08/08/2026
Midway through ‘Tony,’ the new film about Anthony Bourdain, the title character, played with brash naïveté by Dominic Sessa, leaps off a pier in Provincetown, Massachusetts, into the Cape Cod Bay at dusk. For a split second, shirtless, limbs akimbo, shoes still on, he is utterly and totally free, untethered from his past and unencumbered by the man he will become. That freedom is momentary. Bourdain eventually hits the surface, Tony becomes Anthony, and in the film’s closing moments, the man edges ever closer to myth.
When the film premieres this week, it will enter the well-established canon of posthumous Bourdainia. These projects are just a fraction of the cottage industry that has sprung up around the chef and author, who may seem more present today than he did in his lifetime. He lives now in the Bardo of the algorithm, writes Joshua David Stein. As social media is not prized for expressing the subtlety of the human spirit, the image of that Bourdain is almost laughably wise, compassionate, and prophetic. He’s a chain-smoking Odysseus, a merry Sisyphus. Choose your myth; it hardly matters. Every time someone reposts one of his quotes about traveling, they add another brick to the building of a complex that both capitalizes on and obscures the real Bourdain.
“Gen X has the disaffected genius of Kurt Cobain. Boomers have Elvis Presley, whose hip-swiveling silhouette made more money in death than it did in life,” writes Stein. “The Elvis industrial complex, worth approximately $500 million in biopics, musical revues, rhinestone key chains, and impersonators, long ago displaced the man inside it. But then, Elvis’s shtick was spectacle; Bourdain’s oeuvre focused on what it means to be human, fallible, and real, qualities that are lost when someone’s memory is turned into a product line.”
Stein explores how the new A24 film manages to both add to and rise to the top of a stream of products that have emerged to capitalize on the late chef’s mythology: https://nymag.visitlink.me/NdtTsW