The show cuts open Carmy's head like a cake, showing all of the layers and flavors inside.
Christopher Storer’s buzzy series The Bear hurls viewers right in the middle of a tense, drama-laden kitchen in Chicago. The reality of the cooking industry shown throughout the series is on full display, but The Bear is not afraid to go introspective. Both the pilot and the first season finale start inside the head of the protagonist, Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White), through his dreams, running concurrently with Carmy’s reality as he adapts to his return from New York kitchens to rebuild his dead brother’s Chicago sandwich shop. And yet every dream sequence falls perfectly into the series like icing on one of Marcus’s cakes.
As mentioned, the series opens with a dream as Carmy slowly releases a bear from a cage on a bridge at night. The sound of a stove turning on comes before anything is shown, and then the shot dissolves into Carmy, wearing his apron and walking toward the bear under seemingly giant lights. All Carmy says is “it’s okay” and “I know” as he slowly walks backward in a crouched position. After close-ups of Carmy and the bear, cut to a medium shot of Carmy unnerved as the bear charges, and zoom in on him falling. Carmy wakes up in the kitchen breathing heavily as the clock ticks, and he moves forward with his day at The Beef.
The editing and sound play a major part in creating the tension here. Viewers start in a trance-like state with the opening sounds of the stove and then dissolving onto this random bridge. Starting with Carmy’s back puts you in his point of view immediately. It also gives off strong anxious vibes, and the sound of the stove shows how Carmy has connected the kitchen to his nervousness. That, and the intense close-up of Carmy’s eyes, set up the intimacy that the show thrives on. Cutting immediately to Carmy in the kitchen, with quick, intense cuts and the fast guitar strumming underneath puts everything into focus. He feels tension working in the kitchen from past trauma — both from his previous job and from losing his brother Michael (Jon Bernthal) — and he still has no idea how to harness his energy toward building a productive and healthy work environment.
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Two moments peek inside Carmy’s head in the very next episode. A flashback to a year prior shows Carmy in his New York kitchen. The overly white background and lighting combined with unsettling, lower octave piano music and some intense strings toward the end of the scene is a stark contrast to the vibes at The Beef. Couple that with the fact that the first frame of Carmy in the scene shows him chest up looking down makes him feel smaller, almost like he’s drowning in the blown-out white lights. That also sets up when a superior chef (Joel McHale) comes over and looks down on him, shown from a higher angle as he berates Carmy. He calls him “talentless,” says he has a “short mans complex,” and finally whispers “you should be dead” as we hang on a closeup of Carmy’s lifeless eyes. He blinks back into action, and the show quickly cuts to the dishes being removed before flowing back into the frenetic, loud energy of The Beef.
That scene is not a dream sequence, but it is so removed from the current timeline it feels like one. It perfectly displays why Carmy is still uncomfortable in a kitchen. Even if that was not exactly what his days felt like in New York, Carmy’s uncomfortableness of those memories and his feelings come through. Seeing brief flashbacks to those moments throughout the episode only heightens that.
Some of those flashbacks are inserted into Carmy’s next nightmare. He dozes off on the couch watching a soothing cooking video and the show suddenly cuts to a medium-wide shot of Carmy screaming in The Beef. The show interslice cuts to the machine printing orders as Carmy screams throughout the kitchen with the camera getting closer. Two close-ups in a row show Carmy intensely screaming and then in a dream-like state in another environment. A montage of successions of extremely quick shorts sort through Carmy’s face, his old head chef, overdue bills, random shots of his new kitchen, and order printouts saying negative thoughts like “He never loved you,” “He didn’t love you,” and “You killed Michael.” It only slows down to show Carmy throwing frozen food on the stove in his sleep, the cooking video still playing.
Now, Carmy’s multiple pent-up memories and feelings are mixed into one terrifying dish. He’s subconsciously tying his negative energy in the kitchen with his sadness over Michael’s suicide and his guilt in leaving Chicago for so long. Again, the music and the editing add to the tension of the scene, creating an uneasiness and an intensity with growing speed. Unlike the previous two scenes described, Carmy is given a moment to breathe outside the kitchen, and yet the tension is almost thicker. Because here, Carmy has nowhere to keep working, and he’s actively harmed himself. It comes into play later when Carmy finally admits he left for New York because Michael never let him work at The Beef. Carmy went to New York to work in fine dining out of spite, to prove to Michael he could cook. This scene and the messages shown on the printouts are the first suggestion that Carmy is still bitter toward his brother despite loving him deeply. It ties together his resentment and care toward Michael, which directly ties into his complicated feelings about kitchen life.
And then, there's the last dream, which starts off the season finale. These are the first images we see after the whole kitchen spirals and Carmy abuses staff members. That makes the sound of corny music and Carmy hosting a cooking show called “The Bear” (shown in a smaller aspect ratio to fit a 1980s television) appropriately bizarre. Carmy starts talking about Michael shooting himself in the head on the State Street Bridge, which calls back to the first dream when he’s on a bridge. He lets out the history of Michael’s life, and how he left Carmy the kitchen to odd laughter, like they’re hearing Julia Child saying something witty instead of this dark story. He then tries to make beef braciola, the dish Michael made every Sunday, when his cooking supplies literally fade away, and he stumbles, to increased audience laughter. Throughout the dream, different images cut through — the bridge from the first episode, the menu receipts from the second, the bear, his old chef, him yelling in the kitchen, and the most recurring image, Mikey’s face. It ends showing a bear running his prompter as the music and edits rapidly get faster, and the audience laughs hysterically. Carmy yells, “I can’t do this!” and asks to stop, with Mikey whispering.
Carmy wakes up in his apartment and the images keep flowing through — of him shouting at Marcus (Lionel Boyce), his sister, Sugar (Abby Elliott) — and he only calms down seeing images of beautiful food while hearing Mikey whisper “let it rip.” This jarring opening pins Carmy at his lowest point and squeezes out even more emotion and fear than before. It’s the most direct commentary Carmy himself has made about his life — he even called his family dynamic a “nightmare.” Pushing himself to a new low has forced Carmy to finally take time to slow down and reconsider what kind of person and chef he wants to be, and it’s all on display here. As for the craft, Storer, along with writer Joanna Calo, haven't dipped this far into surrealism before, but still, this is a show that starts with a man opening a bear cage in the middle of a bridge. It fits well and adds to the unconsciously uncomfortable and entertaining energy provided in the show.
That dream leads Carmy to let everything out at Al-Anon and start to apologize to his team. The Bear expertly uses multiple dreams and nightmare sequences to visually describe Carmy’s mental state in intense and chilling ways. Yes, dreams are often methods for shows to describe characters’ psyches in trippy, visually distinct ways. The Bear’s rise because they effortlessly mend through so many avenues and somehow fit with the more grounded tone of the show. The fantasy melds with reality, all resulting in a five-star dish.
Patrick Gunn is a TV and film feature writer for Collider. He has also written for Davler Media and 247Sports. You can hear his thoughts about the New York Yankees on the Bronx Beat Podcast. He is a graduate of Syracuse University and enjoys spending time with friends and family.
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