Six Years On: Wrestling with Anthony Bourdain’s Suicide
How social media can exacerbate the suicidal impulse.
Asia Argento and Anthony Bourdain. PHOTO: ASIA ARGENTO/TWITTER
I STILL REMEMBER when the news of Anthony Bourdain’s suicide broke on Friday, June 8, 2018. I couldn’t fathom what I had just read. Although I had never met the author of Kitchen Confidential (2000), I could not stop thinking about his suicide; I kept fixating on his final hours of suffering and what exactly was going through his mind when he made the decision to take his own life.
I suspect my personal reaction to Bourdain’s sudden death was not particularly unusual or unique; many people were shocked and bewildered when they first heard the news of his suicide. Somehow it just didn’t gibe with my image of Bourdain: how could the man who had “the best job in the world” commit suicide? He was always traveling, exploring new cultures, and living his life to the fullest. This was precisely what made his suicide so bizarre and implausible. Behind my obsessive thinking about Bourdain’s suicide, however, I think a cherished myth of mine was being shattered: those who have traveled a great deal are convinced that traveling brings insight, enlightenment, and peace of mind; when Bourdain died by his own hand, that truism was brutally nullified.
It has been said that every suicide leaves a riddle that haunts those who have been left behind. With Bourdain’s suicide, this is definitely the case. It is impossible to know the exact reason behind his suicide, and we should not try reduce his suicide to one singular cause. Even when the person committing suicide leaves a note, the author can be considered unreliable in the sense that the author may want to convey a particular narrative about his/her decision to commit suicide. In the case of Bourdain’s suicide, he did not leave a note, so all we had to go on was media speculation about his motives for committing suicide.
When Bourdain’s suicide was first reported, many media outlets focused on his toxic relationship with Asia Argento and how the tabloid pictures of her affair with a young tattooed French reporter pushed the 61-year old Bourdain into extreme depression and eventually a fatal phase of suicide ideation. The demise of Bourdain’s May-December romance with Argento was certainly a triggering factor in his suicide, but there was more to the story when one looks closely. Bourdain actually had multiple symptoms and many reasons to commit suicide. Suicide is fundamentally irrational and horrifying act of violence that cannot simply be reduced to one convenient master-narrative. I think it’s important to avoid blaming Argento. Bourdain and Argento were locked in a complicated and unresolved conflict, and this unquestionably provoked him. Although her text messages to him in his final hours were hostile and lacking in empathy, it was Bourdain who made the choice to take his own life. Those who myopically focus on Argento downplay the other contributing factors that were also significant.
In the aftermath of his death, a small cottage industry of Bourdain publications has emerged. There have been two full-length biographies, by Laurie Woolever and Charles Leerhsen; a memoir by Tom Vitale, Bourdain’s close friend and producer; a CNN-sponsored publication, Anthony Bourdain Remembered (2019); and Morgan Neville’s biopic documentary, Roadrunner (2021). Woolever’s Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography (2021) presents the reflections of Bourdain’s inner circle of friends and both of his ex-wives. It contains a wealth of information about the last two years of Bourdain’s life, but, to its credit, Woolever’s account steers away from the notion that Bourdain’s suicide can be explained by one single event or cause; all of Woolever’s interview subjects agree, however, that Bourdain’s life took a nasty turn during his final two years. The stress of constant travel, his capacity for overworking, and his contentious relationship with Argento all took its toll on his psyche.
Along those lines, Charles Leerhsen’s Down and Out in Paradise (2022), which could have been titled “The Unvarnished Bourdain,” is able to zero in on Bourdain’s last week and final hours. Leerhsen, who has written biographies of Ty Cobb and Butch Cassidy, had privileged access to Bourdain’s final text messages and his laptop. His biography documents the travel host’s exhaustion from endless travel, his enormously fraught relationship with Argento, but also stresses the notion that Bourdain had unhealthy relationship with social media, and the media attention he was simultaneously generating and receiving through his relationship with Argento. Leerhsen suggests that all of these conflicts and stressors detrimentally affected his mental health in the last two years of his life. Vitale’s memoir, In the Weeds: Around the World and Behind the Scenes with Anthony Bourdain (2021), is unique because Vitale is the only author who managed to interview Argento after Bourdain’s suicide. Although Vitale is not sympathetic to her treatment of Bourdain, he attempts to represent her reaction to his death and her understanding of it.
What is especially striking about all of these sources — Woolever, Leehsen, Vitale, and Neville — is how they all confirm Bourdain’s downward spiral during the last two years of his life. While Bourdain’s suicide cannot be reduced to one narrative or factor, there is a cluster of symptoms and stressors that contributed to his chronic depression and the decision to end his life:
1. Leerhsen reveals that Argento and Bourdain’s communication was extremely contentious right up until the final text message. The long-distance nature of their relationship was an added stressor that often filled Bourdain with anxiety. Much of his contact with Argento was through phone calls, FaceTime, Skype, Instagram, and text messages. Although Argento maintains that they had an “open relationship,” we know from Bourdain’s emails that he often feared that Argento would have relationships with other men when they were separated.
2. Bourdain had been drinking heavily on the night of his suicide and opted to skip his dinner with his close friend, the restauranteur Eric Ripert. Bourdain’s intake of alcohol should be considered a contributing factor.
3. Vitale’s account confirms that the host of Parts Unknown frequently suffered from fatigue and was often exhausted from traveling over 250 days a year. Bourdain was a workaholic who showed no signs of slowing down despite the fact that he was 61. At the time of his death, he was scheduled to return to New York and then fly to India to film an episode of his show. Bourdain rarely said “no” to work.
4. Bourdain had a long history of suicidal ideation. In many of his shows, he often made jokes about killing himself. In the Buenos Aires episode from 2016, he famously tells an Argentine psychoanalyst that he often thinks about killing himself. This episode was filmed before Bourdain had actually met Argento in person. Bourdain’s reoccurring suicidal ideation suggests that he had untreated depression and suffered from travel fatigue for several years. Bourdain’s alcoholism in recent years also suggests that he was self-medicating.
5. Bourdain was also haunted by the notion of public humiliation. Argento’s betrayal wounded him, but the fact that he perceived that millions of people also knew about it exacerbated his suffering. According to Woolever, Nancy Bourdain, his wife for two decades, claimed that her ex-husband was “a control freak” and that loss of control was a significant factor in his decision to commit suicide. His relationship with Argento and the tabloid coverage of her affair with Clement were clearly issues over which he had no control.
6. Bourdain’s suicidal ideation stemmed from self-loathing, but also from the desire to end his suffering and the pain of his break-up with Argento. In his final hours, suicide appeared to be a quick fix.
7. Bourdain was immersed in social media and the internet on the night of his suicide. We know from Leerhsen’s account that he googled “Asia Argento” over 100 times on the night he committed suicide. In his last hours, Bourdain chose to brood online rather than reach out to his inner circle of friends in New York, or his friends and colleagues on the TV crew in France. According to Woolever, when Lydia Tenaglia, co-founder of and executive producer at Zero Point Zero productions, attempted to reach out to him during his final week, Bourdain texted back, “All OK.”
For me, the most undertheorized factor in Bourdain’s suicide was his longstanding addiction to social media and his desire to promote the proliferation of his public image. Leerhsen reveals that Bourdain had a Google alert for “Anthony Bourdain” set to “as it happens” and “configured as a push notification on his Iphone.” Leehrsen quotes David Macmillan, a Canadian friend of Bourdain’s, remarking “that his phone would be going ping-ping-ping every time his name was being mentioned.” Bourdain also often reveled in battles conducted over social media. Leerhsen argues that “when his phone sat silent for too long, Tony would take to social media to say something that might get people talking about him again. One favorite tactic was to knock another TV chef [e.g., Rachael Ray or Emeril] for endorsing a shoddy line of cooking gear or slipping a produce plug in [the] show. […] [T]here was, he knew, nothing like a celebrity feud to get his iPhone pinging.”
Perhaps the best way of understanding Bourdain’s relationship to social media is Guy Debord’s theory of the “society of the spectacle.” Debord, a French radical and founder of the Situationist International, argued that Marxism needed to be reinvented because the most significant sphere of repression was no longer the point of production — the factory floor — but the point of consumption: the mass media and its transmission of bourgeois ideology. In short, film and advertising had created a global nexus of powerful consumer images that mediate reality and persuade people to consume commodities, brands, and products. For Debord, “the society of the spectacle” (the title of his 1967 book) amounts to a powerful form of ideological control.
An important byproduct of the tyranny of images is the creation of a passive society of voyeuristic spectators and consumers. Instead of traveling, for example, viewers watch TV presenters visiting exotic locations. In short, images mediate our existence and life is increasingly experienced while gazing at screens — today, principally television, laptops, and smartphones. Debord, who also died by his own hand in 1994, never lived to see the rise of the Web and the invention of social media. These developments would have horrified him because his conception of the society of the spectacle has been greatly magnified by the rise of the internet and the ascendency of social media in recent years. When we plug social media and the ubiquity of the internet into Debord’s theory, we get life in the 21st century: the society of the spectacle on steroids.
As a celebrity, Bourdain was a major player in this media spectacle — he generated popular images on Instagram and television — but he was also addicted to promoting and consuming images. In short, Bourdain was a player within the society of the spectacle and he had a penchant for manufacturing controversy via his twitter account when he was not getting enough pings on his Google Alert for “Anthony Bourdain.” When the news of Argento’s affair with Clement broke in the Daily Mail, Bourdain took to Instagram and posted a story with eerie music from the soundtrack of Violent City, an Italian film from the 1970s about a woman’s affair being exposed by the paparazzi. Argento responded with a post featuring a Sex Pistols T-shirt that proclaimed “Fuck Everyone,” with a caption at the bottom of her post stating “You Know Who You Are.” Leerhsen’s biography features excerpts from the text exchange between Bourdain and Argento on the night he killed himself:
AA: I can’t take this.
AB: It would have been so easy to have helped me out here.
I required so little. But “fuck you” is your answer.
[…]
AB: Is there anything I can do?
AA: Stop busting my balls.
AB: Okay.
Bourdain’s next move would be a highly symbolic action. After all, he viewed social media as a game, and he hated to lose. In this case, there was no need for a suicide note, or a final posting on Instagram or Twitter; the news of his suicide would be the final blow: Argento would be wounded, and he would be universally mourned. Bourdain’s final gesture ensured victory in the society of the spectacle. Leehrsen reveals that “when Bourdain’s suicide was first reported Google searches for ‘Bourdain Suicide’ spiked to more than one hundred million.” The tragedy of Bourdain’s death is not only his suffering but the fact that he, while in a vulnerable state, succumbed to the logic of spectacular society. Although I have cautioned against monocausal explanations for his suicide, it’s hard to deny that Bourdain’s obsession with his image via social media did not play a significant role in Bourdain’s decision to take his own life.
It goes without saying that Bourdain was a remarkable personality who single-handedly reinvented travel and culinary journalism for television in the last two decades. His death is a colossal waste of talent and humanity, and I am saddened as I write these words. I deeply admired Bourdain’s reverence for traveling and his openness to whatever the world presented to him. But I also feel that Bourdain’s legacy, apart from his books and his travel journalism, must be a message of suicide awareness. On the eve of his suicide, Bourdain was immersed in tabloid scandal, and the intensification of media coverage definitely had a detrimental effect on his mental health. While in a highly vulnerable state of suicide ideation, Bourdain’s immediate access to social media platforms and streaming devices insulated him from his traditional networks of support. If Bourdain had not been cocooned in social media and the internet on the night of June 7, 2018, he might still be alive today. If he had reached out to a friend, on the phone or in person, the outcome might have been different. In the aftermath of Bourdain’s suicide, we have to acknowledge that the rules of the game have changed before our eyes: social media mixed with suicidal ideation is an absolutely toxic combination — one that we have not yet managed to come to terms with.
In the years following Bourdain’s suicide, I have witnessed three separate suicide attempts by people I knew. One was a student of mine, another a neighbor who always appeared to be in a good mood, and the third an old actor friend who shot himself after he lost his job and his mother during the onset of the COVID epidemic. In all three cases, I had no idea that each of them had reached a state of complete despair. We have to try and learn something from Bourdain’s suicide, and every suicide that we endure. Social media has dramatically upped the stakes and we need to do more to combat its often pernicious influence.
© 2024 James Penner
