Image from Hulu
Erin likes to chide me now and again about a comment I made when we first got together. Getting together required moving from Omaha to join Erin in Boise. Part of this move also involved starting a new career. Money was tight in the beginning and we were looking for cost savings. At one point I suggested scrapping the Netflix subscription. Part of my suggestion amounted to, “There is nothing on television worth watching anyway. It’s all garbage”. This was the beginning of a debate on the state of modern television and an eventual compromise to keep Netflix so long as we switched from the disc and streaming to this, “new streaming only platform thing”.
As a person who arrived in Boise with an almost 16 year absence of television I was in no position to debate the merits of televised media. Yet I held fast to this belief while I pursued the streaming options and began to watch a number of programs, some new, and some I missed during those 16 years. Begrudgingly, this steadfast belief began to soften under the proof of so many wonderful shows. It wasn’t long before I was marathoning those 16 years of missed entertainment.
A Little Bit About Movies
Fast forward and I’m just as much of a consumer of shows as the next person. I wait with a certain amount of longing for the next season of the programs I love. I stuff my queue with new arrivals to be sampled later. I will routinely ask friends what they are watching in the hope of coming across the next great series. Eventually there is one which bubbles to the top and merits watching.
The 16 year absence I had from television wasn’t a period of time devoid of movies. Pfft, please. I was the proud holder of a Blockbuster “Movie Pass” subscription and would devour movies on the regular, ensuring I was taking full advantage of my monthly unlimited allotment. And for a period of time this was matched by a membership to “That’s Rentertainment”, a much beloved Champaign-Urbana video rental store unlike any other I’ve visited. From the most popular to the most obscure movies, if it wasn’t there then it didn’t exist. I also built up a small collection of films I loved and would watch obsessively. I was the guy who went through a period of months continuously watching “Apocalypse Now” anytime I was home and wanting to watch something. I would start it over the minute it ended, and watch for however long, picking it up wherever I left off. For months.
It was from this viewpoint I critiqued television and concluded “It’s all garbage”. Add commercials to the mix and it was unworthy of attention. Movies could be two, three hours of well crafted art, whereas the dreck served up on television was hastily applied nonsense. But then there was this whole new streaming thing, where a series essentially, in the beginning, became a ten to twelve hour movie, watched at your own clip, and without commercial interruption. The stakes and the possibilities had changed. Sure, HBO had taken series television to new levels with a number of its programs, but now there were a number of contenders bringing a whole new level of storytelling and themes to the mix, while also serving up those classic series like “The Sopranos”.
I was easily hooked. I couldn’t deny what I was experiencing. Since those fledgling days of immersion I’ve had some serious obsessions with a number of shows. And everytime I think, “How can you top something like this?”, something else arrives in the queue and captures my imagination in a whole new way. Shows like “Mr. Robot”, “Dark”, “Succession”, and the show I want to talk about today, “The Bear”.
Watching The Bear
Erin and I liked Jeremy Allan White's character “Lip” on the series “Shameless” so when we saw the advertisement for the first season of “The Bear” we figured we’d check it out. Like a million other people we were sold by the end of the first episode. We quickly made our way through those thirty minute installments and then waited for a year for the second season. The second season proved to be great, building on all of the characters and adding new dimensions to the show. We also recently wrapped up the third season.
The show is great. I mean, I love the show. It has unique characters and character development, and draws you deeply into each episode. It’s emotionally raw and intense and human and everything I want in a story. I’m still thinking about the third season even though it has been well over two months since we wrapped it up. That’s all I will say - there are a gazillion critiques out there much better at breaking it all down for you.
So, you can find all kinds of writing about the characters and story development and whatever else - that is all great. All I really want to talk about is how the show captures a sense of place, more importantly a sense of “home”, for me. Yeah, how boring, right? Not for me. It is one of many things I’m attracted to in the show.
The Feeling of Chicago in The Bear
The sense of place captured in “The Bear” is Chicago of course. I didn’t grow up in Chicago. I grew up in Chicagoland. There is a difference, and you know it if you’re from there. I grew up in a working class suburb about twenty minutes south of the loop, a place close enough to see the Sears Tower on a clear day, but far enough to be considered outside of the Chicago city limits. Yet even though my stomping grounds were 20 minutes from the city center, we were still intimately connected to the city. The nightly news was Chicago news. Many friends and relatives worked in the city. The Metro line was a ten minute walk away and a straight shot into downtown. The city and the suburbs both had the Son of Svengoolie, Empire Carpet, and that dealership in Schaumburg where “You always save more money”. Working class folks shared the same struggles whether they were from the south suburbs or from the city. I had friends with family in the city, and at one point had a girlfriend living in Bridgeport. So even though there was a line of demarcation, the city intertwined part of our lives.
“The Bear” shoots from locations in the city and in surrounding suburbs. Beside major city landmarks and some of the towns, I’m not familiar with any of it in the sense of knowing particular streets, particular businesses, etc. But I’m familiar with the feeling of these places. The feeling evoked by the size of the locations, the feeling evoked by the width of the streets and the way the cars crowd them, the different models of homes and townhouses filling the neighborhoods, the way the front lawns are sized, the way the trees look in the winter, the way the light and the sky create a tone particular to the place. Yes, I said “The Bear'' shoots from locations in and around the city, so this would make sense, right? Sure, though shows often shoot from other locales calling them one place while they’re actually filmed in another. One look at “Silence of the Lambs” and anyone from Chicagoland will tell you Calumet City does not have mountains. “Shameless” shot much of its series from Los Angeles. Anyway, prior to confirming “The Bear” filmed scenes on location, my insides immediately tugged with recognition. I knew it was back “home”. I felt the surety of it even though some of the “outside” scenes could have been shot from anywhere.
There are moments when watching “The Bear” where I am transported back to the midwest and back to Chicagoland. And while all of the visual markers I mentioned above (streets, houses, etc.) would likely trigger a sense of place for anyone, I swear to “gawd” the light has the greatest effect on me and is what feels so particular to the area. It’s something about the way the light, for days on end, can matte everything out, leaving the world appearing devoid of shadows. I hazard a completely out-of-my-ass guess it has something to do with the Lake Michigan lake effect, something with the way the sky can become a seemingly flat canopy of grayish-white, smooth and without variation, softening and filtering the light waves. My only other out-of-my-ass guess is that the latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates of Chicgoland receive sunlight at a specific angle, creating these light effects that only a native will instinctually recognize. This likely has no basis in reality so there you go.
Chicago has a blue collar underpinning to it. Say what you will, it’s fundamentally a blue collar town. The characters in “The Bear” communicate this type of personality, this type of grit. You know it when you see it, and they’ve somehow effectively convinced me that these are Chicagoland people. They’ve toiled, they’re tired, their laughter is deep and well deserved. They’re so far from perfect, so deeply imperfect, but fundamentally good people. They strive toward something bigger than themselves and work with determination toward this no matter what the setback. There is a weariness under the skin, but a sense of purpose. Okay, okay, I’m waxing on and getting into mythical caricatures of the working class, but I think you get my point.
Some Words and Reminiscence About Chicagoland
I left Chicagoland over twenty years ago, trading a palpable malaise for the small town life and farm fields of central Illinois. I was sick of the crowding, the congestion, a feeling the concreting over of everything never ended, and while I could move through it all, neighborhood after neighborhood, and town after town, I wasn’t going anywhere. It presented the same dreary outcomes, the same possibilities. I was sick of it and recognized remaining was not going to lead to a good outcome. From there it was slow movement westward until I started a new life in Boise.
Obviously, I didn’t leave Chicagoland because I loved it. It’s not as if I locked away a deep abiding love for the place. When I left it represented bad feelings and disappointment. This feeling has not improved much. I still find Chicagoland to be a depressing and dismal place. And the weather sucks. Yet it’s the damnedest thing to me, to watch this show and find moments when I’m overcome with sentimentality. To feel what it was like to be there, to really feel this sensation even though at this point I’ve lived in other places longer than I lived there. It’s hard for me to understand how a place I’ve rejected can likewise feel like a homecoming.
Every time I visit Chicagoland I’m filled with repulsion while also feeling the most at home in my skin. It is a nagging contradiction I’ve never sorted out. I mean, really, I live in the safest place I can have ever imagined, barely any crime, a place where forgetting to lock your car or your front door isn’t going to amount to much. Chicagoland is not that place, not from where I come from. I’m more likely to get mugged or shot when visiting than to have anything happen to me out here. And yet I feel more in my element in Chicagoland, like I’m not an outsider, not some imposter.
When visiting I tend to make time for a drive around the neighborhoods and visit the places I lived and roamed. These places are vastly changed, and in no way resemble the living memories inside of me. I move through the neighborhoods, grimacing at the decline, hazy images from times past mentally blinking in and out. Glimpses of us running down the streets in every season, off on a game of tag, off to a friends, running from the angry grip of a neighborhood bully. There was the old Alpine Frosty, quenching our summer thirst with those massive, tart, sugary, slushies. Now a used car lot. Builders Pub, where we would drink $1.00 mugs of Old Style late into the night after our shift at the factory. Gone now, an empty cinder block storefront in an empty cinder block strip mall.
All of my friends from back home have left this area. The closest lives forty-five minutes south, and everyone else is scattered across the country. The last time I was in town I drove around with this friend from further south, and we visited the house he owned for a time after high school. I lived there for about two years after I got out of the service and have a lot of memories tied to this place. Pulling up we’re greeted by an empty grass lot, with the old garage falling apart at the end of a long, cracked and weed-ridden driveway. The house burned down many years before.
What’s this I’m Getting on About?
Is it the light “The Bear” captures? Is it the glimpses of town and city? Is it the gruff, rough-edged characters hardened on the outside, willing to take the piss out of you at every opportunity, but truly soft and caring on the inside, these characters on screen who at times remind me of my friends, arguing and yelling and debating one another over drinks, spending all of our days with one another, celebrating the ups, supporting each other through the downs? Are all of these shades truly transporting me back to a stored away time and place? Or is it a simple mind trick, just knowing the show takes place in Chicago giving permission to my creative brain to take my memories, sentimentally activated, and overlay those movie reel scenes, mentally massaging my memories into them until they fit these locations, these people playing blue collar Chicagoans? The show triggers an array of emotions associated with Chicagoland, and it feels so vitally real to something inside me yet may be nothing more than sentimental daydream.
One of the risks in writing something like this, and having someone other than myself read it, is to broadcast something universal, or something completely obvious, as if it were something wholly new. But I don’t know what goes on in anyone else’s head, and maybe just writing the obvious here, if it is obvious, is still a way to connect or share something we don’t say enough? I don’t know, I don’t even know how to describe what it is I am trying to communicate. Perhaps I’m just stupified by the richness of my own sentimentality as sparked from watching a television drama?
But whether it is months long viewings of “Apocalypse Now”, or four days consuming a season of “The Bear” it matters to me that it makes a connection. In some way. I guess I can simply appreciate how “The Bear” inspires a richness of memory for a place I both despise and feel at home within. Maybe all of this matters because it reveals this contradiction within me, and this fills me with question and wonder, and then this inspires me to write a few thousand words here about sentimental feelings? Now this is something, especially at this age when it is easy for me to feel so tired and preoccupied with general survival that feeling wonder about anything seems like a sensation long forgotten.
Author: Jason Jacobs
Jason Jacobs is an artist, project manager, and frontend web designer living and working in Boise, Idaho. Beyond work he spends his time with family, as well as reading, writing articles for Uhmm, and working on his art. All words and opinions, etc., are his and do not reflect the positions or beliefs of anyone other than himself.