and a portrait of a young man who aspires to be a writer.
If you’ve been tracking the heated arguments around gender dynamics recently, one of the sharpest disputes concerns publishing. The conventional claim is that men stop reading, particularly fiction, because women in publishing allegedly keep younger white male authors from breaking in. What remains, the critique says, is an industry fueled by a blend of romance-driven fantasy that pass as popular fare. If you don’t crave fairy-oriented erotica, you’re likely stuck with aging science fiction titles.
Those peddling this tale often downplay the broader decline in reading overall and the explosion of competition across every medium for people’s leisure time. Yet the industry has clearly shifted along gender lines as it evolves, changing who reads and who writes. And there has been ample discussion in outlets like The New York Times about why men have peeled away from writing altogether.
If you’re curious about this debate, you should view Tony, a compact, lean, fairly persuasive biopic about a youthful Anthony Bourdain—a kind of origin story for the man who would become a cultural icon. It isn’t pitched as a battle-piece in the gender wars, nor does it set itself up as such. Yet at its core, it depicts a young man whose overriding wish is to write above all else. He is impulsive, combative, moody, and often inebriated, at least until he discovers a practical, tangible way to make a living.
The film unfolds over a single summer in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where a college-age Tony Bourdain travels there for a girl. He tells his parents he has won a writing fellowship and tells the girl the same, even though he was rejected. After a drunken altercation at a restaurant and losing his money when he’s passed out on the street, he ends up taking a job in that very kitchen—washing dishes—to have a place to sleep. He fibs to secure the job, claiming formal culinary training he doesn’t actually possess. This version of Bourdain is outspoken, loud, and arrogant. Yet he has not yet proven anything.
During those months, he earns an opening, beginning at the bottom with mounds of crusted dishes. He grows into a member of a kitchen crew, a collective pushing toward a shared goal, and he starts to form friendships. He also turns to drugs, in part to endure the brutal shifts in the kitchen.
A mentor appears in the form of the restaurant’s proprietor and head chef—a man formally trained in culinary school who is known simply as Chef, portrayed by Antonio Banderas in a standout performance. Chef is strict, exacting, and sometimes fiery, but also patient enough to tolerate Bourdain’s early turmoil. He doesn’t intend to be a conventional role model or mentor, but he becomes one anyway, teaching Bourdain both the artistic and economic value of good food, and the exhausting thrill of working long, sweaty hours to bring it to life. He shapes a boy into a man, and a future chef into being.
Tony is Bourdain’s origin story.
Bourdain, of course, would go on to become a celebrated New York chef, spending his 20s and 30s in some of the city’s best restaurants and climbing the culinary ladder. And yes, eventually, he became a writer, breaking out with an article in The New Yorker and then a book, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, that launched his even more celebrated career as a swaggering, opinionated, no-bullshit, intensely masculine explainer of food and food culture. But he didn’t write that book, or become that man, until he’d been working in kitchens for 20 years, making something real and tactile in the world, and something real of his own life. He didn’t write, in other words, until he had something to write about.
Writing is a tough business, and there are no guarantees, especially when there’s so much competition both on and off the page. But “do something real,” “become an authority on something,” and “gain confidence in yourself built on actual knowledge and experience” are pretty good pieces of advice for anyone who wants to write, or otherwise present themselves to the world. At the very least, that’s what worked for Tony—sorry, Anthony—Bourdain.
