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When I heard of Anthony Bourdain’s passing in 2018, it hit me hard. And when I recently watched the new documentary Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain, it drove home some of the reasons why his death left so many people reeling.
It’s not always easy to talk about the messier aspects of life, but it is important. And the more we can help each other during the more challenging moments, the more we’ll be able to access the truth and beauty Bourdain aspired to.
Here for you,
Matthew x
P.S. This week’s video means a lot to me, and I hope you’ll share it with any friend who’s going through a tough time.
Transcript provided by YouTube:
00:00
[Music]
00:04
do you know what i saw last night i saw
00:07
road runner the anthony bourdain movie
00:10
oh how was that
00:12
i want to say that how was it
00:16
well you know steve and you and me both
00:18
are
00:19
huge huge anthony bourdain fans
00:24
and it was i i think
00:28
i think it’s pretty safe to say
00:32
there have been there have been certain
00:35
celebrity
00:36
deaths that have that have meant a lot
00:40
to me
00:41
one of them was steve irwin
00:44
when he died uh the
00:48
those of you that don’t know that is the
00:50
crocodile
00:51
what was it what was his name crocodile
00:54
hunter
00:55
yeah which i i thought i was right in
00:56
saying hunter jameson but then i
00:58
i realized his image actually was the
01:00
complete opposite
01:02
of that it was like crocodile lover
01:04
would have been more appropriate
01:06
but um he uh
01:09
when he died it meant a lot to me robin
01:12
williams of course i know that meant a
01:13
lot to so many people
01:15
not uh not least of which because it was
01:17
just so at odds with
01:19
the feeling that he brought to so many
01:22
people but
01:23
bourdain was was a huge huge one for me
01:27
i think it was probably the most
01:29
upsetting
01:30
because in my lifetime i had followed
01:32
bourdain so closely
01:35
and was so attached to his work and his
01:38
shows and
01:40
and i suppose his lens the lens through
01:43
which he appeared to view
01:44
life was so
01:48
beautiful and not you know
01:51
relatable because it contained so much
01:53
light and darkness
01:55
and but you saw a guy who had a lot of
01:58
darkness
02:00
in him who seemed to still have this
02:03
rebirth
02:04
in his 50s and 60s
02:07
that allowed him to you know go around
02:10
the world and
02:11
see all of these places and meet so many
02:14
different people
02:15
and have adventures and and i know that
02:18
there was a kind of culturally
02:21
global inspiration he provided to people
02:25
that it made you want to not just
02:28
travel it made you want to explore it
02:31
made you want to
02:33
get out of your bubble it made you want
02:35
to go and interact with people it made
02:37
you want to try
02:39
try things that you hadn’t tried before
02:41
because you saw a person who was really
02:43
living
02:44
it was like this master class will be
02:46
art of
02:47
having an adventurous life yeah
02:51
yeah and i suppose to some extent it’s
02:55
like in a way like a lot of great tv
02:59
shows and movies
03:00
there’s a there’s an element of fantasy
03:05
in there because the reality of
03:08
of bourdain’s life and you don’t need to
03:10
watch the
03:12
documentary to know this
03:15
or to even intuit this the reality of
03:17
his life was being on the road
03:20
250 plus days a year
03:23
and that is
03:28
you know there’s a there’s a line in the
03:30
movie and i’m not going to give away
03:32
lots of the movie or anything like that
03:33
because people can go see it but
03:36
there’s a line in the movie where
03:39
someone a musician who’s close to
03:41
bourdain
03:43
says you know if it feels
03:46
so good coming back home every time
03:51
it feels and it feels so good leaving
03:53
home every time
03:56
and it kind of reminds me of that jerry
03:58
seinfeld
04:00
joke uh in his latest special where he
04:02
talks about you know you go out to a
04:04
show in the evening
04:06
and while you’re at the show at some
04:08
point you’re thinking oh we should
04:09
really get home soon
04:11
yeah and then you get home and the whole
04:13
joke is no one wants to be anywhere
04:17
you don’t want to be at home you want to
04:18
get out and do something then when
04:20
you’re out doing something you say i
04:21
can’t wait to be home
04:23
and and i’m sure much of bourdain’s life
04:26
was
04:27
was like that you know there’s the the
04:29
people said of bourdain that he was
04:31
always rushing to get to the next place
04:34
and and it’s funny because we watched
04:36
the fantasy of parts unknown
04:39
is watching someone who’s just in this
04:42
perennial state of travel and
04:46
loving life and loving meeting new
04:48
people and so on but you’re not seeing
04:51
what it’s like when the cameras aren’t
04:52
on you’re not seeing
04:54
the feeling of being in yet another
04:57
hotel
04:58
and not really wanting to be in the
04:59
place you’re in or
05:01
you’re you’re not seeing the in-between
05:03
scenes you’re just seeing the scenes
05:05
they wanted to show you
05:08
you’re not seeing the moments of
05:09
loneliness you’re not seeing the moments
05:11
of missing family
05:13
and in his case missing a daughter or a
05:16
wife or a girlfriend
05:18
and that’s that that’s why we
05:23
we love parts unknown but in a way we’ll
05:26
never actually achieve the feeling of
05:29
parts unknown
05:32
you know we’ll never be able to travel
05:34
and quite we’ll always be
05:36
in the same way that bourdain was with
05:38
parts unknown
05:40
always trying to kind of re-live
05:44
the stories of the movies he’d watched
05:47
because he actually didn’t travel much
05:48
till later in life
05:50
yeah he didn’t have much money for a
05:52
long time no
05:54
and and he was a he liked movies and he
05:57
had a
05:58
kind of encyclopedic knowledge of movies
06:01
and so you know around the world he
06:04
would he
06:04
started having fun using parts unknown
06:07
to kind of
06:09
re recapture and recapitulate
06:12
scenes from movies he loved
06:15
and that you know he would go to vietnam
06:19
and and recapture
06:21
apocalypse now and be reliving
06:24
scenes from it in his head and that’s
06:27
him trying to capture an essence
06:30
that his mind had bottled at one stage
06:33
or another
06:34
that in a way can can never quite
06:37
capture it but it’s always imitating it
06:39
and
06:40
and you know you and i steve have
06:42
traveled where we’re trying to imitate
06:43
parts unknown
06:46
so we’re doing an imitation of an
06:47
imitation
06:49
you know and always trying to recapture
06:51
something that we’ve seen trying to
06:53
trying to bottle something that that you
06:56
know
06:58
means something to us and we’ve
07:00
literally showed up in places and looked
07:02
at where did bourdain go
07:04
when he was in this place what
07:05
restaurants did he eat at and then you
07:07
go to those restaurants and you’re
07:08
trying to relive that
07:09
i’m sure many people have yeah i was in
07:11
v i was in vietnam and went to the obama
07:13
bourdain
07:14
uh noodle restaurant right right
07:17
and i don’t even mean in a detrimental
07:19
way in a dog derogatory way
07:23
so much of our lives is trying to
07:25
capture the essence of something that
07:27
is emotional to us that means something
07:29
to us trying to recreate an experience
07:32
in the world that we have in our head
07:34
always
07:35
trying to reach for some ideal
07:38
some romantic view of the world a person
07:42
a place a business an idea
07:45
a creation even when we write a book
07:49
you know we’re reaching for some ideal
07:51
we have in our head
07:53
of what we want this book to sound like
07:55
or when i create a show on tour
07:58
i’m always reaching for some idea i have
08:02
of the show in my head
08:03
yeah because you want to share the
08:05
things that excited you when you
08:07
saw them and you want to create them
08:09
either for yourself or other people
08:11
you want to do the same yeah and and and
08:14
in a way
08:15
the show ends up being good if it kind
08:17
of captures 60
08:18
of what’s in my head or sometimes even
08:22
less
08:24
but i there was a real darkness in him
08:30
quite clearly there was a real darkness
08:32
in him that that
08:34
that followed him around or that
08:36
reappeared
08:38
frequently in his life and
08:43
i i suppose
08:50
it’s important the the movie that i
08:53
watched last night in road runner which
08:54
i would encourage everyone to go and see
08:56
is important from this point of view
09:02
not as a way to say that having a
09:04
romantic view
09:06
of life is misguided
09:11
or reaching for an ideal is
09:15
childish
09:20
but to not
09:24
think that anyone else is doing a better
09:27
job of capturing that ideal
09:30
than we are
09:34
to realize that we’re all trying to
09:38
reach for something transcendent we’re
09:40
all trying to reach for something
09:42
romantic
09:43
we’re all trying to reach for something
09:45
that has deep meaning or feeling to us
09:49
and when we can step
09:52
out of the world of parts unknown which
09:55
is a
09:56
in many ways an exaggerated even though
09:59
parts are known was loved for its
10:01
authenticity
10:03
because it felt raw it was raw
10:06
but it doesn’t mean it wasn’t an
10:08
exaggerated
10:09
ideal of a place
10:13
or of or of a person and an experience
10:17
of traveling around the world
10:20
the movie i saw last night in road
10:22
runner was
10:23
a good an important antidote
10:28
to parts unknown
10:32
and the ideal that that creates it’s a
10:34
reminder to all of us
10:37
that there is another side to that story
10:41
so that when we do our version of
10:44
traveling around the world
10:47
even if it’s not literally traveling
10:48
around the world when we go for our
10:50
adventure our ideal
10:54
we understand that there is always the
10:56
other side to that coin
10:57
there’s always the in in-between scenes
10:59
there’s always the scenes that never
11:01
made it to
11:03
the uh the show
11:06
that got left on the cutting room floor
11:08
because they weren’t interesting or
11:09
because they were too
11:12
real too painful because they didn’t
11:14
tell the right story
11:17
those moments we can’t avoid in our own
11:19
lives they don’t they don’t get
11:20
left on the cutting room floor of our
11:22
own emotions
11:24
because we live them all we have to
11:27
we’re forced to live all of that footage
11:28
in our own lives
11:32
but when we see that footage in other
11:34
people’s lives
11:36
and when when we get you know in a way
11:38
that i think the roadrunner movie
11:41
is as generous as parts unknown was to
11:45
people
11:47
even though it’s raw and who knows
11:50
whether someone like bourdain would have
11:51
ever wanted
11:52
that to happen would any of us want to
11:56
die and then have
11:58
the unseen clips of our lives shown that
12:01
we didn’t chose to be out there i don’t
12:03
know
12:04
maybe not we’ll never know but
12:09
it’s an act as generous
12:12
as parts unknown maybe in some ways even
12:15
more so
12:15
because it gives us a real portrait
12:19
of the struggle of the pain
12:23
of the depression of the
12:26
darkness and when we have a realistic
12:29
picture of that in other people
12:34
we can
12:37
not be so hard on ourselves we can be
12:39
more compassionate towards ourselves
12:40
because we can say oh
12:42
they it’s like that for them to even
12:45
even bourdain wasn’t living parts
12:49
unknown
12:50
not the way we see it even he
12:54
wasn’t actually experiencing parts
12:56
unknown the way we experience it
12:59
in the way that’s the generosity of
13:01
parts unknown
13:02
the generosity of that gift is even he
13:05
didn’t get to experience it that way
13:09
um we did and that’s a beautiful thing
13:12
but it must always be tempered by the by
13:15
the other side of it
13:16
because otherwise we will always feel
13:18
like we’re somehow falling short
13:20
of an ideal that other people have been
13:23
able to reach
13:24
which is false because they haven’t
13:28
they are living a real life just like we
13:30
are
13:32
and i think that if we can understand
13:34
that when the
13:35
darkness comes for us
13:38
we’ll be ready to meet it and to know
13:41
that we’re in good company we’re in the
13:43
company of our heroes
13:44
we’re in the company of the people we
13:46
look up to we’re in the company of some
13:49
of the best people on this earth
13:50
we’re not alone in that darkness
13:54
and hopefully that knowledge can stop
13:56
people from
13:57
from getting to the point that bourdain
14:00
did
14:00
where he decided that that darkness was
14:03
too much
14:05
yeah the empathy and the truth
14:09
of seeing someone else going through it
14:11
just kind of makes
14:12
it makes it not seem like our unique
14:14
fate when it’s happening to us
14:16
and we think why why me like why is this
14:19
happening to me
14:20
um it universalizes it yeah
14:25
but i you know like i said i love the
14:28
fact that it didn’t it didn’t put an
14:29
overly positive spin on everything
14:31
there’s true darkness in that movie as
14:33
well as light
14:34
and i i would encourage everyone to go
14:37
and see it
14:38
and weirdly the great the great legacy
14:40
is of bourdain that
14:41
he actually did appeal to life lovers in
14:43
a huge way
14:44
and made people so a lot of people it
14:46
made them sort of
14:48
want to love life more ironically a lot
14:51
of what those shows do
14:52
is make people want to dive into the
14:54
world more
14:55
and there’s something really cool and no
14:57
one should write off all of that because
15:00
of
15:00
the way it ended and that’s really
15:02
really important in life we live in this
15:04
this this infantilized
15:08
version of of imp
15:11
images of people these days where
15:14
everything is angels and
15:15
and demons everything is someone’s
15:17
either wonderful and we should listen to
15:19
everything they say
15:20
or they’re corrupted and we should
15:21
listen to nothing they say and it’s
15:23
it’s kind of pathetic yeah we should be
15:26
looking at what’s useful in everybody
15:28
the fact that bourdain took his own life
15:31
doesn’t change
15:32
all of the beauty that he brought into
15:34
the world then it doesn’t change the
15:35
truth
15:36
of that beauty he accessed it
15:38
unfortunately he wasn’t able to access
15:41
it at the point that he took his own
15:42
life
15:43
but it didn’t mean that when he was
15:45
accessing it at those points that it
15:47
wasn’t real that it wasn’t true that it
15:49
wasn’t something to aspire to
15:51
and i can’t stand the kind of logic that
15:53
people have where it’s
15:54
you know you could post a quote from a
15:56
bourdain or anybody and they’re like
15:59
well why would i take advice from
16:01
someone who clearly couldn’t even
16:03
you know have it in them to stay alive
16:05
or couldn’t even
16:06
avoid committing this crime or doing
16:08
this it’s like
16:09
that is such an that is such a childish
16:13
uh way to look at the world yeah i hate
16:15
that
16:16
people are complex life is complex and
16:19
we’ve all been
16:21
the demon at different points in our
16:22
lives and we’ve always all been the
16:23
angel of others
16:24
and hopefully we’ll be the angel more
16:26
times in our life than we’ll be the
16:28
demon but it’s in both
16:29
both are in us and and let’s hope the
16:32
demon doesn’t win for us let’s work to
16:34
make sure the demon doesn’t win for
16:36
us but uh you know it doesn’t
16:39
people can access truth and then not
16:42
have that truth
16:44
be accessible to them when they need it
16:47
most
16:48
and i and i believe that we’ll never
16:50
know why in that very moment bourdain
16:52
decided to do what he did only he
16:54
knew that but but i do believe that in
16:57
that moment he wasn’t able to access
17:00
a truth that that changed so many of our
17:04
lives
17:04
through him because he made it
17:06
accessible to us
17:32
you
—
This post was previously published on YouTube.
***
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