Monday, April 10, 2023

Comic High Jinks and Repressed Despair in Netflix’s “Beef”

As far as road rage goes, the outburst that sets off the rivalry in the wickedly loopy comic drama “Beef” is downright piddling. Danny Cho (Steven Yeun), a handyman in Los Angeles, attempts to pull his beater pickup truck out of a hardware-store parking lot, when he’s met by an obnoxiously long honk from a gleaming white Mercedes S.U.V., then a middle finger thrust out the window. Danny is in a foul enough mood that he gives chase to the other driver, Amy Lau (Ali Wong). After the pursuit leaves him unsatisfied, he decides to slowly insinuate himself into her home, even her family, to wreak chaos. His choice of target proves unfortunate; Amy is even more desperate for a sense of control, and thus for revenge.

Yet the most gratifying reveals in the ten-part Netflix series aren’t the wild escalations of the central pair but their rich psychological shadings. When Danny and Amy arrive at their respective homes after their encounter, neither can get out the full story about what happened. Danny, recounting the incident to his younger brother, Paul (Young Mazino), in the cramped apartment that they share, brags that he “scared the shit out of that motherfucker,” in a bit of masculine bravado that bears little resemblance to the truth. Amy, speaking to her woo-woo husband, George (Joseph Lee), can barely even begin to tell him about the confrontation before he shuts her down: “You’ve got to start focussing on the positive.” He’s a genial stay-at-home dad (with, perhaps, the world’s most beautiful sweater collection) and the coddled son of a famous artist, while she’s the overworked founder and aspirational face of a buzzy plant business she’s on the verge of selling for millions—and the one resentfully funding the couple’s bougie Calabasas life style. But the chasm between husband and wife is never wider than when George tells Amy, “Anger is just a transitory state of consciousness.” Amy and Danny accidentally uncork something in each other, and it’s a race to see whether they can do more harm to themselves or to the other.

“Beef” makes it both relevant and not that Danny and Amy are Asian American. As the season progresses, the show’s creator, Lee Sung Jin, stresses that his dual protagonists are especially damaged, beset by depression and likely something else: a “void” in their bodies, the characters agree, that feels “empty but solid.” But they also belong to a group—in Amy’s case, two groups—whose members have been socialized to believe that their value lies in their willingness to accommodate, to fit in, to oblige. Now, by having a stranger to fuck with, they’ve stumbled upon a seemingly safe outlet for their most antisocial impulses. The joke’s on them: when Amy catfishes Paul (using thirst traps from her young, white female employee’s Instagram), and when Danny befriends George (by posing as “Zane,” a fellow-cyclist), the pitiful hotheads find themselves confiding in their marks what they cannot express to their loved ones.

The series’ portraiture is most compelling when the alienation experienced by the characters achieves a larger sociological resonance. The soul-crushing interactions between Amy and the potential buyer of her business, Jordan (a bitch-perfect Maria Bello), are spectacularly cringey; a collector of artifacts from various cultures, Jordan treats Amy like another souvenir, a consumable affirmation of a pleasing stereotype. “You have this serene, Zen Buddhist thing,” Jordan airily tells Amy, who might be the first character I’ve ever seen masturbate with what turns out to be a Chekhov’s gun. Later, in couples counselling, Amy says that her Midwestern Chinese-immigrant father and her Vietnamese-refugee mother didn’t exactly model healthy emotional expression. She’s worried that she’s ill-equipped to parent her agitated young daughter, who acts out by picking at her skin and hitting a teacher. On a visit to her childhood home, Amy laments that she’s filled with “generations of bad decisions sitting inside” her—though “Beef” smartly leaves open the possibility that Amy may be deflecting the blame for her personality flaws onto her upbringing. Either way, the story line feels like a confident step toward Asian American pop culture’s maturation. Unlike the hallmarks of Asian Americana (“The Joy Luck Club,” “Everything Everywhere All at Once”), “Beef” is less interested in dwelling on the cultural clashes that have led to the dislocation of the second generation than in exploring how that generation can raise their children without passing on all the hangups and traumas from their formative years.

Amy doesn’t get much support from her mother-in-law, the outwardly colorful but patrician-cold Fumi (an excellent Patti Yasutake), who indulges her grown son while making demands on Amy. The two women are vividly written, and Wong is fantastic in her first leading dramatic role. But “Beef” is, at its heart, a study of male loneliness—a theme that, while bog-standard in prestige television, finds renewed urgency when couched in an Asian American context.

by Inkoo Kang, New Yorker |  Read more:
Image: Chris Kim
[ed. Looks fun/interesting. Possibly cringey. Update: It's not bad. In fact, it's pretty good. Some great acting. Love Steven Yuen doing the Incubus cover - Drive.]