KEITH C. BURRIS WRITES ABOUT THE MAN WHO HAD IT ALL
My housemate and I like to go to the movies. Netflix is fine, but there is nothing like the silver light coming up in a pitch-dark theater.
And there is nothing like the scale and scope of the big screen.
What’s more, this is a time when documentaries are suited to the big screen. They are getting better — less static and less boring.
“Summer of Soul,” is a great new doc about the so-called “black Woodstock”in Harlem, in 1969.
“My Octopus Teacher” is a most unlikely, very not boring, nonfiction film.
Last weekend, we saw “Roadrunner,” a film about Anthony Bourdain, the famed “celebrity chef” turned TV travelogue host, who died at his own hand three yearsago.
I don’t know that it is a great film. Indeed, its creator has admitted to an ethical lapse that bothers me a lot. (More on this in a few lines.) But Bourdain himself is compelling.
Troubled, ruthlessly honest and tough minded (including about himself), compassionate, eloquent, relentless, restless and charming— you cannot take your eyesoff the man.
And you cannot stop thinking about him after you leave the theater.
First of all, he wasn’t a chef. He was a writer, a writer to his core, who made his living, for the first 25 years of his professional life, as a cook. Not a chef. A cook, he insisted.
He once said that everything he learned about life he learned as a dishwasherand cook.
Like: Show up; show up on time, or early; do your best; and be considerate of your colleagues. What you do not get done, they mustdo.
He was also not so much a TV star, or travel and food critic, as a filmmakerexploring cultures.
Food and travel were just the wayin.
He didn’t even start traveling untilmiddle age.
He also said he was not a journalist, though he was. He dug below the surface and disdained all the accepted questions and answers.
And he claimed he wasn’t a cause man, just a loner passing through. But that changed, too. His empathy kept deepening. He never had to preach. He let the camera roll and people told their ownstories.
So what did he learn from travel, which is not all leisure if you do it right and which is not travel at all if it is only done in a bubble?
Be open. Stay humble. And be grateful, he said. You are lucky to be wherever you land. And you area guest.
What a tragedy to lose this man andin this way.
There are multiple griefs and curses in suicide. The obvious one is the hurt inflicted on the loved ones left behind. A less obvious one is that suicide tends to have thelast word.
But it shouldn’t.
This brings me to the controversyregarding “Roadrunner.”
Thedirector used AI to recreate Bourdain’s voice to read part of an email he sent to a friend. It read, in part: “... You are successful, and I am successful, and I’m wondering:Are you happy?”
For me, creating the illusion of Bourdain’s voice speaking these words was both wrong and unnecessary. But the rest of the movie outweighs this arrogant stupidity. Weget the vital man, alive again.
So the real question on the table is: Why does such a man end his life? Why could he not find happiness?
For Anthony Bourdain truly had it all. Not only obvious success, like popularity, recognition and wealth, but success on his ownterms. And success with love.
He made no Faustian bargains. He did good work. And his work madethe world better.
He was beloved, by thousands whodid not know him, for this.
Thosewho did know him, loved him, warts and all. Deeply. He had a talent for friendship and left behind many friends and devoted familywho still acutely mourn his passing.
How could all that not be enough?
How could he not see all that he had?
Did he break his own cardinal rule? Be grateful.
Aren’t many of us breaking thatrule every day?
Of course you can explain any suicide as brain chemistry and demons.
But we live in an addiction culture, in which a great many of us get a great deal of what we want butare not happy.
Soperhaps it is not only an individual matter.
A friend of mine says, echoing something George Orwell once wrote to explain the pull of fascism, that the nature of human beings is that we need to worship something. And we generally pick something that lets us down: Another person, the opposite sex, sex itself, money, power, or just more.
In America, if it’s good, we want more — or something that topsmore.
Rich guys in space would seem to qualify.
Somehow the creation of 50 soup kitchens, or 50 prison libraries, or 50 more St. Jude hospitals, does not have the same kick as your own spaceship and space program.
The Founders assured us of a natural “right,” to “pursue happiness.”
Were they correct? Isa it properly right?
Or is it more like a compulsion, aneed?
And how is happiness to be defined?
If happiness is liberty, Isaiah Berlin said, there are two kinds: The liberty that comes from being left alone, and then positive freedom — making something, creatingsomething.
The American cowboy is allegedlyhappiest when left alone.
The American entrepreneur, like Tony Bourdain, was happiest when making and creating.
The Founders understood both kinds of liberty — freedom from and freedom to. Public happiness was their kind of happiness, and it derived from the great conversation, the great play of ideas — in civic life, in science and the arts, in the ebb and flow of thought itself.
Thought is private. Its advancement takes place in the public sphere.
Hence, Stephen Hawking, who, demonstrably, did not have a very “happy” life, may have