really need to analyze the ted lasso-fication of the bear…
like the declawing of the more wild and weird bits in order to cater to a certain sentimentality…
and it’s not all gone, you have moments of weirdness (the cyclist in copenhagen) or interiority (syd’s food crawl montage), but nothing like season 1 where we’re in dreams (carmy’s kicking off the series, and carmy’s starting the finale of s1) and possible hallucinations/magical realism bits (fak and ball-buster). but it’s leaching out in s2 and you don’t have anything (as far as i can remember) like that in s3
and don’t get me wrong, an episode like fishes is incredible in its commitment to portraying a very real family dynamic and mental illness, and goes such a long way in showing us why all the berzatto siblings are the way they are.
but along with the surreal/magical realism bits, some of the more worrying mental health shit carmy was dealing with in s1 also disappeared (sleep-walking, dissociating). it’s just panic-attacks all the way down (and syd vomiting <3)… and there’s this over-reliance on, like, therapy-speak that i think is especially exemplified in Richie’s arc—that always felt cheap or rushed to me… like richie is a dirtbag with a heart of gold, but i think they really scrubbed him of all dirtbag-ness too quickly in season 2.
like, idk… i will say s3 is lyrical. it’s a less bombastic season, and seemed to me to be more meandering… a kinder person might call it “slice-of-life.”
and part of that is the de-centering of carmy as the main character: the show’s opening up into more of an ensemble show. but why not give us more surreality or interiority for the other characters, instead of doing away with that? like i always wonder why marcus tells syd (i think i remember that’s who he’s talking to in copenhagen about the dreams) he’s having nightmares, instead of showing us the nightmares???
and we do still get some carmy interiority season 2: with the panic-attack flashes and the walk-in freak out. but then with s3 it’s just the lyrical montage first ep of s3, which feels less like carmy evaluating or experiencing these memories involuntarily, than a curated flashback constructed *for the audience*. it feels too clean. it’s cramming in too much too quickly, no real time to let things breathe. like the deboning scene in the finale should have been a satisfying beat in a proper flashback ep, i think.
…
anyway,, i don’t quite know what i’m getting at with all this, but the gradual leeching out of surreal bits seems tied to the removal of carmy’s more intense mental health issues, as well as the reduction of Richie’s more asshole-ish behavior…
it’s a flattening in certain respects in order to reach for this found-family, healing tone, when people’s dysfunction and warping are often the most interesting thing in a show, especially under stress. and i think it’s also expanded to other characters, where we aren’t granted interiority to marcus’s worries or his obsessions, which flattens him a bit. syd too. she had a temper s1! she stabbed richie and walked off the expo line… i’m missing that fire from her…
In order for Carmy and Sydney to happen, Carmy has to be okay with Intimacy and Sydney has to be okay with relying on Carmy in that way. I don't think Sydney has an issue with intimacy because we've been shown how she loves. how she cares. How she likes seeing people happy. She has shared intimate parts of herself with Carmy, marcus and i'm asuming Natalie. I think her issues may be in relying on another person if they can't show her she can rely on them.
Sydney and Carmy grew up differently.she knows love and care and afffection and unconditional love, and nurturance and protection. I think she is able to be intimate. I think she can be intimate with Carmen if he can give her the space to be. If he can show her she can trust him not with just being his partner, but in other aspects. (wink wink).
There have been pocokets of big time intimacy between these two, so the evidence is there they can both be this way with each other. For Carmy, he has to be okay with getting close. He' s just not. He can't be with the C person and whenever it seems he' s getting closer to Sydney, he sabotages in an unhealthy way. Because of the low-self esteem and the trauma, he can't see the benefits of intimacy. He also can't see how intimate he's been with Sydney.
You can see it in his eyes how close he wants to be. It's in his body with how calm he gets when he thinks of Sydney, but it continues to be out of his reach because he can't recognize what that feeling means. Carmy isn't completely lost though. i believe he has admitted to himself who he wants. What he wants, but the negative thoughts tells him it ain't gonna happen. You aren't worth that. etc. etc. etc. It sucks. But lets hope he'll find a path in season 4.
Ok, so a lot of us have contemplated how Carmy will repair relationships post freezer, and rewatching him and Richie, it occurred to me that Richie is very much arguing with Carm the same way one would argue with an addict. For Richie there is so much love there and he can see Carmy self destructing, and it’s not that Carm’s words don’t hurt, but that Richie knows that Carmy is scrapping the bottom of the barrel and trying to cut deep as possible. And I’m not saying that Carm doesn’t need to make amends, what I’m trying to get at is that I don’t think Richie will put up a fight when carmy does. Richie wants to see Carmy succeed, and his anger revolves purely around the frustration of seeing someone you love, someone you know has so much potential, self destruct. Exactly like how he had to watch Mikey self destruct.
ok ok i am thinking about richie calling carm ‘donna’ in the walk-in and also how much he’d tell carm to calm down in season 1 (“don’t blow a gasket”)… implying that richie thinks carm flies off the handle and has too many outsized emotions…
like i think about carmy thinking mikey and richie are fucking with him about claire in fishes and how emotional he gets… idk something about richie and mikey winding carmy up as a kid, having him explode, then treating him like his reactions are as unreasonable as his mom’s…….
i think a big thing that they did right this season (and maybe surprised me with) was about carmy and the berzatto siblings and how they relate to their mom
like donna was *exactly* how i imagined she would be, but i thought sugar would be the drunk whisperer and carmy would be the one outside of her graces. but in fishes to see that it’s the reverse? like suddenly carm not being capable of going to the funeral makes SO MUCH SENSE. like if he had gone, he would have gotten exclusive donna duty in the midst of NY chef trauma and the unmitigated grief for michael…
like… he went into survival mode by not going.
and then there’s the pesky similarities between him and donna… how they internalize and can fly off the handle… the fact that carm’s clock/alarm motif is actually donna’s. carm couldn’t go to the funeral and donna couldn’t go to the restaurant opening. and of course richie calling carm “donna” in the walk-in, which really triggers him
and fucking SUGAR!!!! natalie my saint! who *wants* to be the one to take care of her mom, but not being able to get the nuance and cadence of her mental illness. g-d it kills me!!!
then you have sugar treating carm the same way she treats donna, because sugar sees so clearly how unwell both of them are… and yet carm and donna obviously hate how she goes about ittttt
anyway, shoe-horned romance aside, this season was incredible and this bit of family dynamic explains SO MUCH
it’s so interesting to me that carm is pretty open about his shit show of a family/past, but then syd is reluctant to tell carmy about her family
this show loves parallels between them, so this point of difference is really interesting. it’s like.. syd has no relationship with her mom because she died when she was 4, and just has her dad who loves her and wants the best for her
… well then again carmy has an absent father and a mother who loves him but is very unwell. so it’s an inverse parallel
hmm, syd’s dad compares her to her mom and it’s a good thing. syd laments about how she’s now older than her mom ever was and never knew her
carm knows his mom so well he was the designated kitchen attendant, and when richie calls carm “donna,” it’s so painful he flies into a rage, basically proving richie’s point…
they’re both so much like their mothers and the comparison hurts for different reasons. gonna be sick again one second.
I love your thoughts on The Bear. Particularly the Berzatto siblings. I was wondering if you could talk about Mikey. And possibly his relationship with Richie. Outside of the internet when I talk to peers about the show people are quick to demonize or dislike Mikey. They cite his behavior with Lee and his taking part in ganging up on Carmy with Donna as reasons why. Also, how Richie was so desperate to get away from the beef.
I would love to hear your opinion about how this could be someone’s impression of Mikey. And how you would describe Mikey to someone who maybe isn’t seeing the whole picture? Or just how you would describe Mikey as a person in general.
And do you think his relationship with Richie was very one sided? Do you think it was always Mikey in the lead? I’ve read some fic that truly makes Mikey terrible to Richie.
Hi anon. Thanks for this incredibly thought out ask. Cannot emphasize enough how much I enjoy getting questions like this :)
Michael Berzatto is a complicated guy and he’s a guy we don’t get a lot of screen time with. That’s by design. He’s the character haunting this narrative. Mikey is the Laura Palmer of The Bear (I have that disease where I see everything through the prism of Twin Peaks), and as such we get to know him mostly through people’s grief. Through their imperfect memories. We’re left missing him just as much as any other character. And while I would love a feature length movie showing Mikey’s last days a la Fire Walk with Me, I very much doubt we will get that. So we’re left to figure out this complicated character with scraps.
For these reasons, I do get why people don't understand Mikey. As you mention, they are literally not given anything close to a whole picture. In fact the screen time we have most with him is during Fishes, when he is quite literally at his worst. If people only saw scenes where Carmen was yelling at people in the kitchen or where Richie was being sexist to Syd, I'm sure they'd have a poor opinion of them as well (in fact, being in this fandom after the first season, I can confirm that most of tumblr disliked Richie).
The healthiest we see Michael is in the Ceres flashback in season 1. He’s exactly how everyone describes him: loud, brash, funny. Both Carmy and Richie are just having the best time, completely immersed in the story he's telling. Even Nat’s having a great time, though both brothers stop her from adding raisins, which is Donna’s recipe for the dish they're making (side note, I find it so interesting that Nat is the one trying to follow their mom’s recipe. She's still trying to please Donna, to garner favor, whereas the boys, who Donna relies on in the kitchen and emotionally, feel fine deviating from Donna’s recipe). Even beyond the Ceres flashback, we do get flashes of what makes Mikey great in Fishes: the opening is him checking in on Natalie, he's really sweet and engaging with Carmen in the pantry, and even though Carmy doesn't take Mikey and Richie trying to set him up with Claire well, it's still proof that Mikey cares.
The thing is Mikey is mentally ill, like Donna and like Carmen. He’s dealing with some sort of chemical imbalance (depression or bipolar) on top of the severe parentification he got from Donna. I talk about it at length in my unfinished series delving into the partentification of the Berzatto siblings. As I point out in those posts, Mikey is actually the sibling getting the worst of the parentification, which is a form of abuse where there is a role-reversal between parent and child. Nat can't morph herself easily to accommodate Donna's dysfunction (she un-normalizes it), so she gets Donna's ire instead. Carmen was also parentified, especially when Mikey was out of the house growing up (they have such an age gap), but Mikey was the oldest. He has high EQ and can morph himself to accommodate Donna's dysfunction. It has in fact shaped him into the person he is. Which is someone who is trying to avoid all of the bad: bad outbursts from Donna, bad feelings from his siblings, bad reactions from outsiders to their family dynamic. He's also trying very hard to avoid the bad emotions he's feeling. Michael is looking to avoid all of this through any means necessary, which includes using alcohol and drugs. As I mention in that parentification meta series, using substances is quite literally the only way he's managing his distress.
I want to talk about each point you mention people citing as to why they don't like Michael. But first, I want to preface it by pointing out that Michael has been forced to move back in with Donna. His failed business ventures and poor mental health have forced him back into this scenario that is NOT GOOD FOR HIM. That scene where Cousin Michelle says to Carm that it's not good for him to be in this environment? Well, it's not good for any of the Berzatto siblings. And throughout the episode, you can tell how exhausted Mikey is by it. By having to fulfill his role as Donna's pseudo-partner.
So let's start with Michael and Donna ganging up on Carmen in the kitchen. When Donna and Mikey do this they are functioning as a parental unit. This is the perfect example of Mikey's parentification at work, of Michael acting as Donna's partner. It's what he's been trained to do to maintain the delicate ecosystem of that house. Donna's emotional state is given top priority. Everyone else's emotions fall to the wayside in light of what she's feeling, otherwise you get fallout like her crashing her car into the house. Mikey talks to Nat about this at the start of the episode:
What do you think she's at right now? A 4? A 5? She's not at a 6.
The siblings literally have a rating system for Donna's moods. They're all trying to avoid escalation above all else. Michael in particular. So in that scene with Carm in the kitchen, Mikey is trying to keep things from escalating. This is something Carmen knows too—hell, it's the first thing Carmen asks Mikey to do in Fishes:
Hey Mikey can you come inside and be you for a little bit, I don't know how to deal with these people.
Carmy needs Michael to come fill his role of buffer between guests and their family. Carmy, notably, gets Donna duty—a role I'm sure Mikey filled before Carmen came along. I say this based on Donna calling Carmen "Michael" when he's trying to coax her to the dinner table at the end of the episode. She's implying talking to her like this is what Michael does. When the people you know irl cite this moment, unfortunately this is the rebuttal: this is Mikey's role. Donna needs his emotional support. Otherwise she'd be more abusive towards Nat and Carm. Michael is doing it for the greater good.
As for Lee, that's another great example of soooo much being implied. Lee, along with Cicero, were best friends with their father, and it is heavily implied that Lee and Donna had a fling or two after their dad fucks off (whether Mr. Berzatto is dead or a deadbeat, who’s to say?). When Lee is helping Donna clean shit off the floor, Mikey grabs a beer from the fridge and asks if they are "doing this again." Basically, Lee and Donna have been romantic before. This means Lee would have been around erratically growing up. And it's clear Michael and Lee have a historic antagonism because of this. Lee's first interaction with Michael in the episode has him threatening to "lay [Michael] out." This screams to me that Lee stepped into the man of the house role, and that Mikey and him had altercations that got physically violent. That's why Mikey says at the dinner table, "I can throw forks cuz this is my father's house." That feels very much like something a kid would say to a man who is trying to replace a missing father. And it's especially heated, because it is Michael who has had to consistently step into the man of the house role for Donna and for his siblings! Michael couldn't leave like Lee when Donna and him broke up. Living with Donna and keeping his siblings ok is daily life for Michael.
So all through the episode, Lee is poking a bear (Mikey Bear to be exact). Lee calls him out about telling the same old stories, embarrasses him in front of everyone by revealing he's borrowed money from Cicero and had to move back in with Donna. Lee has been explicitly disrespecting him. And maybe if Mikey was in a better place, he would have been able to roll with it, but as I mentioned before, Mikey is not in a good place. He's depressed, he's been drinking and taking something (pain pills?) to manage the stress he's under. Him throwing forks is not a lucid reaction. Frankly, if people don't also blame Lee for that outburst, then they really weren't paying attention during the episode.
Finally, onto the Richie portion of your question. Richie’s family is something I would *love* to get more canon info about. All we know is that he's not Italian but Polish, his home life wasn’t great, his dad sucked, and Donna allowed him over so often that he’s practically her fourth child.
Richie and Michael grew up together. They're best friends, practically family. It's why Richie is "cousin." Michael's relationship with Richie is his closest relationship. Everyone says Mikey was their best friend, but Mikey's actual best friend was Richie. Period. And there's some complicated jealousy between Carmen and Richie because of what each is to Michael: Carmy's jealous of Richie and Michael's genuine closeness, and Richie is jealous that Mikey has special regard for Carmen as his actual brother. You see this jealousy in the very first episode of the show during that first walk-in fight: Richie was there for Mikey, buried Mikey and took care of Donna, and yet Mikey left the restaurant to Carmen. Left the money in cans for Carmen, so he could fulfill their dream restaurant together. There's honestly some great fic out there that goes into this jealousy. I'll come back to link it if I can find it.
Bottom line is that Richie was the closest person in Mikey's life. They have the same humor, the same life experiences. They had each other's backs. So when you ask if Richie and Michael's relationship was one-sided, I'm going to answer with a resounding no. They're literally besties. It's just by Fishes, Michael has deteriorated. His depression and drug abuse and failures have shrunk his life. Just compare where they're both at: Michael's moved back in with his mom, is single, and is telling the same old stories from their youth. Richie, on the other hand, might have anxiety (the xanax from Dogs <3), but he's in a stable and loving relationship and has a child on the way. That's why Richie asks Cicero for a job—not to get away from Mikey, but to make more money for his expanding family. And yes, he wants to amount to something more than working at a sandwich shop, but hell, so does Mikey. Neither of them want that for the rest of their lives. It's why Michael tried other business ventures. They fail, so he's stuck at The Beef. But it's a weight around his neck bringing him down. He says as much to Carmen when they're in the pantry:
Yeah but the place is no good, Carmy. It's a fucking nightmare. Like trust me I'm doing you a favor.
He even tries to set it on fire for the insurance money! Only Carmen sees the potential.
As for whether it was always Mikey taking the lead, I do think there's some merit to that. Mikey is talked about as more charming than Richie. You see it in Ceres when the edit compares Mikey telling the Bill Murray story to Richie telling the Bill Murray story to his date. Mikey is loud and funny and can "dial a room." Richie can too, but I think Mikey has more finesse. Still, they rely on each other. They back each other up. Michael would hook people with the stories, and Richie would embellish and inject at the right points or reel Mikey in when needed. They supported each other and worked together. I think any fic you might be reading that's demonizing Michael isn't accurate to his character and is actually falling into a pretty common fic trope: if the focus is Character A, then a fic author will cast Character B as the villain in order to serve whatever they're writing, twisting and embellishing the traits of Character B until they’re barely recognizable. Could Mikey be dismissive and hard to contain? Sure, but I don't think that means he didn't love Richie, or was undemonstrative with his affections. Even when Michael was out of it on drugs, they still had a very close relationship—Richie says so. In fact, everything Richie says about Michael supports this. I see zero support in canon for their relationship being one-sided. I'll say it again, they loved each other.
So this is how I would describe Mikey: loud, funny, obnoxious. He could dial a room. He cared deeply for his family, friends, and employees. He suffered parentification and has some sort of chemical imbalance. In fact, because he was charming and loud and funny, people could ignore his deterioration. Even Richie says, "he was Mikey Bear! I thought he'd come out of it," because he was able to come out of it up to that point. But after decades of not treating the problem, the only solution Michael could see was killing himself. He's a complicated character. He's a tragic character. He's the Laura Palmer of The Bear.
The Parentification of the Berzatto Siblings: Mikey’s Mental State
Let’s take a look at Donna’s mental state, as a way of understanding Mikey’s. Donna is dealing with mental illness. She most likely has a personality disorder (Borderline would be my guess) that might be comorbid with a mood disorder (Bipolar or Intermittent Explosive Disorder), and is using alcohol to self-medicate.
Donna’s alcoholism doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Because of her mental illness and the stressors of being a single mom, she is self-medicating with alcohol, meaning she is using it to numb herself out. Between 50 and 70% of people with BPD have substance abuse issues, and 41% of those with Bipolar disorder self-medicate.
This is the state of the Barzatto Family Home: the unstable woman at the center, who can be fun and funny, but is incredibly volatile. She is influencing and modeling behavior for all of the Bear Sibs. So looking back at Michael, as the oldest son, the burden of Donna’s moods and the state of his siblings (and any guests that happen to be around) is firmly on him. And he is empathetic enough to get others out of their funk and charming enough to keep things positive and running (relatively) smoothly. But all the anxiety of this situation—the parentification, which forces a child to disregard their own emotions and well-being in favor of their parent—gets severely internalized, and then masked by his ability to be loud and funny.
Mikey is avoidant above all else. In that first interaction in Fishes, between him and Nat, he literally says, “with [Mom], not handling it is the best way to handle it.” And this approach of his pops up again and again, whether he’s avoiding Carmy (by not picking up the phone or engaging in difficult conversations, or literally, when he leaves the pantry after Carm gives him the present), avoiding handling Donna, or avoiding dealing with his own mental health. This is in no way helped by the fact Mikey is most likely dealing with some form of chemical imbalance, whether it’s depression or bipolar disorder like Donna.
Add to all this the self-medicating behavior Donna models for him, and it’s a fairly clear line from internalizing and masking his pain, to substance abuse; alcohol and pain medication and whatever else he was using are just more intense ways of avoiding his pain. They are quite literally the only ways he’s managing his distress.
In fact, so much of Mikey’s behavior is modeled off of Donna:
The first person to throw a utensil in Fishes is not Michael, it’s actually Donna. She throws one at Steve while Mikey and Richie are giving Carm a tough time about Claire.
Mikey hits himself after Carm gives him the gift, and Donna hits herself at the dinner table.
If Donna hadn’t driven her car through the wall, the scene Mikey makes at the dinner table might’ve been the big story from that Christmas.
And then of course there’s the traumatic tirade Donna goes on about killing herself. That seems like a fairly common threat in the Berzatto household. And it makes me wonder if the gun Michael used to kill himself was his father’s, the one that Donna threatened to use.
And this is a real issue with Parentification: it becomes normalized and perpetuated. These roles and behaviors become integrated into a child’s personality, and alters ideas of what normal and healthy relationships look like. You can see this in how Michael treats Carmen. It was normalized for Mikey to handle Donna in the kitchen. It never occurs to him that baby Carm shouldn’t be around that. But it is normalized *and* unavoidable, so Michael let’s him take on that responsibility. Even the way he talks to Carm, calling him moody, a saltine—these are intended to get Carmen out of his head, but they are also cruel and tell Carm that his emotions are too much, that his emotions can’t compete with Donna’s. After all, Donna and Mikey work together as a parental unit.
You see it especially in the first Mikey-Carmy-Donna Kitchen scene in Fishes, where Donna and Mikey gang up on Carmy together, getting Carm to say he’s happy to be home and loves them. This is a lie to smooth things over on Carmen’s end, but if being around Donna is bad for Carm, it’s bad for all of them. Living at home has got to be triggering, and you can tell throughout Fishes just how done Michael is with it.
Michael’s adulthood is so sad. We know that he had a trail of failed business ventures, money problems, and even had to move back in with Donna. He doesn’t seem to have a girlfriend, and is stuck telling the same old stories from his youth, because the best he can do is mask his dysfunction and entertain everyone. All of this is a self-perpetuating cycle, his avoidance making sure he cannot ask for the help he needs, and his relative functionality ensuring no one pushes the issue.
My next post will breakdown some of the key Mikey scenes in Fishes.
