Page 110 - Metropolis Megazine No.120 International

CARMY

At work, Carmy searches for a way Intimacy emerges as a threat. His past failures, and future fears.
to survive what he has never been connection with Claire (Molly Gor-
able to resolve. The pain of losing don), for example, represents a pos- While other characters seem, al-
his brother Michael (Jon Bernthal), sibility of tenderness—and that is beit hesitantly, to be rehearsing
his unstable emotional heritage, precisely why it becomes unsustai- some kind of transition—Richie,
and the strict discipline of the kit- nable. Carmy does not know how Natalie, even Sydney—Carmy re-
chen have shaped him to act—but to exist in a space that does not mains suspended. Unable to swit-
not to stop or to feel in a functio- depend on urgency and control. He ch off and give in. His pain is not
nal way. When he returns to Chi- fears failure, disappointment, and grandiose, much less romantic: it
cago, he brings with him a silence letting down those he tries to pro- represents an emotional rigidity
that is difficult to break, a sense of tect. The fear of repeating the past that distances him from the world
urgency that he cannot switch off, paralyses him more than the grief at the very moment when he most
and a perfectionism that serves itself. And it is in this blockage that needs to get closer. And behind
more to contain his emotions than the series finds him, literally and every dish and every technical ges-
to create. The kitchen offers him a symbolically, locked in a cold sto- ture, there is always that same im-
logic that the rest of his life lacks: rage room: isolated, powerless, and pulse: to try to organise on the out-
there, everything seems control- immersed in a stream of thoughts side what continues to fall apart on
lable, measurable, and executable. he cannot silence. Time slows down, the inside. In the end, perhaps it is
But this order is fragile, and the but his mind races—images from not a Michelin star that Carmy is
world outside it is always lurking. childhood, memories of his brother, looking for...

110 METROPOLIS JULY 2025