“I don’t know what I’m like”.

Carmy’s confession in the final episode of the fourth season of ‘The Bear’ is an existential wrecking ball, all the more so because by now, loyal viewers can easily – nay, with the glistening, wretched smoothness of tragic inevitability – chart the origin of that realisation.

A clenched man who has willed himself into a new persona that is all about end result, all about proving yourself at every turn… the embodiment of the truism that ‘you’re only as good as your last [project]’. 

Of course you don’t know what you’re like, you dumb fuck – you never even considered that you could be you. That you could be *a* you to begin with. 

In Carmy’s case, the the surface story-metaphor and plot engine is of course tied into him being a superstar chef – a career-rung he only managed to climb after accumulating a fresh barrage of abuse to complement the legacy-pain he suffered under the auspices of his volatile alcoholic mother. 

But like any good metaphor, it is not there to exclude and close off but to include anyone willing and keen enough to pay good attention to what’s going on. 

Showrunner Christopher Storer must have made Robert McKee proud, whether he knows it or not or whether he likes it or not. I’m referring to one of my favourite takeaways from McKee’s ‘Story’, in which McKee is actually channelling someone else – I forget who it is, and I actually think it’s one of those bona fide lines whose original utterer has long since been lost to memory, and it’s now become community property – and it’s this: 

“If the scene’s about what it’s about, you’re in deep shit.” 

Of course The Bear isn’t ‘just’ about cooking. Of course it’s not ‘just’ about the travails of running a catering establishment (or two) in downtown Chicago. 

But Carmy’s mistake is assuming that life can in fact be just that. That if life becomes limited to ‘just’ that one thing, everything will be okay. After all, this is a form of self-annihilation that he can easily justify and perpetuate because it has the potential to create joy for others. Who doesn’t love good food? And the community feeling of a restaurant – HIS restaurant – clearly justifies him erasing everything else by that. He’s performing a service. Nay, he’s a martyr. 

Until the cracks start to show. Until we realise about how his ego is running things to the ground. An addiction to excellence is just another addiction after all, and you chase the high in ever more elaborate ways. In Carmy’s case, this becomes manifested in him changing the menu every night to accommodate a twisted idea of greatness and abundance, draining both his staff and the restaurant’s already-on-thin ice resources. 

That is the hypnotic fallacy that looms large over many a quest for ‘greatness’ in any given field, when it’s employed as a tool of evasion by damaged men (and let’s face it, it’s mostly men who are afflicted by this because it’s mostly men who get access to this arena – see Sydney’s journey in The Bear itself as a useful bit of contrast).

“If I break through an undeniable barrier of greatness all of my previous problems and traumas will become irrelevant because I will have ascended a higher plane, where I will be impermeable and indestructible, and the thought of my mother driving her car through the living room won’t ever bother me again, ever. It’s like that. Trust me, it’s like that. It will be like that. Believe, just believe.” 

But Carmy doesn’t want to become a god. What he really wants – what he really needs – is to become a real boy. He’s a Pinocchio with no Gepetto and no fairy and no Jiminy Cricket. (The Whale is the Bear is the bear is the bear…). 

And so much of Hollywood is ostensibly about this. So much of our mainstream storytelling pays lip service to an idea of what “just be yourself” means. ‘The Bear’ even risked having its version of the manic pixie dream girl in Molly Gordon’s Claire (she even had a cutesy nickname: Claire-Bear!) but luckily that trope was swerved into an opposite pathway and in so many ways, it could only ever be that way: who could possibly be more manic than the Berzatto’s anyway? 

But Carmy is so divorced from an idea of a foundational self that even the mere idea feels ungraspable. Jeremy Allen White’s glassy, thousand-yard stare isn’t a placid, contemplative mode – he’s reaching deeper and deeper into a vast nothingness. 

All of his motions are the repetitive striving of a crazed phantom. He has no access to generative movement, growth and interaction and so settles into what he knows and just runs in place. 

If only his food production were a ritual. It is a ritual, or it could be. If only the running in place were the ecstatic dancing of an indigenous tribe calling forth rain, a good crop… anything that would serve the wider community. 

But instead, it’s a stomping down to silence another tattoo. A beat whose sole aim is to stomp on the mere notion that you are a person at all. 

Here we go round the prickly pear  

Prickly pear prickly pear  

Here we go round the prickly pear  

At five o’clock in the morning.