Anthony Bourdain, Hunter S Thompson and the Power and Peril of Gonzo Journalism

But is it journalism, radical ethnography, front-line storytelling or something else?

There’s nothing wrong with a desire for objectivity in storytelling, like when presenting evidence, explaining a scientific theory or journalism that reports on events. But there are other reasons that we share stories, like when we explore a culture, hear individual experiences and try to understand points of view other than our own. These more emotive and instinctual modes of storytelling have their roots in empathy, connection and shared experience. Not in logical proof.

The edifice of neutral, penetrating and sober journalism can be contrasted with a more radical style of storytelling, ‘Gonzo journalism’, that happily blends the personal experience and opinions of the storyteller with their subjects. Gonzo journalism foreswears objectivity in favour of intensity. It accepts and even brings forward personal biases in an embrace of being-in-a-moment. At the same time, Gonzo journalism is an unashamed production; a calculated part-fabrication that seeks to inspire, educate and even provoke. This duality, between the unstudied and the poised, creates an unexpected tension between the creator of the stories and their consumers.

The Gonzo, nouveau mode of storytelling can be brought to life by the late Anthony Bourdain, along with his conceptual predecessor Hunter S Thompson. Though they lived lives very different to my own, I’ve always found both of their work fascinating, confronting and thought-provoking. I was especially moved by the visible work of the chef, television presenter, writer and agitator, Bourdain. I remember the first time I saw one of his shows, decades ago. I was captivated by the prowling energy of the tall and lanky figure who seemed to stride, talk and chew his way through new worlds to which I had little exposure.

I’d like to compare and contrast Bourdain and Thompson’s seperate journeys with the shared storytelling style that they both embody. But I also want to lift the lid on the possible consequences of their approach. Gonzo journalism may be one of the most deeply evocative means of telling a story, but it isn’t without its costs.

Though it perhaps isn’t wholly fair to read too deeply into personal psychology from public-facing information, it’s tragic and striking that both Anthony Bourdain and Hunter S Thompson took their own lives, dying by suicide in 2018 and 2005 respectively.

In the land of Gonzo, the storyteller always seems, eventually, to be swallowed whole by the brash and bold face they present to the world, all the while hiding deep and personal pain that is their fuel. Put another way, the hunger that drives Gonzo storytelling may be the very hunger that consumes the storyteller.

I don’t usually give introductory framing, but this piece requires some special treatment. The topic is sensitive, but my goal is an honorable one, to explore the powerful contributions of Anthony Bourdain to our cultural corpus of stories, by way of a detour through the earlier work of Hunter S, Thompson. If you’re not feeling up to a discussion of challanging life stories, relationship issues, addiction and suicide, perhaps leave this exploration for another time.

Where does the hunger come from?

Anthony Bourdain was born in 1956, in Manhattan New York. His parents were Pierre Bourdain, a records executive and Gladys Bourdain, an editor for the New York Times. His upbringing, in his own descriptions, was comfortable, middle class, even pedestrian. In interviews, Bourdain never reported anything but love; but along with it, a strange claustrophobia. His quest for freedom and experiences that transcended the stability of his youth.

Through his father, he seemed to connect both to his French ancestry and time spent in France, eating foods that were risqué to an American palette, perhaps igniting a life-long love of food and rebellion

“I blame my first oyster for everything I did after; my thrill-seeking, all my hideous screw-ups in pursuit of pleasure. I was miserable and angry. I bridled bitterly at the smothering choke-hold of love and normalcy in my household. Call it a character flaw, of which drugs was simply a manifestation. A petulant ‘fuck you’ to my bourgeois parents who committed the unpardonable sin of loving me.” (“Roadrunner”)

Bourdain started drug use early, in high-school, made it to Vassar University, but dropped out, ending up in kitchen work. Being in the kitchen was a contradiction; chaotic and energetic, but also structured and hierarchical. It seemed to inspire something, and in 1978 he graduated from The Culinary Institute of America. He worked across the industry in a wide variety of roles, all the while cycling through drug-addiction, variable employment, brushes with crime and financial ruin. He eventually ended up as Executive Chef at Les Halles, owned by friend and mentor Philippe Lajaunie.

Here, Bourdain’s cooking journey took a turn. Having always been a reader, he started writing, joining writing workshops and experimenting with journalism. During this time he produced two (quasi-autobiographical) novels about a rebellious chef embedded in mysteries, ”Bone in the Throat“ and ”Gone Bamboo.” Neither sold well.

Yet, an article, published in 1999, in the New York Times, entitled, “Don’t Eat Before Reading This”, turned his writing lens against himself and the piratical world of high dining;

“Gastronomy is the science of pain. Professional cooks belong to a secret society whose ancient rituals derive from the principles of stoicism in the face of humiliation, injury, fatigue, and the threat of illness. The members of a tight, well-greased kitchen staff are a lot like a submarine crew. Confined for most of their waking hours in a hot, airless spaces, and ruled by despotic leaders, they often acquire the characteristics of the poor saps who were press-ganged into the royal navies of the Napoleonic times - superstition, a contempt for outsiders, and a loyalty to no flag but their own.” (Bourdain, “Don’t Eat”)

This shift in focus, from (semi) fiction to non-fiction continued, with another article in 2000, again in the New York times, that continues to give hints of the observational and writing skills waiting to be unleashed.

“By eight-thirty, the order board is full. To my right, plates of appetizers are lined up, waiting to be delivered, the counter is full of sauté pans; the worktable near the fry station, with its pile of raw steaks, looks like the floor of a slaughterhouse… I make a hand gesture to a friendly waiter, who knows what I want, and he returns with an Industrial – a beer stein filled with a Margarita. The tequila takes the edge off my adrenaline, and goes down surprisingly nicely after three double espressos, two beers, three cranberry juices, eight asprins, and a hastily gobbled hunk of merguez sausage, squeezed into a heel of bread, that I’ve consumed since lunchtime.” (Bourdain, “One Day in Halles”)

Years later, Tim Hayward, writing in The Guardian, noted in Bourdain’s obituary that the rhythm of New York, Bourdain’s own internal frisson and his intelligence fused together to create a style of monologue that could rival the best:

“And when he was on form, Christ, could Bourdain weave words. Not pretentious, not the purple passages of food writers before him, the high prose of the refined connoisseur but the terse, full-auto linguistic firepower of a New Yorker – imagery like crime-scene photos, the flayed raw humour of a morgue attendant, the sort of one-liners a hitman drops as he pulls the trigger, and similes that would make Raymond Chandler eat his own pencils. For all the rock’n’roll, the easy, sleazy charm, the guy wrote like a poet and, as he got older, he just got better.” (Hayward, The Guardian)

All the observations, wit and writing culminated in the revelatory book, “Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly”, released in 2000. On the cover,  Bourdain posed; lean frame, brooding good looks, kitchen implements. The imagery spoke for itself, as did its content:

“I want to tell you about the dark recesses of the restaurant underbelly — a subculture whose centuries-old militaristic hierarchy and ethos of 'rum, buggery and the lash' make for a mix of unwavering order and nerve-shattering chaos — because I find it all quite comfortable.” (Bourdain, “Kitchen Confidential”)

The ‘enfant terrible’, chef and bad boy of cooking had arrived, not just with food, but with evocative stories of a hidden world behind the kitchen divider. “Kitchen Confidential” launched Bourdain into the vox populi . There’s an underpinning tragedy in all of this. The toxic culture of power and dominance evoked by Bourdain’s stories, would come to be something that he had to both regret and rebut later in life. But hold that thought, we’ll get back to it a little later.

For now, we need to take a brief detour to Hunter S Thompson, writer and raconteur extraordinaire. Born decades before Bourdain, Thompson was probably the first to stake out the territory of raw expository observation writing. It’s from Thompson, and those around him, that we get our first definitions of the world of Gonzo journalism.

A short tour through the world of Hunter S Thompson and the birth of Gonzo journalism

Hunter S(tockton) Thompson was born to Virginia Ray Davison and Jack Robert Thompson in 1937, in Kentucky. His father died early in his life and his mother’s alcoholism made the rest of his teenage years difficult. In high school he got into trouble often, drinking and pulling pranks on his classmates. After a brush with the court system, he entered the United States Air Force to avoid prison for suspected burglary.

After spending time in the Air Force, Thompson travelled in South America and worked as a freelance journalist. There, he wrote his first two novels, “Prince Jellyfish”, and “The Rum Diary”, both of which took years to be published. By 1956, he’d arrived in San Francisco, as the drug, music and counter-culture movement were just getting up to the swing of the 1960s. On the West Coast, he began to produce his first ‘embedded’ stories, like the year he spent living with and writing about the Hell’s Angels in “Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs”, in 1967. An insider to the gang culture, he made friends with many of the Hell’s Angels, but was enough of an outsider to be physically beaten, when he was perceived as having overstayed his welcome.

Other work followed, but  it was an article published in 1970 that brought Tompson’s iconoclast style of internal monologue, observation, objective and subjective collision to the fore. Writing for the counter-culture magazine “Scanlan‘s”, Thompson visited the Kentucky Derby. With him was the English artist Ralph Steadman, with whom Thompson was to have a lifelong friendship and working relationship. The two men spent a alcohol-fuelled weekend embedded into the cultural smorgasbord of The Derby.

“He [Steadman] had done a few good sketches but so far we hadn’t seen that special kind of face that I felt we would need for the lead drawing. It was a face I’d seen a thousand times at every Derby I’d ever been to. I saw it, in my head, as the mask of the whiskey gentry — a pretentious mix of booze, failed dreams and a terminal identity crisis; the inevitable result of too much inbreeding in a closed and ignorant culture. One of the key genetic rules in breeding dogs, horses or any other kind of thoroughbred is that close inbreeding tends to magnify the weak points in a bloodline as well as the strong points.” (“Kentucky”)

The finished article, “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved”, is an extraordinarily odd read. Angry and amused, simultaneously observant, but also culturally insensitive at the same time. The casual use of racist terminology probably has to be read in context to time, place and satirical deployment, but it doesn’t make it any less jarring or unpleasant.

I’ll admit, I’m not always sure what is being said is straight or satire. Either way, the article was one of several through that decade that began to propel Thompson onto a more national stage. Writing both about culture and politics, he was renown for fearlessly pointing out the obvious failings in politicians that no one wished to say, and contradictorily making up stories to provoke conversation. This blurring of truth and fiction makes for confusing reading.

In 1972, Thompson’s book “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”, became the touchstone Thompson work, following a (semi) fictionalised drug and alcohol fuelled bender through Las Vegas. Yet, two years later, by 1974, the spark seemed to be burning out. Thompson appeared to struggle to cover landmark events with the same vivacity; being assigned to but failing to complete stories about the “Rumble in the Jungle”, between Ali and Foreman, the end of the Vietnam war and the Presidential election in 1976. From then, Thompson retreated to his home in Colorado, never to really make himself known again.

So where does the Gonzo come from?

The source of the “Gonzo” in ”Gonzo journalism” is difficult to find. More obvious is its application to Hunter S. Thompson. An obvious use is in his “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”. The protagonist, Raoul Duke, essentially a carrying character for Thompson, is accompanied in his journey by a ‘Dr Gonzo.’ Dr Gonzo was, in turn, based on Thompson’s real-life friend, lawyer and adviser, Oscar Zeta Acosta.

Dr Martin Hirst, from the School of Journalism & Communication, University of Queensland, whose excellent work, “What is Gonzo? The Etymology of an Urban Legend”, has a few exceptional theories. He notes that the use of ‘Gonzo’ in Thompson’s novel was predated by mentions or allusions-to-the-idea throughout the 1960s and 1970s. In 1960, the famed writer, novelist and journalist Tom Wolfe noted that new journalism should aspire towards reading more like a novel. In 1975, reporter John Filiatreau defined Gonzo in 1975 as:

“[Gonzo] can only be defined as what Hunter Thompson does... It generally consists of the fusion of reality and stark fantasy in a way that amuses the author and outrages his audience. It is Point of View Run Wild. (Filiatreau 1975, cited in Hirst).”

Twenty years later, editor and Thompson collaborator, William McKeen extended this definition:

“Gonzo requires virtually no re-writing, with the reporter and the quest for information as the focal point. Notes, snatches from other articles, transcribed interviews, verbatim telephone conversations, telegrams— these are elements of a piece of gonzo journalism. (1991, p.36, cited in Hirst)”

It’s generally accepted that legendary reporter Bill Cardoso was the first to apply ‘Gonzo,’ to Thompson’s style, when he noted in a letter, “‘I don’t know what the fuck you’re doing, but you’ve changed everything. It’s totally gonzo.” (Cited in Hirst)

Gonzo’s specific etymology, or word-origin is varied. Again, Dr Martin Hirst notes “Gonzo” could come from the French Canadian ’gonzeaux’ (shining path) (Carroll  cited in Hirst). Or, a Boston slang for ‘guts’ as proposed by Whitmer, another biographer, or an alternation of Italian ‘Gonzo’ (simpleton), o a variation of the Spanish ‘Ganso’ (fool).

In Thompson’s own words, Gonzo was:

“The  writing  would  be  selective  &  necessarily  interpretive  –  but  once  the  image  was  written, the words would be final... But this is a hard thing to do, and in the end I found myself imposing an essentially fictional framework on what began as a piece of straight/ crazy journalism. True Gonzo reporting needs the talents of a master journalist, the eye  of an artist/photographer and the heavy balls of an actor. Because the writer must be a  participant in the scene, while he’s writing it... Probably the closest analogy to the ideal  would  be  a  film  director/producer  who  writes  his  won  scripts,  does  his  own  camera  work and somehow manages to film himself in action…” (Thompson 1979, p. 120, cited in Fedorowicz p. 59)”

Fedorowicz, in an interesting article, “Towards Gonzo Anthropology : Ethnography as Cultural Performance”, suggests Gonzo is a form of radical ethnography or radical anthropology. Thompson exposes both his own voice and that of the Hell’s Angels he associated with, mixing the internal (emic) views of the biker culture and the external (etic) views of those that opposed them, like law enforcement officers.

This doesn’t meant this type of embedding isn’t without its controversy. Anthropologists (who study humans and their cultures) and ethnographers (who study people’s behaviour in context) have wrestled with the tension between a desire for ‘immersion’ and becoming part of a context, event or group versus a mistrust of the misguided urge to become part of group for which one can only ever be an outsider.

It’s clear that Hunter S Thompson influenced Bourdain, at least through his writings. In 2009, while giving a talk in Denver Bourdain was asked “I was wondering if you admired Hunter Thompson?”

Bourdain: “Um, you know it’s a funny concept. Obviously he’s a huge, huge influence on me. I read ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’ when I was twelve years old… It was just like ‘Oh God, this is the most exciting shit I’ve ever read.’ … I don’t think anyone who even casually reads my stuff can understate how important he was to me. That said, he did not age well. I look at his career, I look at the last twenty years of his life, I’m very aware of ‘That ain’t gonna be me.’ I’m not wearing the fucking leather jacket for the rest of my life… I’m not having me a beer with everybody who offers me a beer. I’m gonna live and to write other books. He [Thompson] had to live with the legend and I don’t know if he wore that well. If you’ve seen the documentaries they did on him… the guy killed himself … Not a happy man. I see him as a cautionary tale…I would prefer if I don’t end up that way.”

So from Hunter S Thompson’s exploration of society, politics and the fringe, we head back  into the second chapter of Bourdain’s storytelling, his emergence as a television personality. The creation of a new image but also the destruction of an old one.

Television, the ultimate performance, driven by fear of, and hunger for, connection

Bourdain’s journey into the world in television comes in two halves, the first coming off the back-end of the popularity of “Kitchen Confidential”. This includes shows like “A Cooks Tour”(2002 - 2003), “No Reservations” (2005 - 2012) and “The Layover” (2011- 2013).

There’s an inherent tension here. On one hand, there is a clear excitement in Bourdain moving out of the demanding, all-consuming but meaningful kitchen that had been his origin into a wide world of adventure, harking back to an almost youthful fascination with kids-own adventure stories. Bourdain notes:

“I wanted adventures. I wanted to go up the Nung river to the heart of darkness in Cambodia. I wanted to ride out into a desert on camelback, sand and dunes in every direction, eat whole roasted lamb with my fingers. I wanted to kick snow off my boots in a mafia nightclub in Russia. I wanted to play with automatic weapons in Phnom Penh, recapture the past in a small oyster village in France, step into a seedy neon-lit pulqueria in rural Mexico. I wanted to run roadblocks in the middle of the night, blowing past angry militia with a handful of hurled Marlboro packs, experience fear, excitement, wonder. I wanted kicks – the kind of melodramatic thrills and chills I’d yearned for since childhood, the kind of adventure I’d found as a little boy in the pages of my Tintin comic books. I wanted to see the world – and I wanted the world to be just like the movies” (“A Cook's Tour: Global Adventures in Extreme Cuisines”)

It’s important to note, most or all of these things are self-admitted fantasies, derived from literature and comics. The inherent slipperness of Gonzo raises its head. How much is a sober assessment of ‘what is’, versus the fantasy of ‘what I wish it to be’? In many ways, the transition from chef and writer to travel presenter was nearly instantaneous. In Bourdain’s own words:

“I shall explain. One minute I’m standing next to a deep-fryer and the next I’m watching the sunset on the Sahara. I realised that one thing led directly to another. I realise, had I not taken a dead-end dishwashing job, I would not have become a cook. Had I not become a cook, I would never have become a chef. Had I not become a chef, I never would have been able to fuck up so spectacularly. Had I not known what it was really like to fuck up, that a noxious, highly successful memoir I wrote, wouldn’t have been half as interesting. And I’m not going to say here how to live your life. I’m just saying really, that I got very lucky.” (“Roadrunner”)

In true Gonzo spirit, the first show, “A Cook’s Tour”, was a piratical affair, a tiny crew with hand-held cameras, unique locations, foods strange to those in the West. Bourdain, in the middle of it all, a gaunt and looming New Yorker with a seemingly inexhaustible appetite to know everything, see everything, hear everything, eat everything.

However, beneath the thin sheen of big-screen drama, the first start into television was complicated. Bourdain’s long-term producers, Tenaglia and Collins, note that his first episode on camera, with “A Cooks Tour” was, in many ways, a disaster. Bourdain was more focused on roaming the world, consuming the experiences and then returning to his hotel room to think and write, than providing the give and take of television.

It was only a few episodes into that first series that Bourdain seemed to figure out the compromise that was being offered. Rather than hiding behind the facade of a byline or newspaper masthead, Gonzo journalism puts itself on raw display, even if that display itself is partially fabricated. The dark side to this sort of expansive emotional production is the cost it exacts on the producer and all those around them. The Gonzo is consumed as much as they consume.

“A Cooks Tour” also gave rise to the signature technique for which Bourdain would become famous. A movie and television trick sometimes used to make up for weak storytelling, the voiceover. With the voiceover, Bourdain got to tell a secondary story of his experiences on-top of whatever he was feeling, thinking or saying in the moment. Though this might be taken as a failure of planning, thinking back to the tension in Gonzo journalism between the reality of a moment and the story being created, Bourdain’s voiceover became his signature meta-narrative on his experiences.

These early shows are interesting, the energy is there, but darker changes were on the horizon.

Burning down an old life in search of a new one

For nearly 30 years, from high-school, Nancy Putkoski had been Bourdain’s love, partner and eventually wife. However, the rise to new television fame began to deconstruct what had bound them together. Bourdain notes:

“Making TV was becoming creatively satisfying, I wrote the book and yet continued filming. The tail now wagged the dog. I was hooked on travel, on seeing the world and on the terms on which I was seeing it. I was on the road for the better part of two years, during which time everything in my life changed. I stopped working as a chef, a job of whose daily routines had always been the only thing between me and chaos. My first marriage began to fall apart.” (“Roadrunner”)

Putkoski and Bourdain parted ways somewhere between in 2005 to 2007. Then, in 2007, Bourdain married Octavia Busia, a fellow chef, and they had a daughter. For a time, he seemed to be happy with the fame and newfound stability gained from being a husband and parent.

“My whole life I was like a kid with my nose pressed against the glass thinking about what it must be like to have a kid and a family and normal life, standing in the backyard barbecuing burgers. When I find myself doing that I am ridiculously, stupidly happy. I do a lot of pretty cool shit now; I travel all over the world, I see all these amazing things; but I’m never happier than when I’m standing in the backyard being ‘TV dad’... because… I feel normal.” (“Roadrunner”)

In 2016, his relationship with Busia ended, bringing to a close a period of seeming stability.

Gonzo unbound - where does the performer stop and the human began?

In 2013, Bourdain’s most famous television series began, “Parts Unknown”, with long-time collaborators Collins and Tenaglia. It’s only with “Parts Unknown,” that Bourdain seemed to find his most powerful voice.

Consider an example, his reflective observation, given while sitting in a quiet hotel bar, high above Tokyo. You can hear the odd combination of familiarity and a longing to know; the fascination with a place that is strange, but only because he came to it as a relative outsider.

“What do you need to know about Tokyo? Deep, deep waters. The first time I came here, it was a transformative experience. It was a powerful and violent experience. It was just like taking acid for the first time—meaning, What do I do now? I see the whole world in a different way. I often compare the experience of going to Japan for the first time, going to Tokyo for the first time, to what Eric Clapton and Pete Townshend—the reigning guitar gods of England—must have gone through the week that Jimi Hendrix came to town. You hear about it. You go see it. A whole window opens up into a whole new thing. And you think, What does this mean? What do I have left to say? What do I do now?” (“Parts Unknown”)

In “Parts Unknown”, Bourdain also seemed more clear in his preference for the underdog, the suppressed or the disadvantaged. Meeting them not as a saviour, for he had no answers; but as someone empathetic to their position, a fellow traveller. Like his honest self reflections on his own drug addition when talking to drug addicts in the Eastern United States; his patience with their stories perhaps coming from a growing acceptance of his own complicated journey.

For me, a notable moment of the series was the dinner between then-President Obama and Bourdain in a small restaurant, Bun Cha Huong, in Vietnam. An everyday sort of scene. A crowded restaurant, blue plastic chairs, fans stirring the hot humid air. A seemingly natural moment, with two men used to being before camera but also obviously a well-organised and deeply scripted evenet. Given the amount of security and screening that would have had to occur for then President Obama to sit free among the diners to eat his meal. I love the contradictions. And the indication that, at this point, Bourdain’s impact and voice was significant enough to draw a sitting president to enjoy a meal with him in the heart of Vietnam. No one cleared the table of all the interesting accoutrements. Both men are using chopsticks. Their drinking beer straight from the bottle. That’s Gonzo; a president and a chef/writer/presenter, meeting across an everyday table of noodles.

But how much of it was ’real’ and if not wholly real, what was the fabrication costing?

Maria Bustillos, in an exceptional and highly recommendable review of Bourdain’s written work, “Fiction Confidential”, suggests that Bourdain’s openness, outgoing exuberance and energy was partially a ‘for-television’ construction; that it’s in his writing, not his television work, that traces of his real self come through. As an example, Bustillos compares two passages, one from “Medium Raw” (his sequel to “Kitchen Confidential”) and the second from one of his ‘fictionalised’ novels, “Gone Bamboo”.

Bourdain in ‘Medium Raw’: “That's where I was in my life: driving drunk and way too fast, across a not-very-well-lit Caribbean island. Every night. The roads were notoriously badly maintained, twisting and poorly graded. Other drivers ... were, to put it charitably, as likely to be just as drunk as I was ... I would follow the road until it began to twist alongside the cliffs' edges approaching the French side. Here, I'd really step on the gas... depending entirely on what song came on the radio next, I'd decide to either jerk the wheel at the appropriate moment, continuing, however recklessly, to careen homeward—or simply straighten the fucker out and shoot over the edge and into the sea.” (Cited in Bustillos)

Versus

Bourdain in ‘Gone Bamboo’: “Leaving the Mariner's Club, he took the mountain route back to the pond, the scooter handling differently without Frances holding on in the rear... A few hundred yards ahead, the road took a steep drop down the other side of the mountain to the sea. The road was ungraded and unbanked; one could easily fly right off the side of that mountain, and Henry considered that option, toyed with the idea as if playing with himself, not serious, just to see how bad things were...  Bad manners to kill yourself. Realizing how drunk he really was, Henry started up the scooter and drove cautiously home.” (Cited in Bustillos)

It’s excellent close reading and I think I agree with Bustillos’s revelation that Bourdain’s fictional writing may be a thin skin on his real-self observations. If so, then the visible, loud and confident television presenter was somewhat a construction; and the shows built around him, though studiously crafted to appear chaotic, were just as much a construction, managed, not from behind the camera, but from in-front of it. His long-term producers, Collins and Tenaglia, tell stories about how, at times, it was difficult to produce shows with Bourdain, who was powerfully controlling of the show’s direction.

Yet, in places, the mask seems to drop. In 2016, in a segment that made it into the “Parts Unknown” episode on Argentina, Bourdain seems to be momentarily himself. The set up, in any other context, implies an amusing filler, specifically that Argentina has an unusually high number of therapists per capita. So, they arrange for Bourdain to be interviewed by one. He notes, with what feels like unexpected and blunt truthfulness

“I’d like to be happy … I should be happy. I have incredible luck. I’d like to be able to look out the window and say, ‘Yay, life is good. [He he goes on to explain he isn’t happy, often driven into depression over the smallest triggers]. I will find myself in an airport, for instance, and I'll order an airport hamburger… It's an insignificant thing, it's a small thing, it's a hamburger, but it's not a good one. Suddenly I look at the hamburger and I find myself in a spiral of depression that can last for days." (“Parts Unknown”)

An all-consuming love

In 2016, while continuing to work on ”Parts Unknown,” Bourdain filmed an episode in Rome, which included Italian actress Asia Argento. To everyone around them, the chemistry seemed obvious, intense and all-consuming and they became close.

In 2017, news emerged that Harvey Weinstein, the American film producer, had assaulted Argento decades previous. It was to be one of the first such claims against Weinstein. In the unravelling that followed, Bourdain remained visibly and vocally supportive of Argento. She in turn became involved in “Parts Unknown”, not just in front of camera, but behind it, stepping in to direct an episode when the show’s normal director was ill.

The tension between keeping such a public face and supporting his new partner seemed to take a toll on Bourdain, who confronted long-time producers Collins and Tenaglia with the news that he wanted to quit the show. “Every band comes to an end. It’s time for us to break up and go our separate ways.” They reported having supported his decision, which seemed to put Bourdain in a bind, as if he was tired of being the story, but also was unable to put it down for fear of where that might leave him.

In an enfolding counterpoint twist to Bourdain’s support of Argento, late in 2017, Bourdain was reported to have paid a private settlement to the actor Jimmy Bennet, who alleged Argento herself had assaulted him. A year later, in 2018, pictures emerged that seemed to imply a new relationship Argento and a French reporter Hugo Clément.

The power and price of Gonzo

Anthony Bourdain died by suicide June 8 2018, while filming an episode of ”Parts Unknown”. He was found by a long-term friend and frequent television collaborator, chef Eric Ripert. A devastating reality caught up with the unreality of the continuous production. Everything came to a halt.

Where does the performer start or stop? What is truth, what is fabrication? Gonzo journalism constantly flirts with this tension. “Kitchen Confidential” sets up the image of kitchen tyrant. But then the follow up “Medium Raw” tries to tear it back down and reject the toxic culture it created. In the years that followed, Bourdain spoke out against his own aggressive behaviour in the kitchen and a desire to see an end to the dominance that defined the kitchen culture of his formative years.

Later, Bourdain hosts a series of television shows, framed as travel and cooking documentaries that end up instead award-winning introspectives into shared human experiences, through the vehicle of food. Only in the amalgam of “Parts Unknown”, can you get a sense of the curious, open, hungry and lonely person inside Bourdain’s performance.

Hunter S. Thompson also died by suicide on February 20, 2005, while at his farm in Colorado with his son, daughter-in-law and grandson. Though you can’t draw any direct parallels between the two men, it’s hard to ignore the overtones. Two exhausted performers, busy telling sharp truths, wrapped in a glittering and gauzy fabrication, which isn’t enough to stop those truths cutting deep, into themselves. Both observers of human culture, impossibly fascinated and yet despairing about the state of the world.

When I heard the news of Bourdain’s death in 2018, I could only think about his friends and family, and their loss. Furthermore, I’m grateful for the stories, though I know they are an odd mix of raw honesty and staged fabrication. At the very least, such Gonzo performance evokes in me a desire to try to understand the world and the people in it better. If that’s all such stories achieve, that’s a powerful outcome indeed.

It’s ironic the documentary that explored Bourdan’s life work, “Roadrunner,” by Morgan Neville, found itself in controversy. It was revealed the production team had used machine learning to simulate Bourdain’s voice speaking lines that he had written in correspondence, but not spoken. Though this seemed to ruffle feathers in the mediasphere, I wonder if Bourdain would have found it interesting or at the least goulishly amusing? This was the man who once said:

“It is considered useful and enlightening and therapeutic to think about death for a few minutes a day. What actually happens to my physical remains is of zero interest to me. I don’t want anybody seeing my body, I don’t want a party - ‘reported dead’. Unless it provides entertainment value, in a perverse or subversive way. I mean if you could throw me into a wood chipper and, you know, spray me into Harrods…  in the middle of the rush hour, that would be pretty epic, I wouldn’t mind being remembered in that way.” (Bourdain in ”Roadrunner”)

Whether driven by hunger, curiosity, loneliness, long-lapsed addiction or all of it, Anthony Bourdain gave his all to Gonzo journalism, that intensive form of storytelling that blurred the lines between subject and objective; real and fabricated. He rejected the label of ‘journalist,’ but the trademarked leather jacket fit well.  In doing so, like Hunter S Thompson before him, Bourdain seemed to pay the psychological and emotional price that it requires.

Bourdain might have wanted to avoid Thompson’s fate. Remember his answer to the question of whether he admired Thompson, he noted: “He had to live with the legend and I don’t know if he wore that well. If you’ve seen the documentaries they did on him… the guy killed himself … Not a happy man. I see him as a cautionary tale … I would prefer if I don’t end up that way.”

Bourdain seemed to accept the power and cost of the commitment to his form of truth-telling in his first breakthrough work, “Kitchen Confidential”, but with the hopeful note that he could survive it when he noted:

“I'll be right here. Until they drag me off the line. I'm not going anywhere, I hope. It's been an adventure. We took some casualties over the years. Things got broken. Things got lost. But I wouldn't miss it for the world.” (“Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly”)

I only wish he’d kept true to his word and stayed with us to the end.

References

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