Beef

 Ire, sometimes called "wrath," is one of the seven deadly sins.  Beef (Netflix) is a ten part series that takes ire as its subject.  It's an inventive and well-wrought program, frequently surprising with unpredictable twists and turns.  We live in a world in which media of all kinds flourishes (and profits) by inspiring anger in its consumers.  In the last few years, anger has become an industry and, of course, our nation is profoundly, and, possibly, irrevocably divided.  Therefore, Beef, here referring to a row or dispute between people, is acutely attuned to the Zeitgeist.  The show, more or less, rubs your nose in dysfunctional rage and provides a demonstration as to how unbridled anger infects and contaminates -- what begins as a minor incident infects an extended community of people, destroys families, and, ultimately, results in a number of murders.  Beef is not completely plausible on all levels; aspects of the series involve magical realism (for instance, there are peculiar visions, talking animals, and the like), but the show cleaves closely enough to its milieu and the characters inhabiting that environment to be highly compelling.

Simply put, the premise is the program is that a road rage incident involving a contractor of Korean heritage and a Vietnamese immigrant entrepreneur proliferates into a series of insults and assaults that expands with a sort of lethal and exponential force.  Almost all of the characters are East Asians, either working class members of the Korean diaspora, strivers from the Vietnamese refugee community, and well-heeled, rather condescending Japanese-Americans.  There are only a couple of typically Caucasian characters in the film and, with one exception, they have relatively minor roles.  (One pleasure of the film is that it explores how these communities, comprised of second-generation immigrants, are organized and how these various ethnic groups interact).  An interesting aspect of the show is that the characters all look alike  to some extent -- that is, they are all Asians -- but, of course, sharp distinctions exist as to their social and ethnic identities.  It appears that the Vietnamese look down on the Japanese and vice-versa.  The Koreans live in tightly knit communities that are organized along family and religious ties -- the Korean characters all attend an evangelical Christian church that features much vigorous singing, praying, and rock and roll at their services.  Korean criminals fear Filipino gangs.  And, so, we are presented with clashing ethnicities throughout the program.  Clearly, there are ethnic subtexts to the road rage incident that precipitates the action in Beef; however, I can't exactly understand those aspects of the show.  At a big box Home Depot sort of store, Danny, a Korean-American contractor, is returning a half-dozen hibachis.  He has to wait in line and endure delays caused by other customers who seem insufferable to him.  (He has purchased the hibachis to generate enough carbon monoxide in his apartment to kill himself but has lost confidence in that suicide plan -- we don't learn this until about the third episode and this is an example the rather macabre surprises that the plot offers; it's hard to write about the ten episode series without "spoilers", that is, revealing narrative aspects to the story that are intended to astonish viewers -- therefore, I will give only an abbreviated summary of the show's very intricate plot.)  Departing from the Home Depot (or whatever it is), Danny almost backs into a white SUV.  The driver of the white SUV gives him the finger and this leads to a frantic, and terrifying, chase down the LA highways that ends with both vehicles roaring through someone's landscaping, an encounter that is filmed on cell-phone by a passing motorist.  As we come to learn, the driver of the SUV is Amy, a forty-year old woman of Vietnamese extraction who is the throes of selling her very successful business, a franchise of shops that sell potted plants.  (She is involved in negotiations with Jordan, an eccentric female tycoon, who seems to own a business like Walmart and who lives in a remote fortress-like castle complete with panic-rooms and a octagonal chamber in which she displays her collection of medieval and pre-Columbian crowns; the patronizing and entitled Jordan is the closest thing to an actual villain in Beef.)  Both Danny and Amy are stretched taut to the point where something has to snap -- and it's the road rage incident that demonstrates this.  Neither of the two main characters can dismiss the confrontation and they continue to brood about it.  Danny figures out Amy's identify and goes to her house where he obsequiously comments on her defective plumbing and, then, urinates all over the floor of her bathroom.  Amy tracks him down and paints obscenities and insults all over his red pickup truck.  Danny retaliates by going to Amy's house, dousing her car in gas, and is about to strike a match when he sees Amy's four-year old daughter, June, smiling at him from her car seat in the back of the vehicle.  Amy is married to George, a gregarious and ultra-handsome Japanese man, the son of a famous artist.  (George makes rather grotesque, phallic-shaped pots and jugs -- they look like the work of the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama.)  George is a perfect husband and father and too good to be true -- his marriage to Amy is foundering on his overbearing perfection.  Amy, like Danny, is badly damaged by her childhood -- she was bullied into success by her refugee parents:  we never heard birds growing up, Amy's mother told her, because we were starving, we had eaten them all.  Correspondingly, Danny's parents, who ran a flea-bag motel, have lost everything when a cousin, a thug named Isaac, channeled his criminal operations through the family business, money-laundered with its cash, and embezzled from them.  Danny is struggling to please his rather stern and aggrieved mother and father by building a house for them -- financed by money embezzled from the Evangelical Church in which he leads a rock band.  Both Danny and Amy, beneath their rather placid exteriors, are half-mad and kindred spirits -- this is demonstrated explicitly in the final episode in which, for a few minutes, they speak in unison and, then, switch identities.  Amy catfishes Danny to lure him into thinking that her very attractive (Caucasian) assistant is sexually intrigued by him -- she doesn't know that her assistant is having an affair with the handsome and smarmy George, her husband.  The scheme backfires when she accidentally hooks Danny's kid brother, Paul.  Amy and Paul, then, have a sexual encounter.  Ultimately, all of these misdeeds are exposed, houses get burned down, children are kidnapped, and a lot of people get shot.  

Beef's ten episodes are cumulatively about eight hours long, more or less, the length of Erich von Stroheim's original cut of Greed.  (The equivalence in length exposes an interesting factor -- today's limited series form, clocking in at eight to twelve hours, is the ideal vehicle for presenting faithful adaptations of novels that would otherwise be unreasonably truncated if reduced to feature film length.  The industry has finally caught up with Stroheim.)  Greed, also an allegory about one of the deadly sins, had a similar structure and was also "magical realist avant la lettre -- it featured visionary sequences and symbolic imagery as well.  Most importantly, Greed starts as a low-key domestic satire, a critique of lower middle class mores and bourgeois marriage, and ends with two men, shackled together, laboriously killing one another in Death Valley.  Beef, the name sounds like Greed, ends up with its two principals badly wounded, dying, it seems, in a barren canyon in the desert mountains near Los Angeles.  Greed was butchered; Beef is all there.  (The show is co-produced by Steven Yuen and Ali Wong, the standup comedian, who play the leads.)