The Bear : New (stereotypical) representations of Italian Americans in contemporary television series

Abstract

This article investigates the representations of Italian Americans in the successful TV series The Bear (2022–), following Ryan Calabretta-Sajder and Alan J Gravano's innovative critical framework according to which the field of Italian American cinema, TV and media studies needs to go beyond the strict notion of ethnicity and be, instead, reconsidered as an intersectional area including issues as class, gender, sexuality, power and production. The Bear portrays Carmen (‘Carmy’) Berzatto, a young top chef who returns to his hometown of Chicago to take over his family's Italian sandwich shop and who is living through an emotional breakdown because of his brother's death. The series received great praise for its ground-breaking narration style and nonconformist characters. Still, while the narrative arc of the series does not focus on the Italian roots of the protagonist and his family, many of the climatic moments recurrently exploit the commonplace repertoire of Italian American type: loud, quickly bursting into fits of rage, family obsessed, food enthusiast, somehow involved in dirty business. This analysis will explore how, in this contemporary depiction of Italian Americans, the author paradoxically departs and at the same time relies on the stereotypical dominant cliche usually employed for these characters. As a result, a transitional narration emerges, portraying figures precariously balancing between innovation and conservatism. With a discursive approach, this article will examine how The Bear follows this contradictory pattern, seemingly dismissing crystalized representational myths of Italian descent in the USA and simultaneously validating them.

Representations of Italian Americans on screen have always captivated audiences, both in cinema and television, spanning from the gangsters of early crime films to the most recent TV series and TV shows where Italian ascendancy is just one facet contributing to the mosaic identity of Americans. Between the two chronological poles, Italian American screen and literary depictions gained momentum during the White Ethnic Revival of the 1970s, coinciding with Civil Rights Movements that foregrounded discussions on issues of identity, origin and cultural specificity. This focus prompted efforts to distinguish ethnic groups amidst the ‘melting pot’ concept and led to a radical departure from traditional ethno-social categories, typified in the provocative slogan ‘I’m Not White, I’m Italian’.

However, this emphasis resulted in a narrative resurgence of age-old stereotypes that the socioeconomic advancements of Italian Americans had, to some extent, previously obscured. Subsequently, literature, cinema and television inundated the cultural landscape with portrayals of this ethnic group, epitomized in Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather saga (1972, 1974, 1990; adapted from 1969 Mario Puzo's bestselling novel) or Martin Scorsese's Good Fellas. The success of these works, accompanied by the rise to stardom and critical acclaim of iconic actors like Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, birthed numerous variations of Italian American characters – ranging from mobsters to hyper-connoted stamping of patriarchal figures – gluttonous, carnal, hot-tempered and mama's boy.

The apex of this trend emerged with the TV series The Sopranos (1999–2007), which revolutionized television by introducing a complex antihero protagonist navigating the violent, morally ambiguous narrative of a mafioso grappling with panic attacks, entangled in a time of rapid change and lingering resentments. The Sopranos heralded an innovative style of pop-cultural storytelling intertwined with auteurist sensibilities, infusing the brutal mob tale with ‘slapstick comedy, surrealist dream logic, and narrative invention’ (Egner, 2019), marking a new era in television storytelling. Nevertheless, the portrayal of Italian Americanness retained a considerable proportion of stereotypes – not merely as an integral part of Tony Soprano's character but also pervasive in the social and urban milieu surrounding him.

The recurring depiction of Italian Americans on screen has established a paradigm that continues to be prevalent in contemporary analysis of those quality TV series where the ethnic group is featured. Alongside artistic advancements, academia supplied various perspectives, fostering a robust debate. At the core of the elaborations was the necessity of a distinct and autonomous dimension capable of organizing the multidisciplinary but somewhat disordered and eclectic viewpoints applied to these narratives.

The necessity went hand in hand with the yearning for ‘authenticity’, stemming from ethnic revivalism, and aimed to counter the homogenizing influences of capitalist social massification and globalization. This led to the formulation of clear theoretical and conceptual boundaries to categorize works and authors within the sphere of Italian American representation. Seminal works were issued, like Lentricchia (1974), Gioia (1991) and Robert J Casillo's influential essay on Italian American cinema where he proposed the defining benchmark that has represented a sort of canon in the last 20 years:

Scorsese is without doubt the chief exemplar of Italian American cinema, for which the main criterion is that a director of Italian American descent treats his ethnic group in and of itself on screen. This is not to deny that, in some cases, a non-Italian American can do justice to Italian American themes […] But apart from […] rare exceptions, one must acknowledge that an enormous difference exists between a work such as Delbert Mann's Marty, which treats Italian American subject matter from the outside and with a certain condescension, and the far more knowing, assured, and therefore more authentic treatment of a comparable ethnic terrain in Scorsese's Mean Streets or Who's That Knocking at My Door? (Casillo, 2006: 383; emphasis mine)

This approach's most outstanding merit was establishing a frame that gave direction and sense to the plethora of unhomogeneous case studies focused on Italian American fiction. However, without denying the relevance of such foundational systematization, some scholars have, in recent times, felt the necessity to re-evaluate this demarcation, considering the area of Italian American narratives as a vast, multidisciplinary field where an articulated idea of ethnicity encompasses issues of class, gender, sexuality, power and production. Moreover, the flourishing of streaming services and online media has amplified the access to fiction, skyrocketing the number of quality TV series (as well as arthouse films) connected with Italian American concepts, regardless of film/TV series directors’ descent.

The large panorama offers a diverse array of subjects, themes, characters, directors and creators, whose trait d’union is represented by the unremitting interest in the topic of Italians on screen but first and foremost of Italian Americans on screen. This makes the need for an inclusive and diversified theoretical perspective more urgent. As said, several voices call for new scholarship to be built upon the solid foundations of traditional research in the area, emphasizing huge analytical gaps. For example, in what Peter Bondanella identifies as one of the significant trends in cinema and television, i.e. the mainstream representation of Italian American characters:

Not […] the flesh-and-blood Italian Americans that one may encounter everywhere, but their surrogates, far fewer in number and more vivid in our collective imagination, that we encounter in the movies. In the movies, to a far greater extent than in our daily lives, these characters remain identifiable by their Hollywood representations not as Italian Americans but as ‘Hollywood Italians’. Here, they are predominantly, but not exclusively from New York, and here they are frequently presented as gangsters, prizefighters, Latin lovers, and poor emigrants. (Bondanella, 2004: 12)

Or short films and videos, a genre neglected and almost totally overlooked in Italian American studies, as Anthony Tamburri (2002: 5) underlines when introducing his work on shorts as ‘some sort of first step, so we may, in our studies of visual Italian America, include as a necessary topic of investigation those shorts that have so often gone unexamined for an array of reasons the least of which is aesthetic quality’.

Among these ‘reformative’ stances, that of Ryan Calabretta-Sajder and Alan J Gravano's viewpoint is particularly advanced. Their Italian Americans on Screen (Calabretta-Sajder and Gravano, 2021) challenges the delineation of Italian American cinema theorized by Robert Casillo, broadening his categorization, connecting preceding scholarly works with fresh hermeneutical frameworks and positioning Italian American cinema, television and media within current interdisciplinary discussions. They especially attempt to account for the hiatus in the field of media studies and with specific regard to television:

When discussing the concept of Italian American media studies, we believe the field is grim. To our knowledge, there does not exist a true ‘companion’ in the representation of Italian Americans on television. Outside the world of The Sopranos, which originally aired on HBO, little extensive critical attention has focused on the subject. (Calabretta-Sajder and Gravano, 2021: 3)

Although many case studies engage with TV representation, what lacks is a continuity of research and clarity of methodologies to frame the anarchy of scattered studies and suggestions. In short, there is a need for links and a general perspective from a synchronic and diachronic point of view. This article accepts the invitation of the two scholars to re-mediate the lacuna within the field ¹ and analyses The Bear, a successful TV series featuring a young Italian American chef as its protagonist.

The Bear is an American dramedy created by Christopher Storer which debuted on Hulu on 23 June 2022, within the platform's FX domain. Starring Jeremy Allen White in the lead role, the narrative revolves around a young, James Beard award-winning culinary maestro who returns to his hometown of Chicago to oversee the tumultuous kitchen operations at his deceased brother's sandwich shop. The supporting cast includes Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Ayo Edebiri, Lionel Boyce, Liza Colón-Zayas, Abby Elliott and Matty Matheson (who in real life is a Canadian star chef and food personality). The series has received widespread critical acclaim, notably for its script, direction, performances and production quality. It also garnered multiple Emmy and Golden Globe nominations and accolades for White, Moss-Bachrach, Edebiri, Jon Bernthal and Oliver Platt. Its success prompted a renewal for a 10-episode second season, released on 22 June 2023. In November 2023, the series received confirmation for a third season.

Carmy Berzatto struggles to transpose his upscale restaurant expertise into the salvage of his family's ailing Italian sandwich shop. Alongside his efforts to instil a sense of respect among his discordant kitchen staff, urging them to address each other as ‘chef’, he grapples with mounting challenges – unpaid bills, familial discord, resistance from those surrounding him, the chaotic, unkempt state of the restaurant's cooking stations and blunt utensils. At the heart of ‘The original Beef of Chicagoland’ lies the unsettling, assertive, perpetually ‘on the edge’ restaurant manager, Richie Jerimovich, whom Carmy addresses as ‘cousin’, accentuating the weight of familial ties. Tina is the establishment's longest-serving employee, fiercely dedicated to maintaining the traditional restaurant practices. This attitude is shared by all the other staffers, especially by Richie, who appears to be the kind of man who is always ready to fight and opposes even the least modification of The Beef's traditional kitchen routine and menu. In the beginning, only Carmy's new hire, Sydney, an ambitious black girl who trained at the Culinary Institute of America, appreciates his talent in the gloomy atmosphere of a mismanaged activity.

The low-cost show unexpectedly gained instant popularity, mostly thanks to the extreme realism of the near documentary-quality filming that communicates the authenticity of real chefs working in a restaurant. No glamour is showns; instead, what dominates the scene is a nervous, frantic, unstopping dialogue, relentless anxiety, exhausting deadlines, infinite procedures and repetitive tasks. Stress and tension are always present in the first season and are submerged but never obliterated in the second one. Notices piling up, toilets exploding, phones ringing, fingers cut and burnt, swearing and the combat jargon of the restaurant – the bombarding of ‘Yes, chef!’, ‘Behind!’, ‘Corner!’ – all the elements converge in a claustrophobic, insane portrait of a small business which is a microcosm of a dysfunctional social interaction. The unconventional tone of the series is enhanced by an innovative filming style ‘with a roving camera always on the shoulder or in the face of our chefs’ (Wilson, 2022) and is accompanied by a sophisticated soundtrack featuring mostly 1980s–2000s (indie) rock classics such as Radiohead, Pearl Jam, REM and the cult Chicago band Wilco.

Spectators are initially puzzled by the choice of a top chef obsessed with rescuing a greasy beef joint on the brink of financial ruin. Carmy's fervent dedication to the restaurant becomes evident over several episodes that unveil his underlying motivation. His late brother, Michael ‘Mikey’ Berzatto, a charismatic, handsome and brilliant entrepreneur, left him the business in his will before taking his own life. Michael was not just that, though: he was a drug addict and had large debts with the shady and (opaquely) well-‘connected’ businessman Uncle Jimmy ‘Cicero’. The Bear leaves here the innovative strategy, recurring to the not-so-new pattern of the prodigal son who returns home to fix things among messy relatives and friends. The archetype of the Italian American pervasive/invasive relationship with family emerges as the theme of the series. Restaurant life is scrupulously documented, but The Bear is not actually about food, even if food is at centre stage, adding to the typical characterization of Italian Americanness – as Fred Gardaphé (2004: 240) has argued: ‘Of the many ways Italians have been stereotyped the two most prominent, besides the gangster, are the lovers of food and sex’.

Carmy dedicates extensive hours feverishly scrubbing grease-coated stoves and tarnished floors. His actions also reveal that he aspires not only to extricate himself from a life marred by poverty, resentment and defeat but also to salvage his entire family as well. This aspiration aligns with a prevalent ambition among individuals from traumatized family backgrounds. Such people often face a dichotomy: they either sever ties with their familial roots to secure personal advancement or engage in an audacious, almost improbable endeavour to elevate their family's standing and achieve career success. Carmy attempts both approaches – initially opting for separation (as part of his backstory) and subsequently striving for familial elevation (as depicted in the actual narration). However, both strategies tend to breed deep-seated resentment among those involved. The Berzatto family's coping mechanism involves a frequent avoidance of the subject, masked resentment, intermittent bonding through dark humour and sporadic, intense outbursts directed towards each other as expressions of their collective grief. Carmy is not a tortured genius but is actually a tortured man, evidently on the verge of breakdown, and in this sense he re-enacts the most recently installed paradigm of the Italian American character, i.e. the hero affected by mental issues provoked by family dynamics, inspired by The Soprano.

In the first season's finale (‘Braciole’), he finally decides to attend an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting (his sister had begged him to go) and manages to reveal in a seven-minute intense monologue that the real motivation behind his unpredictable choice is a profound sense of guilt towards his brother and his family:

Over the last couple of months I-I’ve been trying to fix it ‘cause it was in rough shape, and I think it's very clear that me trying to fix the restaurant … was me trying to fix whatever was happening with my brother. And I don’t know, maybe fix the whole family because … that restaurant, it has and it, it does mean a lot to people. It means a lot to me. I just don’t know if it ever meant anything to him.

In fact, the series opens with Carmy during one of his haunting nightmares, uncaging a ravenous bear with whom he faces off. The canny metaphor stands for his struggle to survive the multiple traumas of a seemingly aborted career and to bear the weight of the past, coming to terms with it. It is somehow reminiscent of Noodles’ existential arc in Sergio Leone's (1984) Once Upon a Time in America, and there is even an amusing, probably fortuitous parallelism with the renowned Proustian exchange between Fat Moe and the film protagonist (‘What have you been doing all these years?’ ‘I’ve been going to bed early’). In the pilot episode of The Bear, Sydney asks Carmy a crucial question: ‘You were the most excellent CDC at the most excellent restaurant in the entire United States of America. So, what are you doing here?’, to which he replies ‘Making sandwiches’.

Dark humour punctuates Carmy's hard journey through the grieving process – needed not only for his brother's passing but also for the irremediable disaster represented by his family. It is clearly a process of defining identity, in personal and collective terms. At a closer look, the effort to bring out order from chaos mirrors the present existential crisis of the latest Italian American generations, who feel the weight of cumbersome, heavy traditions. The effort also reflects the condition of cities such as Chicago, entrapped in a hybrid chasm between glamorous gentrification and a provincial – but very definite in identitarian terms – past. In episode seven of the first season (‘Review’), after lamenting the shutting down of an old tavern next door to The Beef, Richie, who in the series represents the old-town system, tells Sydney, who embodies the future of the business and has totally modern expertise: ‘Stop fucking with this place. You let up a little bit, and everything changes … You don’t realize this is a delicate ecosystem; it's held together by shared history, love and respect’. Significantly, the scene continues with gunshots cracking the storefront's glass – a reminder of what the old system was and still is. It is also striking that at crucial moments, somehow the employment of an Italian American screen stereotype emerges (in this case, the ‘warning shooting’), as if its use could reinforce the discursive backbone of the series.

It comes as no surprise, then, that the standout episode of both seasons is a triumph of Italian American commonplaces that function as key to Carmy's personal issues. The episode (‘Fishes’) is the sixth of the second season and is a flashback of a Christmas dinner at the Berzatto household, five years before the narration's time, studded with one-off appearances of Hollywood and TV stars: Jamie Lee Curtis plays Donna, Michael and Carmy's alcoholic mother; Bob Odenkirk is her new partner, ‘Uncle’ Lee; and Sarah Paulson and John Mulaney are other relatives. The dinner is organized for the Italian American Christmas celebration of the ‘Feast of the Seven Fishes’, a traditional family gathering, and is a non-stop chaotic crossing of loud voices and yelling, anticipating the unfolding of a string of violent confrontations. Verbal insults and physical altercations escalate, including the hurling of forks and the smashing of plates. The acrimony of the situation is, again, very similar to that of The Sopranos, which sets the tone of this standard Italian American family quarrel. For her part, Donna is the prototype of the Italian American mother: proficient in culinary skills yet emotionally volatile, exuding an eagerness for affection and validation yet paradoxically seeking reasons to rebuff them. Her demeanour significantly shapes the damaged interactions within the Berzatto family. The culmination arrives when she, in an inebriated state and feeling undervalued for her extensive kitchen efforts, directs vehement outbursts towards her family. The final climax, after much yelling and a systematic breakage of almost every family tie, sees her recklessly driving her car into the house. The scene concludes with Carmy contemplating a towering platter of cannoli, an oddly festive yet incongruous sight amidst the chaos.

The cannoli are perhaps the most iconic food of Italian American cinema and TV. They represent literally and figuratively the emblem of food that comforts, that is somehow maternal since cuisine and pastry are perhaps forms of art and science, hard tasks and financial risks; but cooking is also a means to take care of someone, to nourish someone. The Bear gives space to these not only narrative but also aesthetic moments of insight, underlying them with symbolic items like the cannoli. Another famous scene comes to mind: the famous ‘Leave the gun. Take the cannoli’ of Clemenza in Coppola's The Godfather. The much-debated line was improvised by the actor but is, in a way, exemplary of the polarization between the violence of the mobster's job and the safety of the family, represented by the cherished Italian treat.

In the ninth episode of the second season, ‘Omelette’, Carmy reveals his aversion to cannoli due to its emotional ties to past Christmas traumas involving his mother. On his new girlfriend's counsel, he confronts this trauma by introducing a modified version of cannoli to the menu. In compliance with this request, Marcus, the pastry chef, prepares a savoury cannolo that reflects the personalities and tastes of everyone on the team, symbolizing the collective spirit in the restaurant and honouring the unifying force among them all. ‘This one is a little bit of all of us’, he says; the name of the preparation is, aptly, ‘The Michael’.

Underlying the whole ideological surface of The Bear – a seemingly unresolved narrative regarding ethnic and cultural identity – there is, instead, a keen perception of how being Italian American today implies living a perpetual imbalance between the natural assimilation of ‘other’ cultures and a pull towards an Italian essence that needs to be managed, preventing it from overshadowing everything else. Even the physical representation of the characters converges in this direction: Carmy is an attractive young man but has no stereotypically Italian American features – blond, blue-eyed, with a constant astonished expression on his face, his attractiveness deriving from boyish appearance, barely counterbalanced by numerous tattoos and tight muscles. On the contrary, Mickey, the deceased brother who appears in the flashback scenes, is the typical Italian stud with dark brown eyes and hair, tall, exuding sex appeal and magnetism. Their mother looks tasteless in her too-dyed hair, too-long and too-red nails and too-heavy makeup. Donna and Mickey are the burdensome past to be elaborated by Carmy with pain and grief. All the narrative tracks progress in this direction through a dense web of tropes connected with the dyad of death and (re-)birth: Mickey is actually dead, but in many ways Donna is too: she is reluctant to join the Christmas dinner, which ends with her spectacular car crash, she is invited to the opening of the new restaurant after the renovation of the old beef joint but does not show up, telling her son-in-law that she is not deserving of it; she is a non-entity, a pure ghost from a dysfunctional past haunting Carmy's present and future.

Italian food traditions punctuate another symbolic level of the series, as the titles of the most crucial episodes are dedicated to typical dishes: ‘Braciole’, ‘Beef’, ‘Pasta’, ‘Fishes’, ‘Bolognese’. The very Italian beef culture is paramount in the series, which takes place in this kind of restaurant that is deeply rooted in Chicago identity – as it exists only there:

Not quite a diner, not quite a deli, not quite a fast-food joint, it is a storefront establishment with big plate-glass windows, grubby in a reassuring way, with illuminated signs that advertise Italian beef or gyros. The color scheme is brown and beige; the diverse, largely blue-collar clientele who line up for lunch every day are a glad-handing politician's dream; the menus rarely stray from short-order classics and local specialties. I can summon in an instant the sense memory of stepping inside the doors of Johnnie's Beef or Al's on Taylor, and the newborn-like heft of a warm, paper-wrapped beef sandwich. (Rosner, 2022)

The series was filmed at an authentic Italian beef joint in Chicago, and the filming choice contributed to depicting an environment where the movements and interactions among people feel authentically practical and restricted, evoking a sense of claustrophobia. Christopher Storer, the creator of The Bear, has stated in an interview:

I know the owner of Mr Beef, the restaurant that inspired The Beef, Chris Zucchero. He was my first friend I ever met […] I wrote a lot of the show hanging out with Chris in what they call the elegant dining room of Mr Beef, which is actually just an added-on patio. There was something that felt really lost in time about this specific place. There's even a sign that says, ‘Even though it's 2022 out there, it's still 1988 in here’. (Gordinier, 2022)

Even the much-discussed contemporary identity crisis of Chicago is in itself an existential crisis caused by the transition from the stereotypical image of the rugged blue-collar town of factories to the city of these days, ruled by a new ascendancy of New Economy, tech and finance. The sense of a fading past is what today haunts the new generations of Italian Americans, may they be Chicagoans or not. This generates the sense of an organic culture that has been substituted by globalization and gentrification, starting with food, which is a fundamental identity denominator. ² As Ryan Zickgraf commented about Chicago’s lost culinary identity:

It's not only increasingly difficult to tell the difference between the airy industrial-chic of the newfangled coffee shops, craft breweries, and boutiques that adorn the trendy neighborhoods of Brooklyn, Austin, Seattle, and Berlin but also to distinguish among the people who frequent them. Regional accents are increasingly being replaced by the flat speech patterns of most media figures. (Zickgraf, 2022)

This sheds light on the series’ overarching concern with extended and surrogate families, intended to mitigate the damages deriving from the original one. This last coping strategy paradoxically is employed both in contemporary social dynamics and in (old) Italian family habits: family is all, and all is family. It is significant thus that both seasons’ finales are surrogate family meals: in the first one, it is a lunch shared by the whole restaurant staff after closure. In the second one, the opening dinner is reserved for family and friends, where ‘The Michael’ cannolo is served and Uncle Jimmy ‘Cicero’ receives homage with a nostalgic food journey down memory lane, consisting of a chocolate-covered banana.

That Italian Americanness trickles down from its scholarly precincts is evident in these inextricable minglings of transitional identities where the role of the director's origin is just one of the possible parameters to be considered in the field of these studies. The author (and director of many episodes) of The Bear has no Italian parentage whatsoever, and so his words well represent a testimony of contamination. When asked by the interviewer if there was any transformative or nourishing meal in his life, he replies:

It's in the show – the braciole. My sister and I growing up –our households – we had a bunch of dysfunction […] there was a little bit of estrangement even though we loved each other. And food was the thing that brought us back. Braciole was always this Sunday family thing. The best parts of our family being together. (Gordinier, 2022)

The complexity of The Bear's storytelling fabric, with its unconventional use of Italian American characters and stereotypes, adds to the urge to elaborate a new politics of Italian American representation in contemporary various media. This involves not only a renewed academic approach – which is essential – but also a reconsideration of the role of cultural associations, so far obsessively focused on mafia and gangster images, as Jonathan Cavallero remarks: ‘In recent years, groups such as the American Italian Defense Association and the National Italian American Foundation have protested the depiction of Italians in the HBO television series The Sopranos (1999–2007) while ignoring contemporary presentations of Italian ethnicity’ (Cavallero, 2004: 50–51). The engagement should also involve the viewers in case of misrepresentations:

Audiences can also be empowered to take partial responsibility for the process of representation if they perceive film viewing as a dialogic, interactive process. In short, spectators can deconstruct, challenge, and re-construct those stereotypical dominant media images. Certainly, if Italian Americans and other ethnics misrecognize and take for real their false reflections in the mirror-screen or dream-screen of the cinema, they are as much to blame as the creators of those images. (Tomasulo, 1996: 71).

In conclusion, this case study testifies to the evolution of Italian American representations on screen, acknowledging that even the use of stereotypes is a complex factor in the narrative fabric, and their presence does not automatically imply a negative evaluation of the ethnic substratum involved. Much more should be done in the research area: ‘Film, newspaper, online media, and television in particular, require more theoretical inquiries of Italian American characters such as Columbo or the Fonz played by non-Italian American actors’ (Calabretta-Sajder and Gravano, 2021: 8). This analysis is thus intended as a contribution to this evolving and promising field of study.