SPOILER ALERT: This story reveals details of the Season 2 plot of Netflix’s Beef.
In trying to capture the fractured nature of relationships on the verge of collapse in Season 2 of Netflix’s Beef, composer Finneas O’Connell took inspiration from the sounds of shattered and wobbly glass.
By the season finale of the series, created by Lee Sung Jin, Josh (Oscar Isaac) and Lindsay (Carey Mulligan) have reached the ultimate tipping point in their relationship. Despite all their turbulence that has come before, Josh opts to take responsibility for the country club’s money-laundering schemes to spare Lindsay legal hardships, which will result in prison time. As the police close in to arrest Josh, Lindsay hurls herself over a barricade and runs into his arms for one passionate and final embrace.
The moment is iconically cinematic as the two kiss, the camera circling around them as a synth score bleeds into the tenderness of the scene and drowns out the noise from the throngs of onlookers, the ambulance, the press and the police sirens. The score heightens the intimacy and privacy of a moment that only belongs to them, the rest of the world be damned.
“This scene came about because of Finneas, he sent me an early demo of ‘Vicious Thoughts,’ and it blew me away. It had me in tears,” Lee says on the latest edition of the Deadline video series The Process. “While I was listening to it for the first time, I had this vision of two people running towards each other and kissing and the camera wrapping around them 360 degrees. I texted Finneas being like, ‘Thank you so much for this.’ I didn’t know how the show was going to get there because we were writing episode 3 or something, but I know that the show has to end with two characters. I don’t know which ones, but they’re going to run towards each other on the street and kiss, and this has to be playing in the background over the scene.”
Lee added: “That really gave us the North Star for where the ending of the show is going to be. Because this track is the one that gets me every time, it’s so emotional. There’s so much sadness and nostalgia just baked into it. But, you know, we took that early demo and then we made it cinematic with the strings [behind the scenes].”
In talking about the synth composition, Finneas noted how he layered the show’s chaotic nature underneath. “There’s a dreaminess [that represents] inner peace that [Josh] has found. Then the crazy saw-synth comes in and plays the same melody. It’s really ugliness that has emerged where these two characters who have been concealing so much of themselves from each other and are in denial about the way that they feel about themselves,” he says. “And [in this moment], they’re sort of like, ‘Alright, f*ck it. I am the way I am. And I really do love this person.’ It’s doomed in a Shakespearean sense. But here they are loving each other in the middle of this thing.”
“There’s this Christopher Nolan’s Inception top-spinning noise that so perfectly punctuates the end of this track where the street noises start coming back,” Lee notes to Finneas during the discussion.
“I can tell you why it’s in there. There’s a bunch of sounds of glass shattering in this piece,” Finneas explains. “One of the sounds that I had was like this weird attribute of glass spinning and not breaking. You know that moment where you almost tip something over on a table and everyone [panics] but then it settles? We’ve spent the entire season sort of [looking at these couples] like, ‘Is the glass going to fall over and break?’ ”
To find out more about how the Beef duo was inspired by Park Chan-Wook’s Old Boy, Timbaland and Radiohead, along with filming in an abandoned Korean hospital with the series’ co-stars Charles Melton and Cailee Spaeny, watch the video above.
