The Anthony Bourdain Roadrunner documentary is proof that everything—even personal tragedy—will be mined in our endless quest for content
I was a sophomore in college when David Foster Wallace killed himself.
I didn’t know who Wallace was at the time, but I learned of him a few years later when I spent a few weeks of summer slumming in Spokane—more specifically, crashing at a friend’s house following a graduation ceremony I hadn’t attended while assuring my family’s increasingly frantic messaging that Yes of course I’m thinking about what I’m going to do with my life; No, no this is just a brief, um, detour, but I’ll be back on track very soon I just need some time to clear my head.
Enough time passes, the fog of war fades, a narrative forms. It becomes surprising, as you get older, how easy it is to drag a rosy brush over past retrospective. You’ll always find a way to craft a story that paints you in a favorable light.
I set out to write this piece almost two years ago, beginning it in a fit of furor after coming home from a Tuesday night screening of the Anthony Bourdain Roadrunner documentary. I’d seen it in a packed theater, in the final week of the one (-ish) month respite San Franciscans had been granted from draconian COVID restrictions before the autumnal vaccine messaging blitz began. Gathering with strangers to watch something new. It almost felt normal.
Before the film had started, a young woman had taken a seat down to my left. She turned to her friend and provided a disclaimer: This is going to be really difficult for me. I was a really, really big fan of his. The hair on the back of my neck prickled. A cold sweat descended. There was a chance this viewing experience would be intolerable.
Why do we feel such an insatiable desire need to chip off a bit of celebrity’s glow to light our own lives? You could say the Bourdain phenomenon took that tendency to new heights—or depths—but he was simply the latest in a long line.
I found myself hearkening back to a great line from Anthony Lane’s review in the New Yorker of the Safdie brothers’ film Good Time.
Back to that summer in Spokane. One morning I stumbled upon a New Yorker issue in the mail room that included an article by Jonathan Franzen. I’d just begun reading his work the previous fall, tumbling into The Corrections and then Freedom. His fiction, invariably dense and unflinchingly captivating, provide that sweet sensation of falling into a fabricated world. Here he was writing non-fiction, eulogizing the death of his friend David Foster Wallace in an essay that I’ve returned to quite often in the ensuing years.
The pain of loss grew so severe that Franzen felt he had to detach himself entirely from his surroundings in order to come to some semblance of closure. A significant portion of his pain stemmed from a feeling that the friend Franzen came to know and love was at odds with the legend borne upon his passing. The people idolizing a man from a comfortable remove. But dealing with the individual in all his complexity: that’s real.
Franzen’s piece puts forth an uncomfortable thesis: that this profoundly unhappy friend might have chosen an exit from life in part due to the anticipation of how it would be perceived. Through premature death, Dave was deified.
It seems wise to never speak ill of the dead, but it is worthwhile to cast a glance at how death is perceived by the current culture. Or, with Valentino’s ordeal in mind, the continuing culture. Plus ça change.
Morgan Neville, who directed the Bourdain documentary, makes the conscious decision to show his interview subjects on-screen. It quickly devolved into an orgy of self-gratification, culminating with David Choe, the quintessential Artist-with-a-capital-A, wrapping up the film on his own terms.
I contrasted this with the approach taken by Asif Kapadia, who in his documentary Amy, about the English chanteuse Amy Winehouse, kept his subjects off-screen. You only heard their voices, while the images of the past—sometimes of these interviewees, mostly of Amy—filled the screen. I found this haunting, and far more fitting from a thematic standpoint. This is about the human who died. The framework provided the space needed for reflection.
Death makes for strange spectacle. Ignored almost entirely (there’s a great meditation upon its removal from everyday life in the opening of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s first volume of My Struggle), then exploited for devastating effect in the media. There’s a quiet dignity in paying homage to someone who’s passed away. That dignity becomes lost when there’s some kind of status to be gained in the grieving.
I thought of that day in early 2020 when Kobe died in the helicopter crash. Without missing a beat, ESPN began running in-memoriam tweets by famous athletes and sporting figures along its bottom line.
I wondered if there was an athlete sulking somewhere, wondering why his tweet hadn’t made the cut. The insecurity that might crash on his psychological shores. Was he not famous enough to warrant a spot? Had he failed to craft a statement of adequately heartbreaking sentiment?
Maybe this athlete indulged in a moment of envy and self-pity that he hadn’t been chosen. Before remembering, hopefully, that this was not about him. If you’re going to broadcast a viewpoint to the world, the point was to say something, anything, then let it go. Doesn’t matter where it lands. Refreshing your phone furiously to see what kind of response it’s gotten—how many likes!—seems to prove a disgusting point.
There’s a passage from an article Bourdain penned in the London Observer: “Alternative Guide to Drinking and Eating in New York” that I keep close to chest. It was part of an appendix to the chef’s infamous Kitchen Confidential, the tell-all account of New York restauranteur-ing that had first put him on the map. I was sitting on a stool in a dimly lit Italian bistro in San Francisco waiting for a meal, when, in that inimitable ability great passages possess, I felt a profound sense of calm wash over me.
The ultimate New York dining experience, however, may not be in a restaurant at all. For me, it’s a lazy night at home. I’ll smoke a fat spliff, lay out some old newspapers on the bed, and call out for Chinese. I’ll eat—as seen in endless films—directly out of that classic New York vessel, the white cardboard take-out container, and watch a rented movie from nearby Kim’s Video. Kim’s specializes in hard-to-find exploitation, cult and art-house favorites, organized by director, so I can say give me a Dario Argento, an early John Woo, Evil Dead 2, The Conformist, and that Truffaut film where the two guys are both fucking Jeanne Moreau. Food never tastes better.
Life is lived—or, at least, it seems lived to its greatest fulfillment—in quiet moments redolent with meaning, shorn of the need to capitalize upon them for content.
