Beefin'

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Terry Nguyen, Dirt's senior staff writer, on the class-ridden stakes of rage in Netflix’s Beef (2023), Met Gala ‘fits, and restaurant NFTs.

While watching Netflix’s Beef (2023), I was reminded of my first-ever talk therapy session, during which a well-meaning therapist told me that anger is a secondary emotion, a gut reaction to distress. Her intent was not to invalidate my rage or to indicate its minor importance in the hierarchy of hard-to-abate feelings. Anger, my therapist said, often undergirds and disguises core feelings that hide in its shadow, like fear or sadness. This is ultimately just a theory of anger—a CBT-guided framework for rage-prone individuals to reframe their provocations. But as a person whose life has felt unduly contaminated by rage, the theory was the closest thing I had to a tangible solution. It was a means to recognize my anger as unnecessary armor, not an uncontrollable character flaw.

Rage is the raw, motivating force that propels forward the plot of Beef, a ten-episode series created and co-written by Lee Sung Jin. A minor scuffle in a Los Angeles parking lot transforms into a year-long turf war between Amy Lau (Ali Wong), an entrepreneur trying to sell her houseplant empire, and Danny Cho (Steven Yeun), a handyman contractor struggling to build a steady clientele. The conflict begins when Danny backs out of his parking spot without properly yielding to Amy’s white Mercedes Benz. Amy leans on her horn, jerks the car forward, and flips off Danny. This provokes Danny to speed after her in his red Toyota Tacoma.

From this first interaction, Beef attempts to unravel the nature of rage, revealing how resentment is shored up and stoked by external circumstances, from the shame of financial instability (Danny’s) to the depression of a life overwhelmed by work (Amy’s). A road rage incident might’ve been the catalyst, but grief, as we later learn, lies just below the surface: Danny wasn’t able to return the hibachi grills he had bought with the intention of suffocating himself to death. Alone in his truck, he felt it was a sign the universe wanted him dead. Then along came Amy and her incessant honking.

Anger is ugly, and there are no winners. But who gets to express the full range of rage—and get away with it—is a matter of privilege. Beef, with its primarily Asian-American cast, examines anger’s intra-racial inflections through its characters’ disparate class backgrounds. Danny and Amy were both raised by working-class, first-generation immigrant parents, but their fates and fortunes diverged in adulthood. Amy went off to college, launched a $10-million lifestyle brand, and married the son of a prestigious Japanese interior designer. Meanwhile, Danny skipped college to run his family’s hotel business, a short-lived enterprise, as his cousin Isaac (David Choe) ensnared the Cho’s in legal trouble. Danny’s parents, as a result, lost the hotel and moved back to Korea, a decision that devastated Danny and derailed his life. When the show begins, he has spent the past decade working to earn back the money Isaac lost, so he could buy a patch of land and build his parents a house.

Amy and Danny might be twin flames in their rage, but I was more sympathetic to Danny’s struggle, more willing to excuse his flashes of fury. Yes, Amy is overworked and miserable, but her struggle is embroiled in luxury. She suffers from the “Fleishman effect,” a condition that afflicts ambitious working mothers, who, in their quest to have it all (a timeless home, a perfect family life, a successful career), spiral into a deep depression. The show leans into this material disparity.

Anger may be universal, but rich people get to act as if they have transcended it. Amy’s husband George believes meditation will tamp down her temper. They go to therapy, attend psychedelic dinners to reach a higher consciousness, and fill their big home with beautiful things. For the rich, when anger does manifest, it’s in the form of cold, meditated cruelty. Public, uncontrollable rage is maligned as a poor person’s affliction. When footage of the car chase is posted on a neighborhood watch app, Amy worries that her recklessness will ruin her business reputation. She promises to pay off Danny if he takes the fall for her; her money offers protection from social disgrace and legal prosecution.

Early on in the series, George reminds Amy that “anger is just a transitory state of consciousness.” It comes across as a patronizing platitude, which strikes a nerve with Amy. But Amy goes on to echo a similar sentiment to Danny, when he asks about her wealth and success. “Everything fades,” she tells him, and it feels like a “fuck you” to a man who has little. This is the crux of the existential dilemma that the duo grapples with, as Beef veers off into thriller territory in its second half. Does anything really matter?

The characters’ resentment dissipates frustratingly late in the series—anger being the self-reflexive shield that disguises their innermost fears. In the final episode, Amy and Danny are on death’s door, delirious, starving, and alone in the desert, before their compassion for one another finally kicks in. Perhaps the violent extremes were necessary, the emotionally maximalist circumstances a determined set-up for the finale’s existentialist overdrive: We are equal in death. But this realization only arrives upon their accidental isolation. Upon their return to society, we know that Amy will emerge scot-free, while Danny will be hunted down by law enforcement.

Beef ends on this cliffhanger with the duo’s destinies diverging. Meanwhile, we are left to wonder about the consequences of our many transitory states of consciousness, from anger to life itself. And for what if, as Amy says, everything fades? There’s not much to do besides lean into the feeling and trust that it, too, will come to pass.

PLAYBACK

Snippets of streaming news — and what we’re streaming.

• Puck’s Jonathan Handel on the information asymmetry between streaming services and entertainment workers (writers, directors, actors), as the Writer’s Guild contract negotiations heat up. They are on strike as of this morning.

  • “Limited consumption data are disclosed for top 10 shows, but there’s no standardization to those metrics and none of them flow into residuals formulas. The companies hoard the most valuable data, and what they do release is difficult to compare across platforms.”

• Disney’s Bob Iger fires most of the executive team that helped build Disney+ (Bloomberg)

• I’m on Mold Magazine’s Food Futures podcast with Ludwig Hurtado. We talk about Blackbird, the Web3 loyalty platform launched by Resy co-founder Ben Leventhal, good gatekeeping, and Instagram pop-up dining culture.

Fun links from the Dirtyverse.

• Met Gala 2023 recap: A cockroach was the night’s surprise star. Two choupettes to represent the Furry fandom. Anna Wintour hard launches her relationship with actor Bill Nighy. The hottest outfit a man (Pedro Pascal) can wear is short shorts and a long jacket. Bryan Tyree Henry is wearing deconstructed Chanel bridal. Rihanna looks expensive and swaddled. Personally, I would like to wear Blackpink Jennie’s vintage Chanel look.

• An audience member had an orgastic reaction to Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony. Jocelyn’s tweet from the front lines was aggregated by the LA Times.

• Bluesky is the third (or fourth?) decentralized Twitter alternative that’s emerged since Elon Musk bought the bird app. I am skeptical of whether Bluesky will actually take off, although the big-name Twitter shitposters and celebrities are migrating over. The app is currently invite-only—a metric that might constrain the social network’s growth and, as Eric Hu pointed out, ensures that its “foundational community [is just] SF-NY adjacent tech workers.”

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