Really smart post – and a plea for moderation

As a preface to what I am about to say: first and foremost, I think that Richard Armitage bears no responsibility to any fan beyond staying true to his own artistic vision and doing what is best for himself professionally and personally (which includes considering the impact of his actions on those closest to him). I believe strongly in the moral force of commitments, but I also believe–the energies of his fans in making him a success notwithstanding–that he has made absolutely no implicit or explicit commitment to any of us as regards his career. If he decides that he wants to build up a career reading the works of Georgette Heyer, I’ll support that, or if he wants to become a director, I’ll watch those shows/films in order to look at the world through his eyes from a different perspective. Or if he wants to dig ditches and fade into obscurity, I won’t be chasing him. That is his right, too.

If you are following the Fanstravaganza, though, you will already have noticed this really smart post [link updated after Skully deleted her blog] and plea for temperance by Skully at the Spooks Fan Blog. It concerns the question of the nature and intensity of Mr. Armitage’s fan base, and it ends with the expressed fear that fans who are concentrating on the wrong things and letting their obsessions get away from them will eventually push him out from in front of the camera to behind it for some relief. She makes the explicit comparison to the Beatles. Among other tensions that affected their relationship, chief was their perception that people were ignoring their creative work just to gawk at them.

I’ve had this fear for Mr. Armitage, too, not least because my own experience in creative work of a different kind is that it requires so much effort that when it stops being fun, you just want to run away and never come back. And it’s often not the work or the content itself, but the annoying people who surround you, that make you want to stop. One says to oneself, “I could just earn a living in some less stressful way.” I hope that Mr. Armitage never feels that way about his acting, but if he does, I hope that the need to deflate the energies of crazy fans is not one of the reasons. Given the storms that emerge periodically on the unregulated discussion boards over his intimate life, whether over the identity or the gender of his partner, I think this fear is rational. I’ve been surprised by the explosion of voiceover work he’s done recently, and while I enjoy it, I’ve been speculating (in private) about the possibility that for a variety of potential reasons, he may be trying to create a regular income base that doesn’t require his body to be the focus of hundreds of thousands of salivating women. I can’t help but think if people did know who his partner was, that might calm them down, but it would also expose the partner to an uncomfortable amount of unpleasant public attention. Fear of this sort of thing in light of the well-known excesses of the UK boulevard press is also realistic.

The topic has been raised before by Mulubinba, another Fanstravaganza blogger. The only possible conclusion that we as fans (and as human beings) need to look more critically at ourselves. So indeed, I’m glad to see this topic broached again precisely during the Fanstravaganza. As a new fan of Mr. Armitage, I don’t have a sense of the history of his fan base, though I am trying to learn more. My perceptions are as follows: he seems to have been completely overwhelmed and surprised by the response to “North & South” and to have been feeling his way since then, including giving some interviews that may have been too revealing of his personal life and a move from frequent expressed gratitude to his fan base to occasional expressions of frustration. I have read his remark that he hates the word “fan” in his message of August 3, 2009. Indeed, the message in which he wrote that suggests that he seems to get punished by his fans precisely for the attempts he makes to deal with them genuinely and humanely. Quite recently, he’s stated that he envies the production crews and wishes to move behind the camera.

This is a really hard topic for me, because it’s impossible to separate his acting from his body, since he acts with his body. Discussing how he acts involves discussing how he uses his body to convey ideas, perceptions, moods. Similarly, given the multilevel and often subliminal nature of his acting, it’s fun to speculate about the person behind the roles, who appears to hide oceans of complexity under these characterizations. So I indulge in speculations about his personal life, too, I hope tastefully, and nowhere near as often as I’d like. Indeed, I’m writing this blog partially because I am trying to understand my own fascination with his work and with him, and it’s hard to separate those things. I will admit that I’m not a discussion board participant mostly because they restrict discussion of actors’ personal lives and while I think that is a wise decision if you’re trying to have a disciplined discussion among hundreds of people who don’t know each other and can easily take offense, given my reasons for writing I didn’t want to accept those restrictions for myself. I started this blog because I wasn’t reading the kind of analysis about his work that I wanted to be reading and thought I might have something unique to offer. But this blog is also one huge fan letter to Mr. Armitage, in a form that would be much too bulky for him to read or process and would probably embarrass him if he did/could. So the genres (analysis of actor vs examination of the man) merge, and this is the source of the problem.

What do I think fans can do?

I think a lot of his long-term fans are already doing what they can; that is, the better boards discourage personal discussion and participants of the boards speak up rationally when discussions become stupid elsewhere. There are some strong analytical contributions on his work on various boards and blogs, and indeed, since I’ve been writing this blog I’ve been alerted to more of them. The sites that archive his work and press commentaries on them are responsible and stay away from speculation: in this regard I have to mention RichardArmitageOnline, which is almost scholarly in its approach and a delight to read.

A lot of the frenzy over his body is whipped up by the press, though, which continues to give us bland interviews that cover the same things with the occasionally weird little tidbit thrown in to make us think we’re learning something neat about his personal life. I assume that his publicists also have something to do with this, and if they are trying to build the energy for a big screen career for him, this is the way to go: it’s an attempt to mobilize the energy of female romance pornography to create excitement. But the Daily Mail interview linked above shows that it is also possible for him to get more intelligent coverage, as does the Vulpes Libris interview, which (despite its faults–the interviewer appears to have wrongfooted him at the beginning), makes clear that he’s obviously a creative artist. Thus, his publicists seem to be doing a better job of keeping him on message, but also of getting him better interviewers.

My one suggestion–besides trying to calm down the crazies when you meet them–is to ask better questions when we can. Signal to both journalists and to his handlers that we want to read a higher quality product and that we expect more from the media. With our contributions and questions, we should try to create the impression that the “RA fan base” is a sea of incisive, critical viewers who are curious about everything that goes into making a dramatic role work–and that we’ll deal with the exploding ovaries off screen, on our own time.

~ by Servetus on March 20, 2010.