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AhhhTheFrench  We will sell no wine before its time  7mo ago (text post)   Edited 7mo ago   4048 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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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

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