Being a big fan of Anthony Bourdain, his unexpected tragic sudden death in the summer of 2018 was an ending I more or less saw coming, and dreaded unconsciously for years.
I always deemed Anthony’s TV show as a genre of which the artists made arts with their own life experiences. In other words, the artist gives 100% of his/her own personal life to the art. Bourdain’s brilliance and unique but universally relatable perceptions of life and culture and moral debates were burning brightly through these episodes. If the earlier series of his TV shows were more about the exoticness of the culinary world at various corners of the world, the later ones were getting edgier and darker and more philosophical and sometimes political. And the episodes were getting better and better.
Watching Bourdain’s latest episodes became one of my biggest guilty pleasures. The guilt lied in that the anticipation for his next episode was getting unsustainably higher and yet he could always pull it off without disappointment.
The world was looking smaller and smaller through these one hundred plus episodes and it was getting harder and harder to guess what would be Bourdain’s next move.
Sometimes I felt we the ever growing world wide fan base of Bourdain’s show were acting like leeches sucking off his (including his crew) insanely bountiful creativeness like druggies that did not know how to stop.
Till one day it suddenly stopped and Bourdain killed himself.
Just based on my close follow up with these episodes, I immediately concluded who was the killer. That killer was alienly beautiful but venomously poisonous to Bourdain’s heart. That’s my first impression of her, upon watching “Parts Unknown” Season 8 Episode 9.
Bourdain’s death was such a loss and we the big fans of his were all guilty as charged, with that woman leading the killing.
I knew Bourdain’s decade-long producer hurriedly penned a memoir and published it in the summer of 2021, three years after Bourdain’s death. The book won a lot of praise. But I refused to read it. Three years to me was still too close to why he killed himself. It is still a vulturous move onto something we were so addicted to.
Finally, a few weeks ago, five years later, I spotted the book in a real bookstore. Bourdain, on the cover of the book, in his signature posture, staring back at me with his fierce gaze. “Hey, you, read this damn book Tom wrote, NOW!”
I obeyed.
One reason I was reluctant to read this book was that I could imagine how hard it is for the crews to get over this tragedy. But in the end I still underestimated the pain and desperation of it, through Vitale’s own words.
Per Vitale, each of these 2-weeks shooting contained a lifetime’s worth of adventures and he made over one hundred of these episodes over the course of more than fifteen years, along with a few “core” members of the gang. They were brainwashed by the genius and slightly crazy boss and joined a “cult” like operation team, losing themselves in their shared pursuit of art, sacrificing their family lives and self well-beings.
I read the book by revising all these episodes mentioned. I gained a total new perspective watching these fleeting moments and admired once again how great the art was made by Bourdain and his team.
Going through the pages, and re-watching all the episodes, I felt I was reading a great love story with a tragic ending. It makes you keep worrying about the ones left behind and alive. How could they get over it and move on eventually?
Great love comes with great pain.
I wish Tom Vitale best luck and eventually peace of mind and happiness down the road.
