Warning: spoilers ahead for Beef.
Netflix's Beef is an exercise in pressure cooking. The premise, that of two people who become rivals after a particularly terrifying bout of mutual road rage, is an indictment on what happens when you suppress emotions and let rage fester until the point it blows the lid off your entire life. Over the course of 10 episodes, Amy (Ali Wong), a wealthy small business owner, and Danny (Steven Yeun), a struggling contractor, channel the frustration they feel about their own circumstances into a petty game of chicken which, by the end, finds them both swerving off the road, metaphorically and literally. On the path to mutual destruction, there's inevitable collateral, but in a ninth-episode twist that turned up the heat, one particular death has lingered as the series' most drastic and gruesome turn.
In episode nine, things come to a head for Danny and Amy as their months-long playing with fire erupts. Amy, trying to get the sale of her business back on the table with Jordan (Maria Bello), a home improvement chain store owner, is at her house when she gets a call from her husband George (Joseph Lee) that Danny has kidnapped their young daughter June. Danny had unwittingly stolen a car with June in the backseat and is figuring out how to make it right when his loose-cannon cousin Isaac (David Choe) barges in with goons demanding money. On the phone, Amy negotiates that if he comes to the house Jordan shares with her brother's wife (it's more than implied that the pair ran off together), Naomi (Ashley Park), then they could steal millions of dollars worth of art.
When the gang descends on Jordan's mansion, all hell breaks loose and the plan falls apart. In the chaos, Naomi and Jordan make a break for the panic room in their house with one of Isaac's henchmen at their heels. As Naomi reaches the room, Jordan tells her to wait before closing the door, but she doesn't. Instead, she hits the button right as Jordan trips past the threshold, its steel doors snapping shut through her torso. After some brutally visceral shots of the door ploughing through Jordan's body, the room is sealed shut with Naomi and the top half of her partner Jordan trapped inside.
The scene is particularly gruesome in the landscape of Beef. Granted, the series starts with rage and simmers at that point for the rest of its run, but its casualties, up until that point, had mostly been of the emotional kind, like Danny's brother Paul being unknowingly catfished by Amy or Amy's relationship with her daughter suffering as a result of her dissatisfaction. But Jordan's death is lingered on, the sounds of her especially horrible demise amplified and the reactions of Naomi and the henchman focused on in the aftermath.
With the series speeding towards some kind of inevitably catastrophic conclusion, you could argue that Jordan's death was simply just a necessary penultimate-episode hook, a way to show the audience and the characters that Amy and Danny's rivalry has consequences. But you could also argue that the scene, both the fact that someone dies so brutally and the fact that it's Jordan, feels a little bit out of left field. However, Beef is all about the repercussions of burying emotions and, as a result, not having a handle on them when they burst to the surface. Naomi and Jordan, on the surface, represent something ideal, a life free of monetary constraints, but their lives are just as burdened by unsaid feelings.
Jordan, whose death at any stage would have felt somewhat just by the way she acts as a classic, problematic privileged white thorn in Amy's side, uses power as a silencing tool. Naomi, who is seen across the series as submissive to her condescension, reaches a boiling point in episode nine where it becomes evident she believes Jordan wants to leave her for Amy. Jordan, on being confronted by the attackers, assumes it's the work of her brother who is jealous that she stole Naomi away from him. Without a second thought, she says he can have her back. It's unclear whether Naomi wanted to seal herself in the panic room alone or slice Jordan in two, though it's hard to imagine that was her thought process. Either way, in that split second, Naomi let her unspoken rage call the shots on a future where Jordan is dead.
Jordan is a proxy for so much that rots Danny and Amy to their core. While she literally holds the purse strings that would give Amy the freedom she wants, she also represents the ease of wealth and security that Danny wishes he could offer his family. There's also her overbearing white privilege against a backdrop of Asian immigrant stories, from her cultural faux pas with Amy to the way she sees Naomi as a disposable accessory.
Beef, at its heart, is a story about the Asian-American experience of clawing to the top of a society built by white people to maintain a status quo. Jordan is that status quo, and she had to die for Amy and Danny's beef to reach its final destination, that of damaged, common ground. Still, maybe don't watch with subtitles unless you want the image of [flesh squelches] burned into your brain forever.
Beef is streaming on Netflix now.
