Roadrunner: Anthony Bourdain’s Life and Death

 

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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