Why The Bear? A Commentary
The staff of the Bear face an especially hectic shift involving a power outage in the restaurant and the pilot lights on the stoves going out. Instead of closing the restaurant for the day, Sydney convinces the rest of the BOH team to construct a makeshift stove out of construction materials in the parking lot and take cash payments from customers. One of the best examples in the show of the extremes that owners and their agents expect workers to go for the restaurant to stay afloat.
The HBO series The Bear, centered on a floundering restaurant and depicting a troubled chef, has been widely discussed in recent weeks. There are some good reasons for this. It depicts a great deal of the tension, the chaos, and the emotions involved in restaurant work in an extremely evocative way. It blends the humor brought on by intense boredom —the product of repetitive and tedious prep work— with the terrific intensity of the worst moments one can have behind the line.
Many have commented as well on the show’s commitment to reproducing details of restaurant life as if recounting an esoteric lore; the terminology, the habits, the various BOH personality tropes, sipping water out of plastic quart containers, etc.
However we must situate the phenomenon of the Bear in its proper context.
We are not far removed from the height of the pandemic, which killed thousands of restaurant workers, left millions more unemployed, subjected even more millions to increased intensity of labor, all while restaurant owners lined their pockets with direct cash payments from the State.
It was this ruinous period that led us to found our organization and similar efforts all across the country. Indeed, the pandemic provoked beginnings of a resurgence in the labor movement in our sector. At the same time, public opinion for the first time revealed a sympathy towards restaurant workers which worked against the ever-present cult of the chef-owner.
The Bear represents a return to the perspective of the restaurant owner, and therein lies the limits of the show’s realism. To tell the story of the tortured artist-chef and his band of misfits, The Bear must abandon all economic reality, depicting the mythical ‘restaurant family’ driven by individual personality rather the division of the sector into exploited and exploiters. It makes the motivation of owners not the endless pursuit of profit, as it is in reality, but various humanistic and creative urges. It depicts a fantasy world in which the only people concerned with such vulgar things as money are business owners (!!!) while the workers concern themselves only with the pursuit of the craft or with personal loyalty.
Previous comments, such as a recent article by perennial grifter and head of One “Fair” Wage Saru Jaramayan have underlined the show’s criticism of the ‘toxicity’ of the industry as a whole. However here as everywhere else we must repeat an elementary point. Talk of “the industry” as a whole, as something not inherently divided by the wage relation, can only conceal the class interests of the bosses.