Most of the Big Shots have by now weighed in on the death of Anthony Bourdain. I never met the man, but I’ve been mistaken for him a couple of times. The Big Shots blame his Blue Pill attitude and the behaviour of his two previous partners, both of whom were women you’d take to meet your psychiatrist rather than your mother. What killed Bourdain, they suggest, was the emotional shock of seeing paparazzi photographs of his current partner with someone young, hotter and harder. The hope fell out of his Blue Pill world and he killed himself.
To which I say: no man has ever killed himself over a woman’s infidelity, except in cheap romantic stories. Suicide is done in an absence of feeling: self-pity and despair over an unfaithful girlfriend are rich, life-structuring emotions, not a precursor to suicide.
Bourdain was in Rome to make a TV programme when he saw the photographs. He quit heroin in the 1980’s, but nothing he said or wrote suggested he was working a programme of recovery. He may have decided that a little something would ease the self-pity and help him get through filming. Why wouldn’t he have used his media connections? Because they would not have helped him. Would you have helped supply him? So out onto the street he went. Addicts without a programme do that. Everyone flinches, the trick is not to flinch so a syringe-full of dodgy street drugs ends up in your arm.
And, no autopsy? Rushed cremation? Asia Argento’s father is a well-known film director whose many friends perhaps did not want to see those close to him upset by over-zealous bureaucratic procedures.
In other words, if Our Tony had not been an addict, he would still be alive. But then, if he hadn’t been an addict, he wouldn’t have been Anthony Bourdain.
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