What creator Christopher Storer, and his sister Courtney, not coincidentally a chef—she’s surely both the perfectionist part of Carmen (Jeremy Allen White) and the inclusive part of Sydney (Ayo Edebiri), and their shared talent—continue to do with The Bear —whose third season has just landed on Disney+, and is being consumed at breakneck speed because it only gets better: the rise is meteoric and unstoppable— is history. Not only of television, but of audiovisual fiction. The impressionistic use, in a pictorial sense linked to the emotional —emotions like bombs that explode and blur the moment, any moment—, that is made of the montage from the first chapter turns its viewing into an experience. Everything is shown, the spectator is an active someone who builds and feel from what is shown. As an impeccable formal artifact, The Bear builds empathy from its very first close-ups and, above all, from going deeper after in the characters. Because everything in The Bear occurs after.
The first episode of this third season is a symphony in this regard. A virtually unspoken episode, in which, after two very intense seasons, the viewer witnesses the key moments of the story —Mikey’s suicide, Carmy’s formation in Copenhagen and New York, the discovery and development of talent in someone who has everything against him—, moments that he has heard about hundreds of times and that have shaped the characters, and that he has never seen. The way they appear is exactly how he has imagined it, which elevates the moment, and makes it overwhelmingly redemptive, and at the same time, difficult to bear. Carmy (that Jeremy Allen White that his character will forever haunt) is a moment of great joy, and it … chefas symbiotic as it has become) travels, from the day after the restaurant’s opening, and while he writes a sort of commandments for it, to everything that has brought him there, and we see him breathe, happy, growing far from the pressure of the family, that battle lost from the beginning.
Time bombs
And yes, life goes on, and the restaurant is open, and it doesn’t work as it should, because each one, in their own way, is their own lifeboat, and at the same time, that which is sinking. And if in the first season, the duel and the head-on collision with the past – a past that prefers to ignore you because it will never reach you – was the central theme, or one of them, and in the second it turned to the horror of growing up with fear and not a single hug – the wild and alcoholic motherhood of Donna (Jamie Lee Curtis taking herself to the limit spectacularly) – and much more, here the leader is defined, and the team, and the place that each one occupies in the world is discussed, and how not only “every second counts” – the motto of the restaurant, the way in which the father of the chef Terry (Olivia Colman, in deli) signed all his letters—but that every little thing does. Because every little thing affects the other’s mood, and everyone in that kitchen is a ticking time bomb, one way or another, and the deal is everything.
Those who enjoyed the stand-alone episode—a large-scale interpretive duel—of the Christmas meal (Fish) from the previous season, they should know that here, in addition to the opening one, there is one dedicated to Natalie’s (Abby Elliott) birth, especially memorable, for how painful, crushing and fearful, terrifying it is, as well as for being the audiovisual work of fiction that has most realistically portrayed a birth ever, in fact, the very long previous one. And its status as a jewel points in the same direction as the first chapter, and has to do with the way in which the characters have been created, like infinite pyramids, which continue to be built with each step they take, and that the viewer, thanks to the skill of Christopher Storer and his team of scriptwriters, knows as he would know himself. Because the lesson, almost compositional, of The Bear It is that of introspection. Each of us is an immense world that no one else is seeing. Feeling it, as one feels it inside, is a miracle. A narrative one, and a vital one.
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