Suicide isn’t something we can fully claim to understand, but it’s also not something we need to blame people for.
It wasn’t a bad hot dog. Not great, but not bad, even decent. It could have done with more of the chopped onions, but Midwesterners flee at the sight of onions and I’ve learnt to not expect too many, and it could have used some more of the promised celery salt, but Midwesterners are terrified of anything with specks in it. At least no one had sneaked ketchup in, and the bun to meat ratio was perfect, so I was happy.
I was trying out the food at a new diner-ish place in Hyde Park, Chicago, where I live. You might wonder, Really? A hot dog? You think a hot dog needs to be evaluated? But I was using my very simple criterion for judging any new restaurant: if its most basic dish isn’t done well, if it can’t be bothered to take care over even the cheapest items, it’s not likely to do anything else well, at all. And, given the history of culinary disappointments I’ve had to endure in Hyde Park, where food goes resolutely to die, I refuse to spend too much money the first time.
As I sat slowly demolishing the hot dog, I thought, as I had many times in the last day, of Anthony Bourdain and his disquisition on the perfect burger. And I once again found myself inexplicably reduced to tears.
I did not know Anthony Bourdain, and I’m not in the habit of mourning celebrities as if they were people I knew. I do get and sometimes feel the sense of loss when someone talented dies, but I don’t take it personally.
And yet, over the last twenty-four hours, I’d found myself weeping over a man I admired, and still do, but with whom I was not exactly smitten.
I first encountered Bourdain through Kitchen Confidential, the 2000 memoir slash exposé about the restaurant industry. It was Bourdain who told us never to order fish in a restaurant on a Monday, that the five-second rule about dropped food is bullshit, and that several hands literally come into contact with your food before it shows up on your table, even at the finest restaurants. The book was hugely popular with both a general public and his fellow chefs, the vast majority of whom are still men. Chefs are like writers and teachers: the work they do, the work they love to do, has historically and almost universally been denigrated as women’s work, and it has been used to emasculate them. Their way of compensating for this feminising is to adopt ultra-masculine personalities and, judging by stories about Mario Batali and others, to objectify and denigrate the women in their ambit.
Bourdain lent a rock star gloss to professional kitchen work, and today “Chef” is practically a synonym for Dude, Really Dudey Dude. Even female aspiring chefs on shows like Chopped now feel compelled to show up with tattoos and attitude (which, frankly, strikes me as bizarre — the attitude, not the tattoos — and gives me no hope that the restaurant world is ever likely to end its misogyny: feminism is not about emulating hyper masculinity). It’s unlikely that any other chef will gain the depth of fame that Bourdain saw in his lifetime. When someone considered the coolest of the cool, Barack Obama, wants to be on your show, and he’s the “leader of the free world,” and he agrees, doubtless to the horror of his security team, to sup with you in a Hanoi cafe on cheap, bright blue plastic stools, you have officially become the King of Cool.
Or, really, you simply become Anthony Bourdain and no one else is ever likely to come close. Let us repeat the necessary cliché that Bourdain was an original. Others have done travel shows, others have done food shows, others have combined the two but what no one has done is to create a show and alongside it an entire body of work that integrates a love of food with discussions about politics that, while not explicitly critical of the American Empire, did on occasion raise questions about its existence, a show that delved into the lives of the people and places around the food as much as it looked at the food itself.
Bourdain’s own words indicate that he saw himself in the tradition of writers and travelers like Graham Greene and George Orwell, both of whom had, shall we say, complicated relationships with an Empire they could begin to see ending. In episodes of his show Parts Unknown, he is often shot as the lone white guy or the quintessential American, sunglasses and messenger bag in place as his lanky six feet four inch tall frame makes it way across crowded streets, often filled with non-white bodies much smaller and shorter than his. But what also marks him is his infinite generosity of spirit, and his refusal to take up space that would, we can assume, have been handed over to him, given his status as Visiting White Celebrity (recall: Obama wanted to meet him). In the home of the parents of the Korean-American artist David Choe, he sees the work of Choe’s mother on the walls, photos of her children graffitied with drawn-on details, decals everywhere, and points out that it’s all an extension, an origin even of Choe’s more legitimately recognised art. And, of course, there’s the famous Namibian warthog incident, where Bourdain taught world travellers: Don’t be an asshole. Just eat the asshole.
That still leaves us to question his collegiality with Obama, whose mass murdering ways were masked by that veneer of Cool, and which he never publicly questioned. On Facebook, a friend M.D writes, “That he could so easily loathe Kissinger (while hanging with Obama) without seeing him as being but the face of US ruling class violence and destruction is consistent with the current decontextualized obsession with Trump.” And this long piece on the website Popaganda (not to be confused with Bitch media’s podcast), which I’ve only been able to skim so far, makes similar points. Another one of Bourdain’s progenitors is Julia Child, who worked for the CIA, and that would be the Central Intelligence Agency, not the Culinary Institute of America, when it was still the Office of Strategic Services. Empire is complicated, and its emissaries take different shapes, including benign ones like chefs.
Yet, he was beloved in some parts of the left for statements like the one about Henry Kissinger, where he did not hide his loathing for the man many also consider a mass murderer. I suspect that so many male lefties were fond of him because he embodied a model of masculinity to aspire to: brash, good looking in that European, Alain Delon-ish way, with a taste for cigarettes and booze that could kill most of them in an hour, lots of sex, and an origin story reeking of grease and smoke, all of which carefully obscured the fact that he was once a student at Vassar, that his mother had been an editor at the New York Times, and that the family traveled often to France, his father’s family’s place of origin. Bourdain was a (male) lefty wet dream come true, proof that you could have a successful career excoriating the tyranny of America and still project the lifestyle and persona of a rock star.
I only began watching Parts Unknown in the last couple of days. I was surprised at how much I liked it, how much I could appreciate his style and presentation, because I recall being put off by his earlier television work, where his Hunter Thompson-like personal brand was much more evident. To put it in Bourdain-speak: I hated that macho shit. But now, ten years later, in Parts Unknown, which began thirteen years after the publication of Kitchen Confidential, he’s more likely to make fun of his older self, vainly trying to ride a four-wheeler in Colombia and taking a tumble, his aging and aching body needing to set itself down for a nap.
In the intervening years, I’d grown tired of his public persona and what I saw as a desperate need to maintain a myth of himself as the Ultimate Rebel. I have no doubt his fondness for punk was real, but so much of his proclaimed love for it revolved around punk as affect and fashion, as an attitude more than a way of life, a style you don with the spiked collars, like a costume (disclosure: I’m a fan of punk, sure, but my heart often lies with Abba, a band he hated). Not accidentally, the press often referred to him as the Sid Vicious of gastronomy, and what I found peculiar was that he seemed to need to emphasise that Sid-ness in his personal relationships (or a version of it, minus the deaths and mayhem), to constantly play up the bad-assery of the women he was with. His accounts of his first wife revolved around how much of a rebel she had been in high school, and their combined drug intakes. When he met and married his second wife, he spoke of her in similar terms, this time with an emphasis on her martial arts skills. And then there was the woman he was partnered with towards the end of his life, Asia Argento, whose apparent yearning to be seen as The Bad, Bad Girl rivalled his Bad Boy image.
Argento is the daughter of Dario Argento, the famous director behind films like Suspiria, whose work defines a genre of horror, and she brought with her that cinematic history and a history of being The Rebel Child (she is a single and unwed mother in Italy, something frowned upon in that deeply Catholic country). While looking at photos of the two of them — they both maintained active Instagram accounts — it’s hard to miss the extreme posing, especially on her part: the perpetual and crafted grimaces and sneers, the louche style of holding her cigarette, the chest and arm tattoos prominently displayed whenever possible, middle fingers thrust aggressively at the camera: like him, an adult stuck in a perpetual public adolescence, a constant performance of rebellion even when it was unclear exactly whom they were rebelling against, as two famous people who travelled the world in great comfort. Their relationship may well have been a happy one in real life (and who are we to define what “happy” means?), but it was also a relationship that was constantly being crafted, created, honed, and filtered through Instagram until it looked perfect. We are apt to easily mock the ways in which suburban American couples project visions of idyllic marriages and relationships, but we might pay attention to the ways in which some adults feel the need to perform the Sid-and-Nancy routine, which is just as tired and predictable.
Bourdain often struck me as someone who felt compelled to live up to an image over which he had in many ways lost control. In an interview with People magazine, he addressed the issue of possible retirement: “I gave up on that. I’ve tried. I just think I’m just too nervous, neurotic, driven…I might have deluded myself into thinking that I’d be happy in a hammock or gardening. But no, I’m quite sure I can’t.”
But those are not the only two options at least for, dare we say, normal people. Bourdain seemed to have become incapable of imagining a life that was not pre-drawn for him, neither a novelistic rendition of neurotic energy nor some deadening end in a hammock, in much the same way that every episode of Parts Unknown was meticulously scripted, with producers and crews going ahead and providing the research, planning every shot in advance.
Bourdain’s work is shot through with generosity and kindness, but his was a sense of humanity that never condescended. Consider his relationship to Marilyn Hagerty, the woman who was widely scorned for her glowing review of her town’s Olive Garden. Bourdain was at first among the scorners, then realised he was being a jerk, and then published a collection of her reviews under his imprint, with a foreword by him. It’s here he demonstrates his ability to meet people and culinary spaces where they are at, as he describes her not as some delightful little old lady but as someone who could beat him at poker. And, along the way, he writes, she provides a necessary history of American cuisine as most of America really lives it: “…what she HAS given us, over all these years, is a fascinating picture of dining in America, a gradual, cumulative overview of how we got from there… to here.”
So maybe I cried and still cry about Bourdain because he was not actually a celebrity, a point made by a friend who only knew of his work through my occasional discussions of him in the past. Another friend said it felt like we’d lost a friend. And, indeed, Bourdain always seemed to be not so much the rock star he seemed to feel compelled to pose as but more like a pal, that fuck buddy — that really cool and really smart fuck buddy — you hook up with on occasion, knowing you’ll have an amazing time on several fronts, including the best meals you could possibly find. He travelled to places I’m not likely to venture into, given my distaste for unclean bathrooms and uncomfortable trains, but he made it possible for us all to vicariously experience what he saw and felt and smelt and heard.
That the world is diminished by the loss of one person, that it feels less like everything it should be, is a sentiment often expressed upon the news of death; at least for me, it feels that way now. Bourdain’s suicide came as a shock because it was entirely unexpected, from someone who seemed disinclined to walk up to that particular cliff. In the weeks following, those of us who admired him for his role in #MeToo (Argento was a key accuser, and he publicly supported her and all the other women) might brace ourselves. Let us be honest: many if not all of us have already wondered if there were revelations about him forthcoming — he had after all spent decades in a world rife with sexual abuse, including his own — if that was perhaps the reason for his leaving the way he did. Nothing about #MeToo, with its obsession with hatred for the likes of fat, older men like Weinstein, prepares us for abuse from handsome, kind men who love and support their abused friends and partners.
And that may not be what drove him to suicide, or it may have been a mix of factors. Whatever should be the case — and we may never truly know — it seems indisputable that Bourdain felt the pressure of living a life that was becoming hard to live up to. Several accounts discuss his exhaustion from the grind of filming the show, but physical exhaustion is not, especially for someone with that much money and access to plenty of private self-and-healthcare options, difficult to take care of. Is it likely that he was simply exhausted from having to be Anthony Bourdain all the time, a personality rather than a person?
I’m reminded, in thinking about Bourdain’s death, and my grief, of Kate Spade, who killed herself a few days before his suicide. I was shocked by that news as well, but my first thought was that it was no surprise. Spade, with her often-perfect bouffant hairstyle and her tastefully perky clothes and seemingly perfect life, had always seemed like someone else who was cathected, willingly or not, to an image of perfection. It is impossible to go through life in that state, and far more difficult for women, who are ground up by expectations. Photos like this one, possibly simply the result of bad lighting or awkward timing, where she and her husband look like they would like a ghastly moment to be over soon, make it seem likely that the image, like the bouffant, was always in danger of tumbling over.
I don’t wish to needlessly psychoanalyse strangers I’ll never know or speculate about the state of their lives. And to be clear, I’m not among those who vilify people for committing suicide — it is an act to which people have a right to commit, and those of us who whinge about those left behind might perhaps consider that, for those who succeed, leaving people and lives behind is exactly the point, and a desirable one. But when two wealthy celebrities who had it all commit suicide within a few days of each other, their deaths prompt us to question what kinds of pressures the very state of celebrity might bring to bear upon us all.
To say that we live in an age of celebrity is an understatement, but to say that implies a musty, fusty nostalgia for some purer time without the glare of attention. And yet, it is a fact that “celebrity” is no longer a noun that describes a person, it’s a state of being. In nearly every occupation, a public profile is a necessity, whether through a publicly searchable Linkedin profile (What would you have to hide?) or an array of Facebook posts and Twitter updates (Why aren’t you on more often?). The millions made by a very, very few, like the Kardashians are made by people who’ve understood how to become famous for becoming famous, and the rest of us feel compelled to attain at least a fraction of that celebrity; in many cases, our jobs depend on it. Even in academe, which is where dorks and geeks used to be able to hide, the pressure to demonstrate “public engagement” is felt by newer generations of scholars who might write blog posts long before they take on their first significant research papers.
I don’t have anything more profound to add about Bourdain’s or Spade’s suicides. Suicide isn’t something we can fully claim to understand, but it’s also not something we need to blame people for. It’s a step some take, and its success leaves friends and families bereft, but that’s no reason to think of it as an undesirable step. But we can at least think about the costs of being a public person in an age when what ends up being your last meal remains on the internet forever, a ghostly reminder that your life was never your own, that the only way to find relief was to leave this one behind.
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