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AhhhTheFrench  We will sell no wine before its time  7mo ago (text post)   Edited 7mo ago   4043 thread views

What Caused the Suicide of Anthony Bourdain?

Millions of people connect with his media persona, he was/is a cultural phenomenon. There is a picture of him that is treated like a shrine at my cousin's very good restaurant. Why did a man who seemingly had everything to live for take his own life? Not through an OD or other excess, but by hanging himself from a doorknob? The guy could score drugs in a second, why not ride it out in a heroin haze?

This whole thing is a puzzle to me and it seems wrapped up in his romantic life somehow? I remember seeing a picture of his girlfriend who was obviously cheating on him while "training" MMA etc...

I lose a lot of respect for people that "trade up" after they get famous and ditch their long time spouse that supported them when they were just a normal person, turnabout is fair play? Was it really that he could dish it out but couldn't take it?

Is this someone that people should look up to because he could be a charming bad boy for the cameras? I almost feel like it was too many 3rd world trips, I could actually see the pain he experienced while getting an "authentic" experience over and over again from people that wouldn't make in a lifetime what he made in a day. One or 2 fixers/guides even angled for some wealth or a chance to move to the US and pointed out the extreems, and that is just what they showed us on camera.

Anyhow, I'm a few glasses of wine in. Nowhere in my rambling, incoherent response did I come close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. We are all dumber for having read it. I award myself no points and may God have mercy on my soul.

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We were talking here the other day about role models. Conservative role models are easy to come up with, but progressive ones are hard. But then it dawned on me that Anthony Bourdain is a hands down perfect progressive role model.

Let me copy paste it from here https://www.themotte.org/post/900/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/194107?context=8#context

Anthony Bourdain. Humble beginnings doing "real" work as a cook and a chef at a string of New York City restaurants. Has a passion for French cuisine. Then struck out as a writer who published Kitchen Confidential, sharing this quaint but authentic view of a working class life with the world. All of these honorable professions go far among progressives. They are relatable, humble, involve zero obvious exploitation. True honest work.

I've seen this quote of his pop up at various art festivals:

“Your body is not a temple, it's an amusement park. Enjoy the ride.”

So cool.

From humble beginnings, he was signed to do two travel shows, No Reservations and then Parts Unknown, glorfying open-minded exploration and celebration of other cultures: their food, their traditions, their people, etc. Super romantic while still keeping an edgy down-to-Earth quality. Alludes to having lived a life of mild depravity but in a cute way. Seems like he could come up with an amazing wine pairing with seared sea scallops but you can also have a beer with him and shoot the shit. The worst thing you could ever do is suggest going to McDonalds.

He cannot possibly be a better progressive role model. He even struggled from mental illness! Showing that even hard working, successful and productive people who seem happy on the outside can suffer from depression and bring themselves to suicide.

Mild tangent: I can't shake the feeling that his romanticism, attempts at authenticity, never losing his edgy side belied a somewhat destructive live fast die young ethos and may have all been a big cry for help but progressives I've discussed this with don't believe there's any connection between the two at all whatsoever. He just caught mental illness the way anyone can catch flu.

Neither here nor there but until shortly before his death I had never heard of Bourdain, and have yet to read anything by him or see anything with him in it. Sometimes Japan really is isolating.

Like you, I had only vaguely heard of the guy and was surprised by the publicity around this.

We don't know why he killed himself, so it's all speculation. Nobody knows what demons others are struggling with. Maybe he spent years globe-trotting in order to get away from them, but you can't run away from yourself. Maybe he just finally ran out of energy to keep fighting.

You live in Japan? Are you Japanese? What's your story?

Yes.

No.

Not interesting, and anyway I'm already too self-revealing by half on this site. I've lived in Japan since late 1998, anyway.

What's your story?

My story is that I love Japan! From afar.

How familiar with his work are you? Did you ever read Kitchen Confidential?

I ask because when you read the book that made Bourdain famous, it rapidly becomes obvious that he was troubled long before he was famous. He was the Samurai Sword kid at a liberal arts college before he dropped out and headed into the world of cooking. Much of the charm of the work comes from Bourdain's hard partying, booze and drug soaked world. He dropped in and out of cooking jobs and drugs over the years. His personality before fame was self-destructive.

The problem with finding causes for suicide is that you can always find someone who suffered something as bad or worse who didn't kill themselves. Some people kill themselves over seemingly minor slights, others suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune well past the point at which I would have cut bait.

I confess to never having read it, I have seen every episode and documentary that came out before his death including grainy "a chef's tour" episodes from the early days. I haven't watched any post suicide retrospectives.

It is true, you never know, that is one reason a gun in the house ups successful suicide rates so much, for some people it must just be a fleeting moment of "this is all too much", it passes for most but some pull the trigger, and a gun makes that easy (I say this as a gun toting red blooded american). But damn, sober doorknob hanging? That can't be a good way to go.

I highly recommend the book. It is extremely light and fun and easy, it's a great beach read kind of book. If you're interested in Bourdain's life and mind, I'd say it's a must, because that is the first work he published that made his name, or the last thing he wrote before becoming famous depending how you look at it. So I think it probably offers more insight, or unique insight, compared to his later works which are going to be influenced by his life.

It is true, you never know, that is one reason a gun in the house ups successful suicide rates so much, for some people it must just be a fleeting moment of "this is all too much", it passes for most but some pull the trigger, and a gun makes that easy (I say this as a gun toting red blooded american). But damn, sober doorknob hanging? That can't be a good way to go.

Fascinating Factoid: a high percentage of people who jumped off the Golden Gate bridge and happened to survive said they regretted jumping immediately as they were falling.

The whole idea of placing blame for someone's suicide on a one-to-one basis is always going to end up hackneyed. At best you're talking about an egg-shell-skull on the part of the victim. Even someone like 2arms1head, who wrote a well-reasoned manifesto for why he killed himself, there are people like that still living.

I'd place suicide in general on a spectrum from self-preservation to self-destruction, shooting oneself in the head is one end of it, but something like heroin addiction is pretty close. You know it will kill you. Probably not today, but the odds of an OD add up until one day you don't make it. Bourdain:

...wrote in Kitchen Confidential of his experience in a SoHo restaurant in 1981, where he and his friends were often high. Bourdain said drugs influenced his decisions, and that he would send a busboy to Alphabet City to obtain cannabis, methaqualone, cocaine, LSD, psilocybin mushrooms, secobarbital, tuinal, amphetamine, codeine, and heroin.

He always had that self-destructive streak in him.

I think Folamh3 is close to it ITT. He had confronted his cheating partner who then emotionally abused him, leading to his suicide just hours later. If he were already depressed and planning suicide, he wouldn’t have cared about her infidelity or would have messaged her something else. The fact that he attempted to reconcile the relationship hours before taking his life indicates that he had no plans to do so before the event. So the overwhelming probability is that the experience was causal to his suicide. Which then should make us disgusted that the woman who caused it received attention and pity after the event.

Now what’s the deepest reason he committed suicide? We could blame it on the immoral woman — iirc, the actress he was seeing took Harvey Weinstein as a date to the premiere of her movie, likely indicating she sold her body for status. But I don’t think this is the deepest reason, because as a rich icon Bourdain could easily have found a morally upright partner. The reason definitely isn’t depression; that to me is a truly dangerous “just so” story that thwarts all thinking. I would assert that the reason is poor moral value.

Here is the liberal-individualist boomer par excellence. He tours the world and waxes poetic on the quaint social life, yet considers himself above their primitive family and social ties. He sits down with large families to eat, he attends their communal festivals, and he transmits this all to the solitary Americans in their living room. He is the rootless cosmopolitan, an omni-tourist, an enjoyer of spectacle over substance. Seeing all these wonders of the world, he’s yet unable to internalize their moral significance and necessity. He is self-worshipping; he cooked himself an identity in Kitchen Confidential and was too blinded by pride to ever revise it. Bourdain wanted to be the cool Western individualist loner, enjoyer of all but adherent to none. He attended every place’s ritual meal — each one a eucharist, essential, consuming God — but only as the aloof tourist, the narrator. It was this pride and absence of self-reflection (one’s real needs and obligations) which is the deepest reason. He let his heart be captured by an exotic woman to fulfill his own self-image, the idol he worshipped, which led to his demise.

Here is the liberal-individualist boomer par excellence. He tours the world and waxes poetic on the quaint social life, yet considers himself above their primitive family and social ties. He sits down with large families to eat, he attends their communal festivals, and he transmits this all to the solitary Americans in their living room. He is the rootless cosmopolitan, an omni-tourist, an enjoyer of spectacle over substance. Seeing all these wonders of the world, he’s yet unable to internalize their moral significance and necessity.

Wow.

You've really cut to the heart of what I was fumbling at here https://www.themotte.org/post/933/what-caused-the-suicide-of-anthony/202738?context=8#context

Progressive types see him as a hero. Purely virtuous, a man to aspire to. Implying his suicide could have anything to do with his spectacle is the closest one could come to commiting a sin.

"Travel is not a reward for working it's education for living" -- Anthony Bourdain

The irony. It's too much.

Which then should make us disgusted that the woman who caused it received attention and pity after the event.

There's certainly a vibe of "women have always been the primary victims of their boyfriends'/husbands' suicides."

However, it's not exactly rocket science to avoid wifeing-up promiscuous women, say... single mothers, women who'll suck and fuck male teenagers and adults on your tab, women who will cuck you to your face and ask what's up, as in Bourdain's case.

Bourdain should had known better than to get oneitis and treat a hoe as a wife.

He is self-worshipping; he cooked himself an identity in Kitchen Confidential and was too blinded by pride to ever revise it. Bourdain wanted to be the cool Western individualist loner, enjoyer of all but adherent to none. He attended every place’s ritual meal — each one a eucharist, essential, consuming God — but only as the aloof tourist, the narrator. It was this pride and absence of self-reflection (one’s real needs and obligations) which is the deepest reason. He let his heart be captured by an exotic woman to fulfill his own self-image, the idol he worshipped, which led to his demise.

I really think there’s something to this. I don’t think it’s as simple as ‘he found out his girlfriend was cheating on him’, but I do think that’s the key to it, in a way. People who have this particular sense that they’re unique, that they stand above this mass of parochial humanity, beyond it, viewing it almost objectively are very vulnerable to obsessing over a romantic partner who they feel is like them, also ‘separate’ in some way. It both soothes their vanity and feeds into the ‘favorite person’ complex that is pretty common in people with some personality disorders like BPD.

Bourdain clearly thought Argento was something of a kindred spirit according the documentary, a fellow traveller, someone who had suffered as he had and become strong and funny to cope.

Losing someone like that, or worse realizing that they’ve left you, bored of you, tired of you, is much worse than breakups are for psychologically stable people who lack this perception of their own intellectual apart-ness from community, identity and so on. That’s why even though Bourdain was on vacation with his close friend in a picturesque little town this wasn’t enough to save him, because nothing can replace this person. The sense of loneliness is absolute and profound, exacerbated by the inability (as you say) to self-reflect and conclude that maybe they were projecting large aspects of the image they’d created of themselves onto someone else.

"There's nothing worse than being forgotten by someone you could never forget."

Indeed

Your last paragraph touches deeply on what I picked up on watching a marathon while my knee heals up. The weird dichotomy between his brash world traveling wealthy lifestyle and his use of almost "poverty porn" to make a living.

You could see that both he and some of his hosts were sometimes visibly very uncomfortable due to the obvious wealth and status gap. I think we should maybe give him a little more credit for introspection due to that. Yeah now I can see how he was possibly boxed in by his own ego and it felt like there was no way out. Thanks for the writeup!

I recently watched the Paraguay episode of Parts Unknown, and he said that he was (IIRC) 57, and that he was already the longest living male member of his family in many generations.

Per Wikipedia, Bourdain looks like he was a serially relapsing druggie, which suggests deeper problems he was trying to self-medicate for. He was probably clean when he died, but the police never said what the prescribed medicine found in his system was, and in any case withdrawal is a bitch.

"Hard-living troubled artist" is a lifestyle trope which has a script, including a dramatic premature death. Perhaps Bourdain had always planned to die before he got old, and realised that he was running out of time and needed to take matters into his own hands. If you know why Kurt Cobain killed himself, Anthony Bourdain probably did it for the same reason, plus some semi-conscious desire to copy people like Cobain. The fact that Bourdain was 61 and Cobain was 27 is a comment on rockstardom being an even less healthy culture than celebrity chefdom.

I mean yeah, but most rockstars and celebrity chefs go their whole lives without killing themselves. It does certainly seem like Bourdain cultivated the "Hard-living troubled artist" lifestyle trope, as you say. I think this is the best explanation I've come across, well said. It seemed very deliberate. I mean, it worked, here I am still banging on about it 5 years later.

'We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.' -KV

The standard conspiracy theory on this is that what killed him was drama with Asia Argento. He saw photos of her dancing with someone else, then complained about how she was reckless with his heart and his life, then killed himself.

The New York Post has an article on it:

The book also chronicles his “last, painful days” when he saw photos of Argento, now 47, dancing with journalist Hugo Clément at a hotel in Rome, the last time they communicated.

“I am okay,” Bourdain texted Argento, who he began dating in 2016, after he viewed the photographs.

...

“I am not spiteful,” the text continued. “I am not jealous that you have been with another man. I do not own you. You are free. As I said. As I promised. As I truly meant. But you were careless. You were reckless with my heart. My life.”

“I can’t take this,” she messaged him back. To which he replied, “Is there anything I can do?”

“Stop busting my balls,” the Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things star responded.

“OK,” he typed.

Hours later, Bourdain hung himself.

So is that really all it took? I could see maybe being upset, maybe it feels worse if you've downed a 5th of scotch, but the corners report said therapeutic traces of a narcotic and nothing else . The dude could find another lover. It takes a lot of willpower to hang yourself from a doorknob sober. Like JFC he wasn't facing life in prison or anything.

I'd heard that Argento leaned on Bourdain to pay off a man who'd accused her of statutory rape. This article in the NYT acknowledges that Argento paid the actor off ($380k), points out that Bourdain and his lawyers were involved, but doesn't explicitly say that Bourdain ponied up. CNN states that Bourdain himself paid Bennett $250k.

That is kind of a crazy twist. But yeah, no reason to die over your gf being a weirdo.

Well, think of it this way. You leave your wife, and immediately start dating this glamorous and sexy Italian. During the relationship, your girlfriend becomes an outspoken #MeToo advocate, decrying a culture of silence in which sexual assault is entirely normalised. You support her in her activism (which has the side benefit of raising her profile dramatically, but whatever) - and take public pot shots against Quentin Tarantino. Meanwhile, largely unknown to the public at large, your glamorous girlfriend is facing her own accusations of sexual assault. She begs you to help her out, so you offer her the services of your lawyer and pay the complainant money to keep quiet. So now you have to cope with the cognitive dissonance of being a prominent activist around sexual abuse in Hollywood - while also paying hush money to an actor who claims to have been sexually assaulted (while underage) by a powerful Hollywood figure who was well over a decade his senior.

Everything's tipping away just fine, you try to put it out of your mind. But over time, you start to notice that your glamorous and sexy girlfriend is becoming more and more distant, missing your calls, won't put out half as often as she used to. Finally it dawns on you - she never really loved you, she was using you for your money so she could pay off this dude she raped. When public photos emerge of her dancing with another man and she doesn't even try to console you or tell you "don't worry baby, he's just a nerd" and essentially just tells you to fuck off and stop being such a big baby - well, I can't even imagine how he must have felt. He'd paid a victim of sexual assault to keep quiet, all to appease a woman - a woman who doesn't like him, who fucks other men behind his back and doesn't even respect him enough to hide it from him or from the public at large. The combination of cognitive dissonance, guilt, shame and humiliation could be enough to drive anyone over the edge - even someone without a history of massive alcohol and substance abuse.

I knew I would get some deep cuts here. Thanks for the analysis, it just didn't seem to make sense on the face of it and I was having trouble googling that deeply for some reason.

Uh wasn't there something about her sleeping with Anthony's underage son or something

You're thinking of this, sounds like.

Depression!

So having a defective brain state killed him after 61 years? What pushed that brain over the edge after surviving 6 decades?

The progression of the illness

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