Beef has been all the rage—no pun intended—since it dropped on Netflix last Friday. Steven Yeun and Ali Wong’s dark comedy has skyrocketed into the no. 1 slot on Netflix’s top 10 list, thanks to a zany road rage premise full of hard left turns, needle drops, and forbidden romances. But there’s one scene in particular that we’re all fixated on: the one where Wong’s character gets turned on by a gun.
The story of Beef should’ve led viewers to expect that wild antics would follow. Something this level of wild, though, was unexpected.
(Slight spoilers for Beef Episode 1 follow.)
The series follows Danny (Yeun), who sparks an all-out war with Amy (Wong) after she nearly crashes her pearly white SUV into his worn pickup truck in a parking lot. The pair go to extreme lengths—bad Yelp reviews, flirting with siblings, pee, guns—to get payback. But the deeper they get into the discrepancy, the harder it is to get satisfying revenge on each other.
Chekhov’s (now phallic) gun is introduced in the first episode, in which Amy hacks into her family’s safe to fetch a gun she purchased. Her husband George (Joseph Lee) had previously locked it up, fearful of Amy’s intentions with the weapon—but Amy’s desperate to get in, clawing at the safe like an iPad kid attempts to finagle their tech back after screen time ends. It’s forbidden! (Which only makes it more enticing!)
Alas, Amy is a woman on a mission, and there’s no stopping her. She hacks into the safe by cracking the code—only Amy and Freud himself would have guessed that it was George’s mother’s birthday. Inside lies just one precious item: Amy’s gun, partnered with a bounty of bullets.
One might expect Amy to pocket the gun as a weapon to keep herself safe from Danny, who, just a scene ago, was attempting to crash his car into hers. That’s not the case. The gun is actually more of a toy for Amy. In fact, it’s a sex toy.
Amy begins her session with the gun by rubbing it around her face, kissing it, which almost gives the impression that she’s going to shoot herself in the mouth. She does pull the trigger—but those bullets are firmly planted in the safe, so she’s shooting blanks into herself. (Again, no pun intended.)
She then brings the gun downtown, under her skirt, where she fools around with it. Amy continues to pull the trigger, which is incredibly stressful to watch. No, there aren’t any bullets—but it just feels like something could go wrong at any point. A shot fired *down there* can’t be good news for anyone. It’s thrilling. It’s shocking. It’s—dare I say it—sexy.
As fans continue to obsess over Beef, plenty have brought the aforementioned gun scene into question. Some are into it! Others are, more reasonably, a bit perturbed. A few examples:
In an interview with Rolling Stone, Beef creator Lee Sung Jin explained why Amy flirts with danger in such an erotic way.
“She’s so repressed, she can’t share anything with anyone in her life,” Lee said. “Where would that go and what would she enjoy for herself? We didn’t want to do something just to be risqué or crude, and we were trying to figure out what it is that she would get excited by. I knew that I wanted to have a gun in play.”
Lee also said that The Sopranos inspired him to shoot (heh) the scene. There’s a scene in “Bust Out” in which Richie (David Proval) holds a gun to Janice’s (Aida Turturro) head while they have sex, which really connected to Amy’s character, per Lee.
Amy craves danger in a sensual, carnal sense. Perhaps Danny chasing after her in a very destructive way is actually good news for her. The entire scene is intercut with sequences of Danny driving to Amy’s house, enraged with the fury of a days-old road rage incident. When he finally arrives at her front step, it may be a good call that she has a gun at hand—even if it is a little, well, dirty.
