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The end of Roadrunner, Morgan Neville’s new documentary on the life, career and suicide of Anthony Bourdain in 2018 packs a punch. After exploring the celebrity chef’s relationship with fame and how his death affected those close to him, the film ends with Bourdain peacefully walking away on a beach, at least that’s what it seems. A voiceover from Bourdain’s friend, artist David Choe, breaks the spell to say that Bourdain himself would hate this sweet ending. He then criticizes the way in which society idolizes artists who commit suicide, for example by painting their faces on the sides of buildings. A voice behind the camera points out that there are such Bourdain murals in the city center. “I should go and disfigure them,” Choe said. “He would love for me to do that.” “
The camera then switches back and forth between images of Choe using spray paint to degrade a Bourdain mural and images of other interviewees going through their lives. It’s a cathartic ending that manages to both avoid romanticizing suicide and feel true to Bourdain’s irreverent punk-rock spirit. But again, not everything is as it seems. While murals in Bourdain have appeared in various towns since his death, Neville told Thrillist in an interview that the mural seen in the film is actually one of the commissioned documentary, which is not obvious to Thrillist. the television viewers. He also revealed that Choe painted the mural and cut his hair – which he had not done since Bourdain’s death – at Neville’s request:
[…] when he came up with this idea of degrading the mural, I loved it, but I didn’t do anything with it for six months. And then six months later, I said, “David, remember that thing you said, what would you think of doing that?” And he said to me, “I’m ready. He hadn’t cut his hair six months later, so I said, “Would you like to shave your head and degrade the mural?” And he said, “Of course, because Tony would have loved it.” And, I will say, we actually ordered the mural that we disfigured.
There are many good reasons, including legal ones, not to actually degrade an existing Bourdain mural, let alone on camera, but knowing that the filmmakers orchestrated the scene and paid for one of the paintings. murals Choe denounced – even a destiny to be destroyed – certainly blurs the message. Roadrunner has previously raised questions about documentary ethics and the artifice over Neville’s admission that he used artificial intelligence to recreate Bourdain’s voice to read some of the words he had written. Now, it seems that wasn’t the only crucial part of the film that got staged without signaling audiences that it was dramatization.
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