Love Song for Chicago

All things go

I wish I loved anyone or anything as much as The Bear loves Chicago. It’s the kind of love that feels fully realized and all-encompassing, at once over-the-top and deeply practical.

I did meet a dog this weekend and immediately say, “Oh, I’d take a bullet for you,” so perhaps I’m on my way.

The Bear is creator Christopher Storer’s love song for Chicago, cleverly disguised as a serialized television program now available on FX and Hulu. It’s less a TV show and more a romantic, agonizing mixtape made for somebody you love so much you could really just die over it, and you honestly might, but you don’t exactly know how to proclaim that so, you know, you make them something.

Why did it take me this long to watch a show that garnered its first rapturous rave reviews a year ago? Well, I delay watching stuff sometimes because I know I’ll be all in and not be able to think about much else for a few days afterwards.

Maybe that’s unwell, but you have to know yourself, and sometimes there are Midsommar-themed outdoor birthday parties to attend and costumed dogs to meet. I did that stuff this weekend, but I also got into The Bear. (In its way, Midsommar is also an important story about what happens when one young man can’t get out of the bear.)

Anyway, this is not an essay about the most uplifting rom com of the summer ’19 movie season. This is about The Bear, and Chicago.

Chicago is not an easy city. It’s cold, and it’s tough, even when it’s friendly and loving. People take their clothes off in public as soon as the temperature ascends above 50 degrees Fahrenheit, which can be disconcerting for the casual visitor to behold.

I’ve only been a casual visitor to Chicago, several times, but there’s something about it that burrowed in and never left. It’s the people and their stories, not the place itself, or maybe the people and their stories are the place.

What is it about Chicago? The Bear is only the latest and greatest work of art to make me wonder.

America has so many great cities, we really do. I live in one of them, New York, and I think she’s her own planet, and I’ll never find her less than fascinating. I fucking love Philly, because I love benevolent chaos. Also, do you know how many hot people are there? A lot. It’s stealthy. Don’t tell them I told you.

I like Boston, and I’ve got plenty of pals there. If I ever want to watch a film shot entirely through a grey filter so I can see somebody off themselves or somebody else while screaming about Father O’Malley and his crimes, and also it’s snowing and a good woman is wronged but man did she love that guy in that gang and also now she’s pregnant, Boston people have me covered.

But there’s just something about Chicago, man. Maybe it takes a particularly murderous wind chill to inspire greatness.

Is this an essay about a TV show, or about a place? Is it just some Jersey-bred asshole’s excuse to shit on Boston art she actually legitimately enjoys because it’s just funny to bait her Boston friends? Is breaking balls a kind of mythopoetic language of love and is that part of what makes The Bear great? The answer to all these queries is: yes.

Personally, or perhaps professionally, the highest compliment I can pay it is that it made me sit down and write, a thing that has been harder to do in the years since I got sober. Writing used to be easy, sort of, even if it was painful, because when everything got too loud I knew I had my escape route, a door that opened on a brown sea of bourbon. Now when the dark stuff wants to be said, or when my back hurts, or when I’m bored, I just have to…have that feeling until it passes.

Writing short-form stuff like essays, articles, jokes for robot puppets in the Mystery Science Theater 3000 writers room — all that still felt pretty doable and fun. I actually got better at that stuff once alcohol was out of the picture.

But the longer-form stuff (books written alone, pilots written alone) suddenly got so much harder. Coffee helps, but not enough. I started to look for other things that made me actually sit down and do the thing. I have a running list taped above my desk.

Anyway, turns out The Bear does for me what Bill Withers and old Playboy magazine articles and Boygenius and long walks and Francesca Lia Block and Octavia Butler and the Bible and certain 12-step meetings and the Focus @ will app my friend Ruth Ann recommended do for me, which is to say: The Bear makes me write. Not just want to write — I always want to do that — but actually write.

For that alone, I would praise it to the ends of the earth, but that is a selfish compliment — this thing makes me do what I want to do and therefore it is good— and not something to inspire an entire essay about why other people should watch it.

Since other writers have deftly covered the show’s attention to kitchen nightmares, addiction, mental unwellness, grief, avoidant lovers, and the annual mass subcultural Southern Italian American third-to-sixth generation immigrant psychosis that is the Feast of the Seven Fishes, I shall set aside my own relationships with these topics and write about the show’s relationship to Chicago, a city I have primarily visited to eat, fight, fuck, do comedy, sign books, get drunk and pass out, probably in sweatpants.

When I moved to Los Angeles years ago for the first of two long stays (so far), I developed a rule that goes as follows: All other factors being equal, if I had the option of making a new friend from Chicago or a new friend from anywhere else in the entire world, I’d pick the Chicago kid. They were just more…themselves, somehow. And loud. And fun.

Broadly speaking, popular art from Chicago often seems to open yelling “YOU’RE FUCKING WELCOME!” and then run off cackling into the night. I guess what I mean is there’s often (not always, but often) a specific type of joy that runs through the way artists from that city — people who identify all different ways, who come from all kinds of backgrounds — make art about it.

Even the bleak shit is often suffused with a tender love, and I mean even the really bleak shit. It might not be for you, but you’re lucky to see it and also, you’re fucking welcome.

Thematically, there are plenty of ways into The Bear for viewers who have fucked-up families, or demanding jobs, or restaurant side work stories that induce casual friends to gently ask us if we’ve ever heard of EMDR. Some folks have told me they have to watch the show in doses because it makes them so tense. I get it. But we all keep watching, don’t we? It elicits the same type of panicked chaos in which some of us marinated as children.

That’s also a big reason our central character, Carmen Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White), thrives in a particularly high-pressure corner of a profession in which cuts, burns, bruises and unchecked manic yelling are the norm.

“It’s addictive,” we say about shows like this, and about people like that, and about thrilling, creative, joyful, underpaying, dangerous careers that may put us into early graves. We choose these things when we have many other options, and why?

Because it reminds us, deep down, of something we may have tried to forget. Because it’s familiar, even when it isn’t. Because, as with other modes of so-called escape, we often want the one that leads us right back to ourselves.

Sometimes it’s simpler than that. Sometimes we just know greatness when we see it.

I’m from New Jersey, a place that is not Chicago but that shares certain of its features. We send a lot of our people out into the wider world to do fancy things you just can’t do back home, at least not until you’ve already made your money elsewhere. If you do make your money and you come back with an attitude, both places will check you hard, even when your people are proud of you. Mockery is affection is devotion.

Also, Jersey and Chicago both have better pizza than New York. (Just kidding, deep dish is a fucking bread cake. It’s the gustatory equivalent of consuming a tastier thick woolen coat, which makes sense because it gives you that nice extra warm outer layer for the winter.)

Mockery is affection is devotion. Mockery is affection is devotion. Mockery is affection is devotion. Mockery is affection is devotion. Mockery is affection is devotion. Mockery is affection is devotion. Mockery is affection is

I’ve spent most of my adult life living in New York or Los Angeles, and when you move back and forth from one to the other a lot, people are understandably inclined to ask which one you prefer. My diplomatic and honest answer is “Both.”

Now, I have friends originally from Chicago who’ve done the same bicoastal thing, but none of them ever really enters the whose-city-is-better conversational Olympics, at least not in my presence. I think it’s because their answer to “Which is better, New York or LA?” is always going to be “Chicago.”

They don’t all want to move back, any more than Carmen, the wunderkind chef of Copenhagen and Northern California and Manhattan, wanted to move back. Wherever you’re from, home can mean bad memories: that school, that group of former friends, those funerals, that divorce, the bad shit from dad’s side of the family, the way mom’s side never even did anything for you, the things you did and the things you never got to do.

It can be hard to go home. I’m unabashedly obsessed with New Jersey, but do I live there? No. Some things are better loved from far away, even though my homeland is just across a river, a little island where Carmen used to work for a truly evil chef who clearly does not respect safe words (Joel McHale), and another river.

Can you think of art that reminds you of where you came from, even if it doesn’t exactly mirror your experience? Something so relatable that it seems to live and breathe as a real organism, and as you watch it you feel connective tissue growing to link you to it so that it shows up in your dreams even years later?

The greatest piece of art about New Jersey, except for everything Bruce Springsteen and/or The E Street Band and/or Lauryn Hill has ever done, is The Sopranos. But of course I’d say that, right? It makes sense that an Italian Catholic girl from Jersey with upwardly mobile parents who met in a working-class town in high school and raised a family of walking panic attacks would find plenty to relate to in The Sopranos.

And it makes sense that the show, violent and tragic though it is, would hold for her a few oddly comforting elements — the place names, the food, the slang, even, God help me, the late ‘90s/early ’00s suburban sponge painted McMansion bathroom type of décor.

What did not make sense to me as I watched The Bear was how very much it reminded me of The Sopranos. Carmen Berzatto is not Tony Soprano. Donna Berzatto (Jamie Lee Curtis, a lock for every award they give for an episode like season 2’s “Fishes”), is not Livia Soprano. Richie Jerimovich (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) is not Cristafuh Moltisanti and please don’t let Tiffany No-Longer-Jerimovich (Gillian Jacobs) go the way of poor Adriana La Cerva (I’m not worried; Richie would never let it happen.)

Sure, there’s the Italian thing, the dysfunction thing, the being-great-television thing. But tonally and stylistically, they are different entities. Star Trek is not Star Wars, my guy, though I love both my precious space operas.

The Sopranos could be a lot of fun, but at its heart it was miserable, often painfully so. Aside from our fallen angel Adriana, there is very little real, pure love in that story of sociopathy and its literal and figurative children. The Bear can be sad, depressing, even devastating in moments, but it is never hopeless, and it is never hollow. So why did the two series feel so connected to me?

I realized part of it is because they both got the place right. It is embarrassing to retread the old Sex and the City take that the city is the other main character! but honestly, the city is the other main character. She is ugly and she is beautiful and she is never not worth the cutaways, the long shots, the meditative flyovers with drones or the simulated ones. Give me a faceless Ceres statue for a full three minutes and 56 seconds set to Sufjan Stevens covering “Saturday in the Park,” I’ll stay riveted!

I can’t confirm that the Chicago stuff is dead-on but this is fiction, not a documentary, and it doesn’t matter — it feels dead-on. The magic trick of a show like this, and I say that knowing there are very few shows like this, is that it feels like a world I know intimately.

I’m sure it gets something wrong, somewhere, and there are surely Cubs fans who have opinions and also local restaurant people who have opinions, but I am not those people and all I know is what I feel.

If you took every Chicago-bred person I’ve ever met at a party or ballgame or random concert, in all the places I’ve lived — the Northeast, Southern Appalachia, Los Angeles, and the high desert near the end of the Rockies — and all the places I’ve visited, and you smashed all these walking wounded and healing adult children of Chicago together, all these people who would not stop talking about Chicago once they got one to seven beers in them, these people who kept talking about “home” whether we were down a hill or up a mountain or jumping into the waves on some beautiful coast — if you took all these people, from all these Chicago families, all these Chicago neighborhoods and Chicago micro-neighborhoods and specific Chicago blocks within said Chicago micro-neighborhoods, from all these walks of life — people from nothing who said it was everything, people from everything who said it was nothing, people who never said much about their families because Chicago raised them and that’s all anybody like me should know — if you somehow took every one of this diverse array of individuals and threw them into a giant phantasmagoric transmogrifier, a supernal supernatural centrifuge that converts human energy into, of all things, a goddamn TV show, what you’d get would be The Bear.

The Bear is all those people, the ones I’ve met and the ones I haven’t, and it is the things I will never know because I’m not from there.

This is not to say I believe this piece of Chicago art — or Bashir Salahuddin and Diallo Riddle’s South Side; or Lena Waithe’s The Chi, or E.R., or Chicago Hope, or Grosse Point Blank, or Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, or The Blues Brothers, or Cooley High, or High Fidelity, or Chi-raq, or The Trial of the Chicago 7, or Hoop Dreams, or Empire, or my friends’ stand-up jokes, or the Chicago shows in the Blessed Dick Wolf Entertainment Meta-Universe (from whom so many of us derive electricity bill-paying residual checks, long may it live and thrive), or Home Alone or the fucking Broadway show Chicago, or your favorite Chicago thing I didn’t mention, I didn’t say Uncle Buck or Child’s Play and I’m sorry — represents all Chicago experiences for all time.

There are as many Chicagos as there are Chicagoans, and I’ll never know all their stories, and certainly wouldn’t want to, as I have dogs to meet and things to do and I’m a little shy, believe it or not. But sometimes you see different views of a place by looking through different artists’ eyes, and now and then the view is so good it feels like an honor.

You could take The Bear out of Chicago and put it elsewhere, with cast and creators and crew intact, and it would still be a great show — I recognized more than a few names in the credits and said, “Oh, they’re fucking great, of course they’d be a part of this” — but it would not be this great show, and I love this great show.

It was good to sit and watch all of it in the dark in my apartment, in this apartment. I have lived in my apartment for two years, the longest I’ve spent in any single home in my adult life, because geographic cures aren’t real but, now, my mortgage is.

I am, in my way, still always trying to find my home. This show has one, grounded not in classical tragedy, but in a universal and eternal hope.

It is a show that makes you feel like good things are possible, and that maybe you can love something or someone as much as The Bear loves Chicago.

Can you imagine that? Maybe it’s in your life already, that kind of deep, complex and undeniable love, a love at once flawed and pure, a love with notes but no asterisks. If so, I am happy for you, truly. I am a stranger and I am happy for you, the same way I always was when, at whatever party or concert or chatty bathroom line or airport bar, I’d ask some random Chicago export when they were next going home and they’d break into that certain type of smile and say, like a kid who momentarily forgot everything but the good stuff, “Soon.”

An earlier version of this essay was published on Medium.