America and how it’s broken in all the right places to achieve greatness but still comes up morally short. The poor people in this show do the greatest work of their lives, but it comes at a cost that will never be fully measured, except by the New Critic and otherwise astute viewer having this conversation.

The specter of suicide hangs dark and rumbling over the fictional lives of characters in The Bear, but there is also hope. Carmy now keeps a journal, which is not for writing down recipes. He’s writing affirmations, goals, struggles, triumphs, and failures. Carmen Berzatto is doing what none of those who inflicted trauma on him and the ones he’s loved most were capable of. The journaling proves to the viewer that Carmy is turning inward to do the hardest work of life, to build the only pyramid that matters, one constructed of human relationships cobbled together by kindness, affection, and gentleness. But then the work of the outside world suffers.

Like every human, Carmy has a limited opportunity to achieve a holistic balance between genius, talent, and growing relationships with the people we are lucky to love. Troubled people can still find a way through this storm of life and love others past our selfish pain, like the weathered farmer who finds the balance of nature necessary to produce a crop that feeds the world.

The Bear is many things: a highly rewatchable masterpiece, hip, frantic, overwhelming, sweet, important drama, and yes, it can be funny. But it certainly isn’t a fucking comedy.