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In Beef, growing alienation erupts in a chance encounter between strangers. (Netflix)
Beef, A24’s new ten-episode Netflix dramedy, has plenty going for it. The premise is compelling, featuring two charismatic leads, Steven Yeun (Minari, The Walking Dead) as financially strapped contractor Danny Cho and Ali Wong (Always Be My Maybe) as rich, type A entrepreneur Amy Lau, locked in an escalating feud after getting embroiled in a Los Angeles road-rage incident.
It seems right that this incident doesn’t even amount to a fender bender — there’s no collision, however slight, between Danny’s overloaded old red pickup truck and Amy’s gleaming white SUV. Distracted by his own misery, Danny tries to back out of a parking space and is honked at with blaring aggression by Amy, as yet unseen behind tinted windows. She flips him off, he tries to chase her down in typically hair-raising LA traffic, and that’s the start of the whole insane rigamarole. It’s a good way to illustrate the way people live now, in such a boiling cauldron of pressure and disparagement that we’re all ready to pop off at the slightest diss.
Initially, class seems like the focus of the antagonism. Certainly, I was Team Danny all the way, because after all, who has plenty of money to soften every rough edge of this god-awful world made of nothing but rough edges? Not Danny.
He’s actually only an aspiring contractor, more like a broke handyman with big, anxious dreams, struggling to make his bills and get any kind of professional traction doing repairs for affluent LA types who openly despise him. (Overheard from the wife of one client: “Just fire him, honey! He’s so annoying!”) He lives in a crappy apartment with his slacker younger brother, Paul (Young Mazino), and has promised to scrape up enough money somehow to bring his aging parents over from South Korea. His life is a nightmare of financial worries and desperate attempts to put up a front of happiness and success, which fools nobody.
Show creator-writer-director-producer Lee Sung Jin (Tucca and Bertie, Dave, Silicon Valley) has stated in interviews that he originally planned to have Korean immigrant Dan run up against a wealthy white American guy, but decided against emphasizing racial hostility. Both lead characters are Asian American, though the series delves into the specifics of their very different backgrounds within that broad category. Amy is Chinese American and so driven and harried by expectations of excellence that she’s in a state of throttled rage most of the time. This is the key thing she has in common with Danny, which will create a twisted bond between them. Both are “so sick of smiling” through their woes, they find forbidden joy in acting on directly expressed hatred.
Amy runs a curated plant empire, including one of those godawful stores that look like museum exhibits, in which each ridiculously expensive, preciously potted plant is presented as a separate work of art. She’s about to put through a multimillion-dollar deal selling the whole business to a vastly wealthy monster named Jordan Forster (Maria Bello). Jumping through hoops trying to persuade Jordan to seal the deal, she’s feeling perpetually guilty about not spending enough time with her beloved daughter, June (Remy Holt), and “nice” but clueless stay-at-home husband Joji “George” Nakai (Joseph Lee), a hopelessly untalented artist always spouting New Age aphorisms. She’s also saddled with a harshly judgmental mother-in-law Fumi (Patti Yasutake). In short, Amy is cracking under the strain. But her anguish is all emerging out of personal relationships and monied career developments, very different from Dan’s basic material hardship underlying family turmoil.
Nevertheless, as the episodes unspool, the series focuses more and more on Danny and Amy’s commonality, even as their raging acts of vengeance spin out of control and drag their families and associates into some luridly bad consequences. Lee Sung Jin seems inclined toward broad humanistic conclusions, saying in interviews that the show is ultimately about “how hard it is to be alive.”
And after all, in the end — class issues aside — aren’t Danny and Amy just flawed human beings trapped in a malfunctioning society that pits them against each other? Sure. Sure, sure, sure. Sure. But sometimes I get pretty weary of the almost inevitable “class issues aside” move in popular entertainment. The series goes out of its way to make it clear that both of them have done very bad things in the past, both of them deceive and betray their families, both of them lead creepy, secret emotional lives, both of them gravitate eagerly — even erotically — toward vengeful violence. This insistent equivalence reminds me of the old “cross-class fantasies” made in the Depression era to help tamp down the entirely justified rage of the ever more impoverished working class against the monied elite.
Screwball comedies like It Happened One Night (1934), My Man Godfrey (1936), Easy Living (1937), and Bachelor Mother (1939) were wonderfully schematic in pairing off a wealthy person with a struggling working-class person, showing how each had offbeat charm as well as things to teach each other. Aren’t they both — rich person and poor person — eccentric and comedically flawed, yet so lovable? Don’t they go together perfectly to create a more perfect union? No reason for hating one side more than the other, no call for torch-bearing mobs here!
Though Beef has none of the hilarious, upbeat, utopian qualities of screwball comedy, it shares a certain cross-class fantasy logic, only in dark dramedy form. It’s an unpleasant show, really. But then again, we live in a deeply unpleasant culture, and it’s only natural to point it out.
And it’s also a well-made production with a train-wreck fascination that makes it hard to stop watching once you start. I wish the series ran for eight episodes instead of ten — some of the narrative beats start getting predictable as the feud escalates. But still, the show’s erratic momentum holds up well enough to propel you to the much-discussed grand finale of catastrophe, followed by shaky steps toward rapprochement and possible redemption.
A powder keg of growing alienation finally erupting in a chance encounter with a stranger — truly a story for our times.
US Army soldiers sit inside a Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV) during military drills of Polish and NATO soldiers near the Vistula Spit canal, near Krynica Morska, northern Poland, on April 17, 2023. (Wojtek Radwanski / AFP via Getty Images)
Washington, we are incessantly told, is paralyzed by a climate of brinkmanship and polarization. That has indeed been the case in many areas over the past few years, as was frustratingly clear throughout the Biden administration’s attempts to pass a major domestic spending package after taking office. When it comes to defense spending, however, none of the usual rules of politics seem to apply.
Though unable to find common ground elsewhere, Democratic and Republican lawmakers invariably forget their differences whenever the Pentagon is involved. Despite preaching fiscal restraint on social expenditure, the economic conservatives who dominate both parties have never met a military budget they consider too large or demanded that cruise missiles be subject to a work requirement before they vote Yea. As Stephen Semler of the Security Policy Reform Institute put it back in 2021: “Roll call votes on military spending reveal that there are considerably fewer ‘deficit hawks’ or ‘fiscal conservatives’ in Congress than reported by mainstream media outlets, if any at all.”
The Pentagon’s bloated and ever-expanding budget undermines American democracy, not only because it never receives the same scrutiny as other government spending, but because it ultimately funnels so much money away from essential social and public goods — as a new report released by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) makes vividly clear. Published annually on Tax Day in collaboration with the National Priorities Project, the institute’s analysis examines Americans’ incomes taxes in relation to military and security spending to show just how much of the average person’s tax bill is going to the likes of cluster bombs rather than hospitals or schools. Its findings are staggering.
(Institute for Policy Studies / National Priorities Project)
This year, the average American taxpayer paid $1,087 just for Pentagon contractors alone — a sum representing twenty-one days of work for the average person and four times what they contributed to K-12 education ($270). They also paid approximately $74 for the maintenance of nuclear weapons, while just $43 went to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). An average taxpayer gave $298 to the five largest military contractors, while only $19 went to programs concerned with mental health and substance abuse. Lockheed Martin, incidentally a major air polluter, received $106 from the average person’s income tax contribution, while a mere $6 went to renewable energy.
The Pentagon’s bloated and ever-expanding budget undermines American democracy and funnels money away from essential social and public goods.
The institute has long tracked the wider growth of spending related to domestic policing and securitization. Here the numbers are no less striking: $20 per taxpayer for federal prisons and just $11 for anti-homelessness programs; $70 for deportations and border control versus just $19 for refugee assistance, and on and on it goes.
As part of the study, the IPS also offers an interactive tool showing how money currently going to the military might otherwise be spent. These results are also staggering. For just 10 percent of what America spent on militarization in 2021, it could have funded 660,631 registered nurses, 8.8 million units of public housing, or 1.69 million jobs paying $15 per hour with benefits for an entire year. A mere 1 percent could have funded four-year scholarships for nearly 200,000 students, powered 18.7 million homes with wind or 21 million with solar energy, or salaried approximately 81,000 elementary school teachers over the next twelve months.
(Institute for Policy Studies / National Priorities Project)
Faced with numbers like these, it’s hard to not think about the more generous and humane society that might exist if the institutions of America’s government were less captured by the military-industrial complex. The United States currently spends more on its military than the next nine countries combined (the majority of which are allies), and even a 10 percent cut to its military budget would leave it far ahead of all other countries in total military expenditure.
Since the late 1970s, American politics have been dominated by a strand of fiscal conservatism that views taxes as evil and the state as a quasi-illegitimate body that skims from the wealth ordinary citizens earn. There are many problems with this argument, but it’s especially difficult to take seriously given that its proponents always seem to exclude military spending from the equation. Considering how little scrutiny such spending receives, and considering that it continues to increase regardless of who’s in power, ordinary Americans are effectively being forced to subsidize a bloated military bureaucracy to the tune of hundreds of billions every year — all while having zero say in the matter.
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Charges have been dropped against Frank Allison, a 44-year-old father from Georgia, after a road rage incident resulted in the shooting of both his and another dad’s daughter.
On October 8, 2022, Allison and 36-year-old William Hale were involved in a heated confrontation while driving Highway 1 with their families in Nassau County, Florida. According to witnesses, the two men were engaged in a “cat and mouse” game, and one witness feared something terrible would happen and called 911 shortly before the shooting.
Hale reportedly told investigators that both he and Allison were taking turns “brake checking” each other, a tactic defined by police as “slamming their brakes while ahead of one another.”
At one point, Hale pulled up alongside Allison and shouted something through the window, after which he heard a “pow” and noticed his daughter screaming. He returned fire.
According to documents, Allison also fired shots in Hale’s direction, claiming a water bottle had been thrown through his window, and a single bullet struck the girl in the backseat in the leg. Hale emptied his magazine toward Allison’s Nissan SUV, hitting Allison’s daughter in the back.
On March 31, the prosecutors decided to drop the charge of second-degree murder against Allison due to Florida’s “stand your ground” law, suggesting that Hale was the suspected aggressor.
Hale has since been charged with attempted murder and aggravated assault and has been charged with shooting into a vehicle.
Hale is due back in court on April 20 for his arraignment. It is hoped that the victims of this incident will receive justice and the families can begin to heal. Sheriff Bill Leeper stated after the event, “There could’ve been two dead kids cause of two stupid grown men.”
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