The Bear, redux

 

Twenty minutes into Episode 6 of Hulu's The Bear's second season, I paused it to catch my breath. That was last night, and I'm still panting from the show's distinctively claustrophobic chaos, which was pinging in the red zone nearly from the beginning. 

A flashback episode -- home for the holidays with Carmy (Jeremy Allen White). Too many people in too little space with too much said and unsaid, too many agendas, too many old hurts, too many schemes, demands, unknowns. 

To my mind, that's been the key to the show's phenomenal success: its intensity and brashness and mystery.

So much happens in thpat space where freedom and obligation clash, where it's noisy and bloody. 

Where many of us are our most vulnerable and most creative. 

Now that I've caught my breath I'm taking just one minute to reflect further on the wonder that is The Bear's mother / martyr Donna Berzatto.

Berzatto, as played by Hollywood royal and A-lister Jamie Lee Curtis, is a furious blur of kitchen wizardry, pouring self-pity into her bubbling pots with the wine she steadily guzzles. 

She's a tortured torturer whose narcissism has turned her children into fearful comforters and enablers, inheritors of her mental and emotional illnesses, walking lightly around her to try to avert the inevitable. 

Donna fears abandonment even though it is clear from her treatment that she has abandoned her family for her own fixation on performance. That anybody still shows up for Christmas dinner knowing what will happen is one of the great mysteries of this scenario. Maybe they fear the year they miss will be the day Donna blows her brains out and they won't be able to live with the guilt.

Talk about power and control.

Donna Berzatto is the patron saint of functioning dysfunction and the answer to so many of the lingering questions in The Bear: Why Carmy bailed. Why Sugar is guardedly defiant.  Why Michael is dead. 

To quote the great Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, "Attention must be paid."