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The Bear on FX opens with a dream from the main character, chef Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White), four months after his brother Mikey dies by suicide. Carmy is walking on a deserted bridge at night toward a cage. Inside is a large, growling grizzly bear. He opens the door to the cage and slowly backs away while nervously making eye contact and shushing sounds to calm the bear. The bear lunges at him. He wakes up inside the kitchen of the failing restaurant he inherited from his brother that he is trying to save. He looks up at the wall clock in a panic to assess how much time he has to prepare until the restaurant opens. Instantly, Carmy springs into action and is swept up in the urgency of food prep and the chaotic interpersonal dynamics of the back-of-house staff. As a viewer, I found myself entranced with kitchen life and forgot about the bear dream until Carmy was alone and visibly panicked again. Whenever something reminds Carmy of Mikey, his grief comes rushing back.
The experience of watching The Bear feels like grief; temporarily, you are thrown into life and swept up in the task in front of you until something stirs it up — until the bear starts to growl. The fast pacing and close up shots mirror Carmy’s internal experience of grief suppression. As an audience, we too, are happy to return to the hustle amidst our pain. The Bear reflects the cultural desire to look away from our grief, to not dwell in it — to power through. We are two and a half years into a pandemic that has killed over one million people in the United States; we are used to loss and hoping to move on.¹ Collectively, we identify with Carmy, reeling from loss yet determined to succeed in an economy and culture selling us a tarnished, ableist, and bigoted American Dream. Like Carmy, when we are left alone with our thoughts, when someone mentions the name of the dead, or when we go to sleep and begin to dream, we are faced with the gut-wrenching horror of loss.
Often symptoms of panic and dread occur after we have suffered a loss. We have moments where our grief is brought to the surface, feeling as shocking as it did initially. Bereavement can trigger many overwhelming emotions, echoing throughout our bodies without warning. Carmy reports trouble breathing, and sometimes, he wakes up screaming. Grief can put us in a state of hyper-vigilance, dreading unforeseen catastrophes, fearing a repetition of the calamity we have already endured. As described by psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott, “Fear of breakdown is the fear of a breakdown that has already been experienced.”² This dread can overtake us, seeping into all corners of our psyches and showing up in our relationships, emotions, and even dreams.
In the season one finale, Carmy delivers a seven-minute long monologue at an Al-Anon meeting that helps us piece together his fragmented grief. Twelve-step meetings like Al-Anon are structured around members sharing their stories while the other attendees listen. While watching this scene, I thought of the Jewish mourning ritual shiva, and the practice of psychotherapy. Shiva is a ritual where people visit the immediate family members in mourning and wait for them to speak and express their feelings of sorrow. Waiting for the person in pain to speak is a common framework in psychoanalytic psychotherapy; the therapist lets the patient lead the way and use the time how they need. Twelve-step meetings similarly provide an environment where someone can speak without interruption under the premise that the space is there to allow them to speak freely to facilitate the healing process. In this space, Carmy explores his relationship with his brother and his self-esteem.
We learn Mikey was a struggling opiate addict and that Carmy blames himself for Mikey’s suicide. He didn’t know his brother was an addict, and he wasn’t as close to his brother as an adult as they were when they were growing up. Carmy wanted to work with his brother at the family restaurant, but Mikey pushed him out of the restaurant and his life. In reaction, he left Chicago to train in prestigious culinary schools and competitive award-winning kitchens. In this monologue, Carmy describes his relationship with Mikey and with cooking.
“I felt like I could speak through the food, like I could communicate through creativity. And that kind of confidence, you know, like I was finally… good at something, that was so new, and that was so exciting and I just wanted him to know that and, fuck, I just wanted him (Mikey) to be like, “Good job!” And the more he wouldn’t respond, and the more our relationship kinda strained, the deeper into this I went and the better I got. And the more people I cut out, the quieter my life got. And the routine of the kitchen was so consistent and exacting and busy and hard and alive, and I lost track of time and he died. And he left me his restaurant. And over the last couple months I’ve been trying to fix it ’cause it was in rough shape, and I think it’s very clear that me trying to fix the restaurant was me trying to fix whatever was happening with my brother. And I don’t know, maybe fix the whole family because, that restaurant, it has and it, it does mean a lot to people. It means a lot to me. I just don’t know if it ever meant anything to him.”
Carmy plainly articulates what psychoanalytic theorists have mused about for years. In reaction to a loss, whether a death, a job, a relationship, or some essential element of self, people may cope in an attempt to regain what they have lost. In this case, Carmy wanted to repair his relationship with his brother by perfecting his culinary work to gain his approval. When it wasn’t working, he perceived it as his fault and decided he needed to work harder. And now, in the wake of his brother’s death, he is doing the same by attempting to salvage the family restaurant. It seems likely that Carmy’s attempts to control his life in the wake of disappointments are a repetition of how he coped with an earlier upset that he is unconsciously attempting to fix.
Carmy alludes to his work at the restaurant as a way to heal the entire family. Perhaps Carmy blamed himself not only for his brother’s addiction but also for his father’s. He might unconsciously blame himself for his estrangement from his father, just as he blamed himself when Mikey pushed him away. His attempts to master cooking, deep clean the restaurant, and get the family business out of the red are attempts to feel agency in a world, externally and internally, with so much chaos. Our American capitalistic society perpetuates this myth of exceptionalism and idolizes hard work. The psychologist David Smail calls this phenomenon magical voluntarism, “the belief that it is within every individual’s power to make themselves whatever they want to be.” ³ It’s no wonder we have high rates of depression.⁴ Like Carmy, we are trying to revive what we have lost, and when we fail, we end up feeling hopeless.
You might wonder why a psychotherapist would emphasize society’s impact on mental health instead of a person’s upbringing and experiences. If our culture is the problem, how should we heal? This conundrum brings the words of scholar and activist bell hooks to mind, “rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.”⁵ Communal grieving rituals, peer groups, and psychotherapy offer hopeful healing models. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but our society depends on us considering alternatives to 3-7 day bereavement policies.⁶ We need to take better care of one another. We have to change our relationship with grief on a collective level. In a culture so focused on the individual, it is no small task.
I have seen this change happen in my work as a psychotherapist. Therapy provides a relationship where great healing can occur. Working with a therapist might help you gain compassion for your unconscious attempts to recoup what has been lost. Hopefully, you adopt a different way of relating to yourself and others over time. In therapy, attempts to dismiss pain, turn away from grief, and defensively regain a sense of power will be noticed and seen as important. The experience of being seen when most of our society looks away and is quick to move on can be life-changing. If you are coping similarly to Carmy, a therapist will point out how you are pulling away and powering through and notice your aversion to your mourning. This radical space can be a model for us to learn how to sit with our pain and the pain of others. Relational healing is what’s necessary. If that knowledge can be embodied and carried out of the therapy room, into the world, or into Carmy’s kitchen, perhaps we stand a chance together. We can face our disappointments and mourn in community. In the meantime, let’s stop talking and eat, it’s time for Family meal. Yes, chef.
Resources
1 Hassan, A. (2022, May 19). The U.S. surpasses 1 million Covid deaths, the world’s highest known total. The New York Times. Retrieved August 16, 2022, from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/19/us/us-covid-deaths.html
2 Winnicott DW. Die Angst vor dem Zusammenbruch [Fear of breakdown]. Psyche (Stuttg). 1991 Dec;45(12):1116-26. German. PMID: 1775645.
3 Smail, D. (1993). The Origins of Unhappiness: A New Understanding of Personal Distress (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429482632
4 The State of Mental Health in America. (2022). Mental Health America. Retrieved August 16, 2022, from https://www.mhanational.org/issues/state-mental-health-america
5 hooks, bell, 1952-2021. (2000). All about love : new visions. New York :William Morrow.
6 Time to Grieve: Building Equitable Bereavement Guidelines. (2022, February 14). Hrci Marketing. Retrieved August 16, 2022, from https://www.hrci.org/community/blogs-and-announcements/hr-leads-business-blog/hr-leads-business/2022/02/14/time-to-grieve-are-a-few-days-of-bereavement-leave-enough
