Road Runner, Anthony Bourdain, Suicide, Psychology,
Psychoanalysis, Anger, Pride
Roadrunner: Anthony Bourdain’s Life and Death
My first job, like Anthony Bourdain’s, was as a
dishwasher. I was paid two dollars and
five cents an hour. After six months, I was given a nickel raise. I have continue to be paid – in part of my
life – by the hour. And I continue to
think of my value as hovering around two dollars and five or ten cents an hour,
though my hourly fee is much higher than that.
In the film Roadrunner, Anthony Bourdain is asked how he can
put up with being a celebrity and having people he doesn’t know greet him on
the street. He answers that, if his life
has not taken this turn, he might well be a line chef working hard to meet
deadlines and not being able to pay his rent – so greeting lots of people is a
small price to pay for the life he has.
I don’t disagree with him, but I do think that there is a
tension between his self-valuation (and mine) and the work he does on screen to
help us realize the value of the people whose lives our wars have upended or
maimed or ended. He judges those who are
in power – noting that they have not done enough to value those who are
affected by their power, but he undervalues himself and judges himself not
worthy – in his case, initially he decides he doesn’t deserve peace and quiet, and ultimately he decides he doesn’t deserve to live.
When I worked in a psychiatric hospital that treated very
ill people, I was in a meeting in the wake of a patient suicide. Sadly I did not recall the patient whom I had
tested 6 months earlier. But I do recall
the meeting. Fred Shectman, a dear
friend, led the meeting. He was not on
the team that had treated the man, by design.
It was an opportunity for us to discuss what we might have missed (and,
apparently, I missed a lot, not remembering the man).
Fred noted that in the wake of suicide, two things
happen. One is that we feel guilty. The other is that we look for someone to
blame. And we tend to move back and
forth between those two states – using the one to ward off the other and vice
versa.
When I heard that Anthony Bourdain had killed himself, I was
really angry with him. I guess I blamed
him.
Though the filmmakers say that they wanted to talk about
Anthony Bourdain’s life, it is impossible to do that without talking about his
death and, thankfully, they do that. The
reluctant wife, who was a big fan, had read that this movie feels like therapy
for those who lost Bourdain. I agree
with this statement.
Even though I was not
as obsessed with him as she was, we both deeply respected him and the work he
did. We admired his ability to connect
with people, and to enjoy living – and especially eating, including the weirdest,
most off-beat food. And we admired that
he enjoyed street food and local food – and, though he appreciated haute
cuisine, that he wondered at the complexity, the expense, and perhaps most of
all the tiny portions! And we
vicariously enjoyed how much he enjoyed ingesting good food – and talking with
people – the people who made the food and the people ate it with him.
His death came as a shock to both of us. He seemed, in my memory, so grounded and sure
of himself. This film helped me realize
that, though he was grounded and sure of himself, part of that was a mask; a
pretense. He was primarily a writer –
and he was introverted as so many writers are – so that initially he stepped
into the limelight reluctantly, but once there he was, according to many in the
film, in his element. He could command
the screen (and the people who worked with him to create the show) the way he
commanded the word on the page and the way he could, as head chef, command the
work in the kitchen. And he became
addicted to doing the show.
One of the episodes that I remember fondly was an episode
where Tony talked about his addiction to heroin and about beating that
addiction. He was less focused on his
having beaten it than talking about how powerful the drug was for the many who
had no hope. At least that is how I
remember it.
Some of the people in the film made the case that Tony never
actually gave up his addiction, but that he shifted from being dependent on heroin
to being dependent on writing to being dependent on being Anthony Bourdain,
world traveler and bon vivant. I don’t
disagree with this assessment, as far as it goes. But I think there is more. Another mentor at the same hospital that I
mentioned once suggested that, in suicide, the person who kills him or herself
has condemned him or herself to death for some kind of crime they believe
themselves to have committed.
I think Anthony Bourdain was angry at the world - and angry at himself for the part that he played in that world.
I don’t think that all suicides can be explained as capital punishment, but this description came to mind as Tony evaluated and found fault with
so many people in the world at large and, at what would be the end of his days,
in those around him who had been dear to him.
This was, they noted in the film, projection. But they didn’t quite clarify that he was
projecting a negative evaluation – a devaluation of himself that led to his devaluing
others as a means of desperately trying to avoid the self-devaluing – as if he
could, by saying, “You’re bad” say, “I’m good.”
Of course it doesn’t work that way.
Ironically, his downward spiral happened in the context of a
love affair – but a love affair with another person who, like himself, needed
to be at the center of all that was going on.
Tony was quite the tyrant in his group, and he fell in love with an
equally tyrannical woman.
I am not, and the filmmakers do not, blame this woman (any
more than we have to whenever there is a suicide). As one of his friends said, the person
responsible for Tony’s death was none other than Tony himself. No one other than he put
the noose around his neck.
And we feel, I think, tremendous sadness at what appears to
be a true tragedy – someone who wanted desperately to be loved, to be valued
for who he was and what he had to offer – who could not, ultimately, use the
love that others gave so profusely to overcome the inner judgement that he was
lacking – that he was, ultimately, a line cook who had a crazy moment that took
him into a new space, but one that he felt no more comfortable inhabiting – in fact
less comfortable inhabiting – than his earlier life as a big fish in a little
pond.
Tony also, somehow, could not see that we were dependent,
each in our very small way, on his love for the world and his energy in
exploring and reporting on that world.
It was not just that we lived vicariously through his travels, but we
lived vicariously through his jaded love of the people and places he
discovered.
In an alternate universe somewhere, Tony Bourdain is holding
court, telling his bawdy tales of kitchen life, to a small audience of fellow
cooks, the people he claimed as the audience for his first book, Kitchen
Confidential. These cooks are matching
him (it is a large group) story for story.
And they are all angry – but they transform their anger into a shared
disdain for those they serve and those who are supposed to serve them better,
and they feel satisfied in the superiority of their own lives – and in the
superiority of their comradery.
Following this line of thinking, we can imagine that Tony
lost the comrades that would have helped him survive this messy thing called
living by reaching for the ring that he thought he couldn’t, but in fact could
reach. The ring was being the smartest
guy in the room – complicated by his realizing that the key to getting there
involved becoming the most humble one.
But he was also falsely full of himself and, when he tried to prove his
value by finding a peer who could shine his light back on him, he failed to
live up to his false image of himself, and judged himself lacking.
There were a number of false scenes in the film. No, I am not referring to A.I. voice overs of
Tony reading his own words. That does
not feel false to me – it feels like using the usual artifice that film makers
use to enhance our experience and sell their version of events. The particularly false scenes where the ones
where Tony appeared to be in some kind of therapy.
In one therapy scene, Tony appears to be at a Narcotics
Anonymous meeting – and he is telling of his addiction – but he is talking not
of its power over him, but of his ability to beat the addiction. The camera catching this clarified that it
was staged – and if the others in the room were addicts, they were too cowed by
being on stage to confront him as addicts in a “real” NA meeting would have
done.
The second therapy scene, a staged and filmed individual session,
again felt false. Tony was engaged in
introspection. Real though the
introspection may have been, it occurred in the context of a staged
relationship with a person who, no matter her therapeutic credentials, was a
prop. Real treatment requires authentic
engagement between two people who both feel scared about what they are up
against.
Tony’s gift to us was his confidence – in himself, in his
words, in his ability to capture a moment.
Unfortunately, Tony did not value that as much as we did. I think he believed himself to be a glib but
insincere person in a world full of people who were insincere. He wanted to be sincere – but I think that he
felt that those who knew him knew he was not.
And, of course, he wasn’t. Not
all of the time. And he was duplicitous
and complicated and all of that was part of what made him all the more
lovable. We could relate to him –
because we, too, are duplicitous and complicated.
The greatest tragedy, of course, is that the connection with
his daughter was not enough for him to realize how genuine and essential love
is – and how genuinely important he was in her eyes. A recent meme points out that if you quit
your job, they will replace you, but you can’t be replaced in your family. The funny home videos they made will never
substitute for going out to dinner with him.
I heard about the film as I driving back from a reunion with
some friends from graduate school. Fresh
Air replayed an old interview of Bourdain – after he had published a book on cooking
at home, something he had never done until he had a child. He was adapting commercial kitchen techniques
(cooking bacon in the oven) to the home environment. And he was adapting himself to being a
father. And he was clearly taken with
being a Dad – one of the most transformative transitions that can take place in
a man’s life.
I was angry that he had not realized his importance to his
child.
This film helped me appreciate that Tony’s death was not an
aberration, but was continuously connected to the life of a man driven by the
wish to escape the paltriness of his existence – and tempted by feeling that he
was so close to achieving that, but ultimately believing that whatever he would
grasp was not genuine, not authentic, that he was not who he cracked himself up
to be, even in the eyes of his daughter.
As someone in the film noted, Icarus should be measured not
by the fact that he fell, but by the fact that he flew. Would that Tony could see, as we did, just
how high and wide he had flown and that his wings – though powerfully able to
get him there - needed some repair work to bring him home in one piece. He needed some genuine humility – not an easy
thing for a man of his stature and ambition to express. But who would have said no to helping him?
We left the theater feeling oddly satisfied. As if we had consumed a good meal. I know that sounds strange to say, but we
had, I think, felt haunted and left up in the air by the announcement of
Bourdain’s suicide. It seemed
incongruous. The movie provided
context. It provided a narrative that
made sense. And that is, I think, a part
of what good therapy does. It provides a
narrative – a way of stitching together the sometimes randomly seeming elements
of our life into a sensible story line.
When we have that, we can put to rest something that has been bothering
us.
We didn’t leave Bourdain at the theater. We carried him home with us. I have ordered Kitchen Confidential and we
will likely watch episodes from his oeuvre that we might otherwise have
skipped. We have been able to mourn his
loss – and can move forward, including him again in the figures in our
entertainment world with whom we can engage.
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