When watching the The Bear, we always know what time it is. Images of clocks and timers are pervasive. There is the main kitchen clock, inexorably counting down the minutes till service begins. There are the digital alarm clocks that jolt chefs and staff out of bed each morning to start the day. There is the doomsday timer, indicating how many days till the loans come due and the restaurant has to close. And famously, there’s the sign in the kitchen declaring: EVERY SECOND COUNTS.
All this clock imagery made me think of Paul Griffiths’ musings on time in hisDecreation: The Last Things of Creatures. Griffiths characterizes time after the Fall as “metronomic” time. This is quantitative time, measurable time, linear time. Like the doomsday clock in The Bear, this sort of time is always counting down towards death. Griffiths contrasts it with liturgical time, which, being essentially dynamic and life-giving, never passes away or grow old. (He also draws the contrast using the physiological imagery of the heart’s systole and diastole, which he connects to Paul’s “the time is short/folded/compressed” (1 Cor. 7:29); but that’s too complicated to get into here.)
Back to The Bear and EVERY SECOND COUNTS: my guess would be that Carmen and Richie have fundamentally different ways of reading that sign. For Carmen, it’s a sort of death sentence: he has to make every second count, otherwise the restaurant and his world will fall apart. For Richie, the message EVERY SECOND COUNTS comes as a kind of grace. The realization that he is not fated to being a “loser” (the epithet Sydney hurls at him repeatedly, in a devastating scene) makes him grateful for every second that’s been given him. I think we can even take this one step further, and say that for Richie his new standards of excellence are also grace of a sort, because they provide him with a sense of dignity as well as a means of serving others. As Karl Barth might put it, the Law or Commandment is a form of the Gospel. Of course we don’t always experience it that way, in the hands of sinners the Commandment can be a death sentence. But that’s our fault, not the fault of the Commandment.
Where does EVERY SECOND COUNTS originate? Ultimately from Chef Terry at Ever, who passed the motto on to her protegés—Carmen in Chicago, Luca in Copenhagen. The scene where she teaches Richie how to peel mushrooms embodies a sort of unhurried, peaceful, liturgical time. It seems that for Chef Terry we have all the time in the world. Another parable of grace.
