maybe you didn’t like ‘the bear’ because it didn’t coddle you enough
If you know me or at very least have assumed me to be similar to the majority of people in their mid-twenties who feel the same way, you’ve likely surmised that I’m not a fan of capitalism, but unlike most people who don’t like capitalism, I have a hard time these days calling myself a socialist or even a leftist as I’ve more or less given myself completely to being a full-on defeatist. I spent enough time running around with every brand of leftist you can imagine to have seen that leftists as a whole all share the collective achilles heel of being too petty and sectarian to ever effectively get out of the base building stage and into the organizational stage. Without that sort of forward momentum, I cannot force myself to pretend any longer that my ilk has any hope of victory against the most pervasively powerful empire that has ever existed. I won’t say that the people fighting for socialism are wasting their time, but I will say that they lack the most important tool to cross the gap between where we stand now and any semblance of victory: the resources to deliver any sort of material aid to the people who needs it most. Without that sort of material aid, we the people are regularly tasked to deal with the feeling of being powerless to help ourselves. It may feel only natural then when you are so powerless in a world that doesn’t care if you live or die to try and lash out at anything within your reach to make you feel as though you have some sort of power to make a change. A massive, systemic paradigm shift won’t happen overnight and it probably won’t happen in our lifetimes so while focusing on messaging is probably the best we can do right now, pretending that we’re doing much more than that feels a bit disingenuous.
It is because of said collective inefficacy and the seemingly inescapable nature of capitalism that I find the more liberal and/or performative efforts to do harm mitigation by way of social justice-related online content to be more than a little annoying. In the insular online communities in which we primarily exist as a collective, left-leaning people have done something supremely dangerous: created echo chambers in which we can eventually arrive at some pretty out there opinions and stances that we would have never arrived at if we had done what we should have been doing instead which is immersing ourselves amongst other working class people in real life. The way that this has shaped up for us in the public eye has been… less than stellar. Even people who we wouldn’t consider right-wing reactionaries are rolling their eyes at ivy-league liberals finding new ways to condescend to working-class people about articulating themselves “incorrectly” or not knowing that the origin of a word is somehow problematic in nature. What once started as black and brown people defending themselves from a never-ending stream of racist violence has now devolved into white folks turning it around to condescend to other marginalized people so that they too can participate in the oppression olympics. I know that I’m generalizing and I’m not one of those people who’s going to lament about how “everyone is offended by everything these days”, but the entire development of the phenomenon of being offended by such things has occurred in spaces that are completely removed from real working class people. I hate to be the one who breaks it to y’all, but the United States of America has some of the worst public education in the “developed” world so if you think that people who have decent access to public education (much less those who do not) are being taught all of the same things as those who would police their language, you’re harmfully mistaken. Tragically, it doesn’t feel like most people care about actually making a difference so much as they care about being right and it shows in the way that these discussions are conducted.
However, I am of the volition that one of the single greatest mistakes in normalization that we have made as a society has been, to quote my friend Genesis, the insistence on making violent exploitation palatable by attempting to soften the edges of every movie, show, song, article, tweet, etc. to our liberal likings. I’ve had this thought before, but never so vindictively as I did earlier this week when I stumbled upon an instagram post by the Chicago Hospitality Accountability Actions Database (CHAAD) that put forth some criticisms of a recent release that I quite enjoyed, FX’s The Bear. For those uninitiated, The Bear follows a young, brilliant chef who is struck with family tragedy and is willed by the passing of a family member, his family’s sandwich shop which he takes on and attempts to make better. As a lifelong service industry professional, I’ve waited a long time to see a film or show that could really capture the real grit and stress of working in such an environment and, though the show was definitely a bit bombastic and dramatized, it did a better job than anything else I’ve seen of making a show for us that didn’t feel ridiculous or cartoonish while simultaneously providing real entertainment value. That said, I can absolutely understand why some people couldn’t watch it because, as someone whose work as a chef helped nearly drive me to suicide, the stresses and pits of depression that were articulated in the show were, at times, almost too real. While I have worked through my issues and now feel like I could step on a line again without having a panic attack, I cannot speak for everyone who has shared a similar experience to me in that regard and I will not attempt to do so. That said, I took some serious issue with the content of the criticisms, but let’s get into what was actually said before we go much further.
The summation of the overall criticism against The Bear leveled by CHAAD was as follows:
“The service industry fosters traumas in many ways which is why watching The Bear may have been unpleasant for you. It is a fictional representation of very real abuses and traumas. The show normalizes abuse in hospitality spaces and at no point offers an alternative course or accountability for the harm caused.”
I feel like I have to ask here: when did it become the responsibility of artists and content creators to make happy, equitable stories that develop into representations of a moral effort to enact change into their real life equivalents? I’m sorry, but when you watch a show that contains anything remotely upsetting, is it necessary to the quality of the program to make you feel good about what’s happening? Just because we work in the service industry doesn’t mean that anyone has a responsibility to make us feel better about the aspects of our job that have caused us trauma and discomfort. Hell, I didn’t have any interest in watching a documentary about restaurant work when I started watching The Bear; I pressed play because I wanted a relatable show with good acting and a story that I found compelling and entertaining. If you don’t like the show for some other reason, I won’t sit here and say that you have to. You’re allowed to like things that I don’t and vice-versa. But this specific criticism seems a bit off to me.
I’ll ellaborate.
Call me obtuse, but, to me, it seems like any efforts to put pressure on a creator to make their content more comfortable for me to watch would be me making my trauma and mental illness (which I have plenty of, fear not) someone else’s problem. As much as I feel as though anyone who I know should be able to have an honest conversation with me about anything that I may say or do that is triggering for them, putting that expectation on strangers is weird at best and petulant at worst. The immaturity one must possess in order to expect the world to coddle you to this degree is at a level that I would expect from literal children - not adults who claim to be working professionals. Additionally, there is nothing that the show “normalizes” about the service industry so much as it just captures an experience that has been very real for a lot of us perhaps too accurately for comfort’s sake. To normalize the hostility and toxicity that many of us have experienced working in kitchens, the show would have needed to glorify it in order to justify its existence, but anyone who watches The Bear will tell you that the feeling you got instead of glorification was dread.
Listen, I know that there’s a line here. Maybe we could stop having graphic sexual assault scenes in movies and shows because it’s gratuituous and fucked up to subject people to one of the most dehumanizing things a human being is capable of experiencing. Maybe we can stop making borderline snuff films or at very least make them the niche genre that they deserve to be instead of a mainstream form of entertainment. But at what point in time do I get to evicerate a piece of media because I get upset seeing happy families with parents who love and support their children? When does my trauma become a valid centerpiece to an argument about if a piece of media is problematic? Rhetorical - I don’t want to put that on anyone else because I’m an adult who recognizes that my experience isn’t a ubiquituous one. I recognize that framing everything through the lens of my own level of personal offense is opening up society at large to adopt commentary that will exacerbate harm instead of mitigating it because we’ve run being offeneded into the fucking ground already. Because of such examples of liberal whining, we on the left are now the boy who cried wolf and the more we nitpick, the less anyone is going to take anything that we have to say seriously.
This isn’t to say that feelings don’t matter. A lot of people that I don’t particularly like or have anything in common with from an ideological perspective coined the phrase “facts don’t care about your feelings” and, to an extent, this is true in some contexts. Where the point tends to miss is that your material reality is shaped almost completely by your feelings. If you’re saddened by someone’s absence in your life, you will likely exhibit behaviors that will exacerbate their absence. If you’re too scared to remove yourself from a situation that you don’t have any desire to be in, your feelings of cowardice and apprehension will keep you in that situation. These examples are meant to demonstrate that your feelings can inform your reality which is factually occurring in front of your very eyes if you put enough stock into them; there is an undeniable realness in the subjective. But when do we have to distinguish between an appreciation for the subjective importance of our feelings and trying to force objectivity regarding our personal stances on to those around us?
I can play semantics with this type of thing all day, but at the end of the day, I think that the biggest issue here is the entire reason that I opened up this article the way that I did: the simple fact that this issue is not a show normalizing trauma and abuse so much as the problem is that these abuses exist in the first place. You can quote me on this: I will never sit here and pretend that the restaurant industry doesn’t have a ton of problems that the workers who populate it face. Hell, I’ve touched on that a little before, but nearly every single “hospitality adjacent issue” that’s been described in this post is not hospitality-specific whatsoever as much as they are capitalism-specific. The overarching issue is that capitalism has turned the world into a place in which very few can survive without surrendering themselves to labor exploitation, violence and trauma in the name of paying their bills. This is the world that we live in and, despite what anyone may have you believe, we’re nowhere close to making any kind of change that will take us out of that.
Should we not be able to look in the face of the system that harms us and steal from us without being paralyzed by what’s been taken from us? I already have serious reservations about whether or not we will ever be able to rise above the money-hungry deciders who have decided that our lives and comforts are less important than lining their pockets, but I feel like we can say with certainty that softening the blows that we’re repeatedly taking will serve to do little aside from inoculating us to the harm we experience and, therefore, delay any progress - albeit infuriatingly incremental in nature - that we are capable of achieving. As much as I feel like my hope for breaking free of capitalist chains has diminished to the point of non-existence, we shouldn’t sedate ourselves from reality by demanding that any sort of representation of capitalism’s sins exist to make us feel better about our own anecdotal experiences with them. If a piece of art or media that carries broader connotations about society upsets you, then it likely did what it intended to do. If there was something unrealistic that tried to preserve the sanctity of a problematic aspect of its real life equivalent then I understand where this sort of vitriol comes from, but in this instance, I believe that restaurant workers who find themselves more prone to this type of criticism took the first thing they found that they saw a reflection of their own lives in and ran with it.
I know that this post by the CHAAD has served as a bit of a sacrificial lamb for my own musings, but it’s merely a drop in the ocean of content that’s been created to perpetuate some woker-than-thou, inaccessible, borderline-incomprehensible culture of performativity and caring without direct action. That said, the way that the criticisms that CHAAD laid out were presented as indicitments against the show and the restaurant industry at large that couldn’t be denied by anyone that considers themesleves progressive isn’t uncommon amongst your standard social justice instagram accounts that post ten page polemics rallying against a new percieved evil every week. There’s no way that I can coherently articulate exactly what it is about these sorts of accounts that make their posts read with this tone - and I’m absolutely open to writing that off as a personal reaction - but I know that I’m not the only one who feels like I’m being talked down to when I read stuff like this. If we want to actually foster a culture of caring the way that these detractors from progress say that they want to, we should be attempting to wake people up to their own suffering instead of protecting them from it. Though I do know that some people need that protection, those people are once again far outweighed by all of those who just claim that they do. Let’s save our pseudo-outrage about everything we have the chance to come across and start doing something better with our time. Alternatively, you could just pipe down and stop having a hard-line opinion on every fathomable thing, but I’m pleading with you to please stop making screaming on the internet the centerpiece of your activism.
