Netflix’s Beef lets its cast be assholes for an entire season

The Netflix series Beef is a catastrophic spiral of existential despair and self-destruction. However, it started with little more than a traffic crash: Danny Cho (Steven Yeun) backed out of an LA parking lot in his dingy red van and nearly crashed into a white SUV pristine. The whistle is pressed, the words are shouted, the middle finger is extended. That’s the kind of conflict that the participants in tend to move on with their lives after they let off steam.

But for Danny and the driver of the hidden SUV, there’s still a lot to work out. Danny gave chase, dodging red lights and stop signs while his opponent threw trash at his windshield. After the confrontation ends and the SUV picks up speed, we see that the driver is another Asian-American: Amy Lau (Ali Wong), a disturbed businessman about to sell her burgeoning business. reach their own to earn a handsome sum of money.

Characters in Beef not the well-intentioned victims of circumstances, who eventually learned some lessons. They’re allowed to be horrible, selfish, and petty in ways we rarely see white-centred stories outside, and their behavior creates an intriguing extra layer in the context. Asian-American identity scenes have united them even amid class and cultural divisions.

In essence, the series is an extreme interpretation of what Amy’s emotional husband George (Joseph Lee) says: You never know what other people are going through. Danny is a struggling handyman who lives outside the motel his family once owned with his dissolute older brother Paul (young Mazino). In a sense, George was right that Amy and Danny saw each other as a target for their anger rather than as a separate person with their own lives and emotions. Of course, he also ignores the fact that Danny stalked Amy afterwards, luring him into her house and maliciously urinating all over her bathroom.

Photo: Andrew Cooper/Netflix

Beef makes the Asian-American room appear reserved and polite. We look at the imperfect coping mechanisms they’ve developed, such as masturbating with a gun or inhaling nasty amounts of Burger King. And then we see how, seeing each other as clear enemies, they find an outlet for the emotions they’ve spent their lives repressing.

When Danny returned to the cramped room he shared with Paul, he laughed about his expectation of being “handled by others” with a smile. That’s the quality that, lately, as an actor, Steven Yeun has built his career by embodying: his own buried pain. Former child actor injured in Are notthe smoldering of social ills in Burn. He communicates something going on underneath the face he shows to the world. IN Beef, Danny can’t be honest even when he’s open about how he feels — he lies to his brother that he’s scared of the white SUV and “wins” the confrontation, and he spends most of his time time of the series to make small excuses as if by instinct. (“I did a chest workout yesterday,” to account for being defeated by Paul who was clearly more athletic.)

Photo: Andrew Cooper/Netflix

In Amy, too, we see the things she has to let go of and the performance she has to put on, which is similar to Ali Wong’s own career: She’s basically struggling to keep going. continued to bury his outspoken sense of humour. Her interactions with Jordan (Maria Bello), a potential buyer for her company, are filled with the usual racism she smiles through, like when she’s been praised for her kindness. his “Zen sect” vibe. Amy sees selling her company as an escape from such mind-numbing maintenance, a way for her to make money and focus on raising her young daughter. But even in her personal life, she’s not being heard – George cut her off before she could explain the road rage incident.

To some extent, the characters can trace repression from their families. Amy talks a lot about her quiet Midwestern upbringing, while Danny notes that he, as the eldest son, has shouldered the bulk of his parents’ demands. As in so many Asian-American stories, the protagonists labor under a cloud of generational conflict. But oppression also piles up on them through the social stereotype of the archetypal minority, who always bow their heads and never make a fuss — the very behavior that Danny vehemently opposes in the first episode, and the very expectation that countless Asian Americans have. faced throughout their lives.

EQUAL BeefAs its conflicts spiral out of control, it places its characters in a pantheon of television villains. The characters’ self-actualizing arcs and the collateral damage they leave serve as a low-stakes currency Breaking Bad, with pettiness and discontent not masked by any climactic drama about drug trafficking. We understand Amy and Danny, maybe even support their success at times, and Beef approach that empathy without having to make them particularly likable or empathetic. The series breaks stereotypes by giving its characters such depth, revealing who they are inside. And humanity, Beef realized, often messy, angry, and imperfect.

The background of their actions and the clear history of the pain that accompanies it is unforgivable, and their more unpleasant features never abate. Danny’s interactions with Amy are brimming with forgettable chauvinism, first imagining that only George could be his rival and then labeling her a bored, draining housewife. husband’s art money. For her part, Amy is mostly undaunted by the huge income gap that separates her and Danny – she paints “I’m POOR” on the side of his truck and offers critiques of his work. his struggling construction business. When she tracks him to his motel, she gloats that he didn’t attack her as the host.

As for the intense specific rivalry here, there is also a universal truth to their struggles, in the purification of expression. EQUAL Beef continues, it proves that Danny and Amy aren’t the only characters knocked down by the weight of expectation. George is the son of a famous sculptor, but his own work fails to show his talent and earns no money, leaving Amy to provide for the family. Paul laments how older generations pass on all their worries and insecurities to the next generation. They are also products of forgotten emotions; As Amy and Danny manipulate them to their own ends, Paul and George taste some validation they never received explicitly from their loved ones.

With an increase in on-screen representation over the years, Asian Americans have taken on previously unthinkable lead roles, like things like love interests and superheroes. Its BeefHowever, that removes a really important barrier in that respect: It allows the main characters and supporting characters to become messy and complicated, if not obvious assholes.