The dorktastic past

Note posting and comments at Richard Armitage Fan Blog and RAFrenzy on new video footage of Richard Armitage that surfaced on youtube recently. I’m linking, but not posting it here; if you are interested in viewing it directly and for some reason haven’t visited those sites yet, please do! RAFrenzy has helpfully corrected the aspect ratio, which makes the visual evidence that it could be Mr. Armitage much more convincing than apparent at first view. The comments on the youtube page suggest that the person who posted the video is in a position to make credible his claim that this is Mr. Armitage. Moreover, the corrected screencaps RAFrenzy shows do seem to indicate that distinctive profile we associate with Armitage. I won’t say any more about this here because I already said everything I have to say on the topic at RAFrenzy’s place.

I’m also staying out of the debate about whether materials like this about Mr. Armitage should or should not appear in public, or should or should not go viral. They pop up from time to time. Here’s another example on Facebook [picture has been made private] of an alleged historic picture of Mr. Armitage dancing while at school, added to a fan page by someone from Coventry who calls him “Rich” in her caption. Every now and then in comments on newspaper articles about Armitage online, one reads a comment by someone who claims to know or remember him from dancing school, which is poignant, I think. It’s only normal that people who “knew him when” would try to connect themselves in this way; marking past relationships is a technique of centering the self. Given what seems to have been an early and intense involvement in theatrical endeavors of all types in Armitage’s life, it would be surprising if this sort of thing didn’t happen at all. Presumably if something really awful popped up, his publicists would step in to suppress it if they could. It’s much easier to do that in England, I believe, than elsewhere on the planet.

No, here at “me + richard armitage” we eschew data-gathering and the performance of facticity. Instead, we are all about the meta, and a few things pop into my mind on that score when I see this.

The first is the question of the meaning, for ourselves, of moments that persist from our pasts. This tendency is only accelerating; most of the evidence of the childhoods of people in my generation (I am two years older than Armitage) is preserved in photos and scrapbooks, with some decaying home film technology, but this video shows the extent to which we stood on the cusp, with the advent of affordable, easy-to-use video cameras and reproduction in the early to mid-1980s changing the terms of memory. The mediation of such moments for us by the lack of a record, or their preservation solely in still photography, has receded in an age in which everything can be on tape all the time. Nat calls this video dorktastic, in a teasing way, and I think that’s really appropriate as a designation for it. Adolescents, especially late adolescents, are typically striving for coolness much of the time,  in the context of identity development, which seems to be further and further delayed in our current atmosphere. A 20-year-old in 1991 was still a youth, even if Mr. Armitage had been working as an adult for several years at this point, and this video shows it. The clothing and hairstyles of the late 1980s and early 1990s were quite distinctive (I remember when men wore that particular style of jeans, and not only that, I remember when I thought it was quite alluring!), and hopefully we can look back with amusement at our younger selves, who cannot be remade in our imagination in the same way when the concrete evidence of them is constantly (potentially) before us. (I think facebook works the same way as a technology of making identity fast for my students, but I won’t go into that here.) I hope that, if this is Mr. Armitage, that he remembers the day he did this and his companions in the video with some pleasure or nostalgia, or at least without pain, that after the initial moment of embarrassment at having his younger self unmasked, he is able to accept that self as part of his history. This is hard; it would be hard even for me and I am not famous. I think celebrities, or people who become them inadvertently, have it hard in this regard. I remember thinking about Monica Lewinsky in 1998 that I had also done many questionable things out of what I thought was love when I was 23, but that I had had the mercy of not having them all investigated by a grand jury or broadcast on national television. I have a very hard time even now looking at pictures that document the relationship I was in when I was Lewinsky’s age.

Beyond the question of whether we are embarrassed by our past, second comes the issue of whether such a video is actually embarrassing in other meaningful senses apart from to the self. All of the fangrrls — me included — want to see Mr. Armitage dancing — I think this has a lot do with the difficulty in finding a man who admits he likes dancing, let alone can do it well. (In my case, it also has to do with not being allowed for religious reasons to dance as a teenager  — dancing or thinking about doing it carries an extra tinge of the forbidden for me; I often find watching a dancing man arousing in a way that I suspect others of my generation do not.) Mr. Armitage has flirted with sharing details about this in interviews, claiming his best dance is the tango, for example, that sexiest of all dances, or discussing the euphoria he experiences on the dance floor, and his own personal dancing style. In light of that, this video can hardly tarnish Armitage’s reputation. Assuming it is him, it can only feed the fan frenzy, letting everyone of a certain age imagine themselves dancing to these tunes of the ’90s and doing it with him! I also don’t think that this is really an embarrassing product — or at least not any more embarrassing than any other videotape of average everyday people floating around. It’s not going to make it onto one of those embarrassing home video shows, if they have those in the UK. It only shows us — see above — that smiling boy dancing with some friends for entertainment or something to do, and with apparent enjoyment.

The third matter is the question, referred to off and on in the press by Armitage himself and by his interviewers, of “Armitage as slow starter.” We might compare the Boon screencaps recently located by a meticulous researcher. Assuming these are both Armitage, what they suggest is someone who doesn’t yet quite have his entire body under the effortless control that we see today, someone who hasn’t yet completely grown into his height, or into the marked features of his face. The movements are still ungainly at times, the smile unsubtle, everything requires refinement. And yet the energy, and some of the fundamental gestures and stances, are easily noticeable. Today we get the Armitage who has been working in the performing arts and studying his craft for over two decades — and this video gives us a foretaste of where that person went.

Taken together, my points: In this case, the persistence of the past softens our already tender hearts. We remember our own style choices and preferences of the 1990s; we recall our own identity issues. We glimpse a very brief moment, probably only an afternoon, in the development of someone we admire. Having seen the man, we wish we had known the boy. We see the boy, and are even more moved by the man he has become.

~ by Servetus on April 26, 2010.