Roadrunner both dispels and reinforces the myth of Anthony Bourdain
Oscar winner Morgan Neville follows his Mr. Rogers documentary with a biographical portrait of the celebrity chef
Film Reviews Anthony Bourdain
If you or someone you know is contemplating suicide, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255.
A “fun” little game if you’re experiencing suicidal ideation is to respond honestly when someone asks how you’re doing. The dissociative contrast between internal pain and the external performance of being a happy, functional adult is exhausting—not least because you can be contentedly paddling along, enjoying the warmth of the sun on your face, when a hand appears and grabs you by your ankle, jerking you down into the cold and the dark. Some hide this inner conflict better than others, and many were shocked when Anthony Bourdain, by all accounts the luckiest man alive, died by suicide on June 8, 2018. But as we discover in Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain, for the late celebrity chef, author, and globetrotting TV host, the effort required to maintain a safe distance between the private Tony and the public Tony was Herculean.
Bourdain was famous, on top of everything else, and didn’t just have to put on a bad-boy gourmand act for the cameras; he had to perform being other peoples’ idea of Anthony Bourdain on the street and in restaurants and every-fucking-where he went for decades. Eventually, he got famous enough that he was insulated from the rest of the world by assistants and roped-off VIP areas and all the other trappings of celebrity. That’s when things started spinning out of control. Bourdain was cursed with the gifts of being effortlessly eloquent and charismatic, worldly and witty and, yes, a little cynical, but never elitist or inaccessible. His curiosity and passion were authentic, and people responded to that. Which must have been great—at least for a little while.
To be clear, Roadrunner is very far from an advertisement for suicide. That would be horribly irresponsible, and also inconsistent with the style of its director, Oscar winner Morgan Neville. As he proved with his last feature-length biographical documentary, the Mr. Rogers film Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, Neville excels at tearjerkers. And yes, the end of this movie is quite moving, as Bourdain’s friends, colleagues, and family members attempt to articulate the bewildering void Bourdain left behind. (Perhaps saddest of all, Éric Ripert, Bourdain’s friend and fellow chef who discovered his body while they were filming on location in France, simply says, “I don’t talk about that day.”) But the majority of the film doesn’t wallow in sentimentality. How could it, when Bourdain is narrating his own life?
Between his CNN shows No Reservations, Parts Unknown, and The Layover—all of which Bourdain wrote and narrated himself—a massive archive of video and audio recordings are available for someone like Neville to re-create Bourdain’s voice from beyond the grave. The majority of Roadrunner has the lively, whirlwind quality of the host’s travel series. We begin with the heady days shortly before Kitchen Confidential became a bestseller and proceed chronologically through two decades of televised travel, which gains increasing weight as the crew bears witness to historical events like the outbreak of the 2006 Lebanon War. Neville also indulges in one of his subject’s pet techniques by lifting clips from Bourdain’s favorite films and incorporating them into the narrative; scenes from Apocalypse Now accompany footage from a disorienting trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo, for example.
Neville’s deference to his late subject’s voice also extends to the darker, more troubling aspects of Bourdain’s personality. As if to announce that Roadrunner is not going to shy away from what we all know is coming, the director opens his film with audio of Bourdain caustically discussing how, when he dies, he’d like to be stuffed into a wood chipper and sprayed all over the bourgeois clientele of flagship London department store Harrod’s. In interview clips and behind-the-scenes footage, Bourdain’s insecurities, morbid fixations, and restless spirit dog him and those close to him. But Neville reserves judgement.
That is, until we get to the last year of Bourdain’s life, when he was caught up in a whirlwind romance with actress and director Asia Argento that led him to become an outspoken advocate for #MeToo. The longtime agents, producers, and crew members interviewed in the film clearly do not like Argento, and Neville puts a much sunnier spin on Bourdain’s domestic life with his second wife, Ottavia Busia, than on his unconventional relationship with the adventurous actor. He isn’t so reckless as to blame her outright for his death, but there’s a palpable change in tone when she enters the narrative. And while Argento is indeed a complicated person, the fact that she does not appear in the film to defend herself—nor do any of the other interviewees defend her—results in a biased indulgence in the sexist trope of the femme fatale, especially considering the note of raw, unresolved pain on which this film ends.
There has been a lot of myth-making about Bourdain in the three years since his death, and the implication that he died amid the rubble of a tortured affair with a cruel woman isn’t the only tale Neville is spinning. It’s as if Bourdain didn’t exist before he became famous. Discussion of his childhood is limited to a brief segment that gives the mistaken impression that he grew up in Provincetown, Massachusetts, when he was in fact from New Jersey. Brief references are made to his fondness for Iggy Pop, but we’re left to infer how downtown NYC shaped his worldview. And while one interview subject says, “People forget, Tony was a junkie,” that’s all the movie does to refresh us on that period in his life.
This may be due to a lack of source material. Why, after all, would there be footage of Bourdain from when he was a mere line cook, especially back in the ’80s and ’90s, before every moment of everyone’s life was constantly being documented? But it does feel unbalanced for a film that purports to lift the curtain on a beloved public figure to treat that figure as if he emerged fully formed in the late ’90s like a pithy Athena from the head of Zeus. Many of the people who watch Roadrunner will do so out of their affection for Bourdain, a pop saint of wanderers and troubled souls everywhere. And in terms of celebrating his life by letting us soak in his impassioned, inspiring presence one more time, the film is successful. But viewers should take one more note from the man himself and not fall for easy scapegoats and trite narratives, whether they concern countries or a person who devoted his life to exploring them.
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I was sincerely confused for a second seeing the “Space Jam” review above this, getting my wires crossed, and wondering how and why Anthony Bourdain was in a scene with the Road Runner.
It was for an episode set in the Arizona desert. He and Wile E. Coyote try to catch the roadrunner, aren’t able to, and end up eating fry bread on a Navajo reservation.
I can hear him now…“Yes! A painting of a tunnel, on the side of a solid rock cliff face! Because apparently that’s the traditional way of hunting these things out here. And far be it from me, this kid from urban New Jersey, to question how the locals do things out here.”
lol that was spot on
Someone give this person a ghostwriting job!
There’s so much stuffed into Space Jam, I wouldn’t be surprised if Anthony Bourdain was hanging out with Road Runner in the Mad Max desert or something
Oh god I just realized Parts Unknown was a CNN show, so WarnerMedia does actually own it, so this is nightmarishly feasible.
I’ll never be able to understand suicide. Never. This isn’t to cast aspersions on those who die by suicide, just that whenever I hear about a suicide — especially by someone who, publicly, seemed to be living a charmed dream life — my feelings of sorrow and grief and always accompanied by genuine confusion and bafflement. And very candidly, as a father knowing Bourdain was also a father — even anger and disappointment.Re: Argento — I deliberately ignored the finger pointing after Bourdain died and assumed it was an extension of the demonization by the Italian press aimed at her for daring to speak out against sexual predators. It is interesting to see some of the… lets call it concern… stems from those who knew Bourdain best, not just weird MRAs in Europe. I think it’s important to note, as is mentioned in the movie, that one of Bourdain’s friends points out (and I’m paraphrasing as I don’t have the exact quote) “no 60 year old man kills themselves over a break up, Tony died of suicide.”
You can never understand suicide unless you have experienced thoughts of it yourself.
Thankfully I’ve never walked that path. I’ve had anxiety, I’ve been depressed, but I’ve never considered anything more self destructive than a triple cheeseburger. I’ve talked to friends who have struggled with it, and while I understand it in my head, I fail to grasp it in my heart/gut.
Yeah I don’t blame you. My ex was that way. She knew a male model. Dude got all the chicks, made tons of money, had no problems really but he suffered massive depression. Ended up blowing his head off with a shotgun. She could never understand that. It was hard for her to understand me but she loved me dearly even though I suffered that same issue. Not an easy thing to deal with.
I’ve been on both sides. I almost died from an attempt at 13, and this year I lost my best friend to suicide. I’m still heartbroken over her death, and I know this is how my loved ones would feel if I did it. I’m not mad at my friend, but I can’t shake the guilt of wishing I could have been there when she needed me, and I have the guilt of surviving what she couldn’t. I really, REALLY wish her death killed any suicidal ideation in me, but I still struggle with it. The only kind of suicide I truly condemn is murder-suicide. No matter how low I ever feel, I would never take someone with me. I am in favor of those who are terminally ill who wish to end their life via euthanasia/DNR order. It’s their life, and they shouldn’t have to suffer if they don’t have to.Just my thoughts.
Absolutely this.
Yep, The darkest moods find the darkest corners.
I have ideation and I can’t understand it.
His friends thinking Argento was bad for him and internet trolls thinking Argento was bad for him are two different things entirely. One group knew him personally and knew what was going on in his life, and the other just hates outspoken women. The fact that this particular outspoken woman isn’t without her flaws is pretty much a lucky coincidence as far as the MRA’s and whatnot are concerned.I’m right there with you on not being able to understand suicide. I dread death every single day, and can’t imagine not wanting to be here for this. I can sort of understand it with people who believe in an afterlife (although obviously not if that afterlife condemns suicides to eternal torment) but to me, it’s utterly baffling.
The thought of no longer existing scares the everloving shit out of me.I have been pretty depressed before. I was in denial about it and probably the only reason I didn’t consider ending it was my pets.
You’re lucky that you either haven’t faced enough pain or you have whatever traits let you get through pain that you can’t understand death being a preferable option to continued suffering. I’ve had low-grade suicidal thoughts for about half my life, it’s honestly kind of comforting to know if my chronic pain never improves or gets absolutely unbearable I have some ultimate power to make it stop. But I agree about the kids thing, I don’t think I would ever have them because I can’t imagine someone I loved that much through that.
I’m sorry. Hope you’re in a good place these days.
Thank you. I’m really as good as anyone in my situation can be. Right now it’s more of an abstract thought that it’s kind of nice to know that I don’t have to live another 50-70 years in pain unless I want to.
The brain chemistry of someone contemplating suicide is so different from everyone else that its impossible to understand.A patient of mine who attempted suicide described the feeling as the like the single most emotionally painful moment of a non-depressed person’s life that remains constant for days to weeks. She just wanted the pain to end.
…good for you?Thankfully the people who have survived past their own suicidal depression are self-aware enough and strong enough not to worry about how you judge them, and the ones who didn’t survive aren’t around to take umbrage.
I’m sure suicide is different for everyone contemplating it.
No other way out of a mess or some twisted sense of compassion, or something else entirely.
-like wanting to go out on your own terms while you still have a shred of your mental faculties like my grandfather, who hung himself.
When you feel like you’re making life miserable for those who want, try and do love you, and you’re failing at everything you try to accomplish, racking up chronic illnesses like a retired prostitute, and you’re just standing there on the pier for the hundreth time wanting to walk into the icy ocean and the only thing pulling you back is your dog (because how will that poor, dumb mutt be able to get back home to your girlfriend after you’ve drowned yourself?), then you might understand suicide.But then you get a job, money, a house, kids, married, and you tell yourself you’ll at least have to stay alive until the kids are functioning, successfull adults and then take it from there. You know, happiness, as other people call it.
A real fucked up thing about suicide is
how some of us are convinced people will be so much better off with us
gone, we don’t see how killing ourselves will hurt people more than
staying around. That’s just the way it is, no reasoning or well constructed argument in the moment can dissuade us. We just gotta find something that makes us want to hold on.
So it gets better. Until it maybe gets worse again, but I don’t think it ever truly goes away. Who knows?
But for Anthony it got worse and at least he’s not in pain anymore.
-poor consilation for his daughter who will grow up without a father, though.
One of my daughters had a friend in high school who seemed like the happiest person in the world, until she was found dead. The girl maintained a sunny disposition and never gave any indication that she was having problems. She never reached out for help, not to her friends or family, not one person. She kept it all to herself. Despite having numerous people who cared about her, she isolated the part of herself that was in pain so well that no one knew it existed until it was too late.I think Bourdain may have been in a similar situation—never able to show the part of himself that was in pain and needing help. Not every former addict becomes suicidal. People fall into addiction for all kinds of reasons. For some it’s an escape from boredom. For some it’s taking the party too far. And for some it’s a means of killing the pain. I think Bourdain may have fallen into the latter group.While his past drug abuse may give us some insight into his personality, by itself it wouldn’t necessarily be a red flag. I don’t know if he sought treatment or went cold turkey, though cold turkey would seem to have been his style. Even if he did seek treatment, I doubt he ever shared any of his pain with a therapist.Like many addicts before him, Bourdain replaced drugs with work. He removed himself from the kitchen—the environment where he became a junkie—and threw himself into writing and television production. Unfortunately, the work must not have been enough of a distraction from his pain to allow him to get past it.While Argento probably didn’t help his situation, I doubt she was the reason—or even a reason—behind his suicide. He’d likely been hiding the burden of his pain for decades before she ever came along.
Just curious: how do they know your daughter’s friend committed suicide?
I’m not going to go into any detail, but it was an obvious suicide.
Bourdain didn’t go cold turkey – he visited a methadone clinic for five years to get off heroin, and then went to rehab in the 90s to quit crack cocaine.
I’ve never been suicidal but I’ve definitely wished for death for a fairly long period of my life. That itself is already unbearable and oppressive. I don’t even want to think about how it would be like attempt it.
The cult around Bourdain always gave me a little pause because he struck me as a very troubled man who happened to be very charismatic and sensitive both on camera and on the page. I always got the sense he was drained by fame, and that the constant traveling was leaving him untethered. The refusal of some of his fans to see just how troubled he was, even as it was clearly laid out in his own writings, struck me as a very negative aspect of fame. There was no way he could live up to what so many of his fans thought of him. I say this as someone who thought he was a wonderful writer. As for Argento, she’s obviously not a perfect person but people love blaming the women – see Eve and Yoko Ono – for the decisions of powerful men. Nobody forced Bourdain to leave his wife and child. Nobody dragged Bourdain, a wealthy, famous and influential man, kicking and screaming into a toxic relationship. He could have stopped her from firing a crew member. And frankly, I’ve known more than one middle aged guy who is all about the open relationship until he realizes the woman he loves is having awesome sex with a younger, hotter man while he’s alone. I say all of this as a fan of Bourdain, but also someone who recognizes that he was a victim of his own mental health and bad decisions, not another person.
Then you don’t understand depression. Most people don’t, they confuse being sad, or anything less than excited as being “a little depressed”
Depression, consumes you. For some it leaves you laying in bed in a darkened room, avoiding all contact with the outside world because you’re so unhappy, and insecure that you presume you have nothing to offer beyond not inconveniencing others with your presence. The best thing you can do, you reason is not force others to endure YOU.
For some it’s the constant feelings of doubt, guilt or shame. You’re plagued by the constant habit of overanalyzing everything. Everything you say, everything you do, every look on someone else face. Did you say the wrong thing? Did you disappoint them? Did you let them down? Did they see behind your mask? Do they know how broken, and worthless you really are?
The better your life seems from the outside, the worse it is internally for someone who’s depressed. Financial security, friends family and experience that most people would die to have. But you’re still not happy. You’re still insecure, plagued by doubt, over analyzing everything, question whether you deserve….anything you have. Logically you know it doesn’t make sense….but mentally, you just can’t help it. Which leaves you with the realization that….it’s never, ever going to get better. The money, the travel, the things, the friends, the lovers, the adoration and fame….you’re still miserable, empty and broken. Which is a crushing, existential pain….and the only thing you can think is that you really are broken in a way that can’t be fixed.
You just need it to stop.
And there’s only way you know for sure to achieve that.
To make everything….stop.
You reason out that it would be better for everyone around you anyway. You’re broken, and fucked up inside, and there’s nothing you can do to fix it, you’re just going to continue hurting the people you love, because you’re angry and hurt that they can’t fix YOU.
Better to just hurt them one final time than to draw it out for years….because more than anything else. You don’t ever want to make anyone feel the way that you do…every second of every waking day.
Understand?
It’s simple. The pain is so much you want it to end. Even if that means killing yourself. I struggle with this every day and so far, I’ve made it.Now, if certain things happen in my life, then I’ll end it. I’m over 50, haven’t made any difference in the world that I can see (outside of helping bring my son into this world) so it will be no loss when I’m gone. Maybe a few people will miss me, but that has been online relationships and so I haven’t been able to meet them IRL.When you read about someone killing themselves, just remember that for that person, death looked like the best way out.
I had a best friend from High School and one in College commit the act. Speculation at best: High School married but was from Boston family moved to rural Ohio. Family moves back after he is married, possibly causing issues.College friend, concert pianist who could find no future. Myself, no feelings but suffer from permanent tinnitus. I can at least see there how it may impact some with those suicidal tendencies. But in all cases pure guessing/conjecture since it is not my mind suffering.
I’ve faced mental health issues all of my life, and they have presented numerous challenges and limitations I’ve had to try and navigate. But I’ve only been confronted with suicidal ideation three times. The first and most stark was when I was in so much pain I genuinely wished to die so it would stop. This was less ideation than an animal response. The mechanics of my body were so overwrought that my instinctual response was that death was better than continuing to endure the feelings I was suffering. Thankfully this was brief, only a few minutes, but it was intensely powerful. If in that moment I had had the means I would now be dead. The good thing is I now know my limit when it comes to pain, I definitely have a breaking point.The second was more passing, and a profound sense of my own mortality and existentialism brought on by the death of a loved one. This was more of an ache, like a sore tooth that I couldn’t stop bothering while I thought of other things. In the background of my thoughts I wondered what the point of being alive was, if existence mattered. If the story always ends in death, is there meaning in the motions we go through in life? Selfishly, if I do not get to enjoy my own legacy, my own contributions to the world, however small in scale, why do anything. Who am I living for? What is the point? That kind of thing. But it passed me by as I came to terms with my grief, and my relatively simple answer to some very old questions was “Life is living, the alternative is nothing, and something is nearly always better than nothing.”The third time was last year. I was in pain, and afraid. I was afraid for my family because of the pandemic, and because I thought I had cancer (it turned out to be another medical issue I’ve since…resolved, though that resolution has changed me in a subtle way that I’m not sure I’ve totally come to terms with). I was deeply uncomfortable in my body, I was afraid constantly, and felt I couldn’t speak to anyone without my fear and unhappiness becoming infectious. I was doing copious amounts of research, all of which was sickening, and I felt terribly alone and burdened. It was hard to feel anything else. The simple pleasures that I enjoyed were robbed from me, my creative output was nil. I couldn’t be comfortable in my self. There was no respite from these feelings. I was trapped. The feeling that it might be better to end things now, before they became worse, was strong. But it was an animal thought, a very simple solution to a problem I was having trouble understanding. The feelings were real, but the conclusions were flawed.In the end I have never attempted to take my life for one simple reason. My brain, and the self that has developed within that physical construct, cannot escape the concept of true oblivion. My learning through life left me with two broad conclusions about death:In the case where there is an afterlife, it must be so transformative as to equate death. Or at least so it seems to me. I would be gone.In the case where there is no afterlife, at the moment of brain death, there would be nothing. True nothing is something that cannot be experienced. It is the complete absence, the result of the end. My real ending would be whatever final moments I had. Then I would be gone. In the first scenario, I do not get to enjoy the relief I might feel at the unburdening of my soul from its troubles. Some other version of me might, but as far as I’m concerned that’s a different person, and I’m gone. So what’s the point? What am I dying for, so I can stop worrying about dying, and feeling bad? There’s more chance of that if I’m alive.In the second I likewise get no relief. It’s just me feeling whatever feeling I’m living in at my last second, as my brain ceases to function and th…that is less than ideal. No relief, and the show is over. Fuck that noise. So I came to the conclusion that life is the only thing that really matters, and death should be avoided at all costs. Death is the enemy, life is the prize. I can’t really supply anything other than that. I think feeling like you should die is relatively individual, so whether it could manifest in you, or exactly how is difficult to say. But generally, it is a feeling of being at odds with your own continued circumstance, to the point that change, extreme change, is the only possible recourse. Change so great as there being no return from it. This is either a long obsessive thought process, or a very short and instinctive one. And when considered from a place of remove and stability, both are genuinely terrifying.
The simplest understanding of suicide is the felling that tomorrow won’t be a better day and never will be. It is the exhaustion of all hope.
I am genuinely happy for you. I have the flip of that, I can’t believe that some (most) people live their lives without at least periods of ideation. I have everything, the greatest family, decent money, cool car etc . There is no meta-physical set of scales in my head that balances the above with the idea of the other. They don’t exist in the same plane.
I’ll never be able to understand suicide.Count yourself lucky then.
Obviously in the end, nobody chooses suicide except the person themselves, and there was clearly a lot more to that decision for Bourdain than whatever went on in the last two years of his life.But it’s hard to imagine any retelling of the basic facts of those last two years that reflects well on Asia Argento.
Can you provide an objective recap? I don’t know much of the details besides:Bourdain became “infatuated” with herShe took over production of at least one episode of the show and a longtime/beloved crew member was firedPictures of her w/ someone else surfaced a day or so before Bourdain committed suicideI find it hard to separate legit stuff from the Argento pile-on that got stirred up by the Italian press after she had the temerity to say being sexually assaulted wasn’t cool.
That’s a lot of it, but there was also the part where she turned out to have committed statutory rape and paid off the child in question: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/19/us/asia-argento-assault-jimmy-bennett.html(To be clear: I believe everything she said about Weinstein. Being a horrible person does not protect you from being raped, and being a horrible person does not mean that you deserve to be raped.)
I thought the statutory rape stuff surfaced a couple months after Bourdain died, though who knows what he knew before things became public.
Yeah, given the timing I think it’s highly likely that he’d found out about it.
As I recall, Argento said the payoff was Bourdain’s idea, so either he knew about it, or she threw him under the bus posthumously.
Bourdain paid off Bennett. The texts that came out that proved Bennett’s claims that they had sex came out a few months after Bourdain’s suicide.
She was accused, she denied it, and when Bourdain paid him off, the accuser went away. You can’t just say “she did this” without elaborating on the complicating facts, unless you, random internet person, happen to have some personal insight into the facts of the case.
Who was fired?
Zach Zamboni, an Emmy-award winning cinematographer who I believe had been part of the core team for many years.
The Maine episode of No Reservations was more or less about him and his family, wasn’t it? Hmm, I can see why people may have assumed there was something a little less than savory going on.
This whole situation bothers me, so the only think I will say is that I REFUSE to believe that Zach Zamboni is the name of an actual human person.
lol I almost added “and I am not making this up”
He’ll have to fall back on his massive ice-resurfacing family fortune.
I can’t imagine that they could have made this doc without a ton of Zamboni’s footage.
as someone in recovery and someone who battles suicidal thoughts, I fucking hate the narrative loved ones try and make up about villains in my life. It ends up gaslighting and undermining the suicidal person by trying to reduce their suffering to some “bad influence”, which then invalidates their pain even more.
Strongly agreed, actually. Bourdain didn’t commit suicide “because” of a person he was dating, even if she was kind of a terrible person. She would have still been kind of a terrible person if he had chosen to live. The ways in which she was a bad person don’t change what Weinstein (and for that matter the Italian press) did to her. Life resists neat narratives.(And indeed between her and Rose McGowan, it’s pretty clear that Weinstein gravitated toward unstable personalities in choosing his victims, which seems pretty in line with the ways in which he was horrible.)
I think a lot of their instability is due to an entire industry telling them what happened didn’t happen for so long. I probably wouldn’t recover from that mentally. But for Bourdain, sometimes suicide appears to be the only way to not only escape the pain but also have that pain be heard. Fans blaming Asia is so frustrating because they still are ignoring Bourdain’s cry for help.
I think one of Bourdain’s friends said – or maybe this is how my brain is making sense of it – that his relationship w/ Argento and her impact on him was an indicator that something was up with him, rather than her causing him to behave a certain way/do certain things.
Bourdain was in a spiral for a couple year before he started seeing Argento reportedly. It’s touched on a bit in the film, that he stopped seeing his therapist regularly, against the advice of people around him. By Argento’s account she repeatedly tried to convince him to continue seeing his therapist when they were involved with each other.
Something that is not touched on in the film enough, and what friends, many of which are in the film, revealed in other interviews was that Bourdain regularly talked, or “joked,” about taking his own life the entire time they knew him. Including a time he described in detail that he was about to drive his car off a cliff but a song came on the radio that he thought was a sign to not do it right now. He had been dealing with suicidal ideation his whole life. That the film tries to imply that there was one person who was some kind of “tipping point” is just gross. As you say, that’s just not how it works.
Which basic facts? That they had an open relationship? This was always known. Argento has only had open relationships. That Bourdain was also having other relationships, as he was away from Argento about 265 days a year, and that was always an open and honest understanding? Yes, it became clear that Argento had sex with a 17 year old in 2013, originally lied about it, Bourdain paid the guy off, then it was admitted to a few months after Bourdain died. Or that, as the director insinuates, that Bourdain killed himself because he saw pictures in the press of Argento kissing another man? Interviews with people close to Bourdain don’t “reflect well” on him either. His mood snaps were notorious, he’d cutoff friends for no apparent reason, and regularly joke about harming himself AND harming other people. Argento, by her own account, was trying to get him back in therapy. Something he eschewed before he met her and was something that other people close to him were telling him he should resume. “Reflecting well” would have been giving Argento her own voice in the documentary, when the director has said he didn’t want that to interfere with the “psychological profile” of Bourdain he was trying to achieve. When that’s a documentarians duty. The best documentaries trust the viewer and give every bit of information they can gather. This director explicitly said it was a story he wanted to tell and involving Argento would “capsize” his narrative.
The odd defense of Asia Argento in this article as a “complicated person” results in an indulgence of something, that’s for sure. Wtf.
yeah, she’s no “easy scapegoat”, she’s the prime suspect (if you imagine a world where the police investigated what drove people to suicide – I know the actual killer here is the guy in those photos)
Really interesting lately seeing which people the AV Club condemns and which people it reserves the passive voice for.
Well, at least she when she was 18 she didn’t attend a beauty contest that was founded by a racist person.
lol listen, i don’t think anyone can comment on whether kemper is a racist, but framing the veiled prophet ball as just a “beauty contest” is extremely historically stupid. i also think just framing it as racist was a bit of a misstep. it was founded by racist elites using the same mystic aesthetics that were popular for such groups at the time and in the decades that followed (including the second kkk, most infamously) as a show of force against working class and left-wing movements at the time. to castigate some actress who was 18 at the time is probably shortsighted, but let’s not pretend it’s just a “beauty pageant.” it was and is a celebration of the landed gentry and capitalist classes’ control over the lives of normal people.
Where does the article use the passive voice in talking about Argento?
I think sidestepping what she’s been accused of and just calling her “a complicated person” seems questionable.
Maybe so. But that’s not passive voice.
I don’t think that anyone is trying to defend Argento insofar as she raped a teenager. However, she was crucified in the Italian press for being a rape victim (with a sexual appetite of her own) long before the accusations against her became public. Also (and I say this as a Bourdain fan), many Bourdain fans treat her the way that many Cobain fans treat Courtney Love: as the sole reason for their idol’s suicide. And while it’s reasonable to speculate that neither Argento nor Love were good for their partners, the accusations (or heavy insinuations) that they caused Bourdain’s or Cobain’s suicides is painfully misogynistic. 99.99% of people who go through breakups or have unhealthy relationships do not kill themselves. Anthony Bourdain wasn’t Romeo. He was an experienced older man who had had many relationships before Argento ever came on the scene.tl;dr: No one is denying that Argento has done terrible things, but she not responsible for driving anyone to suicide.
She raped a child. That’s not Bourdain being in an unhealthy relationship that being intimately involved with paedophile whos victim you gave money to (while not knowing they were a victim). It’s certainly a major driver for what happened and if it was gender flipped no one would have a problem laying a large share of the blame at Bourdains door.
exactly, it’s such a blame the wife rhetoric that ultimately sidesteps the actual issue of mental health and addiction, and is such a disservice to both Bourdain and Cobain.
“but she not responsible for driving anyone to suicide.”I get this point but if the kid she raped killed himself I think it’s fair to say there’s responsibility to be assigned to her. Similarly while it wasn’t her decision for Bourdain to commit suicide finding out you’re in an intimate relationship with a paedophile and that you may have helped buy silence (before you knew any allegations were true) from a victim had a definite impact on his decisions.
The fuck? I don’t think you know what the word pedophilia means so you really shouldn’t throw that word around. Pedophilia is the attraction to pre-pubescent children. Argento, all her faults, is not a fucking pedophile.
lmao you literally did the libertarian “it’s ephebophilia aaackshually” to defend a rapist.
Fair enough. I can’t argue with anything said here. But, I still think the article above is a little too loose with it’s defense of Argento who is by all accounts an awful human being.
Argento is an “awful human being” now? Bourdain, who friends say was often massively self destructive and massively destructive to those around him is a “tortured soul” and a women who was traumatized by an awful childhood and rape is an “awful human being.”
It’s possible the news of her paying off an accuser who alleged that she had sexually assaulted him when he was 17 and she was 37 floated completely by you… but there ya go. The age of consent is 18 in California, where the incident occurred. Putting aside the legal component, would you agree that a 17-year-old is a child? If so, how would you classify a nonconsensual sex act involving a woman in her late 30s and a 17-year-old?
Small thing, I do believe “The Layover” and “No Reservations” were on The Travel Channel and not CNN? Parts Unknown was, but I’m unsure if they own the other two or aired the other two ever?
True, I recall Bourdain saying he left the Travel Channel because they were cutting budgets left and right and pressuring him into doing stuff like chili cook-offs. Sort of stuff more up Guy Fieri’s (sp?) alley.
Please do not put the image of Anthony Bourdain going up Guy Fieri’s chili alley in my head.
so woody allen is a demon and asia argento is a “complicated person”, that is disgusting
Seeing as how I was a wreck at the end of Won’t You Be My Neighbor, no way I’ll be able to take this. I’m still not over his death.He was just such a seismic figure. Most people that get big in the food world are a good cook, or a good writer, or good in front of the camera, and he was all three.
I would say, however, that his fame arose from his writing and on-screen persona, not his culinary skills. He certainly was a good enough chef to rise to a more-than-respectable position within his profession, but he didn’t oversee Michelin-caliber restaurants either.
I think he’s said so himself. Possible he was just being self-deprecating, which was characteristic of him, but I think being brutally honest was also characteristic. Part of the appeal of Kitchen Confidential was it was pretty much an unvarnished look at the grind and trenches of the culinary world from a mid/upper mid-level chef who happened to be a great writer and raconteur. It wouldn’t have worked if Wolfgang Puck or Tom Colicchio or some other personality who’d already become famous because of their culinary success had written it.
He was very honest about that. I think that’s how he and Eric Ripert became friends. He said something along the lines of “It’s not exactly like Eric Ripert is gonna call me up to get recipes”.
He always referred to himself as a cook, not a chef. He’s not the guy who gets to order the brigade around, or figure out that a night wasabi foam for perfect compliment the sous-vide monkfish, he was the guy who was on his feet doing nothing but manning the grill for eight hours straight, or peeling spuds, or chiffonading ten pounds of parsley in the back of the bistro. What I loved about him was that he seemed like the last bastion of 90s travel TV – when the world was big and open and waiting to be explored, free of the spectre of either the Eastern Bloc, or the post-9/11 terror. And he had what dozens of trust fund hipsters with nose piercings working for ViCE longed to have and that daddy’s credit card can’t acquire: authenticity. Genuine interest and sincerity for where he travelled – it wasn’t about how good he looked doing so.
He actually was legitimately a chef, though, not just a line cook. He may have started out as a cook, but he had already been in charge of several restaurants by the time his TV career took off. How much hands-on cooking he actually did I don’t claim to know, but he details many of his managerial roles in Kitchen Confidential, if I remember correctly.
I think he was a working chef. He was in charge of the planning, logistics, etc, and he was working in the kitchen. This is different from, say, a celebrity chef or a chef who has kind of graduated from actually working in someone else’s kitchen to being an owner/operator of your own restaurant/franchise of restaurants. One of my favorite episodes was when he and Ripert strap up and work a full shift at his old Les Halles restaurant. Years removed from the day-t0-day work with Ripert now more a celebrity businessman and Bourdain more a writer/producer/travel host, you can tell neither of them (though more so Bourdain) was in their peak fighting shape re: being on their feet 14 hours or whatever the hell it was swinging knives and molten hot caste iron in cramped quarters — though they definitely performed more than admirably.
Yes, this. Rather than a chef-restauranteur, he was a chef who worked for restauranteurs.
The single sentence quote from Eric Ripert confirms what I’ve always thought. He’s absolutely shattered by the experience. That has to be the single most cruel act that the Universe ever pulled on someone. Eric is the kindest and gentlest soul in the world and he had to find his best friend like that at the end.
I continue to be haunted by the thought of Ripert being the one to find his friend’s body. I cannot begin to imagine how traumatic that must have been. I hope he’s been able to find healing since then.
The image/scenario of Ripert showing up that morning looking for Bourdain and finding what he found replayed itself in my head for like a week after the news broke. “Haunted” is the right word for sure.
“Haunted” is the right word indeed. I can imagine Eric saying “Oh no Tony…” and just trailing off with tears starting to fall. It’s horrifyingly heartrending.
Hot take: Argento was a cheating ho and Bourdain was a gross racist, they deserved each other and neither deserves your sympathy. I just wish we could stop lionizing the old dead idiot. He didn’t come to all your moms’ deathbeds and hold their hands, he wrote a couple books about how easy it is to bully immigrants and had a TV show where he went to places. If Rick Steves offs himself I promise you we won’t have this ridiculous national passion play about it.
“He isn’t so reckless as to blame her outright for his death, but there’s a palpable change in tone when she enters the narrative. And while Argento is indeed a complicated person, the fact that she does not appear in the film to defend herself—nor do any of the other interviewees defend her—results in a biased indulgence in the sexist trope of the femme fatale, especially considering the note of raw, unresolved pain on which this film ends.”There’s a reason they couldn’t find anyone to defend her, and it has exactly nothing to do with “sexist tropes.” Sometimes a bad person is just a bad person.
EXACTLY
By that logic Bourdain was a “bad person.” He paid off the 17 year old Argento allegedly slept with. People who were given time to talk in the documentary, have said in other interviews Bourdain was often a raging asshole who was self destructive to himself and those around him. Yet where that’s even touched on in the film it’s romanticized as him being just a tortured soul.And you know who could’ve defended Argento? Argento. But the director has said in interviews that would’ve “capsized” the “psychological portrait” he was trying to make. A documentarian is supposed to be as impartial as possible, not create a narrative themselves.
I agree with you re: Bourdain, but just wanted to point out that a documentarian is NOT necessarily impartial – they are in fact telling a story from their point of view, with their own agendas. What you are describing is a journalist. Documentary films are not the same as the news.
A documentarian is supposed to be as impartial as possible, not create a narrative themselvesAll documentarians have agendas. Especially the ones that say they don’t.
Between his CNN shows No Reservations, Parts Unknown, and The LayoverNo Reservations and The Layover were on Travel Channel. Come on.
I just realized that he died in Kayserberg. That’s a stunningly beautiful town that now I can never think about the same again.
the fact that she does not appear in the film to defend herself—nor do any of the other interviewees defend her—results in a biased indulgence in the sexist trope of the femme fataleDoes she not appear in the film to defend herself because she was offered the chance and said no?Do the other interviewees fail to defend her because she may, perhaps, be genuinely bad in their view?If you were a documentarian and everyone you interviewed thought someone sucked and was a bad influence and that person didn’t want to appear in your film what exactly would you do? Still frames saying Argento did not wish to comment, and despite the fact that his longtime friends and supporters found her to be destructive it’s safer to refrain from any judgement whatsoever lest misogynists and anti-feminists have munition? Anthony Bourdain, by all accounts the luckiest man aliveI haven’t seen more than a few episodes of No Reservations and Parts Unknown but I know the guy was a heroin, coke, booze addict that worked as a line cook, was occasionally seen as dark and cynical, and committed suicide. You could actually glean all those facts from your article. I don’t know how you can get from “known former addict who spent decades working through the extremely high stress, insecure and unstable field of professional cooking that became famous and committed suicide” to “by all accounts the luckiest man alive.” I’m assuming he himself said how lucky he was repeatedly, but his own gratitude or gratefulness still wouldn’t make him the luckiest man alive.Like cursory reading would suggest otherwise. Maybe insensitive.