The Anger Equation – Weekend
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On the Netflix platform, “The Gnaw”, a 10-episode existential comedy from Studio A24, has been released. Judging by the ratings of critics and viewers, this story about a little man who cannot cope with suppressed anger and aggression is the best series of the year.
Second-generation immigrant Danny (Stephen Young) sleeps and sees how he will build a house and bring back to America his parents who left for Korea when their motel went bust. But Danny’s construction company does not generate income, his younger brother, instead of helping, stares at the computer all day long and life has long turned into running on the spot.
Amy (Ali Wong), the daughter of a Chinese man and a Vietnamese, is doing better in Los Angeles and has a big ointment deal: She almost sold a chain of department stores that she built a flower business from scratch. But her husband, George (Joseph Lee), from a wealthy Japanese artist family, will always be half a head ahead of any of her achievements, simply by virtue of innate privilege. It pisses Amy off, but in the world of psychotherapy and “mindfulness,” you can’t even swear. Until you run into Danny on the road.
He came to return the grill grate to the store, but forgot the receipt. By the way, with the help of this lattice, the guy wanted to commit suicide – but he did not succeed here either. And now, at the exit from the parking lot, a strange car brazenly blocks his way, and the driver shows the middle finger from the window. Danny thinks the guy behind the wheel is too cocky. But this is Amy, she finally allowed herself to be herself: yelling, raging and having a duel between a pickup truck and an SUV.
The beginning of Lee Sung Jin’s black comedy is like a fairy tale about a lump from a mountain – it rolls, sweeping away everything in its path. After a frantic race around Los Angeles, once again humiliated, Danny will begin to take revenge on the car boor – that this is an aunt from another social stratum, he will only find out when he hits the car number on the database. He will dirty the floor in her apartment with a designer renovation, and she will paint offensive inscriptions on his car. He almost blows her deal, and she turns him in to the cops. With a frenzy, they will destroy each other’s lives until both are in the ashes. You could, of course, go to a psychotherapist. But for Amy, this is another one of those hypocritical social traditions that helps like a dead poultice. And Danny is convinced: “the shrinks of the West are too tough for the minds of the East!” West is West, East is East, they can’t get along… Ok!
The Asian origin of the characters and the trauma of emigration (all of them have difficult relationships with parents, emigrants in the first generation) only highlight the main problem: this world is generally an unfriendly place. And the main traumatic discovery is that nothing depends on you here, and anger is born from this. Lee Sung Jin pokes fun at the trendy practices of “mindfulness” and psychoanalysis involved in relationships with parents (a chair that George’s father made in the form of his mother’s butt plays a big role in the plot). Conversations with shrinks only varnish the mental discord. But the specificity of Asian immigrants in America has nothing to do with it. This is a story about how he allowed himself to break loose once, did not have time to look back – and was already stuck up to his ears. A lump from the mountain does not spare anyone and rolls the same way everywhere: in the recent Scottish black comedy “Guilt” about brothers who accidentally knocked down a man on an empty road and decided to hide it, and in the Welsh detective story “The Pact”, where the brewery workers just wanted to teach the bastard a lesson -Chief, and he take and die. The format “the claw is bogged down – the whole bird is abyss” has no national affiliation.
In the anamnesis of such stories – the classic film “Fargo” about a little man who just wanted to cheat a little, gave himself free rein, broke firewood, and the whole woodpile fell on him. “I worked like hell all my life, even for basic needs. And I thought that’s why I’m so bad. And then I discovered that when you achieve something, it doesn’t get easier, ”says Danny. Suppressed anger is also a universal emotion. The further the plot of “Gnaw” moves, the more obvious it becomes that Danny and Amy are emotionally similar, and here both intimacy and hostility would be born – but no. Anger and aggression are born from the desire to break out of life’s rut, where you are forced to constantly meet other people’s expectations. The heroes do not notice their similarity until the last episodes, and fragments of irritation fly into their faces – like all of us.
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