I’ve never trusted people who were happy. Either they’re lying or their expectations are too low. Life = 1-e^(-2t), where t=time and you achieve happiness when Life = 1. You forever approach it without ever quite getting there.
Living is disappointment, a daily grab for the brass ring that’s just out of grasp. Every day, you wake up thinking, “Today’s the day!” and go to bed covered in the muck and shit you landed in when you came up short. If, one day, you actually happen to grasp a ring, you’ll lay in bed that night asking yourself whether it was actually the brass one. You’ll eventually come to the correct conclusion: it was not. The one you got hold of was made of the same muck and shit you usually fall into. Or someone is going to steal it from you. Or the ring you grasped rightfully belonged to orphans, and now they’re all dead. Thanks a lot, asshole.
The trick (and this is where alcohol plays a big part) is convincing yourself your equation can get to one, that you’re getting sooooo close, that you’ll somehow be able to change find some magical variable that changes the equation. We know we’re not getting there. We know that only fucking morons without the ability to look inward are happy.
For a few fleeting moments before your chest tightens, your vision turns jittery and before every fuck up you’ve ever made in the real world intrudes, lukewarm 14% ABV Four Loko Black lets gives you false hope that you’ll get to a happy place someday. It’s a short-term, payday-lender-type loan on some future happiness and a debt you will never, ever be able to repay. The interest is usury and collectors will be a bitch. But it’ll get you through the night.
Roadrunner is a documentary about Anthony Bourdain, world famous author, cook and gallivant, whose debts came due. Spoiler alert: He killed himself.
Because the guy was on TV about 12 hours of every day for the last two decades, there is no shortage of footage from which director Morgan Neville can choose to tell his story. And it isn’t really a story. There are no surprises, and the images are selected with a predetermined destination. It’s really more of a profile of a sad man. Whether it’s the complete or true profile, I have no fucking idea. Bourdain didn’t leave a suicide note to tell us.
He did, though, hang himself despite what most would consider a wildly successful life. From drug addict to celebrated cook to best-selling author to host of about 47 popular travel and food shows where he got to go all over the world and eat beating cobra hearts, hang with the president in Vietnam, and swim in rivers and oceans that most of us only get to see on TV.
Despite the money and fame, despite the accomplishments and the ability to wax poetic to millions any time he wanted, Roadrunner says he wasn’t content. To an outsider, Bourdain’s equation looked like it was pretty damn close to one, maybe even over. The movie’s point, though, is that perhaps he came to the realization he would never get there. No matter what he did, no matter who he fucked, no matter how good his work, his curve kept flattening.
In the footage used, Bourdain spends a lot of time wondering whether he is happy. He grasped for many rings: two marriages, a child, falling in love again. He was an addict who leapt headlong into many things, like drugs, Jiu Jitsu, cooking, travel. Home life made him restless. Travel made him eager to move on. Whatever he was doing was not enough, but maybe the next city, the next meal or the next person he met would have the variable he needed to complete his equation, to finally make it equal one.
In his last years, according to Neville, Bourdain tricked himself into believing he could be happy by obsessing over a single woman, the Italian director Asia Argento, who strikes me as somewhat higher strung than an inbred whippet. Roadrunner says she broke his heart. Maybe that disappointment, exacerbated by the exhaustion of the eternal quest, made Bourdain come to terms with the reality that he would never get there, he would never be happy. He had no tricks left.
That’s what Roadrunner wants us to believe. It’s a compelling and easy to relate to theory, but as with any documentary, you can never be sure if it is the whole story. Bourdain didn’t tell it to us. Neville doesn’t interview Argento and he likely had decided that before he started filming.
I didn’t ever really watch Bourdain’s TV shows. A large part of that is because the people who insisted I must were generally assholes and bourgeois tools. People whose own travel photos are of twenty-dollar cocktails and cruise ship cabin bathroom towels folded to look like swans. The movie doesn’t make someone unfamiliar with him love Bourdain, or even explain why I should. It just shows us that lots of others did. In the selected shots, Bourdain seems sour from the start, always suspicious and cynical of his success, sort of smug and maybe not very nice to those around him. He is portrayed as a doomed figure, miserable out of the gates.
The end result for me is sad, and it’s a mildly interesting profile of the unhappiness of one man who literally went further than most in search of the variable he needed. Nobody is happy, though, and one man’s misery just reminds us of how ours is different. Bourdain just a bigger audience and more people hoping he was doing better than them. Three Fingers for Roadrunner.