Sorry, But The Bear’s Claire Is Pure Male Fantasy

The Bear’s second season is absolutely jam-packed with brilliantly written female characters. There’s Ayo Edebiri’s Sydney, of course, but also Liza Colón-Zayas’s delightful Original Beef veteran Tina; Jamie Lee Curtis’s utterly deranged matriarch Donna; Olivia Colman as a soft-spoken head chef; and even Abby Elliott’s Natalie, who after being largely sidelined in the first installment, emerges as a no-nonsense project manager who spearheads the restaurant’s transformation into The Bear. Perhaps that’s why Molly Gordon’s Claire stands out so much—an effortlessly beautiful childhood friend of Jeremy Allen White’s Carmy, who re-enters his life in episode two and promptly turns it on its head.

Don’t get me wrong—Gordon, who is a captivating, scene-stealing presence in everything from Booksmart to Shiva Baby, is brilliant here, too, but there’s no escaping the fact that Claire is a prototypical Manic Pixie Dream Girl from the moment she bumps into Carmy at the supermarket. You can see it in the way she’s filmed: The first time we meet her, she comes into focus softly, reflected in the glass of the sliding cabinets; almost an angel, bathed in a gentle, hazy, golden glow. (Syd and Nat, by contrast, almost always look exhausted under the stark strip lighting of the restaurant.) You hear it in the spine-tingling music, REM’s “Strange Currencies,” which swells to hammer home her significance. And you know it from what she says: she’s quippy; she finishes his sentences; she’s achingly cool; she asks, albeit indirectly, for his number; and, despite not having seen Carmy in years, remembers what he said he’d name his restaurant. He’s dumbstruck, and from that point onwards, we know that Claire is utterly perfect and that she and Carmy are destined to be together.

According to Nathan Rabin, the critic who coined the term, a Manic Pixie Dream Girl “exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.” She’s a woman who’s endearingly eccentric but lacks a real inner life; one who is entirely devoted to making the male protagonist happy and bringing him out of his shell, while having no complex issues of her own to deal with.

Some might say that Claire’s first scene shows her to be more than that—after all, we learn that she’s training to be an emergency medicine doctor, and that her interest in the field stemmed from an incident when she, aged six, saw a classmate break their arm and found herself wanting to “understand it.” This might count for something if this story ever came up again, or somehow became important, or added to our understanding of Claire’s working life beyond her relationship with Carmy, but it doesn’t. It’s just an anecdote designed to add a dash of color and quirk—one which brings to mind Delaney Rowe’s deliciously satirical TikTok series about an “absolutely insufferable female lead of an indie movie” who “runs into an old love interest” or “tells a childhood story.” Watch both clips and I guarantee you won’t be able to see Claire the same way again.

However, the proof that she is wholly designed to break down Carmy’s defenses and open him up emotionally comes in the following episode. Even though he gives her a fake number—something that would surely deter any flesh-and-blood woman—that simply motivates Claire to pursue him more aggressively. She procures his actual number, playfully threatens him, and then seemingly invents an excuse to hang out. (Or are we actually supposed to believe that she has no one else she could ask for help with moving boxes except for a guy she hasn’t seen since school who just gave her a fake number?) Crucially, she doesn’t seem genuinely furious or upset, though—that’d be too thorny. She’s simply bemused and knowing. In this moment, it’s difficult not to see her as the textbook “cool girl” that men dream about, as described by Amy Dunne in her enraged Gone Girl monologue—she’s hot, always game, fun, and someone who never gets angry at her man.

After that, we see her helping him run an errand, and delivering some classically kooky Manic Pixie Dream Girl lines in the process: “I had all this extra adrenaline after resettling this guy’s tibia,” she declares without batting an eyelid; and then, “I’m a horrible driver… but I enjoy the risk of it,” said with an enigmatic smile; plus her confession about shoplifting gum from Walgreens as a child. She also gets him talking about his late brother, and drags him to his first ever party. She’s ostensibly there to comfort a heartbroken friend, but within the context of the show, that scene is significant only because she’s the catalyst that gets Carmy out of his comfort zone and reminds him of the lighter side of life, away from the pressures of the kitchen. After a few longing looks from afar and an almost-kiss (with a backdrop of fireworks, no less), they go back to the restaurant and kiss for real.

The rest of their relationship plays out in Carmy’s apartment, where Claire is a constant source of calm and support, telling him to “never, ever apologize” when he fears he’ll mess everything up. Then, of course, he does. In the climactic scene of the season finale, Carmy—spoiler alert—gets locked into the walk-in fridge and yells about the importance of choosing work over his relationship with Claire, unaware of the fact that she’s just outside the door. “I’m really sorry you feel that way,” she murmurs, walking away with tears in her eyes. But, she doesn’t rage at him; she doesn’t call him out on his shit; she’s just quietly disappointed. You’re left with the feeling that the proverbial door between them is not entirely closed.

In the end, Claire is largely defined by all the things she doesn’t do. Unlike Syd and Nat, who constantly badger Carmy about getting more forks and finalizing the menu and not picking the fancy plates, she seems to expect and demand nothing from him. She admits that her job “isn’t chill” and means her spending “100 hours on and two hours off,” but she’s always inexplicably serene and available to him, never bringing the stress of it home, while Carmy, who is objectively in a line of work with significantly lower stakes, is the one receiving all of the care and reassurance. We see one musical montage of her pushing a medical bed, but apart from that, she’s just in scrubs making long, flirty phone calls or leaving him leisurely, loving voicemails. In short, she’s a saint who Carmy views as a symbol of the love and stability he doesn’t feel deserving of.

It’s entirely possible that The Bear’s creator, Christopher Storer, has done all of this on purpose. When speaking to Vogue about Gordon’s performance earlier this month, he noted that we, the audience, are “also just getting to know Claire through Carmy’s eyes [this season] as this potentially hopeful, beautiful ideal he’s been attached and attracted to since he was a teenager.” But then shouldn’t there also be a moment when that subjectivity is at least briefly acknowledged in the show and we see a glimpse of the real Claire, as we did, for instance, with Claire Danes’s initially vilified Rachel in Fleishman Is in Trouble? Sadly, that never comes.

But, given the progression of Natalie’s character from the first season to the second, it seems highly likely that it will in Season 2—if Claire returns, of course. (Full disclosure: I thought Abby Elliott’s character, who in Season 2 appears to exist solely to encourage Carmy to deal with his feelings around their brother’s death, was actually called Sugar, her childhood nickname, until all of the characters began calling her “Nat” pointedly in the Season 2 opener.)

Ultimately, in Season 2, The Bear has set its own internal bar too high for viewers to be satisfied with a character like Claire. How could she, a sweet and accommodating plot device, ever compare to Syd, for example, a hilariously awkward, supremely talented, always doubtful but outspoken bundle of nerves who is surely one of the most layered and complex women of color currently on TV? The masterful way in which she’s written gives me hope that Storer will choose to engage with Claire in a real and more interesting way in the next installment, giving us an insight into her home life, fears, and frustrations—and, most importantly, give the whip-smart and wonderfully nuanced Gordon much more to do.