We Needed Bourdain
“I’m just having this late-in-life childhood of getting to go to all the places I dreamed about and read about. I grew up reading books about pirates and explorers, so of course, given the opportunity, that’s pretty much what I’m doing on the show.”
150 years ago, Mark Twain was America’s cool uncle gone abroad. He traveled extensively, wrote with playful honesty, and presented his stories to live audiences. He captured a moment and helped define a zeitgeist.
There will never be another Mark Twain, but Anthony Bourdain was as close as anyone will ever come.
Bourdain’s early entries into television felt like the results of a clerical error, conjuring up an image in my head of a strung-out TV executive muttering “Johnson signed the wrong form, and now this guy who cooks steaks in Manhattan has a budget and a crew and is drinking himself to death all over the world.”
But Tony made it work. He experienced cultures most people only dream about, but he didn’t stop at exposition. He remained unapologetically himself. He poked fun at things he saw. He poked fun at his producers. When he and his crew weren’t borrowing storytelling techniques from their favorite films, they experimented with new kinds of cameras or imposed technical constraints in themselves just for the hell of it. Bourdain and Co. closed the door on the polite “Rick Steves in a sweater” era and dragged documentary television into the 21st century with a meat hook.
Bourdain’s projects entertained me, but his honest, curious approach to people inspired me. There’s a difference between experiencing other places and learning from them. Bourdain taught, by good and bad example, to always learn. To engage honestly, and to never, ever be intellectually dishonest in a journey.
The shows themselves were a real-time log of Bourdain’s personal growth. With the full heft of CNN’s journalistic keys to the world, Parts Unknown, a dirty/clean restart after No Reservations, captured Bourdain’s evolution from a snarky anti-tour guide to cultural conversation starter. Instead of show where conversations were about meals, the meals were vehicles for conversations.
And conversations carried real value. They opened doors to hear the reality of each place and the people therein.
My excitement was genuine when I saw him visit my parents’ hometown of Greeneville, Mississippi, not only eating at Doe’s, but dining there with an old classmate of my mother's who had carved her own path as a journalist.
Further afield, his conversations in the Middle East were uncomfortably raw, and made me ask my own questions in my own sphere about foreign policy, about human rights. The human experience took front and center.
Through it all, Bourdain’s presence was haunting because he carried the weight of his sins. Recovered from hard drugs, but still partaking in whatever vices de jour he found in the road, his face always flicked back and forth between a warm smile and a thousand yard stare, and as much as I knew he wasn’t the kind of human who would pass in his sleep at the age of 75, I hoped that Bourdain would find his peace.
My hope peaked during one on-camera conversation, between Bourdain and Iggy Pop, stands out in my mind. Standing on a quiet beach in Miami, the television persona, which I’m fairly good at detecting through my own videography experience, seemed to fade away, and the conversation drifted to a very honest place and I realized we were seeing Bourdain 3.0.
Roots of Fight hoodies had replaced the band tshirts.
Jiu jitsu Bourdain.
Non-smoker Bourdain.
“Drinks less” Bourdain.
Reflective Bourdain.
The humor and the winking remarks remained, but Bourdain as a human seemed both grateful and… awestruck. He stood there, next to one of his own heroes, and together they mused in wonder at their both still being alive, and expressed gratitude for a second chance at a full life.
But writers’ minds are dangerous landscapes. History shows. I was always a bit fearful that some old demon would chase Tony down, no matter what he expressed on camera.
Today I woke up to that fear fulfilled. It’s been eleven hours since I saw the news and I’m still in a fractured state of mind. I want to write while this is fresh, but, God in heaven, it is difficult.
I don’t hesitate to think tragically of Bourdain as among the ranks of Papa Hemingway, Hunter Thompson and Kurt Cobain: another brilliant mind who chose to leave early. If anything, he was the spiritual descendent to all three. He was an adventurer-writer-rocker of the first order.
Collectively, Bourdain’s life and work tell an incredible story.
Kitchen Confidential, is, effectively, his origin story; a madcap rundown of kitchen life in the 70s and 80s. Sex, drugs and rock and roll in chef’s whites. In an alternate timeline, Bourdain could have easily faded into obscurity as just another manchild in that dysfunctional playground. But the smirks and impish remarks we saw on television belied a man who made a powerful choice halfway through a life.
In a car with four friends, he heard a statistic on the radio that heroin would claim the lives of three out of four addicts. All four friends were addicted to heroin. Bourdain wrote that, in that moment, he decided to be the survivor.
17 years after writing that book, the man who once sold his record collection for hard drugs, who used to smoke paint chips off the floor, was clean of drugs and leveraging the full weight of his access to document fraught places like Iran, Cuba and the Congo.
The older he grew, the deeper his interest in humanity became. This is why Bourdain resonated. This is why his death hurts us.
Bourdain wasn’t just the materialization of every hipster’s travel fantasies. On paper, it is hard to believe m that he lived past 35. Years of his life were spent making every possible choice that could accelerate his own demise.
But he escaped his own self-destruction. Not by accident, but by choice.
And we were privileged to see him introduce us to many, many special people, and eventually grow into a legend.
In his own way, Bourdain used the strategies of a drug dealer to lure in the audience and hold us captivated. The television persona pulled us in with snarky remarks about bad hot dogs in Chicago or merciless comments about tourist trap restaurants in Italy. Then, before we were quite aware of it, we were hearing dinnertime debates in Jerusalem over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And I can’t remember a single episode where he parted with his hosts on bad terms.
A younger person, a less experienced person, a less internally ragged person, could not have brought the sensibility that Bourdain brought to his documentation of the world. He knew the value of life, because he was painfully aware of how much of his own he had wasted.
The arc of Bourdain’s accidental career, from the unpolished beginnings of A Cook’s Tour, to the genre-bending work he did on Parts Unknown, was so much more than advertised.
It wasn’t about Emmys and bigger budgets.
It wasn’t just about food and booze.
It wasn’t just travel.
It was a redemption story.
Out of the slough of addiction, he found a voice, and with his crew and his words, Anthony Bourdain took us to dinner in a different city a week for seventeen years.
We don’t mean to be, but we are cynical. Our phones give us near unlimited access to data and information. We can make judgements and be reductive without ever leaving the house. Bourdain reminded us that people across the world are as layered as we are ourselves. He reminded us of our humanity.
Beyond the snark, beyond the persona, the totality of Bourdain’s life and work serve to inspire us and give us hope.
We needed him.
We will miss him.
