I only caught a few episodes of the Bourdain culinary show, and he seemed pretty decadent to me (and died a repellently decadent death). But one of his episodes really moved me— he went someplace down in Appalachia and hung out with some good ole boys, went shooting with them, cooked squirrel and other country game, sat around having a great time as Southerners do. It seemed so incongruous from his usual schtick, and yet he seemed to be sincerely enjoying and respecting his hosts. Wish I still had the link. It was some years ago.
I was only vaguely aware of who Anthony Bourdain was and only went to the movie because I was offered a free early screening, whereupon I checked some reviews, read some good things, and noted several very solid actors, so I took a chance that it had some merit.
I had only associated Bourdain with the travel writer who did the foodie-around-the-world gig. I hadn’t realized that he had started as an aspiring writer at Vasser ... and that while he may have finished as a writer, he spent 27 years in between doing useful work in kitchens. He took up the foodie trek thing as a retirement gig.
Some of the decadence is foreshadowed. Some of that was Bourdain’s own proclivities, but some of it was apparently tied into the odd subcultures that exist in the cooking world. In the movie, we only see his coming of age summer, at the end of which he enrolls in the Culinary Institute of America. But the foreshadowing is there.
I was chatting with a neighbor about the movie. The neighbor happened to have taken an interest in Bourdain — it might be an overstatement to call him a fan, as he’s more a backyard grill kind of guy — but he had read Bourdain’s autobiographical book, which I gather was a big success. That must have been gratifying, given his youthful literary ambitions. But my neighbor assured me that Bourdain was ruthlessly critical of the decadent weakling he had been before taking up a real job.
It also seems clear that Bourdain never outgrew some things that he should never have started in the first place. We dump on the toxic underside of Hollywood with great regularity on FR, but the movies are only one domain with some extraordinarily destructive subcultures.