The Ants in 'Beef' Are a Nod to One of the Greatest Sleeper-Hit Thrillers of All Time

Beef has been one of Netflix's best original series for a while, and now, Season 2 takes it to the next level. This time, creator Lee Sung Jin tells a more complex story, including many small details and references for viewers to interpret, while Josh (Oscar Isaac), Lindsay (Carey Mulligan), Ashley (Cailee Spaeny), and Austin (Charles Melton) go on with their shenanigans. The ever-present ant motif is arguably the most intriguing; with t,em always getting crushed whenever they appear. But there's obviously a lot more to them: the ants connect directly to Beef's critique of late-stage capitalism and also to Oldboy, the Korean classic that's one of the series' greatest influences. How, though?

Beef Season 2's critique of late-stage capitalism is made pretty clear from the start, with Josh and Lindsay bending over backwards to please the members of the Monte Vista Point Country Club and benefiting from whatever crumbles those leave them — like ants. When Ashley and Austin show up, they focus mostly on undermining the older couple so they can have these crumbs for themselves. What both couples have in common is how they'll never belong to the elite, feeding them said crumbs.

Like an ant colony, a capitalist society has a very well-defined class structure where mobility is possible, but only up until a certain point. People in the top 1%, for example, will never leave that spot, and have reached a stage where they don't even need to work, as long as the "worker ants" continue to (for them, every level below theirs is a lower class, of course). It doesn't matter if it's Josh and Lindsay or Ashley and Austin; work can never stop for the benefit of the rich.

While the members of the country club surely benefit from this system, the character that best embodies it is Chairwoman Park (Youn Yuh-jung). In the season finale, her cruel monologue about capitalism being "a system of the self" highlights how, ultimately, everyone puts themselves before the collective, and how everyone serves a purpose, like Dr. Kim (Song Kang-Ho), who merely joined the elite through her. In the end, those at the top never acknowledge those who come from below, like queens in an ant colony.

Ants Also Represent Replaceability in Late-Stage Capitalism

In the end, Ashley and Austin take over Josh and Lindsay's positions in the country club and essentially become their predecessors. The members acknowledge them the exact same way, with casual superiority, revealing that it ultimately doesn't matter who it is that's managing the club, and that everyone beneath them is replaceable. That's what it means whenever an ant gets crushed under someone's finger, with another ant rushing to take its place, so their line doesn't stop.

Josh crushes many ants throughout the season, believing his upper-middle-class position grants him the same benefits and status as the elite, allowing him to try to crush people lower than him, like Ashley and Austin, but he and Lindsay are ultimately the ones really getting crushed in the story. The one crushing them is Chairwoman Park, a queen ant, and the younger couple are their replacements, until the time comes for them to be crushed, as well. For worker ants, it's a never-ending cycle of social-climbing.

The country club is like a microcosm of society; in the end, it doesn't really matter who performs what function, since worker ants are easily replaceable whenever one gets too cozy. For the members, smashing an ant like that is more casual than when Josh does it; one does it for comfort, but, deep down, the other is actually doing it for survival, lest he be replaced.

Ants Also Nod to Themes of Loneliness Influenced by ‘Oldboy’

Besides capitalism metaphors, the ants in Beef are also a nod to Oldboy, one of Lee Sung Jin's biggest influences when making the series. Ants are also a recurring motif in the movie, with the scene when Mi-do (Kang Hye-jeong) tells Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-sik) about it being particularly relevant: "Very lonely people that I met, they all hallucinated ants at one time. [...] Ants move around in groups. So I guess very lonely people keep thinking about ants. Even though I never did." A flashback immediately follows, where she hallucinates a giant ant on the subway.

In Beef, this ties directly to Chairwoman Park's idea of "a system of the self" and the loneliness that the four protagonists feel, despite having their partners and being part of a collective system. Being an ant in this context is being lonely, knowing that yourself doesn’t really matter that much. Speaking to Collider, Lee Sung Jin talked about this as related to the show's premise of "battle between the individual and the collective, and forming a partnership with someone and how much you hold on to yourself within it."

The Oldboy influence on Beef becomes obvious in the action sequence at the Trochos headquarters in the season finale, but the use of ants as a symbol for loneliness is a much deeper and more complex nod. Josh and Lindsay are as desperate for connection as they work as part of the collective; they only find their true connections when they leave this system. Ashley and Austin, on the other hand, are connected but eventually lose that connection when they are integrated into the ant colony. Maybe they'll soon start hallucinating giant ants on the golf course at the country club.