Weekly obsession update

So: the only thing I watched all week was Strike Back episodes 1 and 2, but of them, I watched several scenes obsessively, probably a dozen times a day for most of the week. A gracious friend made this possible last Sunday evening, and then she topped her generosity off by facilitating viewing of episodes 3 and 4 last night.

Richard Armitage as Peter Macduff in Shakespeare Retold: Macbeth (2005). Breakfast scene. Source: Richard Armitage Central Gallery.

And this afternoon I finally got to Shakespeare Retold from netflix. I think that Annette at Richard Armitage Online puts it extremely well: “This performance is a physical one. Richard Armitage’s skill in using his body to convey emotion, in a part with few but significant words, is used to the full. This skill is most evident when he is told of the murder of his wife and children, in long shot, the slow loss of control over his body being a very moving image of the sense of total loss he experienced at that moment.” I don’t have much more to say than that. (I was also impressed by James MacEvoy’s ability to flare his nostrils at key moments, though I felt like he overdid it.) My main response is how well this particular adaptation of Macbeth works, and how sorry I am that as soon as Mr. Armitage gets a supporting role in a Shakespeare play, the role itself seems to get cut down. He was excellent, but we didn’t see much of him — same as with Angus in the BBC Macbeth, but Macduff plays a central role in the play! (I am prejudiced because early modernists consider the speeches in Macduff’s scene with Malcolm an important source for discussing views of kingship in early modern England.) This adaptation thus ends up being all about the internal self-destruction of the willfully immoral, and not about the other theme of the play, the morality of government and the obligations of kings — a major reason the play was hot material in its own day. I know that the shortening has to do with the television adaptations, but it became clearer to me this week after watching Strike Back why he’d be eager to do “The Rovers.” If his last three big roles have been Guy of Gisborne, Lucas North, and John Porter (and the latter seems likely to be renewed, something I can’t disagree with based on my viewing — I am eager to see the last two episodes and would happily watch another series), and he really wants to keep up his acting chops for a major dramatic lead, he needs to keep his hand in in more classical roles. As he said, he’s looking for another North & South,* and I doubt that Strike Back is likely to get him that, though I could see it getting him a film role as an action hero. OK, Mr. Armitage, I forgive you for wanting to appear in a role that I am unlikely to get to see. Maybe we will all get lucky and it’ll become so successful that they’ll make a film version.

[* footnote to that article: Mr. Armitage, Machiavelli was not a “baddie.” He actually wrote several republican treatises, and he was tortured as a consequence of his attempts to defend republican liberties in Florence. If you’re thinking of The Prince, keep in mind that (a) no one really understands what the status of that text is; scholars have been fighting over it for centuries; and (b) it’s primarily the reception of The Prince that makes us think of Machiavelli as evil — not the text itself. Since you put him in a category with Richard III, I’ll assume you mean that Machiavelli was a baddie in the same sense as Richard, i.e., he’s been widely misunderstood by posterity. But it’s good that you said that in a magazine article and not in my class, for you’d definitely have gotten points off!]

Santi di Tito, Portrait of Niccolò Machiavelli (now in the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence), who like Richard Armitage also had a marked jaw and protruding nose. This is not a contemporary portrait; it looks like it was made from a bust of Machiavelli also in the Palazzo Vecchio that is thought to have been based on the man’s death mask. Source: Wikipedia.

Anyway, Strike Back. My absorption with this became a little frightening to me. Eventually I realized it was connected to thoughts I’d been having about Sparkhouse, so I finished up some drafts I’d been writing earlier on the roots of my inclination to trust servicemen and farmers, and the price paid for the myth that the serviceman will always save you. This is getting long, so I think I am going to make the Porter obsession into a separate post.

Thanks to everyone, by the way, who kept coming back here and looking for me during this last week. It’s gratifying to be missed, and I’ll try not to leave you alone for so long again. If I’ve been a regular commentator on your blog, I should be caught up with that again in a day or so.

~ by Servetus on May 17, 2010.