Uncomfortable Truths about Our Times: Beef & Notes from the Underground, Part I
“I’m a bad person,” Amy Lau confesses to her husband in episode eight of Beef. “I’ve been like this my entire life. I want to blame my parents, but I think it’s just me.” Beef, a 2023 Netflix series, won eight Emmy awards and three Golden Globes. Starring Ali Wong as Amy Lau and Steven Yeun as Danny Cho, it begins with a road rage incident between two high-strung strangers and spirals into deeper and darker activities by and between the two main characters. Across 10 episodes, we watch Amy and Danny antagonize each other, hurt and alienate their family members, work too hard to help others, lie, treat each other cruelly, hate and harm themselves, and end up in bizarre and R-rated situations. We watch them make bad choices and see them believe themselves to be bad people, a conviction based on both legitimate and illegitimate evidence. Every episode packs an intense punch.
As new and exciting as it is, Beef very much resembles Dostoevsky’s Notes From the Underground in the best of ways. On the opening page of Notes From the Underground, the Underground Man tells us, “I am a sick man…I am a spiteful man.” We are soon convinced. He is disgusted with everyone and with himself. While the book opens with his reflections, it turns to actual interactions with others. He proves himself to be difficult to get along with, perhaps impossible. He meets up with old friends, antagonizes them, gets drunk and behaves badly, feels humiliated, visits a prostitute, proposes to help her begin a new life, and then humiliates her to feel superior. What is true when he is alone is also true when he is with others. As he says, “the more deeply I sank into the mire, and the more likely I was to get myself completely stuck in it.” The self-description could easily apply to either of the two main characters in Beef.
Reading Notes From the Underground or watching Beef can make you profoundly uncomfortable. The characters make bad choices, are sometimes cruel, and are often sick and spiteful. Yet we’re still reading Notes From the Underground over 100 years after it was written. Beef made the Nielsen top ten for viewing. The stories succeed for the same reasons that they make us uncomfortable. The discomfort does not come dissimilarity from our own experience, but from similarity. Perhaps we wouldn’t go quite so far or say exactly the same things, but we know the ugliness that lurks within us when we’re cut off in a parking lot or passed over for a job we believe we deserve. We know the judgments we make of others and ourselves. Beef and Notes From the Underground are more than interesting narratives—they are a commentary on society and on the nature of the human condition.
The Underground Man is easily one of the most unlovable characters of classic literature, but he tells us that people like himself, “not only can, but even must exist in our society, given the circumstances under which it has been constituted in general.” Dostoevsky was writing from Tsarist Russia, where you could be sent to Siberia for reading socialist literature. Men like the Underground Man had few freedoms and very limited prospects. A man could linger just above the bottom of society—lonely and miserable—for a whole lifetime, borrowing to buy a beaver collar, paying for sexual intimacy, hating young military officers, and finding solace and escape only in literature. The Underground Man has been described as a “superfluous man.” Though the circumstances of this century are quite different, the sense of despair has continued.
1866 edition of Notes from the Underground
Beef draws attention to the hamster wheel of our America today. People work very hard and feel like they get nowhere. They struggle to connect in their relationships. Amy Lau works hard to support her family, but is never fully appreciated. She isn’t sure that her parents ever loved her. She is sexually unfulfilled. Her mother-in-law is difficult. She just wants to sell her company and connect better with her daughter and be happy. She is not sure all of that is possible. Danny Cho also works hard to support his family. He has a freeloading brother and a criminal cousin who is always in his way. Danny works very hard and wants to buy a house for his parents, but has no degree and struggles to get his company going. No one seems to respect him or take him seriously. He is exhausted and underappreciated, just like Amy. He finds his comfort in Burger King chicken sandwiches, usually four in a sitting. In Beef, every time the main characters seem to be healing or getting ahead, something bad happens. Many people feel that way, even if they only eat one chicken sandwich at a time.
In Beef, our badly behaving characters link their spite to the rapid transformations of the last 40 years. In episode 10, Danny reflects on the plight of his (millennial) generation. He complains that everyone born in the 1980s “got screwed.” It was all “fast food, candy, and secondhand smoke.” He continues, “We hit puberty right when they invented the internet.” Then ethernet came when they left home and it was a Wild West of pornography. “We were the guinea pigs. We got used.” He asks, what if “everyone started imitating porn and now real life is the porn?” Given these bewildering circumstances, maybe the Underground Man is correct. Maybe someone who will bump you off the sidewalk or run you off the road must exist. These people are the product of our times and their provocations.
What can we do in these circumstances? Attempting revenge is one option. After being run off the road by Amy, Danny is determined to find her and make her pay. When he finds her, he manages to get into her house through trickery and then urinates all over her bathroom. He feels great about it. Amy decides to go after Danny, perhaps to ruin his life. As the show continues, they escalate their attempts at revenge to absurd levels. While we may not go to the same lengths, many of us also feel put upon by the world and we want to make the world pay. According to the Underground Man, “a man takes revenge because he believes revenge is justice.” Our main characters, and sometimes ourselves, believe that they are the victims of an unjust world. Part II of this essay is available here.
Elizabeth Stice is an associate professor of history at Palm Beach Atlantic University. She has a book about World War I, Empire Between the Lines: Imperial Culture in British and French Trench Newspapers of the Great War, and she has written for various publications, including Front Porch Republic, Comment, and Inside Higher Ed.